County releases city election candidate list

In most cities of Washington County, the mayors running for reelection are doing so unopposed, according to a candidate list released by the county Auditor’s Office Friday, with only a few exceptions.

In Ainsworth, Mayor Troy McCarthy will defend his seat against Jonathon Ward. While McCarthy has a few election wins under his belt, as a council member in 2015 and mayor in 2017, November will mark the incumbent’s first contested election after running unopposed in those years.

In Wellman, Mayor Ryan Miller is running again in a bid to keep the office he’s held since 2005. He is challenged by Douglas Oldfield, a Wellman resident whose name does not appear on any candidate list in the last several years.

Unlike every other city in Washington County, West Chester’s mayoral race will have no incumbent. Instead, current City Council member Vanessa Wasson is running for mayor uncontested, after current Mayor Steven Lippard declined to file for another term.

Mayoral incumbents in Brighton, Crawfordsville, Riverside and Washington are running uncontested for reelection in November, with no challengers filed for the race.

City Council races will be different story.

In Washington, council members Steve Gault, Elaine Moore and Fran Stigers will go without challengers, making it the only city in the county with no electoral competitions.

Wellman’s City Council race looks much the same. Council members Shannon McCain and Fern Bontrager are slated to run for their offices again, with no other candidates filed for the race.

Ainsworth’s City Council election looks to be similarly non-competitive. Three candidates have filed for the three seats on the ballot. Two of them, Timothy Bean and Jared Waters, are incumbents. The third, Devan Worthington-Bentley, would be a new face on the council.

Council elections in other cities will be a mix of more competitive and more complicated.

In Riverside, two candidates seek the two remaining full-term council seats: one of them is council member Tom Sexton, an incumbent. The other is council member Kevin Mills. While Mills was appointed by the council to fill the seat vacated by Jeanine Redlinger in June, he has opted to run for a seat with a full, four-year term, and will apparently face little competition in doing so.

That leaves the door open for the remaining two years of the term started by Redlinger. Three Riverside residents have filed for the spot: Larry Simon, Phillip Richman and Kevin Kiene.

The city of Brighton has two council positions on the ballot, with four candidates vying for the seats. Council members Charles Emry and Rose Jaynes will be defending their seats against campaigns from David McArtor, who ran unsuccessfully in 2017, and Thomas Lucas.

Crawfordsville will have five names on the ballot for its three open seats. Only one of them, council member Sheila Baker, is an incumbent. The other four, Jordan Hill, Joshua Hesseltine, Dave Masters and Tom Gerot, would be new faces in the city government.

All three council members in Kalona up for reelection are running for it: Joe Schmidt, Craig Spitzer and Henry Beisheim. Their races will be contested by Roy Carney, a newcomer to the city’s electoral scene.

Once again, West Chester’s election is shaping up to be an outlier. With all five council seats up for the vote, as they are every two years, only two council members are running for reelection: Ron Carey and Justin Banks. Vanessa Wasson plans to leave her position for the mayor’s. Council members Andrew Barnhart and Rochelle Bush-Allen have not filed to run again.

The kicker: nobody else has filed to run for city government in West Chester, with three of the city’s five council seats listed with “no candidate” on the county’s candidate list.

County officials were unavailable for comment on the implications of West Chester’s apparent shortage of candidates, as the report was released shortly after the Auditor’s Office closing time on Friday.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com