Great job at the polls Saturday, Prince George.
For starters, you turned out in record numbers. A total of 19,710 voters cast a ballot, shattering the previous record from 2005, when 17,621 residents voted. That's an incredible 2,089 more voters. Voter turnout was 34.3 per cent, nowhere near our lofty goal of 50 per cent but a significant improvement over the 28.8 per cent of the electorate that voted in 2011.
There will be plenty of time in the coming days to fully digest Saturday's results but here's a few quick observations:
- Don Zurowski was a far more aggressive and focused candidate than during his first mayoral bid in 2008 but came up short for the second time. Zurowski ran an excellent campaign and the 8,850 votes he received would have easily won him the election in 2011, when Shari Green won with just 6,969 votes over Dan Rogers (5,332 votes).
- Lyn Hall, the mayor-elect, campaigned like he was five points behind from the moment he announced in June. His campaign was proof that a relentless ground game, led by a tireless candidate meeting as many people as possible, supported by a dedicated team of volunteers working the phones and solid advertising across all media wins elections. He earned every one of his 10,463 votes.
- The vote may have been bad news for the Prince George Public Library. The two incumbents who lost their seats, Cameron Stolz and Dave Wilbur, have been the last two councillors to serve as council's representatives on the library board. Both men worked hard to get the rest of their colleagues to make a new front entrance at the downtown branch a priority. Both men deserve the thanks of residents for their years of service on city council. Hopefully the next council representative on the library board will be as passionate about the library as they were and hopefully the new mayor and council keep that new entrance high on their spending priority list.
- Drilling into the numbers, it looked Saturday night that the Hart had a major hate-on for Frank Everitt, giving him just 111 votes for 23rd overall out of the 25 candidates. To put that in perspective, Coralee Larsen, who finished 23rd overall and proudly announced she spent nothing on her campaign and did not promote herself online. took 223 votes in the Hart. When the Kelly Road polling station reported its results Saturday night, it pushed Everitt off council and only his numbers in the rest of the city saved him. Then the city issued revised numbers Sunday morning to show that Everitt received 1,111 votes in the Hart, pushing him past Jillian Merrick in the final count.
- The No fluoride supporters were glum to start the night. The Yes side won all three advance polls, as well as the special poll and the mail-in poll. The No side, however, won every poll held on Saturday, although that doesn't quite tell the story. The two sides were at a virtual draw at Malaspina and D.P. Todd, while just two polling stations, Kelly Road and Ron Brent, made up more than half of the 1,407 votes that were the No side's margin of victory.
- Brian Skakun could be the most beloved city councillor in the history of Prince George. Skakun not only won his fifth consecutive term on council, he was the top vote getter with 12,674 votes and he won every single poll, except for the mail-in, where Garth Frizzell beat him by just one vote. Almost as beloved as Skakun, Murry Krause finished second in Saturday's vote and is also back for his fifth consecutive term and sixth term overall.
- The three newcomers are all women - Jillian Merrick, Terri McConnachie and Susan Scott, who finished fifth, seventh and eighth, respectively. Another woman, Debora Munoz, finished ninth, just 96 votes behind Scott. Only the Amazing Kreskin would have picked Merrick to be the top newcomer at the start of the campaign. At just 30 years old, she's the youngest city councillor by a long shot but her work with Community Futures, her quirky hand-crafted signs, her smarts, her unique message that helped her stand apart from the other candidates, the significant financial boost ($7,000) she got late in the campaign by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and her grassroots campaigning propelled her to the council table. She'll be the one to watch over the next four years. This could be the first step in a long and fruitful political career for the UNBC grad.
