Voters choose new leadership

By LPR Staff
Editor/POST-REGISTER

Voters in both the Lockhart Independent School District and in Martindale made their voices heard during Saturday”s elections.
Three at-large seats on the LISD Board of Trustees were on the ballot this term. Elected trustees John Flores and Dennis Placke both chose to run for reelection, while Alan Fielder, appointed las

t year to fill an unexpired term, opted not to run for election.
Each district voter was able to cast up to three votes, one for each available seat. Still, only a total of 3,008 votes were cast, meaning only about 1,000 of the district”s nearly 12,000 voters made it to the polls.
First-time political candidate Juan Alvarez, Jr. earned a seat on the board by a resounding margin, earning 891 votes, nearly 30 percent of the total.
John Manning followed Alvarez, securing a seat on the board with 703 votes.
Flores, the sitting board president, was reelected to his at-large position with 661 votes, around 22 percent of the total turnout.
Placke received 16 percent of the vote, losing the seat to which he was elected in 2003.
The final two candidates, Ermine Carter and Rose Dunn-Turner earned 155 and 110 votes respectively.
The vote will be officially canvassed and newly elected members sworn into service during the regular LISD Board of Trustees meeting on Monday, May 22 at the Lockhart High School Conference Center.
In Martindale, a hotly-contested City Council election ended with three virtual landslide victories and two incumbent councilmembers being unseated.
The incumbents, Eugene Cox and Elida De Leon, along with their spouses, Place 4 candidate Nancy Reyes-Cox and seated Place 5 Councilmember Chris De Leon (who was not up for re-election), were at the center of a controversy during this election. Some Martindale residents expressed concern about the possibility of having two married couples occupying four of Martindale”s five city council seats.
The voters spoke to that and other concerns en masse.
Cox lost his Place 1 seat to Les Harrison, who dominated the race, earning more than 70 percent of the vote.
E. DeLeon also lost her seat, earning 86 votes to Dorothy Jo Hardwick”s 173.
Reyes-Cox competed with Karen Linebarger for the Place 4 seat. Linebarger won with 177 votes, about 69 percent of the total.
Four provisional votes were returned to the election judge for confirmation, and the official results of the election will be canvassed on Tuesday, May 23 during a special meeting of the Martindale City Council.