Supes contest one of three close Valley races

With 1,105 votes separating incumbent Sonoma County First District Supervisor Valerie Brown from challenger Will Pier, the latter isn’t conceding defeat.
“And I’m not going to until all the absentee ballots are counted,” Pier said Wednesday morning, citing the candidates’ 2.7 percent separation. “We’ve estimated there may be as many as 6,000 absentee ballots that were turned in to the polls. There’s a chance that the trend could go my way.”
“If not,” he added with a laugh, “I really want to thank everybody that has worked for me, and tell them I’ll be there in four years.”
For her part, Brown said she didn’t expect the 20,891 to 19,786 (51.2 percent to 48.5 percent) tally to change much.
“I think that we saw, all evening long, the same numbers come through – maybe a 100-vote variation from time to time,” she said. “My understanding is that there are only 7,000 absentee ballots for the whole county, and my guess is the number for the First District is not very large … from my point of view, I’m going though life looking at a victory.”
Three other Sonoma Valley races were also running close by Wednesday’s press time. Sonoma County Registrar of Voters Janice Atkinson said Wednesday morning that with 28 days to certify the election, an official count was “probably about 27 days away.”
“We don’t know how many vote-by-mail ballots there are, or provisional ballots,” Atkinson said. “By the end of the week, we should have some idea of what they are countywide.”
Of the four candidates vying for three seats on the Sonoma Valley Health Care District board, challengers Peter Hohorst and Madolyn Agrimonti respectively captured 8,275 votes (30.4 percent) and 6,428 votes (23.6 percent). Incumbent Bill Boerum had 6,341 votes (23.3 percent) with challenger Bill Gurry placing a close fourth at 6,124 votes (22.5 percent).
On the education front, challenger Alexander Bantis apparently unseated long-time incumbent John Musilli for the Area 1 seat on the Sonoma County Board of Education at a tally of 12,149 (50.0 percent) to 12,080 (49.7 percent).
In the race to fill three board vacancies for the Valley of the Moon Fire Protection District, incumbents Dawn Mittleman, Bill Norton and Ray Brunton seem to have defeated contender Elissa Wadleigh with respective totals of 4,459 (29.6 percent), 4,340 (28.8 percent), 3,974 (26.4 percent) and 2,251 (14.9 percent).
With a record-breaking countywide voter registration of 252,372 and nearly 80 percent participation – and despite scattered reports of polling problems in other jurisdictions – Atkinson said Tuesday was “an amazingly smooth election” – partly due, she said, to the absence of the traditional crush of last-minute, Tuesday-night voters.
“We certainly had our share of worrying coming up to this election,” she said. “We had some areas in Rohnert Park running low on ballots, but they never ran out – we sent more at 7 p.m.”
In Sonoma Valley, several locations saw lines of voters awaiting the polls’ opening. At Sonoma Truck & Auto Center, precinct worker Karen Robidoux said ten people had showed by 7 a.m. and at one point were lining up inside the business waiting for an available booth.
Twenty-three people voted at the Sonoma Valley High School gymnasium in the first half-hour, and 20 to 30 people greeted arriving precinct workers at the Vintage House Senior Center – where 183 people had voted by 3 p.m. and another 78 had dropped off absentee ballots.
“You’d think it was their birthday,” Kathy Marine said. “A hundred fifty a day is what we usually get.”
Similar conditions prevailed at the Sonoma Valley Veterans Memorial Building, where voters filled one room while a blood drive went on in another.
“This election is more than we have ever had at this precinct,” 10-year election veteran Helen Herbaugh said, adding that the election also drew a number of young people.
Her colleague, Margaret Anderson, agreed. “A lot of people, it was their first time voting,” Anderson said. “When they left, they said, ‘Oh, that was easier than I thought!’”