Lexington voters decide three City Council seats
By Kelly Evans
Lexington City School Board Chairman Frank Friedman will join incumbents Mimi Elrod and Jim Gianniny on city council after beating out two other newcomers in the city’s first contested election since 1998.
Friedman, who said his campaign relied mostly on “grippin’ and grinnin’,” was one of five candidates running for the three open city council seats. Incumbent candidates Elrod and Gianniny garnered 29 and 25 percent of the vote respectively as nearly 55 percent of Lexington residents braved the cold and wet conditions to cast their ballots.
Friedman, who works as a financial advisor, graduated from Lexington High School in 1984 and attended Hampden Sydney College. After college, he accepted a banking job in Florida and lived there until he returned to Lexington. He said his low-key campaign was a welcome change from Florida, where he was constantly inundated with political advertisements.
“The neat thing about Lexington is that you don’t have to run a campaign,” he said.
Elrod and Gianniny said that although this year’s race was contested, they did not crank up their advertising efforts.
“It’s very low-key,” said Elrod, who was appointed to city council in 2003 when one of the council members moved out of Lexington. “I can’t imagine people attacking each other. I don’t think Lexington would respond positively to that.”
“I am doing nothing different than I’ve done for the last 34 years when I’ve lived in Lexington,” said Gianniny. “I go to the grocery store. I see constituents everywhere I go. That’s the way Lexington is.”
Elrod said that while there are issues facing the city council – an 8-year-old debate over the courthouse building, a proposed expansion of the cemetery, and the constant residential development – members cannot go into city council with an agenda.
“You have to have an open mind about it,” she said.
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Produced by Washington and Lee journalism students.
Lead supervisor: Prof. Claudette Artwick
Reporting supervisors:
Technical supervisor: Michael Todd