DeVilbiss out-slugs Sullivan for borough mayor

MAT-SU — Given the way voting went Tuesday, it seems safe to assume Larry DeVilbiss will be the next Mat-Su Borough Mayor.

A Palmer farmer, veteran borough politician and current member of the Matanuska Electric Association’s board of directors, DeVilbiss received 3,339 votes. Combat veteran, attorney and former Washington state legislator Brian Sullivan finished in second place with 2,156 votes, not enough to trigger a run-off election. Still, nothing is quite official yet.

As of Thursday, the count of those outstanding ballots had not yet started. The borough canvassing board was checking to make sure those voters were qualified to receive a ballot.

“The election is not expected to be resolved this week,” borough spokeswoman Patty Sullivan wrote in an e-mail Thursday.

The borough says there are still 1,418 ballots to counted. Sullivan would need more than 90 percent of those to overcome DeVilbiss’ lead, a fact he seemed to understand in an e-mail sent on election night.

“I wish the best to the new borough mayor and am grateful for the experiences of this campaign,” Sullivan’s e-mail read, in full.

Certification of the election is scheduled for Jan. 20, though DeVilbiss said he’s actually going to be in Mexico then. He said he’ll be back for the first meeting he would be required to attend as the new mayor.

DeVilbiss said on election night he was very happy with the margin of his apparent victory.

“I didn’t want to win by a squeaker, I wanted a clear direction that where I was going was where the borough wanted to go and I think we got that,” he said.

Borough residents, he said, can expect him to be an active mayor making bold strides toward greater transparency.

By active he said he means he will wield the mayor’s admittedly limited powers to the utmost, even invoking one power — the line-item veto — that has been so sparingly used in the past that there was some doubt as to whether the mayor actually has that power.

“The attorney assured me that I did have line-item veto power, so I was right on that,” DeVilbiss said.

A line-item veto is generally reserved for budgets and allows the person who wields it to cut specific items rather than knocking down an entire ordinance.

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As for transparency, DeVilbiss said that he wants to broadcast assembly meetings online and give residents opportunities for real-time input.

“I want to set up a system where people can interact and give input directly into the decision making process, maybe something like American Idol where they can vote on a separate board and have the same access to the same public information that the assembly has and follow it live on the Internet,” he said.

Of the borough’s 59,593 registered voters, 7,309 people voted. That’s about 10 percent voter turnout.

The mayor election was the only one on the ballot. It was a special election called to fill a vacancy opened when the previous mayor, Talis Colberg, resigned to take the top job at Mat-Su College.

Though in its final days the race seemed to be mostly between Sullivan and DeVilbiss, who traded shots in ads online and on the radio, it actually started out as an eight-man race. It became a seven-man race when military veteran and Butte resident Bruce Walden dropped out. He was too late to take his name off the ballot.

Retired telecommunications industry worker Kenneth Clark finished with the third most votes, 88 and Palmer farmer John Liener was fourth with 74 votes.

Walden finished in fifth with 70 votes, and Kurt Jarmer was one vote behind with 69 ballots. Health care administrator David Wilson got 48 votes, college student Jeff Ward received 25 votes and 23 write-in votes were cast.

DeVilbiss prevailed in every precinct save three that Sullivan carried — the city of Palmer, Walby Lake and Talkeetna.

Sullivan campaigned hard, jumping into the race early and touting support he had on the borough assembly. For his part, DeVilbiss posted an exhaustive list of supporters to his campaign website. They included a number of big-name Republicans. State representatives from the Valley delegation recorded radio ads for him.

DeVilbiss said he personally worked hard to the end, waving signs and getting people to the polls, despite the day’s strong winds.

“I started at 4 o’clock out on the flats being slammed between my sign and the van until 8 o’clock and then from 3 o’clock this afternoon until 8 o’clock tonight I was out there again,” he said. “Today I was going house-to-house and business-to-business getting people to vote.”

Somewhere in there, around 6 p.m., he got word that a house he owned had burned down. It is a home used to house some of his employees. Everyone made it out O.K. and his insurance company is working on the claim. He said that losing the house made the day kind of bittersweet.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.