Willow Park voters returned three members to the city council in voting that culminated on May 2.
Buddy Wright (Place 3), Scott Smith (Place 4), and Nathan Crummel (Place 5) all held their seats by roughly 20-point margins over challengers who had ties to and endorsements from Mayor Teresa Palmer.
Wright garnered 578 (59.83%) votes to Houston Wingard’s 388 (40.17%). Smith’s vote total was 589 (60.97%) to Roy Kurban’s 377 (39.03%). Nathan Crummel outpolled his opponent Marcy Galle by the largest margin, 597 (61.87%) to 368 (36.13%)
Wright and Smith, while technically incumbents, were originally appointed to the council to fill vacancies left by the resignations of Lea Young and Greg Runnebaum. This was their first election.
Wright said he was relieved that the process is over.
“It's been a lot of work to get to this point,” Wright said, and I’m grateful the voters deemed me worthy to put back on the council.
“I was pleasantly surprised, to say the least,” Smith said of his election. “I had no bearing on what to expect — we did everything we could to connect with folks. And so I just hoped the results would show and it did.
Because of the tensions between Mayor Palmer and the council, Wright and Smith were asked if they thought the results of the election would change the dynamics of the way the council and the mayor work together.
“I think that this was a message from the voters to some degree,” Wright said. “The games that have been played shouldn't be tolerated, and we've been given the voice and the latitude to move forward with the agenda of growth and with progress and not just obstruction.”
“I've always felt like we've been in opposition to the mayor, unfortunately, and obviously, I don't want to work that way,” Smith said. “That's never been my intent to work that way, but she definitely has her own agenda.”
With the mandate of the election, Wright said the city needs to be housed to deal with continued growth.
“Because of our rapid growth that we see already here and forecasted to come, I feel like the way we have done business as a city needs to change. We have for a very long time worked with the idea that there have been norms — we have not had to have strictly defined policies and procedures because we've just been a small town. And we're not going to be a small town for much longer.
“So I think that the next thing that we need to do over the next year and two years is to is to codify our policies and procedures as a city and make sure that we have rules and procedures and guidelines that everybody has to follow instead of just relying on people to behave. We have to make sure that we have rules in place.”
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