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Roger Straw, Editor
766 West J Street
Benicia, CA 94510.
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A new day in Benicia: Patterson & Campbell
By Roger Straw
BENICIA, CA / November 8, 2007, 8:00 AM - Well, the dust is almost clear. Although there are 4100 more absentee ballots to be counted, it looks like we have a new five-member City Council, headed by Mayor Elizabeth Patterson.
Letters of congratulation and joy are flooding in to Patterson via her extensive email E-Alert network. Campaign supporters are calling it a new day in Benicia. Benicia Poet Laureate Joel Fallon penned a poem, A Different Kind of Mayor which appears on the Patterson campaign website.
"We've a different kind of mayor,
with barrettes in her hair
not one of your small-town good ol' boys."
The major news media have done an admirable job covering campaign results. This morning's Vallejo Times Herald ran two front page stories about our Benicia elections. One covered Mayor Patterson's hopes for the future, and another covered the arrest of Joe Kearns, a Patterson supporter who was jailed on election night for having taken video of Salvatore Evola and possibly Albert Seeno III himself helping out at the election night Whitney phone bank headquarters, in a Coldwell Banker Real Estate facility. Kearns told The Benicia Independent he was only acting like a papparazzo, seeking proof of a connection between the Whitney campaign and the Seeno / Discovery Builders development project. On a citizen complaint, the Benicia police booked Kearns on a charge of "disorderly conduct, peeping." Some are questioning the police action, given the strong ties of support between the Whitney campaign and local Police and Fire Fighters. Local attorney Dan Healy has agreed to represent Kearns, and says that a case like this would usually result in no more than a citation. Healy also questioned the election night decision by the police. "This is Benicia, not Pakistan," Healy said.
If tradition holds up, Patterson will share leadership with Tom Campbell as Vice-Mayor. Although it seems not to be spelled out in the Benicia Municipal Code, the Vice-Mayor position has by tradition fallen to the highest vote-getter among candidates for Council in the current election. That would bump our current Vice-Mayor, Alan Schwarzman, out of the job. Schwarzman received the most votes for Council in the 2005 election, and although new on Council, was thrust into that position immediately on joining Council
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