CHICKASHA – Five newly elected members of the Chickasha City Council were administered the oath of office April 15.
The new councilors include:
• Zach Grayson, an Army veteran and local business owner, was the lone candidate for mayor. He succeeds insurance agency owner Chris Mosley, who stepped down after six years in that role.
• Kea Ginn, a registered nurse and clinical director of LifeLine Home Health and Hospice, easily won reelection to a second term in Ward 1.
• Charlie Burruss, who is engaged in oil and gas mineral management, was elected in Ward 2 by a razor-thin three votes out of the 723 ballots cast in that contest. He replaces appointee Rick Croslin, Chickasha Public Schools superintendent who was appointed by Mosley to serve the last 11 months of an unexpired term until a new council member was elected.
• Erica Alexander, former owner of Alexander Eats, filed unopposed for the Ward 3 seat that Dr. R.P. Ashanti-Alexander, a school administrator, vacated after 11 years in office.
• John P. Smith, a U.S. Navy retiree who previously was a school teacher/administrator in Chickasha and Marlow, won a three-way race to replace Grayson as a Ward 4 councilman.
The newly constituted council voted unanimously to name Ward 2 Councilwoman Georgianne Hebblethwaite as mayor pro tempore. In that role she will lead the council whenever the mayor is absent.
After the swearing- in ceremony, Eric Anderson, one of the candidates defeated in the Ward 4 contest this year, congratulated the newly elected councilors and told them they “represent all citizens” of Chickasha, not just those “in their respective wards.” He also said their offices “are not a platform for personal agendas.”
Anderson, an Army veteran who moved to Chickasha eight years ago, was a Ward 4 council candidate last year, too. He moved to Chickasha eight years ago, graduated from the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and said his oldest son lives and works in Chickasha.
Every candidate for the city council must be a registered voter and a resident of the ward for which he/she seeks to represent, but all candidates run at-large. The mayor and the eight council members are elected by “all [of] the qualified voters of the city,” the City Charter decrees.
Councilors serve twoyear terms and their service is voluntary; they receive no compensation.
Chickasha has “around 8,101” registered voters, according to Katrina Hughes, Secretary of the Grady County Election Board. Just under 9% of the registered voters in the community participated in the nonpartisan City Council election April 2.