Incumbent Chris Faraldi appears to have won the Republican nomination to retain his seat as a member of the Lynchburg City Council, state election results indicated late Tuesday.
Faraldi, the city’s vice mayor, held a 21-vote lead, 1,023 to 1,002, over challenger Peter Alexander in the council’s Ward IV Republican primary. Under state law, a losing candidate can request a recount if the margin is 1% or less after the election results have been certified. That can take several weeks.
Ward IV comprises the Timberlake Road corridor at the St. Thomas More Catholic Church precinct, Sandusky neighborhood at Sandusky Middle School, and midtown at Perrymont Fellowship Hall and Linkhorne Middle School, largely a middle-class populace. Though both candidates were present at polling locations earlier in the day, neither replied to requests for comment Tuesday evening.
Supporters of both candidates carried similar issues into the booth. Lynchburgers interviewed Tuesday said they were concerned about real estate and personal property taxes, which they said have increased markedly in recent years, and the ways in which taxpayer dollars have been spent in the current term.
Linda and Mike Worsham, who voted around lunchtime at St. Thomas More in Ward IV, said they supported Faraldi’s efforts to keep the city from spending “wasted money,” like the city’s $8 million plan to build an amphitheater at Riverfront Park downtown. They supported Faraldi, who initially opposed the project but later voted to appropriate $3 million of the city’s surplus revenue toward the project.
The Worshams also said they appreciated Faraldi’s efforts elsewhere to lessen the city’s tax burden on its citizens.
“Senior citizens deserve a break,” Linda Worsham said.
Mel Clark, another voter at St. Thomas More, supported Alexander on similar grounds. He cited the ongoing debate in the city about closing elementary schools with declining enrollment as a cost-saving measure.
“The school system has to be economically viable,” Clark said, adding that he has sympathy for the people who have worked to keep schools like Sandusky Elementary open throughout the public discussion of the matter. Clark also said he was concerned about the tax burden on residents and crime in the city.
Election officials at St. Thomas More and Linkhorne described above-average turnout for a primary, but not quite the number of voters they were expecting given the highly publicized U.S. Senate and congressional primaries that went along with the city council primary. St. Thomas More reported just over 700 Republican primary ballots cast of the more than 5,500 registered voters in the precinct. At Linkhorne Middle, about 775 Republican ballots were cast from the 3,801 registered voters.
The primary challenge came in the midst of infighting among Republicans on the Hill City’s representative body. Shortly after Faraldi was elected to his first term in 2020, he and fellow Republican Stephanie Reed became vice mayor and mayor, respectively, by teaming with the council’s two Democrats to block Republicans Jeff Helgeson and Marty Misjuns from leadership positions. Alexander, who aligned with Helgeson, Misjuns and the Lynchburg Republican City Committee leadership, then challenged for the Ward IV seat.
Faraldi, who has described himself as a pragmatic candidate who cannot be controlled by party lines, staffed on a handful of state and federal Republican campaigns prior to seeking office himself. He works as a Realtor in the Lynchburg area. Alexander, a retired contractor and pastor, has not held public office.
Tuesday’s election results are pending the count of provisional ballots and will be certified in the coming days.
