Shakeva Frazier will be the first female city council member since 2010 and the first new face on the Danville City Council since 2020, according to unofficial election results Tuesday night.
Frazier will join incumbents Mayor Alonzo Jones, Bryant Hood and Gary Miller, who were reelected, to fill the four open seats on city council.
Vice Mayor James Buckner was the only incumbent not reelected. He has served on the council since 2014.
Danny Marshall beat Jasmine Lipscomb in a special election to fill the remainder of Del. Madison Whittle’s council term after Whittle was elected to the General Assembly last fall. In February, Marshall was selected by city council to fill Whittle’s vacant seat until the special election.
Nine candidates — four incumbents and five challengers — ran for four open seats on the council.
Frazier, in her second campaign for the city council, received the second-highest vote count, after Jones, who has been mayor since 2018. She was runner-up in the 2024 council race.
In an interview before Election Day, Frazier said that women make up 54% of Danville’s population, and they should be represented on the city council.
“Nothing against the men, but it’s time,” Frazier said in a September interview. “Young girls and women need to see women included in decision-making. We have a group of men making decisions about our community where most residents are women.”
When council members are inaugurated in January, Frazier will be the first woman on the council since Ruby Archie, who served from 1994 until her death in 2010. Archie was Danville’s first and only female mayor from 1998 to 2000.
Frazier is executive director of Third Chance Housing, a local nonprofit that focuses on homelessness prevention, housing affordability and economic resilience.
“My feet are already on the ground” when it comes to expanding affordable and transitional housing, she said.
At a candidate forum in October, she said that her biggest priority, if elected, would be ensuring that each resident can be part of Danville’s continuing economic growth.
“We do have a lot of prosperity coming in, but there are still areas that can use funding and resources,” she said in September. “Seniors and young people are both in a crunch. They are leaving the city, and they need ways to grow here and we need to make them want to stay.”
The vote count was as follows, according to unofficial vote totals:
Alonzo Jones: 6,546
Shakeva Frazier: 6,485
Bryant Hood: 6,190
Gary Miller: 6,050
Dustin Whittle: 5,157
James Buckner: 4,889
Shelby Irving: 4,317
Tony Howerton: 3,434
Lonnie Jones: 1,920
In the special election, Marshall received 6,956 votes, and Lipscomb received 6,002 votes.
This is the first city council election since 2020 that a newcomer has been elected.
Hood has been a council member for six years, and until Frazier was elected Tuesday, Hood and council member Barry Mayo, also elected six years ago, were the newest members of council.
Miller has been a member of council since 2008 and has served two stints as vice mayor since then.
Jones was first elected to the council in 2010, and he has been mayor for eight years.
Marshall was a member of the city council from 2000 to 2011 before serving as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates from 2002 to 2024. He stepped down from his position in the General Assembly due to medical issues and swapped places with Whittle on the city council.
For the school board race, the three incumbents won the three open seats over challenger David Jones. The vote count was as follows, according to unofficial results:
TyQuan Graves: 7,841
Trina McLaughlin: 7,765
Keisha Averett: 7,581
David Jones: 4,495
Each of these elected officials will begin their new terms in January.
