NIC is projected to retain incumbent board of trustee member Judith Meyer and welcome fresh faces Todd Banducci and Ron Nilson to the fold.
Meyer successfully fought off challenger Paul Matthews for Seat A, winning 53 percent of the unofficially tallied votes, and carving out a 3,198 vote lead over her opponent.
Numbers were similar for Seat B’s Banducci, who won his race with 54 percent of the vote, and kept a 3,868 vote edge over incumbent trustee Mic Armon.
Nilson, who ran in a field of six candidates for the wide open Seat C, claimed 32 percent of the vote, but still came out 3,868 votes ahead of his closest competitor, Vicki Ambrosetti.
Ambrosetti preformed somewhat of a small upset in the race by out-distancing fellow candidate Dean Haagenson by a slim 50 votes. Haagenson had been considered by many to be Nilson’s primary rival for the seat, and had been campaigning with Meyer and Armon in the weeks up to the election.
Meyer received the most votes out of any candidate running in the three races with a total tally of 25,038.
Banducci’s total came in second with 24,435, and Nilson’s numbers were 14,576.
Meyer’s campaign out-raised her opponent by $2,368 dollars, according to campaign disclosure forms from Oct. 29.
After taking out a loan for $4,539, Nilson’s campaign raised the most money in the election with $12,539.86 to his name.
Despite being nonpartisan positions, the race featured a distinctly partisan tone, with Matthews, Banducci and Nilson running together with endorsements from the Reagan Republicans.
Meyer and the defeated Armon, a self-stated Republican, both repeatedly said that they did not want politics to be a factor in the race, and both claimed ignorance on the part of their endorsement from the local Democrat’s party.
Partisanship was just only one of the talking points in the races, with issues of transparency, fiscal concerns, expansion and debate about how much input the business community should have in college affairs appearing in almost all of the 10 candidates’ platforms.
The county will release the official scores within a few days.
