Candidate: Every Vote Counted

Candidate: Every vote counted

■ Low-budget, personal campaign worked for library board's newest member.

By MARIANNE RZEPKA

NEWS STAFF REPORTER

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Was it the homemade signs? The one advertisement in a monthly newspaper? The calls Ruth Winter made to friends Monday morning urging them to vote?

Maybe everything together made the 110-vote difference in Winter’s winning a seat on the Ann Arbor District Library Monday.

“Every vote counted,” Winter said after she learned she was one of three candidates who won a four-year term on the seven-member board.

Winter, 39, was the only non-incumbent to get a seat, winning along with Richard Dougherty and Sandra White, who have sat on the board for the past two years. Eight candidates were in the running.

With this election, all seven members of the board are filling out full terms.

The library used to be run by the Ann Arbor school district, but under Proposal A, passed in 1994, the library system had to become independent, with its own board.

The first elected board was chosen in 1996, with the top four vote-getters filling the four-year terms and the next three dropping into two-year terms.

Winter, a physician and anesthesiologist at Foote Hospital in Jackson, said she ran a “low-budget campaign.” Her children helped her make 50 campaigns signs and install them at polling places in the district.

Winter, who is on the board of the Hebrew Day School, had one advertisement in the Washtenaw Jewish News. On Monday morning, she called friends to remind them to vote. “Some of them thought the election was tomorrow,” Winter said.

And, when she showed up with her husband and children at the Balas Building Monday night, Winter discovered she’d won a seat on the board with 1,573 votes. Winter will be sworn in at the first library board meeting in July.

Coming in fourth, with 1,463 votes, was Marlene Ross. She also appeared at the Balas Building but said she had no comment.

The vote totals for the remaining candidates were: Warren Hecht, 1,188; Charles Wilbur, 849; Sigurd Nelson n, 535;-and Henry Hardy, 492.

The two incumbents waited for the results at home.

“I thought I had broad support,” said White, 55, who works in Lansing as chief of training evaluation and compliance unit for the Women, Infants and Children supplemental nutrition program.

White was the top vote-getter with 1,932 votes; Dougherty came in second with a total of 1,890 votes.

Both those totals were way behind their votes two years ago, when White received 2,981 votes and Dougherty 3,214 votes. But two years ago, the election also included a request for 2 mills for operations.

This year, there were no such issues to bring out the vote, said Dougherty, 63, the retired director of the University of Michigan library system. Only 5.1 percent of the registered voters in the Ann Arbor school district turned out for Monday’s election, and many of those who did vote ignored the library candidates on the ballot.