After a campaign that lasted for months and saw thousands of dollars spent, all last night's St. Pete City Council race in District 1 settled between Charlie Gerdes, Bob Kersteen and Josh Shulman, is that the race now is just between Charlie Gerdes and Bob Kersteen.
In an election in which less than 3,000 people participated (2,864 to be precise), the results were not surprising to close observers. The well-established Gerdes easily took the highest percentage of votes with 52 percent, Kersteen qualified for the general election run-off by garnering 28 percent, while Shulman took 20 percent.
The question that some citizens in St. Pete might have today is, why have a run-off when one candidate has already taken a majority of the vote in a primary? We'll have more on that in a subsequent post.
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2011.