One of the busiest and arguably contentious races this Tallahassee election season has been the bid for city commission seat 3, which is currently held by mayoral candidate Jeremy Matlow.<\/p>\n
But the race is far from over.<\/p>\n
Since no candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary, the race has slipped into a runoff and a pesky recount between Tom Derzypolski, Talethia\u00a0Edwards and PJ\u00a0Perez.<\/p>\n
Derzypolski’s and Edwards’ results fall within the margin for a machine recount, according to Florida law. The two candidates are split by 24 votes.<\/p>\n
“I think Tallahassee is speaking pretty clearly that it’s time for a new way of governing where we do so leading with respect and encourage the discussion of new ideas in a respectful way without teams and factions and 3-2 votes,” Derzypolski said.<\/p>\n
Perez, who received 29 percent of the vote, will advance to a runoff election and face whichever candidate comes out on top.
“This is telling us where the city wants to be heading as a community and so for me, I’ll just continue to plug away at what we’ve been talking about,” Perez said.<\/p>\n
The candidates celebrated with family and friends but agreed that the work must continue.<\/p>\n
“This open seat gives a bit of a shake up to the city commission and a lot of people are looking for fresh ideas and people who have had their ears to the ground,” Edwards said.<\/p>\n
The race has been one of the most heated contests of the season with negative ads, accusations of divisive campaigning tactics, and controversial social media posts.<\/p>\n
The seat stretches across the neighborhoods of Northeast Tallahassee, including Midtown, and has been held by Matlow for nearly eight years.<\/p>\n
According to the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office, the position earns $99,167 annual salary.<\/p>\n
The runoff election will occur on Nov. 3 during the general election, and the candidate with more than 50% of the vote will win the bid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the busiest and arguably contentious races this Tallahassee election season has been the bid for city…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[232,234,233],"class_list":["post-375544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}