Commissioner Jon Irons stepped down last month<\/a> ahead of a planned move to Atlanta due to a family member\u2019s job opportunity.<\/p>\nArmstrong, 77, a former teacher and basketball coach at Whitehall-Coplay High School, served two terms as county executive, leaving at the start of this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI sincerely thank you, I do really appreciate this, and I will do my best, as I always have, working with everyone for the betterment of Lehigh County,\u201d Armstrong said.<\/p>\n
Armstrong said he was impressed by the other candidates.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir credentials were fabulous,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Voting for Armstrong were commissioners Sheila Alvarado, Ron W. Beitler, Chairman Geoff Brace, Dan Hartzell and Antonio A. Pineda.<\/p>\n
Sean Ziller, deputy director of economic development for Bethlehem, got the second most votes with commissioners Sarah Fevig and April Riddick choosing him. Commissioner Zach Cole-Borghi was absent due to a death in his family, Brace said.<\/p>\n
Alvarado, Brace and Riddick voted for Ziller in early rounds of voting before switching to Armstrong. Under the county\u2019s Home Rule Charter, five of the eight commissioners had to agree on a candidate, or the decision would have been left up to a judge of the Court of Common Pleas.<\/p>\n
Ten candidates were interviewed for the appointment last month. Four candidates who previously put in their names subsequently withdrew.<\/p>\n
All the persons who interviewed for the job were Democrats, since the charter required Irons\u2019 replacement be from the same party. The term runs through 2027.<\/p>\n
Armstrong served on the Whitehall Township Board of Commissioners from 2015 to 2019, and is the treasurer of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission and first vice president of County Executives of America, and president-elect of the National Association of Regional Councils.<\/p>\n
He will join the board after he is sworn in. A date for that was not set by the end of Wednesday night\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n
Beitler, who advocated for Armstrong on social media and called him \u201cuniquely qualified,\u201d applauded all the candidates.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was an impressive group of people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Brace agreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt takes guts to put yourself through this process. Some of you have never pursued elected office before. That is not a small risk that you just took. Thank you, because that\u2019s citizenship right there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Following seven rounds of voting, Lehigh County commissioners on Wednesday chose former County Executive Phillips Armstrong Sr. as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,433,182,883,139,28,50,432,1654],"class_list":["post-264324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-lehigh-county","tag-local-news","tag-local-politics","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-politics","tag-top-stories-tmc","tag-whitehall-township"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}