Unofficial final voting results issued by the Montgomery County Board of Elections revealed that McDonald won 61.5 percent of the vote during Tuesday’s election while current Mayor Joyce Sutton Cameron had 38 percent of the vote.
Sutton Cameron has been mayor for six years and on the council for 15 years.
“The voters have spoken. Our citizens are seeking a change for our community,” Sutton Cameron said. “It has been a wonderful experience representing Trotwood and all the citizens for the past 15 years. I love serving my community and will continue to do so.”
McDonald, owner of True Style Hair Salon, added that her other top priorities as mayor are to unify the city’s staff and to hold a town hall meeting within her first 90 days in office.
“Moving forward from there, continuing in the area of transparency and accountability, that’s going to be the way we’re going to operate,” McDonald said.
McDonald said the citizens’ dissatisfaction “was shown at the polls by the numbers of people that came out.”
Trotwood had 17,457 registered voters, and 5,650 voted in the mayor’s race, according unofficial statistics provided by the county.
Besides a new mayor, the city will also welcome two new city council members who will replace the two at-large seats held by Bruce Kettelle and Barbara Staggs.
The new council members are Robert Kelley Jr., a licensed social worker and retired director with The Dayton Chapter of The American Red Cross, and Rhonda Finley, a purchasing and logistics consultant for Heidelberg Distributing Company. They will join McDonald and council members Bettye Gales, Rap Hankins and Ron Vaughn next year.
“They ran a very determined campaign and it paid off,” said Kettelle of Kelley and Finley.
Kettelle added that he believes the influence of local pastors played a key role in Kelley and Finley winning the election.
“When 10 local pastors endorsed our opposition without even interviewing me, that is a difficult force to overcome,” said Kettelle, who served on the council from 1997-2001 and then returned in 2011. “Trotwood is a very religious community, and we have a lot of people that listen to their pastors, as they should.”
Staggs, who is the city’s vice mayor, did not immediately return phone calls placed by the newspaper.
When asked about his council legacy, Kettelle said he was proud of his efforts in attracting new life to the city’s business quarters and redirecting the city’s money from economic development to stabilizing neighborhoods “by rehabbing houses and stepping up our code enforcement efforts to try and keep our home values from falling.”
Unofficial final voting results show that Kelley led the race with 28 percent of the vote. Finley came in second with 26 percent. Kettelle came in third with 19.38 percent, followed by Staggs with 19.37 percent. Challenger Mark Landis had seven percent.
In the council race, 9,258 votes were cast.
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