Louise Alexander defeated Mayor Kenneth Gulley in the Sept. 22 runoff, ending his 16 years in office, and voters settled two City Council seats and two Board of Education seats the same night.
Unofficial returns posted at City Hall Tuesday night, with 11 of the city’s 12 precincts reported, gave Alexander 2,376 votes, or 54.5 percent, to Gulley’s 1,981, or 45.5 percent. The City Council canvasses the returns and declares the official result at noon Tuesday, Sept. 29, the Tuesday after the election, as state law provides.
The result reverses the order of the Aug. 25 election, in which Gulley led the four-candidate field with 1,809 votes to Alexander’s 1,644 but fell short of a majority.
Gulley, first elected in 2010, was seeking a fifth term. Alexander served on the City Council from 1998 to 2010 and represented District 56 in the Alabama House of Representatives from 2014 to 2022. She will be the first woman to serve as Bessemer’s mayor.
Alexander told WIAT after the vote that the city’s agreements on the Project Marvel data center would be her first order of business. “In my first five days in office, we are going to revisit the contracts on the data center and we’re going to make sure that everything is right,” she said. If they are not, she said, she will take the matter back to the public.
She said the data center played “a big part” in the election, along with blight in the neighborhoods, AL.com reported.
Gulley, City Attorney Aaron Killings and the mayor’s chief of staff, Christopher Warren, signed a nondisclosure agreement with the project’s developer, Logistic Land Investment LLC, and the city did not release a copy of it until July, after the Alabama Rivers Alliance threatened to sue, according to AL.com. QTS Data Centers of Virginia plans the $14.5 billion campus of 18 buildings on Rock Mountain Lake Road, with up to 130,000 gallons of water a day from the Warrior River Water Authority, 1,200 megawatts of power from Alabama Power and about 350 permanent jobs.
Five council members voted in November to rezone about 700 acres for the campus, and the council rezoned another 914 acres in April. Three of the five who voted for the first rezoning have lost their seats this year, and the two who voted against it, Cleo King and Donna Thigpen, kept theirs.
In a statement posted on the city’s Facebook page Wednesday, Gulley thanked the city. “It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve as your Mayor for the past 16 years,” he wrote. “I am deeply grateful for the trust, support and opportunity you have given me to work on behalf of the Marvel City and its people.”
In the District 6 council race, Valerie Williams unseated Carla Foreman Jackson, 420 votes to 240. Williams had led the four-candidate field Aug. 25 with 217 votes to Jackson’s 180.
In District 7, King kept his seat, defeating Silas Baldwin 352 to 248. King had fallen three votes short of winning outright Aug. 25, with 266 votes to Baldwin’s 191 and Howard Acoff Jr.’s 79. King told AL.com the data center “was a huge factor” in the vote. “You cannot hold information from the voters,” he said.
The council that takes office in November will have three new members: Williams, Cynthia Stephens-Donald in District 3, who defeated Sarah Person on Aug. 25, and Kelvin Eades in District 5, who defeated Teco Stephens. King, Jarvis Collier in District 1, Chester Porter in District 2 and Thigpen in District 4 return.
On the school board, Omar Chapman, director of the Bessemer Public Library, unseated Margie Varner in District 5, 306 votes to 246. Varner had led the six-candidate field Aug. 25, 142 to 107. Darryl V. Aikerson, a former superintendent of Selma City Schools, won the open District 6 seat over Grover Dunn, 408 to 252, after trailing Dunn 230 to 217 in August.
Five of the seven board members will be new: Elaine Holifield in District 1, Remeka Little in District 2, Tasha Wynn-Scott in District 3, Chapman and Aikerson. Sam Morris in District 4 and Lee Jones in District 7 return. Bessemer City Schools remains under state intervention, and the state Department of Education suspended the sitting board in January, AL.com reported.
About one in four of the city’s 18,000 registered voters cast ballots in the runoff, according to AL.com.
Winners take office the first Monday in November, Nov. 2, along with the council and board members elected outright Aug. 25.