With an unofficial estimated 5,000 of the more than 65,000 registered voters in Inglewood going to the polls, the city clerk has released the unofficial results, and at this point only one race remains up in the air.
In the contest for the School Board Seat 4, Margaret Turner Evans with 47 percent of the vote and Graciela Patino with 23 percent of ballots cast may be headed for a run-off in June.
The other races offered few surprises. Incumbent City Clerk, Yvonne Horton, won more than 90 percent of the vote in the citywide election.
Wanda Brown, Inglewood City Treasurer, and Fourth District City Council Member Ralph Franklin were unopposed and reelected.
Third District Incumbent councilmember Eloy Morales garnered 88 percent of ballots.
In the school district, all of the board-appointed candidates came up short. Instead, the voters elected Margaret Richards-Bowers to the First District seat, Melody Ngauc-Tuuholoaki won the Third District seat, and D’Artagnan Scorza took the Fifth District seat.
The board members serve only as an advisory to the state-appointed administrator Donald Brann, Ed.D., who has the final say on all actions. The state took over control of the Inglewood Unified School District in 2012 and since then has gone through two other state-sanctioned administrators and one report from the Fiscal Crisis and Management Team, the official oversight body. That report indicated that the district was in worse shape than when it was first taken over. Brann was brought in to run the district after that report.
The district worked out a 20-year loan with the state to address its financial woes and is expected to be under the control of the state administrator for the foreseeable future (or until the loan is repaid).
City Clerk Horton advised that the election day results are unofficial and provisional and Vote-By-Mail ballots, turned in at the polls instead of mailed in before the deadline, are still being counted. “I doubt that the final vote count will change the outcome of most of the elections, however, school Board seat 4 is too close to call,” she said.
