Hugo Residents Return Mayor, Council To Office
It was not a good year to be an incumbent. However, in Hugo, both council members up for re-election ran unopposed, and Mayor Fran Miron pulled past former Mayor Walter (Wally) Stoltzman to win by 111 votes when fi nal precinct tallies came in late in the evening. The deciding precinct was Ward 1, whose vote tallies were reported considerably later than those in Wards 2 and 3.
Problems cropped up when Hugo City Clerk Mary Ann Creager and local election offi cials attempted to send in the voting results for Ward 1 after Wards 2 and 3 had been reported to Washington County. Ward 1 includes Oakshore Park, Beaver Ponds, and Victor Gardens, all subdivisions in the southwest corner of the city.
"We had some modem problems," Creager said, "and we fi nally had to drive the results in to the county."
This resulted in a very late reporting time; Hugo and Woodbury were the last two cities in Washington County to report their final election results.
In fact, the Pioneer Press listed Stoltzman as Hugo's new mayor as the paper went to press, based on 75 percent of local precincts reporting. Stoltzman, a former mayor of Hugo, won the majority of votes in Wards 2 and 3.
The final vote tally was Miron, 2,256; Stoltzman, 2,145. Incumbent council members Becky Petryk and Chuck Haas, representing Wards 1 and 3, received 1,379 votes and 723 votes, respectively.
When asked about his narrow victory, Miron said, "The lesson I learned from this race is that you can work in a positive way toward goals and achievements that, as a group, you agree on; you can see some success in politics by doing that," said Miron. "But you're not going to thrive in politics unless you really get out and try to get that message to the public, and I didn't do that."
"But I'm very pleased with the results," he said. "I think we've got a good team at City Hall, I think we're providing a good service to the community, and I'm very honored to be a part of that."
The Washington County Bond Referendum had consid- erable support in Hugo. All four voting precincts within the city refl ected support for the county question, which authorized the sale of $20 million in bonds to be used to secure and preserve natural areas within the county.
Fifty-eight percent of Hugo vot- ers cast ballots in support of the measure to raise their property taxes, a tally of 2,781 "yes" to 2,026 "no" votes.
According to Creager, Wards 1 and 2 saw a surge in voter registrations on Election Day. "We had 487 new voters register in Ward 2 yesterday," said Creager, "and 389 in Ward 1."