Runoff set in Marion County
ARMANDO RIOS
The Baxter Bulletin    24 May 2006

YELLVILLE — Marion County Judge Charles Trammell appeared to be going into a Democratic primary runoff with Kenneth Oxford June 13 in a race Tuesday that included minor glitches.

With 33 of 36 boxes counted, unofficial results late Tuesday showed Oxford had 1,010, or 48.26 percent of the vote, to Trammell's 569, or 27.19 percent. Challenger John Tate received 514 votes, or 24.56 percent.
 
With the remaining boxes left to count, Oxford still had hope to win the election outright.

"I am thankful to the Lord for the people that turned out and I appreciate them helping me and for everything they have done," Oxford said. "I still hope I can win the election."

"All that hard work and the promises are paying off for him," Trammell said of Oxford. "I guess that means we have a lot of work to do within the next two weeks."

Oxford touted his experience as his best qualification for the office.

"I have a lot of training in roads, management and doing a lot of public relations work," Oxford told The Bulletin in an interview last week. "That is very important in dealing with the public."

Trammell touted his experience as his best qualification. "It does not make any difference how many years you spend with any business or individual, you learn how to run a county or be a county judge and you do that with experience," Trammell told The Bulletin last week. "I am in my second term and when you look at all the county judge candidates, there is only one that has county experience and that is me."

All the candidates had stated that roads were the most important issue in this race.

Trammell said he has been using the dollars the county gets to the fullest extent.

Trammell said he had one project where he used $34,000 in county road department funds to get state funds for a total of $1.7 million for a road project. He said another 3.1 miles of roads would get overlaid at a cost of $270,000 but it would cost the county roughly 10 percent, or $27,000.

Oxford said he would like to see the roads maintained properly.

Oxford said he would like to see the quorum court put as much money as possible into the county's road department budget because roads are very important in Marion County.

Oxford also said during the campaign he would like to see small industry come into the county and said he would look into moving the 911 Center out of the Marion County Sheriff's Office and setting it up by itself.

Marion County voters used 32 touch screen machines Tuesday. A Marion County Election commissioner said officials had a problem with some machines that did not recognize when 7:30 p.m., the time to close the polls, arrived. The machines had to be forced to shut down and poll workers did not know how to do that. Election commissioners had to give instructions to the poll workers on how to force the machines to shut down.

armandor@baxterbulletin.com