Beaconsfield: landslide win for Pollock

Though he earned nearly twice the amount of votes as incumbent Bob Benedetti to become the next mayor of Beaconsfield, former councillor David Pollock inherited a mixed council tonight, with three of his supporting candidates grabbing seats while two of Benedetti’s, and an independent, took the others.

“I think we’re going to focus on much better prioritizing our expenditures,” Pollock said to reporters at city hall earlier tonight, recalling one of the themes of his campaign.

“I like to see that our library, our recreational facilities, are much better maintained,” he said, rather than spend cash on building new ones.

First elected to council in 2005, Pollock stood out over the last four years, voting against council on issues such as the annual budget, as well as a 10 per cent pay hike council gave itself in 2007.

Of the city’s eligible voters, 3,962 voted for change, while only 1,938 pushed for Benedetti to return. “I think I’ve had support from the Beaconsfield community for a number of years,” Pollock said, “and I think they showed that support tonight.”

Pollock thanked his supporters many a time throughout the night as results kept coming in, and he also spent some time with his sons, who appeared at his side.

Still, he was coy about certain issues he has inherited from the previous administration, such as a row with Pointe Claire resident Claire Sargent, who was fined over $2,000 for cutting down some vine overgrowth covering signage on the town’s lawn bowling annex building, told the fees would go toward replacing the plant, but has wanted a refund ever since the vine grew back on its own.

“I certainly feel that Claire could have been treated a whole lot better than she was by the city,” Pollock, who had brought up the issue during a mayoral debate little over a week ago, said tonight, but he did not confirm she would get any money back.

Pollock also said he would roll up his sleeves to get negotiations back on the right track with the city’s blue-collar workers, who walked out on a strike in September, nevertheless recalling that Beaconsfield residents already deal with “a high level of taxation” for their services.

With only five to six weeks between council’s official swearing in and the city’s next annual budget due date, the mayor-elect conceded that consulting the public on the matter may be a little difficult. “We’ll certainly try to find an effective mechanism to get that done,” he said.

According to Rhonda Massad, a small business owner who supported Pollock throughout his campaign and won the District 6 council seat, some of that mechanism may involve the Internet. “We’ve collected a lot of e-mail addresses while we were canvassing,” she said, and that will come in handy when the time comes to talk to the public.

Karin Essen, a management consultant for various companies, and the former head of the Beaconsfield Citizens’ Association, fought a close battle to prevail over incumbent Karen Messier in District 2. “We had a tough battle,” she acknowledged at city hall tonight, a few minutes after Pollock’s crowd of supporters erupted in applause once the final results from all voting booths were in. “We ran a good, clean campaign,” she said, and added council has a lot of work ahead with the budget coming up.

Two incumbent councillors took their seats back after a pitched battle that lasted until all poll results were in. Wade Staddon and Roy Baird, in Districts 3 and 5, respectively, made their way to city hall to congratulate the new mayor and council members.

“He was very clean and ran a democratic council,” Staddon said of Benedetti, also praising his work in getting new infrastructure programs kick-started. “Definitely, the dynamic of the council will change,” he said, but he was hoping to work with the new members.

Baird attributed his victory to remaining clean during the campaign. “There’s a way to run a campaign,” he said, “and that’s to run it cleanly, and not as a ‘dirty pool.’ ”

District 1 was the only one where nobody openly backing a mayoral candidate was victorious. Independent Michael Montagano took the seat. In District 4, the winner was Pollock supporter Brian Ross.

For incumbent Bob Benedetti, a retired broadcast journalist, rosy expectations began to dim once the results for Districts 4 and 5, the first ones to be counted, began to roll in.

“They’re not good?” Benedetti asked a pollster over the telephone earlier this evening of those two results, as a hush fell over the roomful of supporters who turned up at at Le Club West Island fitness centre to be with their choice for the top job.

He jotted those results on a Bristol board with a marker before telling reporters of his surprise. “My sense was positive in both those districts,” Benedetti said. “A lot of people flat-out said they would vote for me,” he added.

Third mayoral candidate, Hela Labene, only earned 403 votes. Most of the candidates backing her finished last in their races, and nobody from that slate appeared publicly tonight.