Democrat Jon Green easily won Tuesday’s special election to fill the vacancy on the Johnson County Board of Supervisors. Green earned 9,718 votes, or 66.1 percent of all votes cast, according to the totals published by the Johnson County Auditor’s Office. Republican Phil Hemingway won 4,504 votes, or 30.6 percent of the total, and Brian Campbell, who ran without party affiliation, received 471 votes, or 3.2 percent. There were also 15 write-in votes.
Green, the former mayor of Lone Tree, a small town in southeast Johnson County, told Little Village last month that unique moment created by the COVID-19 pandemic inspired him to run for supervisor following Janelle Rettig’s resignation.
“I think that for as calamitous as the past 14 months or so have been, this is nevertheless a moment of significant opportunity,” he explained. “The pandemic has scrambled so many things — it is forcing all of us to reconsider some of our priorities, some of the basic assumptions we’ve made about what government is, what government can do, what government should do.”
“And at the end of this transition phase from the past that has already died and the future that hasn’t arrived yet, hopefully we can grab the wheel and we can steer ourselves to a better, more equitable future where we have a more muscular government at all levels that is prepared to address systemic racism, that is prepared to deal with the climate calamity so that we have a planet here left for folks in the coming generations.”
Green will serve out the remainder of Rettig’s term, which runs through December 2022.
Turnout for Tuesday’s special election was substantially higher than the last special election for the Johnson County Board of Supervisors in December 2018. That election saw a voter participation rate of 9.98 percent. In this election, 16.64 percent of the county’s voters cast ballots.
