Spokane City Council District 2
Election Results
| Candidate | Votes | Pct |
|---|---|---|
| Jon Snyder | 9,456 | 64.39% |
| John Ahern | 5,229 | 35.61% |
* Race percentages are calculated with data from the Secretary of State's Office, which omits write-in votes from its calculations when there are too few to affect the outcome. The Spokane County Auditor's Office may have slightly different percentages than are reflected here because its figures include any write-in votes.
About the Race
District 2 encompasses much of downtown, the South Hill and the newly added West Plains section of the city. Jon Snyder, the incumbent, is the founder and former publisher of Out There Monthly. John Ahern served in the state House for a decade before returning to Spokane to care for his ailing wife of 50 years. Pay for this seat is $30,000 per year with full benefits. It is a four-year term.
The Candidates
Jon Snyder
- Age:
- 55
- City:
- Spokane, WA
- Occupation:
- City Council member and former owner of a monthly outdoor magazine
Career: City Council member and former publisher of the Go Green Directory and Out There Monthly magazine, which is focused on outdoor recreation. Founder and first board chairman of KYRS Thin Air Community Radio.
Education: Graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in 1987. Earned bachelor’s degree from Evergreen State College in 1991.
Political experience: Won current Spokane City Council term in 2009. Serves on Washington Traffic Safety Commission, Aging and Long Term Care of Eastern Washington board and Spokane Regional Health District board. Formerly served as Spokane Regional Transportation Council member and Spokane Transit Authority board.
Family: Married. Has two school-age children.
John Ahern
- Age:
- 89
- Occupation:
- Business owner, former Washington Representative
His Words: “I’d be glad to give you a full blown interview after I win the election. Like a colleague of mine said to me in the House, he pulled me aside and said, ‘Ahern, what you don’t say can’t hurt you.’”
His Pitch: According to what Ahern has said at open forum during Spokane City Council meetings, under Stuckart the City Council has lunged to the left, making the city undesirable for businesses and unsafe for citizens. As the council’s leader, Ahern would outlaw marijuana and move to clamp down on immigrants who are in Spokane illegally.
Notable Experience: Former Republican legislator who served five terms in the House of Representatives between 2001 and 2012. Unsuccessfully challenged Councilman Jon Snyder in 2013, when he won 35 percent of the vote. Long-time owner of Janco products.
Education: Graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. Earned bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Denver.
Neighborhood: Comstock
Complete Coverage
Job shuffle leaves top police positions vacant
A shakeup in the Spokane Police Department has left three top jobs vacant and no uniformed officers within much of the command staff. The latest change came Wednesday when the department’s second-highest ranking officer, Assistant Chief Craig Meidl, notified Chief Frank Straub that he was stepping down from the command staff to return to a civil service position as a lieutenant.
Liberty Lake won’t allow marijuana sales at first
Liberty Lake has joined the list of cities imposing moratoriums on recreational marijuana, while Spokane Valley may explore ways to add its own set of restrictions on opening any state-licensed pot shops. The moves follow Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s conclusion earlier this month that the voter-approved law legalizing marijuana in Washington doesn’t prohibit cities and counties from banning pot if they want.
Hospitals backpedal on request for city ethics probe
Deaconess and Valley hospital officials are abandoning their request for an ethics investigation of three Spokane City Council members who used city letterhead to express concerns about medical staffing levels during an ongoing labor dispute.
Ben Stuckart allowed to assign Spokane City Council duties
Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart will soon be handing out duties to the city’s six other council members. The Spokane City Council on Monday unanimously agreed to give Stuckart the power to chose which members serve on what boards.
Doug Clark: John Ahern’s recount strategy compounds big loss
Nobility sometimes rises out of a crushing defeat. It’s our way of romanticizing lost causes like Gen. Custer’s futile last stand at Little Big Horn, say, or those brave Alamo holdouts, so outnumbered and outgunned.
John Ahern seeks futile recount in Spokane City Council race
A Spokane City Council candidate who lost big in his attempt to unseat incumbent Jon Snyder mistakenly believes he still may have a shot at winning. John Ahern, a former Republican state representative defeated by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in the council race, is paying for a partial recount. But the request targets only about 1,600 ballots – too few to even potentially overcome Snyder’s nearly 5,700-vote margin – and it’s too late under state election laws to broaden it.
Doug Clark: Election autopsy finds more bucks, zero bang
The Spokane City Council has been rocked by a seismic shift in the balance of impotence. The council’s right-leaning rube majority has been replaced by a preponderance of lunks of a more leftist persuasion.
Spokane City Council power shifts post-election
To the victors go the committee assignments. It may not sound exciting, but the first likely change in the new Spokane City Council as a result of Candace Mumm’s victory Tuesday is the power to decide who sits on what committee.
Mumm and Snyder take commanding leads in Spokane City Council races
The balance of the Spokane City Council will shift to the left after a season of record-breaking campaign spending. The first results from Tuesday’s election showed incumbent Councilman Jon Snyder easily holding on to his seat representing south Spokane with 64 percent of the vote over former Republican state Rep. John Ahern. In the other competitive Spokane council race, former Plan Commission Chairwoman Candace Mumm was beating Michael Cannon, chairman of the city’s Community, Housing and Human Services Board, with 54 percent of the vote.
Conservatives lose control of Spokane City Council; voters oust state senator
Progressives appear poised to regain control of the Spokane City Council.
City Council campaign ads contain false claims
Beware. With money pouring into two Spokane City Council races at a frenzied pace, the campaign material arriving by mail, on the radio, on TV and on the Internet may be misleading or plain wrong.
Doug Clark: Council campaign fortune could be better spent
It takes a lot to shock me after nearly 40 years of journalism. I once had to conduct an interview while standing next to a charred corpse that lay among the scattered wreckage of a plane crash.