As expected, Gabriel Sterling will inherit the Sandy Springs City Council seat that his longtime friend Ashley Jenkins vacated two months ago.
Sterling received more than 75 percent of the vote on Tuesday night, rolling to victory over upstart contenders Chiteka Jackson and Dennis Williams in the District 4 special election.
With all five precincts reporting, Sterling received 614 of the 811 ballots cast in the election. Jackson finished second with 160 votes (19.7 percent) and Williams had 37 votes (4.6 percent).
Sterling had always been the presumptive favorite, earning an early endorsement from Jenkins and leaning heavily on residents' familiarity from his involvement in city politics over the past decade.
"I felt pretty confident," Sterling said from his victory party at The Brickery, a local restaurant. "I worked my plan the way I intended from the beginning."
A native of Sandy Springs and one of the leaders in the city's efforts to incorporate earlier this decade, the 40-year-old Sterling earned his first electoral victory after coming up short in campaigns for the Georgia House of Representatives in 1988 and 1998.
Jackson and Williams attempted to counter Sterling by selling voters on their diverse business backgrounds and knowledge of city issues. They also tried different methods of reaching voters; Jackson walked the streets, went door-to-door and had campaign volunteers hold up signs at major intersections while Williams set out dozens of signs on well-traveled streets throughout the district.
In the end, they couldn't overcome Sterling's big advantages.
During his campaign, Sterling promised to fight growth and projects that would hurt the district's neighborhoods, oppose any attempt to increase property taxes, lay the groundwork to solve the area's traffic woes and come up with a way to increase trails and green space.
He also pledged to resume the fight of his predecessor, who vigorously opposed the city's plan to make a pitch for a satellite campus of Gwinnett Technical College.
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