After a grassroots campaign focused on communicating with constituents, Ron Mathies will serve four more years as Herbert's mayor.
"It's my third term and that gets pretty hard in today's age to win a third term," Mathies said. "I actually worked pretty hard at it, but we did end up winning and I'm happy. I hope to serve another four years and keep working and trying to improve our town."
Mathies beat councillor Ron Becker by only 15 votes. With 333 ballots cast, Mathies had 172 votes to 157 for Becker.
"We all have different opinions and different views," he said. "What I thought right away is that there was some opposition to me with some of the things going on in the community and I know there's a large part of our community they never get heard. They never get to have a voice in it. I thought my best option was to go from door to door and talk to the people that you really never get to see, and they were very appreciative.
"They were able to voice their opinions to me and... I think that got me a lot of votes. I've been here all my life and we've done some things to really help the community... I just work hard. I just basically work to try and help the community, and I think in the end that paid off."
Mathies found that in having those conversations he found some support for the direction of the town.
"Most of them that I talked to, they were happy with the way it was going," he noted. "They didn't have concerns with me as the mayor. What they probably weren't that interested in going and voting until I talked to them. I said, listen, I'm going to need some votes... there was a few of those issues when I explained what had happened, there was a side that they had never heard because it's like every place else. If you don't go out and tell your side, they never hear. So when I clarified a few of those things I think it helped.
"In our community, there's an awful lot of good people volunteering and helping. It was good to have good, strong opposition, and I happened to win."
Now the focus turns to potential projects over the next four years.
"We'd like to get Main Street paved," Mathies said. "That's going to be somewhere between $500,000 and $700,000. I thought we could get it done in the next term. We've done a lot. In the last eight years. we have been able to spend about $3.25 million on infrastructure. That's one thing I think we can get done as. We would like to do something with a walking path or a walking area for the people. We have so many kids and we've got a lot of mothers walking and they really don't have any place to walk. On the streets, our sidewalks are not that good. It all takes an awful lot of money that we don't have. We keep working on it."
Herbert had three council positions up for grabs with four candidates.
Darla Martens, Daniel Hamm and James Ricardson won that election. They join acclaimed councillors Pat Gammel, Dawn Wanner and Tom Newburgh in filling out the council table.