CHAPEL HILL – Mark Kleinschmidt received 89.7 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s election, easily winning his third term as Chapel Hill’s mayor.

Kleinschmidt thanked the community for the turnout during the elections.

“First of all I want to say how grateful I am for the support that the community showed, and I’m very grateful for being re-elected,” Kleinschmidt said. “I always said that there are about 20 percent of people who vote in Chapel Hill who will never vote for me ever, and well, I beat that.”

Along with incumbents Sally Greene and Ed Harrison, two newcomers will be joining the council. Maria Palmer and George Cianciolo beat out Loren Hintz and Amy Ryan. Kleinschmidt said he was pleased by the outcome.

“I’m really surprised, although I think that the ultimate results reflect the strong campaigns, particularly of the top six vote getters, all the way down from the four winners through Amy and Loren,” said Kleinschmidt. “I think we had some great campaigns that really engaged the community. I’m really looking forward to working with this set.”

Although Kleinschmidt was running unopposed, 500 people wrote in another name. Some of those may have been the result of a last minute write-in campaign from people upset with how the Central West development has been handled. Kleinschmidt says he’s glad to hear feedback from people about the Central West area.

“Well I’m glad folks are engaged, the only thing that’s kind of disturbed me at all are some of the ways that this process has been described inaccurately,” Kleinschmidt said.

He stressed that the Central West plan is general guidance for future development and it has not been approved by the town council.

For his third term, Kleinschmidt says he is looking forward to working on the plan to redevelop the Ephesus Church-Fordham Boulevard area.

“One of the things I’ve been working on really hard for the last four years is getting work done on the Ephesus Church – Fordham Boulevard district,” said Kleinschmidt. “That’s actually a really exciting project that’s going to give real meat to the words that have been said by almost everyone who’s ever run for council or mayor for the last 15 years, that they want to enhance our commercial tax base.”

Prior to being elected as mayor in 2009, Kleinschmidt served on the council from 2001-2009.

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