Post Falls election to feature four- and three-way battles

by Brian Walker
| September 7, 2013 9:00 PM

POST FALLS - Interest in running for Post Falls City Council surged on Friday, the deadline for candidates to file to be on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Post Falls will have four- and three-way races for council, while no one filed to challenge Linda Wilhelm.

For seat No. 2 currently held by Ron Jacobson, the candidates will be Barry Rubin, Joe Bodman, Jim Hail and Alan Wolfe.

Hail filed on Thursday and Wolfe and Bodman on Friday to add to the choices in the final days.

Wolfe said his filing was not a last-minute decision to run, but a matter of needing to double check with a key person first.

"I've been thinking about it for a while, but Dani (Wolfe's wife) was on vacation out of the country, so I wanted to wait until she got back to have a good discussion about running," he said.

Jacobson is running for mayor against Kerri Thoreson, another current council member.

There will also be a three-way race for council seat No. 4 held by Betty Ann Henderson. She'll be challenged by Jayson Cornwell, who filed last week, and Christi Fleischman, who filed on Friday.

Wilhelm, who holds seat No. 6, also up for grabs, emerged from the filing season as the lone candidate for her seat. Candidates for city elections have until Oct. 8 to file as a write-in.

"I feel very blessed that no one is running against me," Wilhelm said, adding she doesn't know why that happened. "I feel like I work hard at what I do. I love the position and I love the town.

"I wasn't looking forward to the campaign - running for office was one of the most stressful times of my life - but I was looking forward to winning the seat."

Wolfe said the reason he chose to run for a seat that already had two candidates at the time he filed - Bodman filed later in the day - rather than enter a race with just one candidate obviously wasn't about positioning himself for the best chance to win.

"I am more concerned with the council as a whole," he said. "I have a lot of respect for Linda Wilhelm and the work she has done over the years so I never really thought about running against her. I've had my eye on Seat 2 since Ron decided to run for mayor and wanted to see who would step forward."