Voters elect new mayor in Donna

DONNA — Voters elected a new mayor for the first time in six years in the city's runoff contest Saturday.

David Simmons, 54, defeated incumbent Mayor Ricardo "Rick" Morales, 40, garnering more than 57 percent of the vote.
In the other runoff contest, for the Place 1 seat on the Donna City Council, voters re-elected Guadalupe "Lupe" Castillo, 38, over challenger Angie Gonzalez-De Los Rios, 32.

"I'm really kind of speechless at the moment," Simmons said when reached by phone after unofficial results were released. "People obviously wanted to make a change and the people spoke."

Simmons is a tax assessor-collector for the Donna school district with no elected-office experience. Morales, who has long been a fixture of Donna politics, has served as mayor for six years and as a councilman for two before that.

"It's been a long campaign," Morales said when reached by phone. "I left the city in better condition than I found it in fiscally."
Aside from the sweltering weather, voters and campaign workers reported no problems at the single polling location at Amigos del Valle, 1408 Silver Ave. In all, more than 2,800 people voted in the mayoral runoff, topping the 2,424 who voted in the three-way contest in the May election.

"People want change," Castillo said Saturday afternoon without acknowledging the irony of an incumbent making that remark. "Everything's been really smooth, other than the hot weather."

Gonzalez-De Los Rios, a spokeswoman for the Donna school district, had never run for public office. And while she came up short, she said she learned a lot and that her political aspirations remain intact.

"It's hard when you come up short like that," she said by phone. "I'm not going away, especially with the response I got."