Published: November 04, 2009 01:32 am      

Trigona re-elected Johnstown mayor

JOHNSTOWN — Tom Trigona is keeping the mayor’s chair in Johnstown.

The Democratic incumbent held off a strong challenge from Republican Sharyn Spinelli, who lost by 238 votes with all precincts reporting late Tuesday.

“What made the difference were my friends and the people who believed in me,” Trigona said as he celebrated his win.

The race had turned nasty in recent days, with both sides trading attack ads. Trigona noted that it “really was a tough campaign.”

But he added that he will work hard to live up to voters’ expectations.

“I’m hoping we can work together and move this city forward,” Trigona said.

Spinelli could not immediately be reached for comment.

The mayor’s race featured two candidates who never had run for the position before.

It was Spinelli’s first campaign for political office. Trigona had risen to the position in 2006 because he was a councilman serving as deputy mayor when former Mayor Don Zucco resigned.

Trigona, a 63-year-old retired schoolteacher, billed himself as a “people’s mayor” and said his top priority is combating blight throughout the city.

He defeated Democratic challenger Anthony Gergely in the May primary.

Spinelli, 62, touted her business expertise as a longtime restaurateur in the area, saying the financially distressed city needs progressive vision and fiscal restraint. She had been unopposed in the primary.

In Johnstown’s council/manager form of government, the mayor is a mainly symbolic leader whose vote carries no more weight than that of any other City Council member. But “leadership” was a central issue in the general-election campaign, and the candidates’ rhetoric escalated within the last week.

Trigona’s camp ran a newspaper advertisement saying Spinelli “wants to run the city but she doesn’t follow the law.”

The advertisement cited two instances in which Spinelli had been cited – once for criminal mischief and once for a “cleanliness violation” at one of her restaurants. Both were relatively minor citations, and Spinelli paid fines.

The GOP challenger fired back, berating Trigona for running a “smear campaign” because he had “no real record or achievements to tout.”

She also ran an ad claiming that Trigona had moved out of his longtime home in Cambria City in order to flee neighborhoods that “are being overrun by blight, crime and code violations.”