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Rene Torres |
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Adela Garza |
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Dr. Jaime Silva |
Rene Torres was elected Saturday to the Place 2 position on
the Texas Southmost College board of trustees. The Place 1
position is still up for grabs as Adela Garza and Dr. Jaime
Silva head for a runoff election, which will be held within
30 days.
In the Place 2 race, Torres, a retired UTB/TSC assistant
professor, received 3,951 votes to retired schoolteacher Petrita
“Tita” Esparza Tamez’s 2,521 votes.
“I’m extremely happy,” Torres told The Collegian on Saturday
night. “My family worked very hard the last two-and-a-half
months. We had a meeting with my family, and there [were] 150
of my family members there, and each one of them was asked to
bring 20 names, so that was really the foundation for getting
the 61 percent [of the vote] that I received. …We felt good from
the very beginning about getting the numbers that we did today.
But it’s a lot of hard work, it wasn’t easy.”
He retired from UTB/TSC in 2004 after 25 years of service.
“The university was good to me,” Torres said. “I simply just
want to give back to the university. I want to talk about
student issues; that’s my main objective.”
The election is heading into a runoff as neither Garza nor Silva
had a clear majority.
Garza, a retired account executive for Wasatch Education Systems
Corp., received 2,981 votes (or 44.89 percent) in the Place 1
race and Silva, a cardiologist, garnered 2,082 votes (or 31.35
percent). Businessman Jose A. Herrera, the incumbent who was
appointed to the post in December 2007, received 1,578 votes.
“We’re off to a runoff,” Garza said about the results. “But I
feel good, I feel exhausted. … We were the top vote-getters.”
Silva said he is happy.
“I expected that this was going to happen, a runoff,” he said.
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