The list of possible replacements for Mayor-elect Michelle Davis-Younger’s seat on the Manassas City Council is down to four, and the fill-in will probably be chosen at a work session tonight.
Sixteen people initially applied to fill the seat before the Nov. 30 deadline. After a preliminary review of candidates Monday, council selected four finalists: Sandy Day, David Farajollahi, Ashley Hutson and Dheeraj Jagadev. By city law, the interim council person will serve one year but can seek election in November to a full four-year term if they so choose.
Vice mayor Pam Sebesky said she was impressed by the diversity among applicants.
“I can’t tell you … how excited I was to see so many people of color, so many young people and so many women who applied for the position,” Sebesky told InsideNoVa. “It was just so much more reflective of the Manassas community than where we might have been in the past.”
Farajollahi and Jagadev both serve on the city’s Social Services Advisory Board, and Day serves on the Board of Equalization, which hears appeals of real estate assessments from property owners in the city.
Among those who were not chosen as finalists were outgoing school board member Scott Albrecht and recent Republican council candidate Harry Clark.
During a closed meeting Monday night, council heard a three-minute pitch from each of the 16 applicants as to why they should serve on the council. Council planned to have more in-depth question-and-answer periods with the four remaining candidates Wednesday.
Davis-Younger, a first-term council member herself, became the first Democrat elected mayor and will become the first Black and woman mayor when she is sworn in next month. She said that partisan affiliation shouldn’t be a deciding factor in who is selected to take her seat on the council, but that she would be looking for someone whose values and goals generally align with hers. The city’s application form did not ask about political party affiliation, so she didn’t know how the pool of applicants split.
“I’m not going to ask. I’m trying to look for the best person to fill the seat. I think you can kind of figure that out through the way they answer questions,” Davis-Younger said. “At the end, it’s about finding the right person to fill the spot for me. I see it as replacing me, so I’m sort of looking for someone who might handle themself like me.”
At the same time Davis-Younger takes office, Democrat Tom Osina replace Republican Ian Lovejoy on council, after narrowly winning more votes in last month’s election, giving Democrats a 4-1 majority before the sixth member is chosen.
Theresa Coates Ellis, who lost to Davis-Younger last month in the mayor’s race, will be the only remaining Republican on the council.
Sebesky said she hopes that the new councilperson will be publicly announced after Wednesday’s meeting so he or she can go through orientation with Osina. The council will begin an especially important budget season when the new members are seated Jan. 4, but the council cannot formally vote on Davis-Younger’s replacement until her seat is officially vacated that night.
In a race where the top three vote-getters won seats, Clark finished sixth in November. The longest-serving member of the Manassas school board, Albrecht declined to run for re-election in 2020 after 20 years.
Six applicants are either serving or have served on local advisory boards or committees. Davis-Younger herself appointed Farajollahi to the city’s Advisory Board to Social Services, for which Davis-Younger also serves as the council’s liaison. Before Monday’s closed session, Davis-Younger said she’s “strongly considering” supporting Farajollahi, who works at the U.S. Geological Survey, as her replacement. He also serves on the Manassas & Manassas Park Cities Democratic Committee.
“I’ve been working with him for a while, I appointed him to the social services board and he’s done a bangup job there, just a phenomenal person,” Davis-Younger said. “He has a really good way of taking the lead with some things and running with it, he’s very in tune to the political climate. He’s a young guy who moved to the city. He picked Manassas because he liked what he saw.”
Jared Foretek covers the Manassas area and regional news across Northern Virginia. Reach him at [email protected]
