Bouska chosen Marion mayor

Marion

Some hard feelings remained last night after Marion's hard-fought mayoral campaign, which saw Allen “Snooks” Bouska pull of a seven-point win over at-large City Council member Nick Glew, 5,659 votes to 4,925.

“We have no regrets,” Glew said. “We ran a positive campaign full of character and ethics, and he took a very negative approach. Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of work to do to pull the community together.”

“You're going to figure out how to run a coalition, how to put things together,” Bouska said of his immediate priority. “There's a lot of other issues than the Seventh Avenue project.”

But even Bouska will tell you the city's handling of that major crosstown street project is the reason he got into the race. Bouska, 66, had operated the Seventh Avenue Dairy Queen restaurant for years before turning it over to one of his children. He now manages other properties.

“There's a lot of misinformation about the Central Corridor project, stuff his campaign worked to spread aggressively,” said Glew, 32, a communications specialist for Anderson-Bogert Engineers.

“The other side kind of played it up, and I'm glad because it brought out a lot of voters,” Bouska said.

But for all that, Bouska said he has no major changes in mind.

“There's still a lot to talk about and it's a political thing,” he said. “It's give and take. Nothing is set, that's for sure. I'm not dead set on anything.”

Hiawatha

Next door, Mayor Tom Theis said he thinks Hiawatha residents' satisfaction with the city's thriving development may have helped re-elect him.

“It's kind of neat that we're going to get to continue doing some things we've started,” said Theis, 68, shortly after his lopsided win over challenger Steve Waller became final.

Theis ran up a nearly two-to-one margin, 1,156 votes to Waller's 591.

He said he plans to continue the policies that brought some new residential developers to town.

“We're not going to have any dramatic changes for a while, but that's not my style,” Theis said.

Theis said Hiawatha had 12 new housing starts this month, and work is continuing on the Tower Commerce Park off Tower Terrace Road.

“A council member called today and said he'd been listening and said he hadn't heard anything negative,” Theis said. “I guess that's a good thing.”

Theis was Hiawatha mayor in the early 1980s and again from 1993 through '99. He rejoined the council in 2000 and ran again four years ago.

Efforts to contact Waller were not successful.