The San Diego County Registrar of Voters Tuesday released final vote tabulations and certified the Nov. 7 special election results.
San Diego City Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe is set to become the county’s first Black woman supervisor, taking the vacant seat representing District 4.
The final count gave Montgomery Steppe 61.58 percent of the vote, or 60,383. Her Republican opponent, Amy Reichert, followed with 38.42 percent, or 37,681.
Though the outcome wasn’t official, Reichert conceded the race the day after the election when early results showed her trailing by over 20 percentage points.
The nearly 700,000 residents of the heavily Democratic district, which stretches from Clairemont to Spring Valley, have not had a supervisor since Nathan Fletcher resigned in May following allegations of sexual misconduct.
Montgomery Steppe will become a key Democratic vote on a board that has had an even partisan split for six months.
Montgomery Steppe will likely be sworn in by early next month and serve through January 2027. She was unavailable for comment Tuesday.
San Diego will hold a special election to fill her seat on March 5 to coincide with the state primary election.
In Chula Vista, none of the three candidates vying for the city attorney seat secured 50 percent of the vote, sending the race to a March 5 runoff election.
Marco Verdugo will face off against Bart Miesfeld for the post, which is currently filled by acting city attorney Jill Maland. She is a lawyer with an outside firm the city hired in February to fill the position until voters elected someone new.
At the final tabulation, Verdugo earned 39 percent of the vote, or 9,733 votes. Miesfeld followed with 37.8 percent, or 9,430. Dan Smith Diaz came in third with 23.18 percent, or 5,783.
Voters had elected Simon Silva, a longtime deputy in the City Attorney’s Office, in November 2022 but he died two months prior that year after a lengthy battle with cancer. His name remained on the ballot due to election codes. The circumstances resulted in a special election.
Verdugo is an attorney with a private practice who represents the cities of Coronado and Solana Beach. Miesfeld is also a lawyer in private practice and was Chula Vista’s last appointed city attorney from 2008 to 2010. Smith Diaz is a criminal defense attorney who runs a firm in the city’s downtown area.
In North County, two water districts overwhelmingly supported a ballot measure to break away from the San Diego County Water Authority.
About 94 percent of voters in both the Fallbrook Public Utility District and Rainbow Municipal Water District supported leaving the county water authority.
In the Fallbrook district, a total of 5,610 voters agreed to the detachment while 338 were opposed. Voters in the Rainbow district supported the divorce by a slightly larger margin, 6,034 to 326.
The two districts are now poised to join the Eastern Municipal Water District, a sprawling jurisdiction that serves much of Riverside County.
