Scott Seaton, the target of fellow members of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors, was re-elected to his Wayne District seat in a landslide victory on Tuesday.
Seaton, the Republican nominee was who opposed by fellow Republicans in his re-election bid, easily defeated independent John Higgs, a vineyard owner who had the backing of two sitting members of the Board of Supervisors, Butch Wells and Jeffrey Slaven, in his bid for the Wayne District seat.
Seaton received 67.3 percent of the vote in the two-way race, per updated numbers from the Virginia Department of Elections on Tuesday night.
Seaton was the only one of the four members of the Board of Supervisors up for re-election who had an opponent in the 2023 election.
The other three – Slaven, in the North River District, Michael Shull, in the Riverheads District, and Carolyn Bragg, who was appointed to fill out the calendar year after Morelli’s resignation in the South River District – all ran unopposed, and all were re-elected as would have been expected.
The resounding win comes for Seaton came after he was censured by the Board of Supervisors in July in the midst of his ongoing battle with BOS members over his support for body and dash cams for the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office, which the majority of the Board opposes, and his push for the county to address decades of illegally assessed fees by the regional animal shelter.
The censure led to the removal of Seaton from appointments to the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro Metropolitan Planning Organization and the board of the Community Action Partnership of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro.
Seaton also came under fire from fellow Board members after it was revealed by BOS members that he had been recording closed sessions of the Board, including one, on March 20, that dealt with the resignation of Steve Morelli, the now-former South River Supervisor, reportedly over sexual-harassment allegations against Morelli.
Augusta Free Press has taken Augusta County to court to gain access to the recording of the March 20 closed session, which Seaton has said he feels needs to be made public, because, he has said, the discussion in that closed session went outside the bounds of what should have been allowed under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act.
The status of that court case is still up in the air. An Augusta County General District Court judge sided with the county last month in a ruling blocking the release of the recording of the March 20 meeting, but we appealed that ruling to the Augusta County Circuit Court.
Augusta County Circuit Court Judge Shannon T. Sherill has recused himself from hearing the appeal. The Chief Judge of the 25th Judicial Circuit, Joel R. Branscom, has assigned Judge Thomas J. Wilson IV, who retired as the judge of the Rockingham County Circuit Court, to hear the case.
No date for a hearing in that appeal has yet been set.
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Chris Graham
