Haymarket Mayor Says Election Settles Things

After Storm, Town 'Needs to Move On'

Spouses Ozzie Vazquez and Susan Shuryn will join the Haymarket council. A voting bloc in the making? No, says Shuryn: "We're independent thinkers." (By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

Haymarket Mayor Pam E. Stutz said her decisive reelection last Tuesday was a vote of confidence from the public that she and the Town Council made good decisions this past year.

But what an election.

Stutz won about 72 percent of the vote, while her challenger, Timothy M. Benjamin Jr., a former auxiliary police officer, drew 26 percent.

Incumbent council members Robert B. Weir, John C. Cole, Sheila L. Jarboe and Natasha A. Sikorsky were also reelected and will be joined by newcomers and surprise winners Ozzie Vazquez and Susan Shuryn, who are married to each other.

The campaigns by Vazquez and Shuryn and by Benjamin and his wife, Vicki, who ran unsuccessfully for council, added more quirkiness to the election in a town with a $1.5 million budget and a continuous rumor mill.

The town of 1,000 people has been embroiled in controversy since a probe last year into accusations of sexual harassment by Police Chief James E. Roop and Sgt. Gregory Breeden. The Town Council suspended Roop and Breeden for 15 days without pay after a lawyer hired by the council found that the men created a "hostile work environment" through sexually offensive comments.

Months later, the council fired a police officer who was accused of standing guard at an illegal poker game in Fairfax County and shut down an auxiliary police program indefinitely. Most recently, Stutz was criticized after she did not immediately show the council a March 29 resignation letter from former prosecutor Cynthia A. Dupray that questioned Roop's integrity.

All of the town's happenings were reported on Townofhaymarket.info, a Web site that Stutz criticized because it posted Dupray's confidential letter.

Stutz said the election results showed that residents have grown tired of the debate about the police department. "I think the residents spoke out," she said. "The biggest thing we heard was that this town needs to move on."

Council member James E. Tobias, who often opposed Stutz over recent issues, lost his reelection bid. "The residents made their vote. They decided they needed new leadership," he said. Council member Bryan A. Garcia, who also served as vice mayor, did not run for reelection. The vice mayor is selected by the council from among its members.

New leadership is what Vazquez and Shuryn said they hope to bring to the council.

The husband and wife work as technology managers, and Vazquez said he believes they were elected because of their profession. "They [voters] were looking at us with a corporate background to be an asset to the Town Council," he said. "They were looking for professionals."

Initially, residents did not know Vazquez had been elected. When the town reported the election results to the media, the votes for Vazquez and Tobias were transposed. Although Vazquez knew he was the winner Tuesday night, the public was not informed until Wednesday.

Vazquez said the win was a surprise. "We didn't expect that the two of us would be elected," he said.

Shuryn said they are eager to start work. "We're both going to be on a learning curve because we're newbies," she said.

Addressing traffic, maintaining Haymarket's small-town appeal and other development issues are on Shuryn's list of priorities.

As far as the two of them being considered a bloc, Shuryn said the council should not worry. "We're independent thinkers," she said.

Said Stutz: "We're definitely going to ask them to sit across from each other. That's a little joke."