Former City of Greater Shepparton Mayor Dinny Adem has been re-elected to replace Rob Priestly.
A countback held by the Victorian Electoral Commission on Wednesday, July 6, to replace the extraordinary vacancy found Mr Adem the successful candidate.
Mayor Shane Sali congratulated Mr Adem on his appointment and said he was excited to begin working with him.
“On behalf of council, I welcome Dinny to the team and look forward to working with him to achieve strong outcomes for our community,” he said.
First elected to council in 2014, the Albanian community leader served as mayor in 2016 and 2017 and deputy mayor in 2020.
Cr Sali said Mr Adem’s previous experience would provide a smooth transition for councillors to get on with the job.
“That’ll make it a lot easier for him to get in and get up to speed,” he said.
“We’ve been running with seven councillors at the moment so it will be good to get back up to eight and back to true representation.”
Deputy Mayor Anthony Brophy said the countback result was expected.
“Dinny was just outside finishing 10th in the original ballot,” he said.
“If you were a betting person, he would have been the person to put money on.”
Mr Priestly resigned from council last month after running for the seat of Nicholls in May federal election.
He said his campaign as an independent candidate made his position on council untenable.
Election manager Charmaine Morel said Wednesday’s countback included 35,931 ballot papers from the October 2020 general election.
The quota for the count was the same as the original election.
“They will be redistributed to the unsuccessful candidates that were at the election and who are eligible to participate to fill the extraordinary vacancy,” Ms Morel said.
Allan Turner, Shelly Sutton, Royden James, Ben Ladson and Steve Neff were the other candidates included in the countback.
Zahra Haydar Big and Andrew Bock were no longer eligible to be elected and were excluded from the countback.
Mr Adem has 48 hours to formally accept the position, and if he so, he will be sworn in next week.