Columbia has an all-woman City Council with Tuesday’s election of Sharon Jones to the vacant Ward 4 seat.
“I am overwhelmed by the amount of support that I’ve received from the community,” Jones said at her Tuesday night watch party at the LiUNA Hall on Tiger Lane, with some precincts yet to report. At that point, however, Jones led Dave Sorrell by more than 600 votes and Ryan King was in a distant third. Jones added, “With this kind of a lead I feel like the results are pretty well locked in and I’m really excited to get to work for the people of the Fourth Ward.”
“Locked in” was an understatement.
In the unofficial final totals, Jones garnered 3,930 votes to runner-up Sorrell’s 2,926. King had 812 votes.
“It’s not looking good,” Sorrell said before hugging his 19-year-old son, Reid, just a few minutes before the final totals appeared on the Boone County Clerk’s webpage.
Sorrell, who retired in 2025 following a 24-year career with the city – including five years as utilities director – had relied on his engineering qualifications to gain votes from residents frustrated with long-delayed utilities projects. Several former and current Columbia city department leaders and employees were among the throng of Sorrell supporters at his watch party at Trail Stop Brewery.
Jones, meanwhile, is the chair of the city’s planning and zoning commission, and she said that her first priority serving on City Council will be digging into the budget and trying to separate “actual expenditures versus hoped-for expenditures.” She added that she looks forward to reviewing long-range planning documents including the capital improvement plan, the strategic plan, and the Central and West area development plans. “I am hopeful that with me on the council we can get some stuff done.” Jones currently serves as the chair of the Columbia Planning and Zoning Commission. “I think I’ve got the personality to kind of bring people together to start having more productive conversations.”
Jones said that her campaign was built on grassroots movement and word of mouth.
“A lot of the conversations that I’ve been having in neighborhood meetings, in small group meetings — like with DSA, like with IN-TACT, like with Sierra Club — where those folks then go and tell people, ‘When we work with Sharon, here’s what we hear and here’s what we like to see.’ That kind of word of mouth and grassroots support is how I’ve gotten these numbers tonight.”
The Ward 4 seat became vacant when Nick Foster resigned on April 30. Candidates had fewer than three months to campaign for the post.
Supporters from the Mid-Missouri DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) celebrated Jones’ victory and the defeats of statewide Amendments 4 and 5 by wide margins.
“Her experience and track record both down at the state and in the city with the Planning and Zoning Commission has been nothing short of superb,” Luke Jensen, DSA member, said. Jensen was drawn to Jones’ candidacy because of her policies supporting city workers and making sure that the city government is working for the citizens, he said.
Kristen Finley, DSA steering committee communications director, said DSA supported Jones because her policies aligned with its platforms.
“Everything that we do is based on democracy, and she presented her policies to us, and we approved of them,” Finley said. She cited universal pre-kindergarten education, strong unions, opposition to Flock cameras, and the recently passed pedestrian safety ordinance as some of those policies.
Finley and Jensen also were happy to see Amendments 4 and 5 fail by more than 4-to-1 margins. Amendment 4 sought to overhaul the state’s citizen initiative process, and Amendment 5 sought the gradual phaseout of the state income tax, replacing that revenue with sales tax increases.
“Anything that we get done in Missouri is done by the petition-led initiative, and we use that to make sure our voices are heard,” Finley said. She added that Amendment 5 would have create a regressive series of sales taxes against Missourians that she said would hurt “the lowest margins of our communities.” Jensen said that he thinks Amendment 5 failed because there wasn’t a plan to replace revenue lost by eliminating the income tax.
“It was very clear to rural ruby red counties that [the legislature] had no plan when they presented this,” he said. “They had absolutely no plan on what they were going to do if this passed. We knew that they were going to raise sales tax, but we didn’t know on what and that is really concerning.”
In other city election results, voters narrowly approved Proposition 1, the city’s ballot measure that asked voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax dedicated to the fire and police departments. The sales tax proposal passed by a mere one-tenth of 1 percent, with 15,042 “yes” votes and 14,957 “no” votes.
Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon had predicted voter turnout of between 30 and 40 percent, and the final tally showed 36 percent, or 46,309, of the county’s 128,224 registered voters cast ballots.
