Tolar out in District 8!

Lexington, SC (Paul Kirby) – The heavily contested race for Lexington County Council District 8 has ended with Glen Conwell exceeding the 50% of the votes he needed to claim the seat without a runoff. Conwell received 1,325 votes or 51.58% of the vote, just enough to win outright. The incumbent, Ned Tolar was knocked out of the seat by Conwell garnering 809 votes for almost 31%. Tolar held the seat for just one term. These result were as of 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night.

This race was marred by controversy over a campaign contribution to the challenger Glen Conwell that the SC GOP said was perfectly legal. The incumbent Tolar cried foul and said that the donor, Mrs. Lou Kennedy of Nephron Pharmaceuticals, tried to hide the source of the donation, an accusation that Kennedy flatly denied. Kennedy said that she was proud to be able to support a candidate that was honest like Conwell and had been angered by a letter Tolar’s campaign distributed that called Lexington County a mess. Kennedy and a host of others vehemently disagreed with that assessment of the county and publicly said so.

The other challenger, Charles Crouch, had run for the seat before but lost. He leaned strongly on his background in finance and said that he was running for the most part to try to get something done about infrastructure in the area. He lives in an portion of the county that has some of the worst traffic woes close to Sunset Boulevard and Corley Mill Road. He received 460 votes in the race.

There is no Democrat running against Conwell in the November election.