The dust has finally settled after an intensely fought special election campaign for the Chairmanship of the Carroll County Board of Commissioners, and the top two candidates - Republicans Bill Chappell and John Denney, who will face off again October 16 in a runoff election - offered their assessments Friday of where their campaigns stand.

To have won Tuesday, a candidate would have had to receive 50 percent plus one vote - a threshold none of the four candidates seeking the chairmanship were able to reach.

The special election resulted from the abrupt departure of former Chairman Robert Barr, who resigned in June in the thick of controversy surrounding an unforeseen budget shortfall and what Barr characterized as a lack of confidence in his leadership by some county employees.

Whoever prevails Oct. 16 will only serve the remainder of Barr’s term - 13 months - and then face the voters again in a July 2008 primary and a November 2008 election, assuming the winning candidate will seek re-election.

Chappell, publisher of the Carroll Star News, was able to garner the most support Tuesday night, with 42.03 percent (3,472 votes) of the vote, compared to Denney’s second-place showing of 28.63 percent (2,365 votes).

Republican Jimmy Godbee and Democrat Tom Flippo received 24.14 percent (1,994 votes) and 5.07 percent (419 votes), respectively, and were eliminated from the race. Write-in candidates drew 0.12 percent (10 votes). The question now is whether or not Godbee and Flippo supporters will vote in the Oct. 16 runoff, and if so, whether they will disproportionately support one candidate over the other and sway the election.

Special elections typically draw far fewer voters than major, statewide or national elections - Tuesday’s brought in 8,284 (17 percent) of the county’s 48,509 registered voters - and runoffs ordinarily generate even lighter turnout, but both Chappell and Denney said they plan to hit the ground running for the next three weeks and hope to broaden their bases of support.

Chappell reiterated his admiration for Godbee and the campaign he ran and expressed optimism that he could pick up a reasonable number of Godbee supporters.

“I expect a number of them to stay home, and I expect the remainder to split, but I do know that I’ve already picked up the support of a lot of people who really believed in Jimmy,” Chappell said.

Denney, a former member and chairman of the Carroll County Water Authority, agreed that it would be difficult to predict the percentage of Godbee’s supporters who would ultimately support one candidate or the other, but said, like Chappell, that he was confident certain people would most likely support his bid for chairman.

“I know a number of people who are my friends and Jimmy’s friends, and a lot of them were committed to Jimmy for a while, so in many cases, I know that they will switch over to me, but I’m sure the reverse is also true, and some will switch to Mr. Chappell, but the key question in every election is which groups will turn out to vote,” Denney said.

Chappell, whose candidacy has revolved around charges of reckless spending and government waste, said that he is pleased with the state of his campaign and does not anticipate any changes in strategy going forward now that he faces only one opponent.

“I’m very happy with the results, and I’m happy with how I ran my campaign,” he said. ”We ran a clean campaign based on what I see the issues to be, and I’ll continue to do that."

Denney has taken different positions than Chappell on issues like hiring a county manager, which he supports, and suggesting that the county’s water supply is not quite as dire a situation as Chappell and others have suggested. He said he had no intentions of fundamentally changing his campaign strategy for the final weeks leading to the runoff, but that the extra time to reach voters was a welcomed opportunity to highlight the issues he says are central to his campaign, including leadership experience, government accountability, and lowering the tax burden on county residents.

“This was a short campaign period, and this gives us some more time to get out there and reach out on a grassroots level, and reach people on a one-on-one basis, and get my message out in a broader sense,” Denney said.

Denney also implied that he felt higher voter turnout could benefit him, and said he was surprised more people didn’t go to the polls.

On the eve of the election, Carroll County Elections Supervisor Patti Brown-Traylor said she had sensed an unusual level of enthusiasm among the electorate, and was cautiously optimistic that close to 30 percent of eligible voters would turn out Tuesday - far more than the 17 percent who actually showed up.

“I really expected at least 10 or 12 thousand people to turn out, and so I was disappointed with that, and I might have done a bit better if more people had voted,” Denney said, adding that he felt the position was far too significant for such a small portion of the county to choose who the next chairman will be.

Chappell has often presented himself as the antiestablishment, “change” candidate throughout the campaign, and he vowed to continue hammering the county government over the next few weeks for what he views as incompetent financial management.

“We’ve had a lot of waste in county government, and I think that has to change, and I also believe that when the county found itself in a financial crisis, they fixed it by raising taxes, which is a Band-Aid,” he said.