seven-member board

Randall Winston has declared victory in his campaign for Seat 6 on the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees, in what was the closest of three races in last week’s election for the seven-member board.

Second-place finisher Gabriel Buelna has conceded.

According to the count released Monday, Winston had 38.7% of the vote and Buelna had 31.7%, followed by community college professor Roberto David LaCarra in third place and realtor Tonia Arey in fourth.

To win a seat on the seven-member board, candidates need only a plurality of votes, not a majority.

Winston declared victory in an email to supporters over the weekend.

“You voted and told your friends and family why this race mattered,” Winston told supporters on Saturday. “Because of you, the Los Angeles Community College District will have a trustee who believes our colleges are where this city builds opportunity.”

In a brief interview Monday, Buelna said he called Winston to concede and wished him the best in his new role.

Seat 6 turned out to be the most contentious of the races for the Board of Trustees, which oversees the largest community college district in the country with some 200,000 students, most of whom are low-income.

During the campaign, Buelna and Arey accused Winston of misleading the public by describing himself as an architect and an educator, when his full-time job is deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Winston responded by saying his first professional degree is in architecture, he is licensed in the field and he will be teaching a leadership class at West L.A. College this fall.

Helping boost him to victory was a key endorsement from the community college district’s faculty union, which put significant financial resources behind his candidacy.

Between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, the union contributed $800,000 to a committee supporting Winston and the two other winning candidates, helping produce slate mailers that hit the doors of voters, according to campaign filings.

James McKeever, president of the faculty union, AFT Local 1521, declined to discuss many details of the union’s decision, but told The Times that the executive board wanted to go “in a different direction” and saw Winston as the best candidate.

In the race for Seat 2, incumbent Steve Veres held a 40.91% to 33.48% lead over educator Adriana Cabrera, who was in second.

Cabrera did not return emails seeking comment, and Veres said she had not called to concede. As of Monday afternoon, Veres had nearly 97,000 more votes than Cabrera with an estimated 44,000 more ballots to be counted county-wide, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.

In Seat 4, Darryn Harris, a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health, has the biggest lead of all.

According to the latest numbers, Harris had 57.3% of the vote in a seven-person race. Healthcare workforce specialist Elaine Alaniz was in second place with 14.4%.