Glidewell wins race to serve out Files' Arkansas Senate term

FORT SMITH -- Former state Rep. Frank Glidewell was elected Tuesday to serve as state senator in District 8 for the remaining 19 weeks of the term left unserved when Jake Files pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges and resigned from office.

Glidewell defeated Libertarian Party candidate William Whitfield Hyman, a Fort Smith attorney, in a special election to fill Files' seat. The four-year term expires at the end of the year.

With 82 precincts reporting, complete but unofficial totals were:

Glidewell 4,807

Hyman 1,968

Glidewell, a retired electrical contractor who served six years in the Arkansas House of Representatives, appeared on Tuesday's ballot after he defeated former state Sen. Denny Altes in a special Republican primary election May 22 by a vote of 6,727-3,612.

While Hyman lost Tuesday's election, his name will appear on the Nov. 6 ballot against District 76 state Rep. Mathew Pitsch, R-Fort Smith, to succeed Glidewell as District 8 state senator in a new four-year term.

Pitsch was second in a three-man primary May 22 for the Republican nomination for the new District 8 term. Glidewell received the most votes with 4,193, compared with 3,641 for Pitsch and 2,693 for Altes.

But Glidewell did not get enough votes to avoid a runoff, and Pitsch defeated him in a close June 19 election by a vote of 2,070-1,991.

Glidewell said during his campaign that he was not supported by any special interest, opposed liberal "tax and spend" policies, Internet sales taxes and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

He criticized the "veil of corruption" that he said had fallen over the Fort Smith community in recent years, adding that he would continue to serve with honesty and integrity.

Glidewell served in the House from January 2005 to December 2010. He served 18 months as county judge of Sebastian County in 1997 and 1998. He served as a justice of the peace on the Quorum Court from 1980 to 1986 and again from 1989 to 1993.

Hyman is an attorney practicing in western Arkansas who has taken on high-profile cases as an attorney and as a plaintiff.

Currently, he and Monzer Mansour of Fayetteville are representing sanitation customer Jennifer Merriott in a lawsuit against Fort Smith in Sebastian County Circuit Court, alleging illegal exaction and unjust enrichment.

The lawsuit, which is pending, accuses the city of wasting residents' sanitation fees by deceiving customers into thinking the recyclable waste they were separating and setting out for collection was being recycled when it actually was being dumped in the landfill for nearly three years.

Last week, Hyman and Natalie Hyman sued the Walnut Ridge Police Department in federal court alleging violation of free-speech rights when someone in the department deleted posts from the department's public Facebook page.

The posts showed body-camera video of a December 2016 arrest of a person by a Walnut Ridge police officer. William Whitfield Hyman complained that removal of the post from what he said is a public forum violated the First Amendment.

The District 8 Senate seat became vacant in February when Files, 46, resigned from the Senate after pleading guilty in federal court to charges of wire fraud, money laundering and bank fraud.

He was charged in the wire-fraud and money-laundering counts with using for his own purposes about $26,000 in state General Improvement Fund money he had authorized to be used in the construction of a softball complex that he and Lee Webb were building on city land.

The bank fraud charge grew out of a bank loan Files obtained in which he pledged as collateral a forklift that he had sold months earlier to satisfy a debt.

Files was sentenced June 18 to 18 months in prison and was ordered to pay $89,903.77 restitution. He reported to the minimum-security federal prison at El Reno, Okla., on Aug. 2 to begin serving his sentence.

Metro on 08/15/2018

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