PRINCETON, WV (WOAY) – Mercer County Commissioner Greg Puckett was reelected to his seat after an intense election season.
Greg Puckett was first elected to the Mercer County Commission in 2014, and he was reelected to his second term this week. He originally won the primary in June with no resistance, but soon after had an independent challenger on the ballot.
He says it was challenging having to campaign again with significant resistance.
“Anytime you go into a campaign and you try to have the best of intentions, you get your message across and you hope that the voters resonate back with what you’ve been able to convey. Plus the workload that we’ve been able to do over the past six years, I think that really spoke to a lot of people,” Puckett said.
Puckett is also the executive director of Community Connections, which has a heavy focus on drug prevention. He says he wants to focus his future endeavors on drug prevention even further in the future.
“We’ve got a lot of problems in our area with the shift of drugs from opioid pills over to heroin and also meth. So the methodology of how you deal with substance use also has to change.”
Puckett also has a heavy emphasis on local economic development and tourism. He says one thing he wishes to start in his second term is building relationships with neighboring counties to help grow the local tourism industry.
“We can’t keep doing things in silos. If we keep doing things with just Mercer County, then we only limit the possibilities here. I think you bring in McDowell County, Wyoming County. We start looking at how these trail systems are interconnected, and how that tourism growth could be much bigger than just our borders.”
Puckett won reelection as the republican candidate against independent challenger Ronnie Oakley with a vote count of 17,948 versus 5,161. No one else in one of the three seats on the County Commission is up for reelection until 2022.
The term length for a Mercer County Commissioner is six years.
