“I’m doing this because I’ve always loved Dunmore and always been active in environmental causes,” said Brier, who credits a large group of volunteers for her win.

Excerpt:
An official count completed today confirmed that Brier easily won a borough council seat with a tidal wave of a write-in votes, an unheard of event in Dunmore politics and rare in Lackawanna County or anywhere else.

“The people came out of the woodwork to help me,” said Brier, 66, an accountant by training and manager of an orthopedics practice.

For probably the first time, Dunmore will have three women on the seven-member council — Brier, incumbent Carol Scrimalli and another newcomer, Beth McDonald Zangardi.

The official results for four available council seats showed incumbent Vince Amico as the top votegetter with 3,001 votes followed by incumbent Michael A. Dempsey, 2,980, Zangardi, 2,922, Brier, 2,323, incumbent Michael F. McHale, 1,428 and incumbent Michael Hayes, 1,083.

Brier’s run for office grew out of disappointment with a Sept. 19 council vote on whether to amend the borough zoning ordinance. The council voted 4-3 to amend the ordinance to say landfills aren’t structures. Whether the landfill qualifies as a structure stands at the heart of Friends of Lackawanna’s appeal of a 2015 borough zoning board decision that found the landfill is not a structure. Friends of Lackawanna urged the council to vote against the amendment with the appeal still pending. Landfill lawyers argued the borough decided long ago the landfill isn’t a structure by not defining it that way in the zoning ordinance, and the amendment would only affirm that.

Amico and Dempsey voted against the amendment. McHale and Hayes voted for it, despite campaign promises to oppose the landfill.

“Vote them out,” many in an overflowed crowd chanted the night the council voted.

Enough voters agreed.