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St. Charles County's top official running for a 4th term

St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann (left).
File photo | Jason Rosenbaum | St. Louis Public Radio
St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann (left).

St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann will try for a fourth term in 2018, he announced Monday.

If he wins, the Republican would become the county’s longest-serving official.

Republicans in the St. Charles County had been weighing whether to run if Ehlmann had retired. No Democrats have announced their candidacy yet.

The 66-year-old is the second person to hold the county executive post, succeeding Republican Joe Ortwerth in 2007. Before Ortwerth, St. Charles County had a different form of county government.

“I’m proud to have served St. Charles County during a time of incredible growth and opportunity for those who live and work here,” Ehlmann, a former judge and state senator, said in a statement

In a jab at St. Louis County, he said that St. Charles County "must be careful to avoid their failures.”

During his tenure, Ehlmann said he “has focused on maintaining public safety, securing the county’s fair share of state funding for transportation and infrastructure projects, and growing the local park system.”

Follow Jo on Twitter: @jmannies

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Jo Mannies has been covering Missouri politics and government for almost four decades, much of that time as a reporter and columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She was the first woman to cover St. Louis City Hall, was the newspaper’s second woman sportswriter in its history, and spent four years in the Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau. She joined the St. Louis Beacon in 2009. She has won several local, regional and national awards, and has covered every president since Jimmy Carter. She scared fellow first-graders in the late 1950s when she showed them how close Alaska was to Russia and met Richard M. Nixon when she was in high school. She graduated from Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, and was the daughter of a high school basketball coach. She is married and has two grown children, both lawyers. She’s a history and movie buff, cultivates a massive flower garden, and bakes banana bread regularly for her colleagues.