Time for some changes in Tucson City Council. Steve Kozachick lead the race after initial early result were release a little after 8pm last night by a razor thin margin. Over the course of the evening with 32 precincts out of 89 counted Trasoff was ahead with a growing margin that look insurmountable.  It appears that the east side precincts came in late in the evening to swing the race towards Steve. Final results 48.6% to 50.78% for Koz. Steve won with a 1200 vote margin. Here’s the actual results.

Buehler-Garcia lost by as little as 573 votes out of 60,000+ cast. Their will be lots of talk about what Uhlich did differently than Trasoff but either way the results show a huge lack of confidence in the direction of our city.

Shaun McClusky came out of no where to challenge a Democratic machine and put up together an amazing race. Hats off to Shuan, I’m sure we’ll see more of him. Congratulations to Richard Fimbres, the newly elected Ward 5 councilman.

We will have two new faces on the Tucson City Council.

From the AZ Star:

Uhlich, who serves as the executive director of a nonprofit agency, had 47 percent of the vote to Buehler-Garcia’s 46 percent.

She said the race was “very difficult” because it was dominated by negative advertising and independent campaign efforts. “That’s heightened the fear and anxiety people feel in the city,” she said, adding that makes her job more difficult.

The small margin, she said, just “shows there’s a lot of stress and anxiety because of the economic downturn.”

“The citizens of Tucson told us loud and clear the message of fiscal responsibility,” she said, adding her first responsibility will be to balance the budget in a fair way.

Buehler-Garcia said it was hard to counter the Democrats 2-to-1 voter registration advantage, but took solace in the fact that it was a horse race nonetheless. “I think it speaks to one — we ran a good campaign. And two, there is a level of frustration in the community.”

The emotions at the Republican celebration at an east-side Chuy’s Mesquite Broiler swung wildly. The early crowd of about 250 cheered when the polls closed and cheered again any time anyone mentioned the influence of the Tea Party.

The anxiety became more palpable as the candidates continued to trail. By 9:30 p.m., about half of the attendees had left. But by 11 p.m., with the east-side precincts coming in, the margins shrank again and Republicans vowed to seek recounts if the race remained tight.

The party had predicted the rise of the Tea Party, discontent over the Rio Nuevo missteps and the national dissatisfaction might have all coalesced to spell a win.

Bob Westerman, chairman of the county Republican Party, said the early voting strategy will need to be reworked. “Even though we pulled up even with the Democrats, our strategy was to do better than that and we didn’t really meet our goal.”

He was clear, though, that the night was a success and the Tea Party movement remained “extremely relevant.”

“I can’t stress enough how extraordinary the numbers were.”