Mayor Phillip Jones and newly elected council members Curtis Bethany III, John Eley III and Cleon Long took their oaths of office Tuesday morning before a judge at city hall. At the same ceremony, Bethany was elected vice mayor on a 6-1 vote.
With 15 of 16 precincts reporting, Cleon Long, an engineer with Huntington Ingalls, appears to be the likely winner in a three-way race for the Central District Seat B.
Mayor McKinley Price championed the proposed amendment to the city charter to give voters an avenue to recall council members. But no other council members supported it.
Newport News Waterworks, a city-owned regional supplier of drinking water, purchased 792 acres of land during the late 1990′s and early 2000′s to build a reservoir in King William County. The project was stopped in 2009, but the city has waited until now to sell, and is, in some cases, making less than half of what it paid for the land.