Hampton's challenge.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Don Hampton won the battle Tuesday night, but the incumbent county commissioner is far from a sure bet to win the war this fall.

Hampton was the top vote getter - barely - in a six-way contest for the East Lane seat on the Lane County Board of Commissioners. Now the former Oakridge mayor and retired public school teacher faces a formidable challenge in the fall as he takes on second-place finisher Faye Stewart, a Cottage Grove businessman and member of the prominent Stewart timber clan.

The numbers do not tell an encouraging story for the incumbent, who was appointed to the county board last year to replace Tom Lininger. Lininger left to join the University of Oregon law school faculty. (The election is for the remaining two years of Lininger's term.)

Hampton, a moderate, received 32.7 percent of the vote, with the conservative Stewart just behind at 30.5 percent. Finishing a close third was conservative Cedric Hayden, a former Republican legislator who got just under 29 percent. That means the two conservatives snagged 60 percent of the total vote. Add right-leaning Mark Herbert's nearly 4 percent vote total, and it's clear that Hampton will need more than the traditional power of incumbency to win in November.

In the North Eugene commissioner race, incumbent Bobby Green easily defeated challenger Greg Ringer, a University of Oregon professor, by a more than 2-1 ratio. In a re-election bid four years ago, Green convincingly beat a tougher foe in Kitty Piercy, who won Eugene's mayoral race Tuesday. After nearly a decade in office, Green appears to have an unshakable grip on the North Eugene seat, similar to the one that former Commissioner Jerry Rust had for years in the South Eugene district.

Green is a moderate with a right-leaning tilt who often votes with West Lane Commissioner Anna Morrison, a hard-core conservative, while South Eugene and Springfield District Commissioners Peter Sorenson and Bill Dwyer frequently vote as a liberal bloc. That alignment has left the moderate Hampton casting swing votes, and a Stewart victory in East Lane this fall could give conservatives a decided edge, ironically at the same time the Eugene City Council has taken a swing to the left.

In a three-way Lane County sheriff's race, Russel Burger scored a decisive win with more than 60 percent of the vote. Currently a captain and chief deputy under retiring sheriff Jan Clements, Burger's victory gives him some breathing space to deal with imminent major budget cuts in the sheriff's office.

Burger's extensive law enforcement background at the state and local levels and his status as second-in-command should help ease the transition. But the magnitude of the county's fiscal woes - and the fierce infighting over how to handle them - will certainly make Burger wonder at times why he decided to grab the lightning rod that is the Lane County sheriff's job.