Baroukh was one of seven people running for three seats on the City Council. Four years ago, when he ran the first time, he won by just 55 votes and the top four candidates had only a 1.56 percentage point spread among them.
This time he cruised to victory. The voters gave 21 percent to Dave Tarter, 19 percent to Baroukh and 17 percent to Philip Duncan. No other candidate reached 12 percent. (Actually, since voters got to vote for three candidates, you could triple those numbers; Baroukh actually had the support of about 57 percent of the voters while getting 19 percent of the votes.)
Baroukh was the only incumbent to win. The other incumbent, Lawrence Webb, didn’t reach 11 percent of the vote total.
The seven members of the City Council elect the mayor from among their number and Baroukh has been mayor the last two years.
Falls Church is a bedroom community just a few miles outside Washington, DC. It has a population just over 12,000. It is known as one of the most leftist communities in the commonwealth of Virginia—though in the rest of the country, that wouldn’t qualify as very far left of center.
Falls Church was identified in 2011 as the richest jurisdiction in the entire United States with a median annual household income of $133,313.
Winning election May 1 starts a happy month for Baroukh. He will be marrying Bernadette Fancuberta on May 27.
Baroukh was born in Tehran and came to California as a child. He grew up in Los Angeles and graduated with a BA in psychology from Chapman University in Orange, California. He then moved east to get his law degree from the University of Virginia, and stayed in Virginia. He went to work for the federal government after graduation and is currently a senior attorney at the Department of Homeland Security, where he is responsible for immigration and national security issues.
Baroukh’s four-paragraph biography on his campaign web-site states very clearly that he was born in Iran and speaks Farsi.
