City of Anderson Elections Include Challenges for Mayor, Dist. 5 Seat
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
In early April, when the dogwoods along Main Street are beginning to gamble on spring, Anderson will ask itself — quietly, on a Tuesday — what kind of city it wants to be.
On April 7, two of the city’s races will be contested, and a third will be settled without a fight. A single candidate has also stepped forward to claim the council seat left vacant by Luis Martinez, who resigned in December, leaving District 2 temporarily without a representative and City Hall with one more empty nameplate in its chamber.
At the top of the ballot, Mayor Terence Roberts, first elected in 2006 and now a kind of civic fixture, faces a challenge from Anderson photographer Van Sullivan Jr. The contest pits the cautious continuity of a two‑decade incumbent against the eye of a man whose profession is to frame scenes, find angles, and persuade people to look again at what they think they already know. The mayor’s race, like so many in small Southern cities, will likely turn on whether voters feel more loyalty to the steady hand they recognize or curiosity about how the city might appear through a new lens.
Roberts is a graduate of Winthrop University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in business administration/marketing in 1983. After college, he returned to Anderson and opened his own State Farm Insurance agency, building a long-running career in financial services and small-business management. He has been a State Farm agent and agency owner since 1988, a role he has continued to hold alongside his service as mayor. He was first elected mayor in 2006, defeating two-term incumbent Richard Shirley by a vote of 2,219 to 1,887. He has since been reelected multiple times, including an uncontested race in 2018 that secured a fourth term running from July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2022; his current term runs through June 30, 2026.
As mayor, Roberts has emphasized downtown revitalization, recreation, and neighborhood investment, helping attract restaurants, public art, and new businesses to the city center. He has also been involved in regional leadership efforts such as Ten at the Top, focusing on public safety and quality-of-life issues across the Upstate.
Sullivan’s education includes Anderson University and the Art Institute of Atlanta. He is a commercial and portrait photographer whose professional life has unfolded largely in the Southeast. He runs Sullivan Photography, a studio he has led as president since 2000, specializing in real estate, architecture, commercial work, events, and portraiture. He is closely tied to the Anderson Arts Community and has served as a photography teacher at the Anderson Arts Center, and earlier worked as an assistant photographer at TTI North America, shooting products, building sets, and processing images for packaging and reports. He has also held technical roles such as scan technician at Prime Media, where he digitized and color‑corrected images for publication.
Far more symbolic, however, is the open race for District 5 — a seat that, for almost half a century, has been held by Dr. Beatrice Thompson. Her retirement is less a political note than the end of an era. Into that space steps her son, Darryl Thompson, who describes himself as a “community‑minded leader with over 20 years of experience in finance and strategic leadership,” and who seems intent on translating a corporate résumé into neighborhood governance. A Clemson University graduate, Thompson built a career in operations and consulting across the Greenville–Spartanburg–Anderson corridor, a region where logistics, manufacturing, and professional services bleed into one another along the interstate. In 2008, he founded Professional Pathways LLC, a firm devoted to training mid‑sized companies in the language of efficiency — lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, leadership development, and the intricate grammar of quality systems. Before striking out on his own, he held senior roles at Interface, Inc., serving as vice president for organizational learning from 2007 to 2008 and as corporate director of business systems from 2001 to 2007, posts that suggest fluency in both spreadsheets and the softer politics of change management. Since January 2025, he has been semi‑retired and self‑employed, a pause in a career that may yet find its next expression at the council dais.
Opposite him on the District 5 ballot is Tonya Winbush, whose credentials are rooted less in boardrooms than in waiting rooms and church basements. A community organizer and the lead medical support assistant at the Anderson VA Outpatient Clinic, Winbush occupies the daily front lines of bureaucracy and care, where veterans navigate appointments, paperwork, and the fragile work of being seen. She is, as she calls herself, a lifelong learner: she earned a Bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Anderson University, a pursuit that stretched from 2008 to 2018, and has studied at Tri‑County Technical College. Her civic biography is dense. She serves as an executive committee member for the Anderson County Democratic Party and as Senior Vice Commander at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 689, where service is measured in hours and funerals rather than headlines. Environmental work has drawn her into the Upper Savannah River Basin Council and the Adopt‑A‑Stream program; having grown up on Lake Hartwell, she treats water not as a picturesque backdrop but as infrastructure and inheritance. Winbush organizes Bible study groups and community events, the small, steady convenings in which a district’s social fabric is quietly maintained. In 2025, she stood in for Dr. Thompson at public events, representing the long‑time councilwoman before voters now weighing whether to send a different Thompson — or Winbush herself — into that same seat.
If the District 5 race suggests a contest between legacy and reinvention, District 2 offers no such drama. There, Marshall Pickens III is running unopposed to complete the term in the seat vacated by Martinez. Pickens’s path to the ballot reads like a methodical ascent through the city’s institutional life. A finance and transportation professional, he works as an office support specialist at Southern First Bank in Greenville, a role that places him somewhere between the front counter and the back office of regional capitalism. He has served on the Anderson Planning Commission since August 2014, quietly helping decide where and how the city will grow, and sat as a trustee for the AnMed Health Foundation from 2018 to 2024, overseeing philanthropic currents in the local healthcare system. In 2016, he was named one of Anderson County’s “20 under 40,” an honorific that signaled an early consensus about his promise. He holds a Bachelor of Science in business administration from Anderson University, joining a familiar line of local leaders who never strayed far from their alma mater’s orbit.
Not every name on the April ballot will require voter deliberation. No opposition emerged for the remaining incumbents: District 1’s Kyle Newton, District 3’s Jeffrey Roberts, and at‑large Seat 7’s Matt Harbin will appear alone in their respective races, beneficiaries of that particular local equation in which satisfaction, apathy, and simple political caution are difficult to disentangle. Their quiet glide toward new terms forms the backdrop to the city’s more vivid contests.
Taken together, the April 7 elections will not remake Anderson in a single day. But they will determine whether a mayor extends a twenty‑year tenure, whether a historic council seat passes from mother to son or to a neighbor who has spent her career in clinics and church halls, and whether a planner and banker steps from advisory boards into elected office.
On that Tuesday, in a city where nearly everyone is one degree removed from everyone else, voters will walk into familiar precincts and make relatively modest choices. In a place the size of Anderson, such modest choices have a way, over time, of becoming history.
