Nick Foster will continue representing Columbia’s Fourth Ward on the Columbia City Council after the incumbent candidate clinched a win in Tuesday night’s election.
Also, Jacque Sample will also represent the Third Ward on City Council, after running in an uncontested race to fill a seat held by outgoing council member Roy Lovelady.
Foster was challenged by Ron Graves, chief of the Center for Development and Civic Engagement at Truman Veterans’ Hospital.
With all precincts reporting, Foster received 62% of votes , compared to 38% for Graves. The results from the Boone County elections office were unofficial.
In all, about 25% of registered Boone County voters cast their ballots in the 2025 general municipal election.
Foster has served as Fourth Ward councilperson for three years. He came to Missouri 14 years ago when his wife began teaching at the University of Missouri. Previously, he worked as executive director of nonprofit Voluntary Action Center, before retiring in 2020.
Foster held his watch party at Broadway Brewery after polls closed Tuesday night. He gave an emotional acceptance speech about 9:15 p.m., after final election results came in.
In his speech, Foster urged Columbia residents to “recommit to truth and the facts. And we need to recommit ourselves to one another.”
He encouraged residents to get involved and quotes a letter that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham, Alabama jail in 1963.
“All of us are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny,” Foster said. “Not everybody who voted today and in the past voted for me, but I am their representative, and I have everyone in my ward and citywide in mind when I make the decisions I do.”
Earlier in the evening, he said one of the biggest challenges on the campaign trail is “trying to reach as many people as you possibly can.”
“When you’re doing forums and when you’re responding even to newspaper and so forth, there’s such a limited amount of opportunity,” he said, “and so many of these issues we’re facing, pretty much all of them, are far more complex than you can answer in one minute or two minutes, or write in a couple of sentences.”
He added that the city’s largest single challenge going forward is “managing our growth.”
“We are growing at an exceptional rate, and we have been,” he said. “And so I think that we need to manage our growth in a way that preserves who we are as a city and the values that we hold.”
Graves hosted a watch party at Grand Cru Restaurant, a steakhouse in south Columbia. His campaign focused on public safety, infrastructure and affordable housing.
Graves is the the chief of the Center for Development and Civic Engagement at Truman Veterans’ Hospital. He has lived in Columbia his entire life, graduating from Hickman High School in 1983 and the University of Missouri in 1988. He has volunteered for 33 years with Daniel Boone Little League.
Graves said he and Foster spoke last week, and he was glad that the two candidates avoided negative campaigning.
Graves also said growth was one of the biggest challenges Columbia faces.
“The problems that we’re having only be exacerbated if we continue to grow this fast and don’t put the funding into really the basic things where cities should provide — safety, electric, water, sewer and housing,” he said.
Graves also said the city needs to move quicker in developing infrastructure for its residents, including finishing projects, including a planned new electrical transmission line that has been in the planning stages for more than a decade.
