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With 85 percent of city precincts reporting late Tuesday night, it appeared Board of Education members Shirley Issel and Terry Doran would win re-election and parent activist Nancy Riddle would take the third school board seat up for grabs this year. 

A total of six candidates ran for three slots on the five-member panel. The two seats held by board members Joaquin Rivera and John Selawsky were not up for re-election this year. 

After midnight, Riddle had 24 percent of the vote. Doran was second with 21 percent and Issel had 20 percent. The next closest competitor, recent Berkeley High School graduate Sean Dugar, had nearly 13 percent of the vote. 

“I’m feeling pretty good,” said Riddle, who is chief financial officer for Monster Cable of Brisbane, speaking to the Daily Planet late Tuesday night. “I think probably the financial background helped a lot.” 

Issel and Doran won re-election despite persistent fiscal woes plaguing the Berkeley Unified School District, which faces a $3.9 million budget shortfall this year. 

Issel said her re-election marked an endorsement of the steps the board has taken in the past few years to bring solvency to the district. 

“I think the message is really clear – the voters feel we’re on the right track,” said Issel. 

The district’s financial woes were a chief issue in the campaign. Riddle suggested that the board, which slashed millions last year and still faces the $3.9 million budget shortfall, has taken a haphazard approach to cuts. 

She said members must demand detailed budgets and a range of cost-cutting options rather than “highly summarized budgets” and a few recommendations for cuts from Superintendent Michele Lawrence. 

Riddle also said the district needs to engage in long-term financial planning, rather than year-to-year cuts, if it hopes to get out of a cycle of financial crises. 

But Issel and Doran argued that the board has taken important steps on the road to fiscal recovery, replacing most of the district’s upper-level management in the last couple of years and putting a new data processing system in place that will help fix sloppy accounting practices.