By Leon Worden/SCVNEWS.com

While the Santa Clarita Valley electorate made some close calls in the Nov. 8 school board election and even unseated one incumbent, Lynne Plambeck and Daniel Mortensen slipped away with four more years on the Newhall County Water Board the easy way: Nobody ran against them.

On Tuesday the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors certified the “appointment in lieu of election” of Plambeck and Mortensen to another term on the Newhall County Water District board.

The NCWD serves a patchwork of SCV communities including parts of Newhall, Castaic and Canyon Country. Just like school districts, it has a five-member board which is elected in odd-numbered years. Two seats were up for grabs this year. Had there been an election, it would have been Nov. 8.

Under state law, if only one qualified candidate has filed for a particular office by 5 p.m. on the 83rd day prior to a scheduled election, the “supervising authority” – in this case the Board of Supervisors – must appoint the lone candidate “at a regular or special meeting held prior to the Monday before the first Friday in December in which the election is held.”

The only candidates to file for the two open seats were the incumbents, Plambeck and Mortensen.

Plambeck and Mortensen were last elected in 2007 with 35.44 percent and 33.63 percent of the vote, respectively. (Challenger Rachel Neville came in third with 30.94 percent.)

The 2007 election was Mortensen’s first. The current NCWD board president, he’s a tax attorney with a juris doctorate from the University of California Hastings College of Law and a post-doctoral degree from New York University’s School of Law. He’s the principal in his own law firm on Lyons Avenue where he specializes in tax law, estate planning and post-death administration. He lives in Newhall with his wife and three children.

Plambeck has served on the NCWD board since 1993 except for a two-year period (1998-1999) when a challenger unseated her. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Cal State Northridge and operates a film recycling business in the San Fernando Valley. A frequent speaker on environmental issues at City Council meetings, she’s the president of Santa Clarita Organization for Planning and the Environment, aka SCOPE.