Harlan Kirgan
Marion “Nootsie” Sattler is the lone city candidate in Eunice to end up unopposed after qualifying closed on Friday for the Nov. 6 election.
“I’ve got big shoes to fill,” he commented about his unchallenged bid to succeed Jack Burson as alderman at-large.
“I was kind of nervous,” he said about qualifying. “You always got that gut feeling that somebody is going to come out at the end. But it just showed that evidently people like what they see and what’s going on to be unopposed like that.”
Sattler also said, “I was elated that people entrusted me to fill that position. That’s not an easy job.”
Sattler, 51, is Ward 3 alderman, which is his first elected job in city government.
“The thing is to just keep moving forward,” he said. “Like I said, big shoes to fill taking Mr. Jack’s position. I’ve learned a bunch from Jack.”
At the end of his term, Burson, who did not qualify, will have served 24 years as Eunice alderman at-large.
Sattler intends to serve as alderman at-large pretty much as he has done in his Ward 3 post.
“Like I always said in my campaign, there is no ‘I’ in team. It is not an individual thing to do it. You’ve got to have a team. You’ve got to have people out there, citizens to work with you. It is not always an easy job to do what you’ve got to do,” he said.
When he ran for Ward 3 aldermen four years ago, Sattler said he didn’t consider himself a politician, but rather a “people person.”
Sattler said he wants people to be proud of Eunice.
On Wednesday, Sattler sounded a theme often heard from Burson about the need for increasing the city’s millage tax to pay for infrastructure improvements and pay raises for city employees.
“We can’t keep kicking that bucket,” he said of the city’s needs.
Sattler, who is mayor pro tempore, said he got a taste of the city’s day-to-day demands on Monday when Mayor Scott Fontenot was on vacation.
“My phone started ringing,” he said about issues that had to be addressed.
Sattler said he also received “a bunch of calls Friday after 4:30,” the end of qualifying.
“I was getting kind of overwhelmed,” he said of the calls and text messages congratulating him on his unopposed bid for alderman at-large.
‘That made me feel a lot better. People think ‘this guy did a good job in his ward,’” he said.
Sattler is in outside sales at the family business of Sattler Supply Company where he has worked since 1977.
Sattler said he has been president of the volunteer fire department and served on the St. Thomas More Church Council and Knights of Columbus.
He graduated from Iota High School and he and wife, Lori, have two children, Chelsea, 24, and Trevor, 20.
Lori is an registered nurse and works at Fresenius Dialysis Care.