Sonni Marbury was enthusiastic about joining the crowded race this fall to fill an unexpected District 1 vacancy on the Centennial City Council.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a race like this,” the financial planner said. “It’s exciting to know that all of us care so much. With seven of us, it’s going to be fun.”

It will also be among the most populated races for public office in Centennial’s eight-year history.

The seven candidates scrambled to meet the Aug. 24 filing deadline after the city council scheduled a special election to replace Councilmember Betty Ann Hamilton, who left the district and was forced by the city charter to resign.

The special election will take place Nov. 3 in conjunction with the city’s regularly scheduled mail-in election.

For Marbury, 38, the mother of a 7-year-old Highland Elementary School student, the decision to run was the product of uncertain times. She says she threw her hat into the ring to ensure that the burgeoning city remains in good hands — her own.

“I’m tired of just wondering what’s going to happen to me and what’s going to happen to my community,” she said.

Marbury says many other Centennial residents share her uncertainty as Centennial approaches its second decade as a municipality.

“There is nervousness that the city is going to come in and regulate us,” she said. “I think the people who sit back and just let things happen to them end up the most miserable. Government has a purpose and it’s important for people to know what that purpose is.”

The first-time candidate is particularly interested in the future of the city-supported Streets at Southglenn, the $310 million mixed-use development that officially opened Aug. 28 in District 1 on the former site of Southglenn Mall.

The 77-acre project has been a public-private partnership in many respects. In 2005, the city council created two government entities to facilitate construction of the touted “new urban” development, which is expected to be a major sales-tax boon for the city of 103,000.

Now that Streets at Southglenn is finally a reality, Marbury wants to ensure that the multi-use project is successful — in terms of economic development and as a community gathering place in west Centennial, which was unincorporated Arapahoe County when Marbury lived in the area as a child.

“I grew up walking around Southglenn Mall. My first job was there,” she said. “I want my daughter to be able to have that strong retail place that is in a safe and healthy neighborhood — and that these businesses stay full. The biggest nightmare is businesses move out and you have empty space.”

Marbury has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the west Centennial-Greater Littleton area. Her family moved from Detroit to Littleton when she was about 13. After attending college in Kentucky, she came back to Colorado.

The political hopeful lived in Greeley for a time while working for Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Schaffer in the 4th Congressional District. She was later an employee of U.S. Sen. Hank Brown.

Marbury and her husband moved from northern Colorado to present-day Centennial in 2000, just as the incorporation movement was getting underway.

Although Marbury supported the voter-approved creation of the city, she opposed the home-rule charter that residents OK’d in a special election last year.

“Home rule made me nervous about growing too large and losing our purpose,” she said. “But it’s here and we need to learn to work with it no matter what side of the issue we were on.”

Marbury is a financial planner for the Metropolitan State College Foundation, a nonprofit organization that receives, invests and administers private support for Metropolitan State College of Denver.

“My financial planning background really helps me as far as knowing the nuts and bolts of cash flow,” she said.

Marbury has little to say about the other six candidates in the race, though she suspects she would have policy differences with former Councilmember Vorry Moon, a Democrat. City races are nonpartisan.

“Centennial is a wonderful city,” Marbury said. “I want to have a strong voice to keep it that way.”