Candidate's Biography

By Sherri M. Butterfield

Mayor Pro Tempore, City of Mission Viejo

Sherri (Miller) Butterfield was born and grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. For two years, she attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, as a Seven College Conference Scholar. Then she returned to her home state to earn a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma. After her graduation, Sherri spent a fellowship year at the University of Oklahoma Press, where she received extensive on-the-job training in scholarly editing. For more than thirty years, she has been a freelance writer and editor specializing in the creation of educational materials and in the preparation of nonfiction manuscripts for publication. She is the editor of more than three hundred book-length manuscripts and the author of seven published books, several educational activity packets, and numerous articles.

A Mission Viejo resident since 1972, Sherri was appointed to serve on Mission Viejo's General Plan Advisory Committee (GPAC) in 1990. Later that year, she was appointed to the Mission Viejo Planning Commission, on which she sat for four years, several times serving as its Chairman. She was elected to the Mission Viejo City Council in 1994 and was chosen to serve as Mayor Pro Tempore in 1995, as Mayor in 1996, and then as Mayor Pro Tempore again in 1998.

In addition, since March 1995, Sherri has represented Mission Viejo on both the Executive Committee and the Board of Directors of the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA), the organization that provides fire suppression, emergency medical, rescue, and fire prevention services to nineteen Orange County cities and to the unincorporated areas of the county as well. Sherri served as Chairman of that board during 1997.

A self-proclaimed (or self-diagnosed) bibliophile who is deeply concerned about the future and fate of libraries, Sherri long advocated the construction of a new public library in Mission Viejo. She chaired the Library Site Selection Committee (1991-1992) and the Mission Viejo Library Committee (1992-1993), was Founding President of the Board of Directors of the Mission Viejo Library Foundation (1993-1994), and served on the Library Design Task Force (1994-1996). On September 7, 1996, ground was broken atop a hill at the southwest corner of Marguerite Parkway and La Paz Road, in the heart of the community, for a new library. A year later, on October 25, 1997, the Mission Viejo Library opened its doors at last. This beautiful 27,650-square-foot wood, stone, glass, and stucco structure is truly state-of-the-art. It has 332 parking spaces, will hold 168,000 volumes, and is open 58 hours a week to serve all who can read or be read to.

With her family, Sherri has spent seventeen summers as a volunteer makeup artist for the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach. She has devoted more than two thousand hours to this effort, which raises over $150,000 annually for grants and scholarships in the arts and to support art schools, museums, and other related community projects. In June 1996, Sherri was made a Life Member of the Festival of Arts in recognition of this service, and in January 1997 she was asked to serve out the unexpired three-year term of one member of the Festival of Arts Board of Directors.

Sherri's books have won awards for both content and design, and she has been honored as a Woman of Distinction by the Mission Viejo Activities Committee (1993) and, more recently, by the Conservative Women's Leadership Association (1996). In November 1997, the Mission Viejo City Council voted to name the community room of the Mission Viejo Library in Sherri's honor and proclaimed her a Home Town Hero in recognition of her continuing efforts on behalf of the library, the Fire Authority, and the community.

For thirty-five years, Sherri has been married to her high school sweetheart, Marion L. Butterfield. Marion is a Systems Engineer at Boeing (formerly McDonnell Douglas) in Long Beach. Together, they are the parents of two grown daughters, Kirsten (Butterfield) Hill and Tara Lee Butterfield, and the grandparents (as of July 27, 1998) of Meghan.