Candidate for
Council Member; City of Mission Viejo

A native Oklahoman, Sherri (Miller) Butterfield earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma and then spent a fellowship year at the University of Oklahoma Press, where she received extensive on-the-job training in scholarly editing.

For nearly forty years, Sherri 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 aducational activity packets, and numerous articles.

A Mission Viejo resident since 1972, Sherri was appointed to serve on the Mission Viejo Planning Commission in 1990, elected to the Mission Viejo City Council in 1994 and 1998, and chosen by her colleagues on the Council to serve as Mayor in 1996, 1999, and 2000.

Since March 1995, Sherri has represented Mission Viejo on the Board of Directors of the Orange County Fire Authority, the countywide organization that provides fire suppression, fire prevention, and emergency medical services to Mission Viejo, twenty-one other Orange County cities, and the unincorporated areas of the county. During 1997, Sherri chaired that board.

Beginning in 1988, Sherri devoted nearly ten years to making Mission Viejo's dream of a new public library come true. 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 (1992-1994), and served on the Library Design Task Force (1994-1996).

On September 19, 1995, Sherri appeared before the Orange County Board of Supervisors to successfully request that Mission Viejo be allowed to withdraw from the county library system and to use the nearly $1 million collected annually in Mission Viejo for library service to build and operate a doors-open, books-available, plenty-of-parking, state-of-the-art municipal library to serve all who could read or be read to.

With her family, Sherri spent nineteen summers as a volunteer makeup artist for the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach and devoted more than three thousand hours to this effort. In June 1996, she was made a Life Member of the Festival of Arts in recognition of this service.

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 by the California 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-nine years, Sherri has been married to her high school sweetheart, Marion L. Butterfield. Marion is a Senior Manager of Engineering at Boeing in Anaheim. Together, they are the parents of two grown daughters, Kirsten (Butterfield) Hill and Tara Lee Butterfield, and the proud grandparents of Meghan and Ryan.