Benita Cotton-Orr (Mayor of Sky Valley, Georgia, candidate 2025)
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Benita Cotton-Orr is running for election to the Mayor of Sky Valley in Georgia. She is on the ballot in the general election on November 4, 2025.[source]
Cotton-Orr completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. Click here to read the survey answers.
[1]Biography
Benita Cotton-Orr provided the following biographical information via Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey on October 15, 2025:
- High school: Wentworth Senior Secondary School
- Bachelor's: Rhodes University, 1984
- Gender: Female
- Religion: Christian
- Profession: Consultant
- Incumbent officeholder: No
- Campaign slogan: Preserving Sky Valley's Heart and Future
- Campaign website
- Campaign Facebook
Elections
General election
The general election will occur on November 4, 2025.
General election for Mayor of Sky Valley
Incumbent Hollie Steil and Benita Cotton-Orr are running in the general election for Mayor of Sky Valley on November 4, 2025.
Candidate | ||
| Hollie Steil (Nonpartisan) | ||
 | Benita Cotton-Orr (Nonpartisan)  | |
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| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Endorsements
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Campaign themes
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Benita Cotton-Orr completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Cotton-Orr's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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Benita was born in Simon’s Town, South Africa, and raised in Durban. She immigrated to Georgia in 1986, finding the safer life she sought for her family. She lived in Cobb County until moving to Sky Valley permanently in 2022. She and her husband, Scott, fell in love with the serenity of “Georgia’s Highest and Coolest City.”
Benita’s career spans journalism, public policy, and communications consulting. She is the founder of High Grounds Consulting LLC, a boutique policy and communications firm based in Sky Valley, Benita spent 13 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She left the Editorial Board of the AJC in 2003 to become Vice President of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. TShe left the Foundation in 2021 and launched High Grounds Consulting in 2022. A 2007 alumnus of Leadership Georgia, Benita is actively involved in civic and policy organizations, including:
The Political Science Advisory Board at Kennesaw State University; past Board of Governors, Georgia Charter Schools Association; First Generation Americans Foundation Board member; U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s Advisory Task Force for Georgia; Visiting Fellow at the Badger Institute; Policy Advisor for the Heartland Institute; past boards of America’s Future Foundation (Georgia) and Common Cause Georgia; Faculty member at the Leadership Institute; Fellow at DoNoHarmMedicine.org; Co-Chair, Georgia Center-Right Coalition Second Friday Meeting; chair, Rabun County Republican Party.- I'm running to preserve Sky Valley's heart and future. This hamlet in the Northeast Georgia mountains deserves to grow organically, not cataclysmically. Sky Valley's low-density growth must be preserved or the infrastructure, environment and community will be overwhelmed
- Communication is key to Sky Valley's future. Residents -- both part-time and full-time -- deserve to be informed on the issues that affect them. Property owners are taxpayers, whether they're absent or resident. Absent owners may not have a vote, but they deserve a voice in the community where they pay taxes. As mayor, I will keep the lines of communication open.
- Transparency inspires trust in government. I will "open the books" ... the checkbooks, the meetings (to the extent allowable by law) and the interactions. Council members will communicate via official government emails.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2025 Elections
External links
Footnotes
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