Two seats are up for a public vote on the Boca Raton City Council in the March 19 citywide election, but only one features two legitimate candidates.
A city of almost 100,000 people, Boca Raton long ago shed its sleepy retirement-mecca image, with upwardly mobile families drawn to its A-rated schools and young adults swiftly supplanting older, nontraditional students at Florida Atlantic University. The Owls’ heroic journey to basketball’s Final Four last year will only hasten the transition.
Along with this expansion and rapidly changing demographics have come the usual complaints we hear in cities across South Florida — traffic, overdevelopment, affordability. But in fact, Boca Raton has fought to maintain height restrictions put in place decades ago, despite what visitors may think when they hit downtown and see the massive Mandarin Oriental complex slowly rising along Federal Highway. (The town has 100-foot height restrictions in place apart from a small downtown area where those restrictions are slightly higher.)
The city council has carefully guided Boca Raton through slow, steady development, rejecting the massive condo towers that rise like canyon walls in bigger cities to the north and south. The beach here is as pristine as you will find in South Florida, as the city long ago dedicated its beachside to park land rather than allow it to be paved into an oceanside commercial district as many other cities have.
The next council will likely take steps toward re-envisioning the government campus near the city’s Brightline station, including the Boca Raton Police Department headquarters and City Hall. Given their track records, two faces familiar to Boca Raton voters are the best ones to guide the city through this process.
Seat C: Yvette Drucker
The race for Seat C might as well be a race in name only. Yes, two names are on the ballot, Yvette Drucker and Bernard Korn.
But council member Drucker, 48, is the only one who’s running a real campaign. Korn, 69, is a perennial candidate who did not return our questionnaire and did not participate in an online candidate interview. He loosely decries “corruption” on the city council — a charged word in this city given that the arrest on corruption charges of former Mayor Susan Haynie was only five years ago.
But as an example of this supposed “corruption,” in several emails to the Sun Sentinel, Korn points only to perfectly legal campaign donations to Drucker by a local developer. If campaign contributions from developers were truly the mark of corruption, there would be hardly any commissioners left in South Florida.
Far from being a pawn of developers, Drucker has served on the council as it has shepherded the city through the downtown height variances granted previous to her arrival there. The circumstances and areas of downtown Boca Raton that are allowed such variances have not expanded under her watch.
Her thoughtful, independent votes are exactly what the council needs as it navigates the transformation of the area around the Brightline station.
For Boca Raton City Council Seat C, the Sun Sentinel endorses Yvette Drucker.
Seat D: Andy Thomson
Voters face more of a real choice in Seat D. Two candidates are looking to replace Monica Mayotte, who is term-limited out of office. Brian Stenberg, 54, is a civic-minded community activist who worries that development is going too far, too fast in the city. But in our interview with the candidates, Stenberg pointed to the city’s 100-foot height limitations as ironclad. Back in 2014, several developers downtown were granted 140-foot variances under certain circumstances.
We sympathize with Stenberg’s desire to maintain downtown charm, but if those sort of breaks were put on development, as his opponent Andy Thomson says, “We would be faced with lawsuits and we would be losing them because we would be denying them their property rights.”
Thomson, 41, is a former member of the city council who seeks to rejoin it after an unsuccessful run for the state House as a Democrat in 2022.
“What weighs heavily on me is whether [a project] is fitting with the character of our city, whether it will enhance or detract from our quality of life and whether it complies with the code,” Thomson said in our interview with both candidates.
It’s the sort of answer that often costs politicians among voters who want to hear unrealistic promises that their representatives will stand athwart the city and tell developers, “Stop!”
We hope it won’t cost Thomson with voters. His tenure on the council from 2018 to 2022 was marked by collegiality and smart-growth development, which have often been lacking in neighboring cities.
For Boca Raton Seat D, the Sun Sentinel endorses Andy Thomson.
City council elections are nonpartisan and citywide in Boca Raton, so all voters can vote in both elections. Council members are paid $28,000 a year.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at .
