For City Council, stick with Drucker, Mayotte
Seven-day average for new cases has been declining since Jan. 8
Over the past few years, there has been high drama on many city commissions in South Florida. Delray Beach has been running through city managers. Hallandale Beach has practically become a punchline. And two years ago, the mayor of Boca Raton was arrested on public corruption charges. But unlike some cities, since the mayor’s arrest, the Boca Raton City Council has been notable for, well, its lack of notoriety.
Two Boca Raton City Council seats are on the March 9 ballot and we recommend keeping the incumbents in both. Of course, there’s more to it than just the current council’s congeniality.
Seat C
Unlike county commissions — and indeed, most other city commissions in South Florida — the members of the Boca Raton City Council are all elected to at-large seats, meaning they all represent not just one district, but the whole city. And all city voters get to vote in each election.
Four candidates are running for Seat
C — Yvette Drucker, the current councilwoman; Bernard Korn, a perennial candidate; Josie Machovec, who gained notoriety after suing the county over its mask mandate; and Constance Scott, a former councilwoman. Drucker is the incumbent, though just barely. In October, the city council chose her from among 32 applicants to fill a seat left vacant by Jeremy Rodgers, who was sent overseas by the Navy in June.
Drucker and former councilwoman Scott had already filed to run in March, and both applied to fill the vacant seat until the election. (Rodgers was not running, as he had reached his term limit.) Drucker was selected after virtually no debate. Many of the applicants felt like the fix was in.
“It seemed like decisions had already been made,” said Brian Stenberg, another applicant who’s now running for Seat D, the other council seat up in March.
Florida’s Sunshine Law prohibits elected officials from privately discussing matters that may come to a vote before them. Neither can they use city personnel as go-betweens to line up votes prior to meetings. It must be said, the optics surrounding Drucker’s selection didn’t look good.
On the other hand, Drucker has an outstanding history of volunteerism that makes her a great pick. According to her answers on the Sun Sentinel’s candidate questionnaire, in just the past two years, she has served on the boards of the Junior League of Boca Raton, the Boca Raton Historical Society, the Don Estridge Foundation, the Greater Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce, Florence Fuller Child Development Center, the Boca Raton Children’s Museum and the city’s education task force and historic preservation board.
And though the city council voted 4-0 for Drucker to fill Rodgers’ open seat, she has shown she is not a rubber stamp. For example, while Mayor Scott Singer and Councilwoman Andrea O’Rourke voted against “Liv on Fifth Avenue,” a proposed student housing project near Florida Atlantic University, Drucker cast the third vote, along with Councilman Andy Thomson and Councilwoman Monica Mayotte, to approve it.
A few weeks later, Drucker broke with Thomson and sided with Mayotte and O’Rourke over an issue relating to sidewalk repairs.
“I vote independently of the council, I take every vote very carefully, and I vote the way that I vote,” Drucker said. “I don’t follow anyone.”
Drucker’s toughest challenger is Scott, who has served as Florida Atlantic University’s director of local relations since 2015, according to her questionnaire. In the six years prior to that, she served two terms on the Boca Raton City Council.
Scott left the council because of term limits, but under the law, a term out of office resets the clock, allowing a previously term-limited politician to run again for the same office. Scott has a history of philanthropy and volunteerism that rivals Drucker’s, and she should be proud of her work for the city and its citizens. But while Scott is within her rights to run again, we believe Drucker represents a fresh voice, especially as she is the first Hispanic council member.
Two other candidates are running for the seat. Korn, who ran against Mayor Scott Singer in 2018 and 2020, did not participate in our endorsement interview or submit a questionnaire. Machovec is a stay-at-home mom and one of four plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Palm Beach County over its mask mandate.
“COVID-19 was an eye opener for me on how influential our local government is on our daily lives,” Machovec wrote in her questionnaire. “What started as just a mom wanting to take my children to the playground has led me on a journey I never saw coming, and to this race.”
Machovec is calling for a complete rewrite of the city’s comprehensive development plan, partially, she said, because the council passes too many variances. But an overhaul of the city’s comp plan is tricky business, one that could open a can of worms in a city that has handled development better than most in South Florida.
This, then, is a race between Scott and Drucker. We believe Scott has had her time on the council and Drucker represents the future. The Sun Sentinel endorses Yvette Drucker for Boca Raton City Council Seat C.
Seat D
In Boca Raton’s other city council race, newcomer Brian Stenberg faces incumbent Monica Mayotte in Seat D. When asked to identify the differences between her and Stenberg, Mayotte said there were few.
“Usually when someone decides to run against someone else, it’s because of differences in ideas, but I really don’t think there are any here,” she said.
While they agree on much, there are some differences in priorities. Asked to name Boca Raton’s top three challenges, Stenberg was the only candidate to list in his questionnaire both the fact that City Manager Leif Ahnell will retire soon, and that the pandemic will likely lead to a longterm drop in commercial property values that the city must plan for.
Replacing Ahnell, the city’s chief administrator for more than two decades, could be the most important decision the next council makes. And with many professions rethinking how they work, the impact on commercial property is a consequential issue that deserves more discussion in Boca Raton and elsewhere.
But Mayotte, first elected three years ago as part of a slate of candidates running against overdevelopment, has walked the walk, promoting steady but slow growth in the city — sometimes to a fault. She voted against the Midtown project along Military Trail near Glades Road, which resulted in a $137 million lawsuit by developers. But that lawsuit was dismissed by a state appeals court Feb. 3. Mayotte and other council members who listened to local residents and looked for a project with a smaller footprint appear to have won the day, though other lawsuits related to the project are still underway.
Mayotte sees her top priority as “COVID-19 and economic recovery that keeps us safe and responsibly moving forward,” as she wrote in her questionnaire. Her no. 2 priority, she writes, is “smart, resilient development/redevelopment with innovative planning and exceptional design.”
Mayotte has shown that, when it comes to development and design, she will not settle for less than the best. Neither should Boca. We endorse Monica Mayotte for re-election.
“This isn’t how I expected to feel three weeks into the Biden presidency.”
A seven-term congressional Democrat who represents Boca Raton, West Boca and northwest Broward County in the House, U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch had been preparing for exhilaration after the departure of Donald Trump.
Instead, Deutch had spent six hours alone in his Rayburn Building office on Jan. 6, hiding from the pro-Trump mob. He then had watched most of the House GOP caucus refuse to certify the election results. A week later, he had watched as only 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection.
Three weeks later, Deutch had watched as only 11 Republicans voted to sanction Marjorie Taylor Greene for, among many heinous actions, calling the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting a hoax. Deutch had helped to lead that sanction vote. His district includes Parkland.
“I have been to some remote places where there are coups on a regular basis,” said Deutch, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. What he saw on Jan. 6 “looked like the far corners of the Earth.”
In Washington, Deutch had remained the collegial, upbeat wonk who had served in the Florida Senate. But the attempted insurrection and the party-over-country allegiance of so many Republicans have shaken him deeply.
“There was a moment,” Deutch said when we spoke last week, “when I wondered, ‘Is this irredeemable? How do we pull ourselves back?’ I think we will, but it’s terrible to even think that.”
And how do Democrats work with Republicans after most denied the election result and refused to accept that Trump made the bomb that exploded on Jan. 6 and lit its fuse? Twelve of 16 Republicans in the Florida delegation voted against democracy because their candidate lost.
“We’ve had lots of conversations,” Deutch said of the delegation’s Democrats. “Some of my colleagues won’t work with [the Republicans]. It does impact who I’m going to spend a lot of time with.”
From a practical standpoint, though, “I’m not left with many people. I love Fred Upton, but I can’t do everything with him,” Deutch said of the Michigan congressman who was one of only three Republicans to certify the election, impeach Trump and sanction Greene.
With Greene, the question was whether stripping her of committee assignments — after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy failed to act — would make the QAnon fan into a victim. Imagined grievance drives Republicans from Trump on down.
“At some point,” Deutch said, “somebody’s got to do something to hold people accountable. [Republicans knew] that the dangerous precedent was not what we did but to allow her to continue. That’s the FBI saying that, not me.”
Nothing, though, frosted Deutch more than people calling the Greene sanction “a tragedy.” Referring to the Stoneman Douglas shooting, Deutch said the House action came “nearly three years after something that was a tragedy that day and every single day since.”
In mid-December, 126 House Republicans signed onto the frivolous lawsuit from Texas that sought to invalidate millions of legal ballots. “After that,” Deutch said, “I thought it couldn’t get worse.”
How wrong he was. “To vote again [on Jan. 6] against certification even after all that happened was very hard to accept. A lot of times, I vote differently from my colleagues, but this was such a fundamental statement to let a lie continue to fester …”
His voice trailed off.
It is demonstrably false that Biden stole the election. Yet many Republicans — among them Gov. DeSantis — still refuse to acknowledge that publicly. I asked Deutch which is worse: actually believing the lie or cynically avoiding the issue for fear of angering the Trump cultists.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Both are terrible.”
Republicans will continue to sanitize the events of Jan. 6, even as they call for unity. That’s why the House managers’ presentation was so important, showing how close we came to a bipartisan massacre inside the Capitol.
After reflection, Deutch has focused on what happened roughly 13 hours after the attempted insurrection. Congress and then-Vice President Pence followed the Constitution and declared Biden the rightful winner.
“It felt very empowering,” Deutch said. “It was a great act of defiance.”
Exhilaration will have to wait.
Florida reported 6,297 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday and another 220 new resident deaths linked to COVID-19. The state has now reported 1,837,285 cases since the pandemic began.
The seven-day average for new cases has been declining since Jan. 8.
South Florida reported 2,354 new cases Tuesday.
Palm Beach County: 345 additional cases and 6 more deaths. The county now has 115,145 confirmed cases and 2,397 deaths, including 42 non-residents.
Broward County: 753 additional cases and 9 more deaths. Broward has a known total of 186,063 cases and 2,312 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. The death tally includes 37 non-residents.
Miami-Dade County: 1,336 additional cases and 22 new deaths. The county now has 395,828 confirmed cases and 5,239 deaths, including 32 non-residents.
Testing and positivity
Public health experts say the virus is considered under control when the COVID-19 test positivity rate is under 5%. But since Oct. 29, Florida has exceeded 5% in its widely publicized calculation for assessing the rate for testing of residents.
The state reported a daily positivity rate of 6.61% on Tuesday, down from 6.83% the day before. This method of calculating positivity counts new infections only, but also counts repeat negative tests, which skews the figure downward.
According to the state, the new reported case numbers reflect the results of 101,405 COVID-19 tests of Florida residents received from labs in the past day, up from 55,414 results reported the day before.
Palm Beach County: Test results for 6,348 residents were reported Tuesday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 5.51%. That’s down from 9.44% the previous day.
Broward County: Test results for 11,253 residents were reported Tuesday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 6.66%. That’s down from 7.41% the previous day.
Miami-Dade County: Test results for 22,879 residents were reported Tuesday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 6.52%. That’s up from 5.88% the previous day.
Deaths
The state’s pandemic data report shows a total of 29,154 Floridians have died from COVID-19. In addition, 505 non-residents have died after contracting the virus.
Most of the fatalities reported Tuesday happened over several weeks but were just confirmed in the past day.
Out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Florida ranks No. 26 for deaths per 100K residents and No. 23 for cases per 100K residents, according to the latest data from the health department and the COVID Tracking Project.
Hospitalizations
As of Tuesday, there were 4,646 people hospitalized in Florida with a primary diagnosis of COVID-19, according to the state Agency for Health Care Administration.
In South Florida, Broward County reported 611, Palm Beach County had 352 and Miami-Dade had 738.
Hospitalizations hit a peak in late July of about 9,500 patients statewide, then dipped as low as 2,011 on Oct. 19. The numbers steadily increased throughout November and December.
Vaccines
In Florida, 1,284,052 people have received their first dose of the vaccine, or about 5.98% of the population.
So far, 1,103,298 people have completed the series of doses required to be vaccinated. That represents about 5.14% of the population.