Candidates for mayor in Lauderdale sling mud

FORT LAUDERDALE — It’s the height of election season in Fort Lauderdale, and passions are flowing. So is vitriol.

Candidates in the mayoral race — Bruce Roberts and Dean Trantalis — are serving up a heavy dose of negative advertising, something not seen in a Fort Lauderdale mayoral race in years.

This year marks the first open seat for mayor in nine years.

The race pits two city commissioners against each other in a March 13 runoff for the seat Mayor Jack Seiler is leaving because of term limits.

Voters have pulled inflammatory flyers from their mailboxes alleging Roberts was guilty of a “dishonest racist lie,” or “caught red-handed” taking “cash” from developers. Flyers portray Trantalis as a puppet with rouge and lipstick and describe him as “a liar” who juggles the facts and a hypocrite, lobbyist and “dummy.”

In the days leading up to the Jan. 16 primary election, a Trantalis campaign volunteer who’d been accused of tampering with Roberts’ signs was arrested for running from police. And the Roberts campaign headquarters door was vandalized with feces and a condom.

Seiler said he doesn’t “appreciate any of the negative advertising from any of the candi-

dates, no one excluded. The fact is, we ought to be better than that. We ought to be able to talk about the future, talk about where we’re heading, not where we’ve been.”

In his 25 years in elected office — the last nine as mayor — Seiler said he never mentioned an opponent in his advertising. He also never lost.

“I’ve never felt you should get elected because you lowered your opponent,” said Seiler, who endorsed Roberts. “… Be for something.”

Roberts and his campaign manager, Judy Stern, did not respond to text messages and cellphone calls to comment on their campaign messaging.

A voter in southwest Fort Lauderdale said she was torn between Trantalis and Roberts, but after receiving one of the anti-Trantalis attack ads, she voted for him because she didn’t want to support that type of campaigning. Voters complained on Twitter. Cal Deal, a longtime activist, wrote that “If you have to fight dirty to get your candidate elected, you need a better candidate.”

Trantalis said he plans to stick to the issues leading up to the runoff, but he couldn’t rule out veering negative.

Trantalis won 46 percent of the vote Tuesday night, with 14 percent voter turnout. Roberts won 31 percent. A third candidate, Charlotte Rodstrom, won 22.5 percent and is no longer in the race.

The battle between Roberts, the city’s former police chief, and Trantalis has intensified. At commission meetings, relations between the two have deteriorated. Roberts raised his voice in one exchange, accusing Trantalis of using “hyperbole” to exaggerate infrastructure problems.

Roberts in election debates said Trantalis was deceiving voters with his campaign ads, and he wanted voters to know that they couldn’t trust what he says.

Roberts