New Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek hopes to give residents a voice
When newly elected Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek sat on the City Council about two years ago, she became frustrated when voicing opposition to the increasing number of residential subdivisions she said were changing the city’s historic character.
“We are just becoming so blah, with everything new and all monotone,” Sladek said. “And it was all 4-to-1 votes [among council members] and the pat
tern became constant suppression of the minority view. I was the only person [on the council] who had any differing opinion…. And it was impossible to accomplish anything.”
Sladek singled out longtime Mayor Dominic Persampiere — with whom she has had a long-running political feud over the years — over what she said was his domineering ways.
“He was just a tyrant, honestly,” she said. “I realized there’s only one fix: We have to remove the person that everyone insists on making the chairman [Persampiere]. And nobody else seemed as thick skinned as me for attempting such a thing.”
So Sladek — an attorney, a real-estate broker and longtime community activist — decided to run for mayor. Last month, she won with 44% of the vote over Randy Core, who got 35%, and Emma Reichert, with 21%. Persampiere, who served as mayor since 2010, decided not to seek another term.
“I did it to give a voice to the people,” said Sladek, 40. “It’s about respect for the residents. If people come [to a meeting] and they want to share an opinion that is different from yours, I don’t want us to be like ‘Oh, you don’t understand. Your concern is not truly valid.’ That’s not the right answer. A better answer is: ‘Let me try to understand why you’re fully concerned and see if we can come up with a way to have you be less concerned.’”
Persampiere shrugged off Sladek’s description of how he operated as mayor.
“I wish the new mayor lots of luck,” he said. “But she will quickly learn that it is much harder to be the mayor than it is attacking the mayor.”
But Sladek’s first meeting as mayor on Dec. 2 didn’t go smoothly. After her swearing-in ceremony, the council moved forward with the annual task of selecting a council chairman, the person who runs the meetings, from among the five members.
Traditionally, Oviedo’s mayor is selected as chairman. However, in a 3-2 vote, council member Bob Pollack was picked as chairman — with Keith Britton, Jeff Chudnow and Pollack voting in favor — instead of Sladek. Sladek and Judith Smith voting for the new mayor to serve as chairwoman.
Residents in the packed room booed and jeered as Sladek was forced to sit at the end of the dais so Pollack could move to the center.
“A lot of people here tonight are disappointed about the politics that just occurred,” resident H. Alexander Duncan said. “This is what makes a lot of citizens sick of politics.”
Sladek said she can still call for votes or make motions as a council member.
“I want people to trust the government and that was not a good step,” she said. “People clearly want to move in a new direction, and they [council members] did not accept that.”
Born in Oviedo, Sladek attended Lawton Elementary,
Jackson Heights Middle and Oviedo High schools. As a student, she was involved with the 4-H Club and the Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps.
She then headed to the University of Notre Dame, where she studied English literature and anthropology and spent a semester in southern India. After graduating with a bachelor of arts degree, she moved to Cambridge, Mass., where her husband, Paul Sladek, was studying law at Harvard University. He now works for Orange County government.
Sladek then earned a law degree from the University of Florida.
After returning to Oviedo, Sladek quickly took an interest in city politics and worked as a reporter and editor for the Oviedo Voice, a now shuttered weekly newspaper.
She also founded a government watchdog group, Oviedo CANDOR, or Citizens and Neighbors Deserve Openness & Responsibility.
The group eventually was sued by the city after it launched a website that included the e-mail addresses for each City Council member, including Persampiere, who had recently defeated Paul Sladek in 2002 for a council seat.
In its suit, Oviedo accused Sladek and her organization of intercepting emails intended for council members before becoming public records. The city eventually dropped the lawsuit.
“I was trying to facilitate communications between citizens and politicians, so I created auto email forwarders,” she said. “They were alleging that I hacked into the city computers and stole public records. Can you steal public records? The city spent almost $10,000 [in the suit].”
She called her government watchdog efforts as her “very intense hobby.”
That included regularly butting heads with Persampiere, who served on the council with Sladek’s father, Phil Cloninger, a council member from 2000 to 2002. Cloninger, who died in February 2004 of complications from a motorcycle accident, also clashed with
Persampiere.
Cloninger’s daughter took over the family’s political mantle when she was elected to a two-year council term on in 2016.
Like her dad, Sladek wrangled with Persampiere on the council. Her most notable dispute with him occurred when Sladek spoke out against a planned annual taxpayer-funded trip to Washington, D.C. Persampiere and other city officials planned to meet with lobbyists and federal officials.
Persampiere eventually called off the trip. But last month, Persampiere and other city officials took a similar taxpayer-funded trip to the nation’s capital — just weeks before he stepped down as mayor.
Sladek said that she’ll only travel to Washington as mayor “if there’s a reason.”
In addition to her mayoral duties, Sladek is busy with her growing family. She gave birth to a boy just days after the Nov. 5 election, to go with the couple’s 13-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son.
The family lives in one of the oldest homes in Oviedo, a former church built in the late 19th century, overlooking a small lake.
The couple also purchased a vacant one-acre tract adjacent to their home to preserve it after learning that developers proposed turning the old citrus land into townhomes and a Starbucks coffee shop.
As Sladek walked in her backyard, she pointed out her beehives that eventually will produce honey she hopes to sell. There’s an old oak tree that she uses to gather acorns. She bends down to pick and taste edible wild plants and wildflowers, including Spanish needles and amaranths.
Her first orders of business, she said, are giving residents more opportunities to speak at public meetings and getting the city to modify its comprehensive plan, or blueprint for Oviedo’s future growth.
“Otherwise, developers will change the comp plan piecemeal,” she said. “And the city will then lose its identity.”