Don’t be surprised if the candidates vying for Seat 2 on the Loxahatchee Groves Town Council seem familiar. They are the same two candidates who faced off against each other in 2019, the last time the seat was up for election.
Loxahatchee Groves Vice Mayor Laura Danowski is being challenged by former Councilman Todd McLendon, who lost the Seat 2 race to Danowski three years ago. Now, Danowski is the incumbent, and McLendon is the challenger.
It is one of two races on the Tuesday, March 8 municipal ballot, with the other being the Seat 4 race between incumbent Mayor Robert Shorr and challenger Paul Coleman. The winners will get three-year terms on the council.
In 2019, Danowski took just under 60 percent of the vote to oust McLendon from the dais. She is proud of the work she has done over the past three years on behalf of town residents.
If re-elected, Danowski said she would seek to lower the town’s taxes in some manner, either through the millage rate or the per-acre assessment.
“As the town moves forward and fixes some of the long-standing problems, it would be a great goal to be able to reduce some of those charges,” Danowski said.
She also wants to clean overgrowth from roads that cut the line of sight for drivers and reduce shrubs that hang out into the road and scrub against vehicles. “That needs to be fixed,” Danowski said.
She is also looking forward to the execution of to the town’s canal refurbishment plan.
“Management is working on that, and it’s focused on clean water, re-sloping banks and trash removal,” Danowski said. “I also want to keep our rural nature… and hold developers to the Southern Blvd. corridor.”
She feels commercial uses on Okeechobee Blvd. needs more thoughtful discussion.
Danowski’s campaign brochure questions whether long-established businesses along Okeechobee Blvd. should be called “illegal” since many were located and operating long before the town incorporated. She suggests that an overlay could address legacy land use and give strength to code enforcement. While more than three years of research and opinion have gone into the structure of a potential Okeechobee Blvd. overlay, Danowski believes that more input is needed from residents, staff and planning before the council votes on it.
Danowski is quick to note that the town’s accomplishments over the past three years are not solely to her credit, but to the council majority with town staff support. One of the biggest accomplishments was the unanimous enactment in November 2021 of a four-year road improvement plan that does not add extra taxes to residents, she said.
Other achievements by the current council include term limits for council members, five-day-a-week access to town hall, retirement of all long-term town debt, an in-house building and code enforcement department, and the purchase of new equipment for the utilities department, Danowski said.
During her term, the town has also held numerous community events, cleanups, parades and fundraisers.
Danowski’s election brochure lists supporting Okeechobee Blvd. improvements, including a horse trail, crosswalks and a roundabout, but not at the expense of town infrastructure funding or residential tax dollars.
“We have replaced a culvert at C [Road] and Collecting Canal, and we are working on two others,” she said, explaining that the project was quoted years ago at $300,000 by the town’s engineering contractor, but the town was able to get the project completed for about $138,000.
Danowski said she is focused on the road resurfacing plan because if one council seat changes, it could be defunded.
“If [Mayor] Robert [Shorr] and I do not get re-elected, that road resurfacing plan can be brought up again and defunded,” Danowski said. “I’m very concerned about that.”
Her brochure asserts that paving can be done before installing drainage, but a lack of available easements is a town-wide challenge to drainage. Town management and public works are working on a master drainage plan to bring to the council.
The four-year road plan approved 5-0 by the council last November calls for $1,114,000 to be spent in fiscal year 2022; $1,148,000 in fiscal year 2023; $944,000 in fiscal year 2024; and $700,000 in fiscal year 2025.
Danowski, 55, manages a 10-acre farm with an equestrian boarding facility. Originally from New York’s Long Island, she has lived in Loxahatchee Groves for 14 years.
Before her council service, Danowski was elected to the Loxahatchee Groves Water Control District Board of Supervisors in 2015, replacing 15-year incumbent Robert Snowball.
“Part of the reason that I ran for the water control district is I worked on a dredge barge for two years, and our biggest client was the Reedy Creek Improvement District,” she said. “They take care of all the canal banks and waterways in Walt Disney World, so I know how drainage works.”
Danowski believes that part of being a good leader is to like people and engage with them whether the subject is tough or easy.
“You have always got to remain positive,” she said. “I will never bully anybody. I will never disparage anybody. It’s uncalled for, and it’s unproductive.”
She added that she loves her service with the town. “I love being part of something bigger than any one action,” Danowski said.
For more information about her campaign, Danowski invites residents to call her at (561) 889-2344.
After three years off the council, McLendon sees a town government that is spiraling out of financial control.
“We have to get our costs under control,” he said. “The council in the last three years has continued to raise our taxes every year. They’ve raised it, however our reserves have gone down, so we’re clearly spending too much money.”
He said the assessment for trash collection is projected to be a quarter of a million dollars higher next year than it was three years ago. “And we’re getting less service than we were,” McLendon said. “Those kind of costs need to be straightened out.”
Opening equestrian trails while he was in office is something he is particularly proud of.
“Every single candidate always promised to open equestrian trails, and I was able to successfully do it,” McLendon said. “I understand why it hadn’t been done before. It was a difficult process, and it took many major tasks to get it done. However, I was able to get it done and no other candidate can say that. That was a pretty big accomplishment.”
He explained that in order to open trails, the council had to make the LGWCD dependent to the town, and the district had to get ownership of the land, because the water control district had only an easement.
“It took some major doing to have that happen,” McLendon said. “I was very proud of that.”
If elected he hopes to rein in unpermitted commercial enterprises.
“We have a lot of industrial sites in town that have never been allowed there,” he said. “We’re getting more and more of them. That needs to be cleaned up. We’ve got to put an end to that.”
McLendon added that some of the recently paved roads are already starting to deteriorate.
“One of the things that I’m not looking forward to is the recent roads that have been paved are already failing, and we’re going to need good leadership to repair these roads in a short period of time,” he said, pointing out that large pieces of D Road have crumbled since the recent paving. “The white stripe along the edge of the road is gone because the road has been eaten away all the way to it. That’s happened in a two- or three-month period of time, and these roads are supposed to last 20 years.”
McLendon said the roads are deteriorating due to shortcuts in the process that reduced the cost of construction.
“They should have brought the dirt up to the edge of the asphalt, but they didn’t,” he said. “You’ve got this two-inch lip that the tire of your vehicle peels away at every time you drive off the road. If the sand had been brought up to the top of the asphalt, you wouldn’t have that happen. It didn’t get done because they wanted the cheapest job they could get with the intention of doing it two or three months before the election, and hoping that people would fall for it.”
McLendon asserted that in the past three years, the council has approved in excess of $1 million in expenditures that have never been on the agenda.
“That’s not transparency, and that’s pretty aggravating,” he said. “When I was on the council, I don’t think we voted on anything, even over a dollar, that wasn’t on the agenda. It’s like that rule has gone out the window.”
McLendon added that when he was on the council, there were two opportunities for public input at the beginning of the meeting and at the end of the meeting.
“They removed the second one, so they’ve removed 50 percent of free public comment time,” he said. “I’m not happy with that.”
During his term in office, McLendon noted that the council created a monthly workshop to allow better council-resident communication, streamlined procedures to expedite code changes, strengthened the town’s code of ethics, expanded town hall hours at no additional cost, adopted a policy allowing residents to come into compliance with codes, purchased a new grader and implemented changes reducing traffic on Okeechobee Blvd.
McLendon, 48, is a third-generation Floridian with two sons. He works in the computer and air conditioning industries, while also raising exotic birds.
For more information about his campaign, contact McLendon at (954) 931-4634 or metasystech@gmail.com.
