- March 28, 2024
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It’s almost time for another election season in Winter Park and Maitland – and all of the races have already been decided except one.
Winter Park City Commissioner Greg Seidel will look to defend his seat against challenger Wes Naylor in the upcoming March 14 election.
The qualifying deadline on Jan. 10 set the stage for the showdown for Seat 1, but it also guaranteed Winter Park City Commissioner Sarah Sprinkel’s reelection since she faced no opposition.
“I’m excited to do it again,” Sprinkel said. “We have a lot going on in our community right now. You can see that [the Commission works] really well together; there’s a lot of camaraderie. I’m not ready to stop.”
In Maitland, two members of City Council were reelected last week when no challengers arose prior to the Jan. 20 qualifying deadline. Longtime Councilwoman Bev Reponen will serve her fourth total term on City Council, and Councilman John Lowndes will fulfill his second full-term when they are sworn into office again on April 10.
Lowndes said he’s looking forward to continuing to learn and make decisions based on what’s best for Maitland, and creating a successful path to the future.
“I want to make sure we continue to head down that right path,” he said.
Reponen said she’s committed this term to making her long dreamed of “welcome to Maitland” sign on the U.S. Highway 17-92 railroad trestle overpass a reality, and to continuing to listen and fight for what residents want to see in their city.
“I love the job, I love serving the people, and I love going out each morning and having people tell me what they need or think,” she said.
Back in Winter Park, the race for the seat to Sprinkel’s right is heating up. Commissioner Seidel said he plans to continue pursuing the same goals he set for himself back in his 2015 campaign. Finding a better way to manage traffic remains one of biggest goals, he said, and he plans to do that using a traffic model that will be able to calculate how much impact a development has on neighboring roads. That information will be able to tell the city whether a development makes sense in the area or what road improvements must be made to mitigate those effects.
All the model needs is funding, he said.
“The sooner we get that in place, the sooner we can manage all the transportation,” Seidel said. “That includes the rails going through the town. That includes buses.”
“What we can do is improve the effectiveness of the current roads we have.”
Seidel said that he’s also still adamant about preserving the character and charm of Winter Park, and that starts with preserving neighborhoods like Orwin Manor, he said. The current commissioner added that he knows there’s a difference between “character” and “historic” when it comes to homes in Winter Park. The current City Commission has wrestled with balancing historic preservation and personal property rights, overturning an ordinance that would have made it easier for historic districts to be established due to an outcry from residents fearing overbearing rules and regulations for altering their homes. But what if the city were to create “character neighborhoods” instead? Seidel said lenient design guidelines could help keep those neighborhoods special, adding that he wants to know how to find a fair balance.
Seidel also hopes to see the electric undergrounding of power lines move forward in a timely, cost-effective manner. The city, he said, should bond the rest of the undergrounding efforts in the hope of saving money in the future due to rising construction costs – materials, he said, have risen 27 percent since 2012.
“If we look at bonding this and getting it done sooner, we can put a control on those construction costs, those energy costs,” Seidel said. “If we don’t bond it, what we’re asking the residents who aren’t undergrounded yet is to carry the risk of not getting undergrounded. I don’t think that’s fair. What if we stopped in five years because it’s too expensive?”
Before taking up the mantle of City Commissioner, Seidel served on the city’s Utility Advisory Board for six years, serving as the chairman for four of those years. He’s an owner of The Balmoral Group, an engineering design firm with an expertise in economics, environmental analysis and GIS capabilities. It’s this expertise, he said, that gives him a strong understanding of what developments make sense for the city.
“The issues that typically come before the Commission are land development issues,” Seidel said. “My engineering background is able to help with producing the best outcome for the city of Winter Park.”
“I will campaign how I have previously: I’m about honesty, I’m about integrity and I’m about doing what’s best for the city. During my last campaign, my picture of Winter Park was traffic flowing smoothly, all the electric lines underground, and shiny happy people everywhere. I’m still working on it.”
Challenging Seidel for his seat is Wes Naylor, a Winter Park resident for almost five years and Navy veteran having served nearly 28 years. Naylor said he wants to run for the Winter Park City Commission for one reason: to make the community a better place to live for his 10-year-old daughter.
The candidate said that pushing back against crime in Winter Park is his top campaign priority, and that he would start by reevaluating the resources in the Winter Park Police Department. The city should consider placing more officers out on sidewalks rather than in their cars to create more of a presence around Park Avenue, he said.
“I think we’re at a real inflection point where we can take a fresh look at it with Chief Deal as our new police chief,” Naylor said.
“Given the size of our city with roughly 80 uniformed officers on the force, that’s probably the right size for our police force. We wouldn’t want to be in a place where we would have 200 police officers and have someone on every corner. That’s not where we want to be. It’s not keeping with the character of the city. I think the question is how do we as a community with police in partnership expand our presence so that people know that Winter Park is not the place you come to rob a SunTrust on a Friday afternoon.”
Naylor said he understands the city recently crafted a new vision, but said he hopes to take part in creating an “actionable plan” to actually reach those goals set by the city. He added that his background in the research and acquisition side of the Navy forced him to look 20 to 30 years into the future.
“[In Winter Park] we go from solving problem to problem in sort of a Band-Aid fashion,” Naylor said. “Hopefully one of the things I think I can bring to the City Commission is the ability to look 20 to 30 years down the road … whether its development or public safety.”
Naylor said he understands very well that Winter Park is a special place to live, and thus development and preserving the village character is one of his top priorities. All cities evolve over time, but it’s up to the city and its residents to come together and decide where that goes, he said.
“We’ve got to be very careful how we do development,” he said. “We know that over the next 20 years Orlando is going to be one of the fastest growing economies in the United States. … But with growth comes a lot of challenges.”
“We can’t have this divide where we’re at war with each other. We have to come together with a consensus on how we’re going to do this.”
In addition to his military experience, Naylor has experience serving on multiple local boards, including the St. Margaret Mary School Board and the Winter Park Police Pension Board. He’s currently the president and managing partner at The Coe & Naylor Group, a consulting firm that advises clients in the fields of training, modeling and simulation. He’s also a faculty member at the Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College.
Naylor’s belief in how the community should come together to solve its police and development issues ties into his third campaign point: improving the civil discourse in Winter Park.
The recent general election and past elections in Winter Park, he said, haven’t stuck to the issues and have become very personal, adding that it’s his intention to set the standard for proper civil discourse during his campaign.
“You can be passionate without being personal,” Naylor said. “We can disagree without being disagreeable. A lot of it is being willing to listen.”
Winter Parkers will head to the polls to cast their votes between Seidel and Naylor on Tuesday, March 14.