Joel EngelhardtDana Middleton, Rachelle Litt win seats on Palm Beach Gardens City Council; precinct breakdown shows gated communities came out strong.
Palm Beach Gardens residents returned incumbent Dana Middleton to the City Council as well as former Council Member Rachelle Litt, who ran after a three-year respite caused by term limits.
Newcomer Damien Murray got 50 more votes at the polls on March 10 than Middleton but lost the vote-by-mail tally by nearly 1,000. He fell 57% to 43% to Middleton, facing her first election after winning her seat three years ago without opposition.
Likewise Litt and her closest challenger, Heather Deitchman, were separated by just 15 votes on election day but Litt topped Deitchman and third candidate David Levy by more than 800 votes each in vote-by-mail ballots.
Zoom in: Both winners dominated in the vote-rich environments of three key gated communities: Frenchman’s Creek, Mirasol and BallenIsles.
- Litt and Middleton also drew substantial support west of Military Trail at precincts voting at the city’s Sandhill Crane Golf Club, the county’s Solid Waste Authority building and Watson B. Duncan Middle School.
Deitchman and Murray nearly matched the winners at precincts voting at Gardens City Hall and won outright at Palm Beach Gardens Elementary, Gardens High and Allamanda Elementary School, all areas close to Plant Drive Park, which ignited opposition when the city turned the park over to a nonprofit to build an ice-rink complex.
Of note: In direct contributions, Litt raised the most money at $72,945. Levy raised $25,677 and Deitchman had $7,530.
- In the Group 5 race, Middleton outraised Murray by $44,405 to $17,450.
- Voter turnout in both races came in just under 15% of the city’s 45,196 registered voters.
Other races
In West Palm Beach, incumbents Cathleen Ward and Christy Fox rolled, with Ward grabbing 77% of the vote to defeat Martina Tate-Walker and Fox getting 67% against Roger Jackson III. Turnout fell below 10% in each race.
In Lake Park, Mayor Roger Michaud delivered a convincing victory over Ralph Moscoso, scoring 73% of the vote and winning all four of the town’s precincts. In one precinct with 268 registered voters, just five showed up (Michaud won 3-2). Overall turnout was 15.2%.
In Juno Beach, as Stet’s Jane Musgrave reported, the three-candidate slate of retired FPL engineer Dave Santilli, nuclear power contractor Scott Shaw and tech entrepreneur Max Fraser won easily with about 65% of the 1,200 votes cast. Turnout was 42%.
In Lake Worth Beach, covered by Lake Worth Beach Independent’s Joe Capozzi, voters rejected key amendments to ease rules for leasing city property, with Questions 2 and 3 going down with more than three-quarters of the 3,300 voters opposed. A question of whether to remove references to police and fire departments in the city charter went to a manual recount before failing by two votes. About 23% of city voters turned out.
North Palm Beach still has a special election March 24 to replace the late Kristin Garrison on the Village Council.
Also, coastal voters from Hypoluxo to Jupiter go to the polls March 24 to decide the state House District 87 race between Democrat Emily Gregory and Republican Jon Maples.
See all election results at the Supervisor of Elections Office website.
Joel is a founder, reporter and editor at Stet News. His award-winning newspaper career spanned more than 40 years, including 28 years at The Palm Beach Post, which he left in 2020. Joel lives with his wife in Palm Beach Gardens. He volunteers on the board of NAMI Palm Beach County and the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society.
