The race for an open seat on the Palm Beach Gardens City Council is ablaze over firefighting.
A second contest pits a veteran incumbent against a newcomer suspicious of city government after the decision to convert a city park into an ice-rink complex.
The establishment favorites, Group 2 incumbent Marcie Tinsley and Group 4 challenger Chuck Millar, are government wonks, intimately familiar with site plans and zoning disputes after spending most of their professional careers navigating the intricacies of local government.
Millar’s opponent, Palm Beach County firefighter John Kemp, is a fourth generation Floridian who grew up attending Hialeah Gardens city meetings with his father, a planning board member, and his uncle, the mayor. And he learned perseverance and patience as he and his wife, Jennifer, navigated the nation’s health system to diagnose and cure their critically ill son.
Tinsley’s Group 2 opponent is Scott Gilow, an outsider, whose interests as both an ice-skater growing up in Green Bay, Wis., and a bike rider who co-owns an Abacoa bike shop, converged into opposition to the city’s decision to close a skateboard park and convert Plant Drive Park into an ice-skating complex.
Stet has looked into the court records of all four candidates, publishing findings about Millar here and Gilow here.
But, with no candidate forums scheduled before the March 11 election, Stet held wide-ranging discussions with all four candidates to offer a sense of their positions.
Can city and county get along?
Tinsley, 56, a vice president in property and construction management for Herb Kahlert’s Karl Corp., is in her second council go-around. She served from 2010 to 2017 before term limits forced her out of office.
But the voter-approved term limits allow a council member to return after sitting out and she won an election to a partial term in 2021 before winning a full three-year term unopposed in 2022. She seeks a second three-year term in this cycle.
One reason Gilow cited for opposing her is to make sure she didn’t win the seat again without opposition. While Gilow has raised no money, loaning his campaign its entire $1,939 war chest, through Feb. 7 Tinsley has raised $55,820, more than any other candidate.
While she said she views campaigning as a gift because “you learn so much about your city,” she compared running for office to giving birth. “You really have to put yourself out there. … It’s like having children. You forget the pain you endured giving birth to children.”
Despite the city’s history of lawsuits and disputes with Palm Beach County, she praised the city for working with the county on traffic issues.
As evidence, she cited the 2016 agreement that allowed construction of Avenir and involved county signoff on Northlake Boulevard widening and the extension of Coconut Boulevard to Beeline Highway through the 4,000-home project.
She downplayed the county’s 2021 decision to sue the city over the city’s decision to pocket county road impact fee payments from developers. After a judge ruled in favor of the county, city officials went to Tallahassee to push a bill that would force counties to negotiate with cities over how those dollars are spent.
“We have to collaborate with the county to work together to solve some of these traffic-related issues,” she said. “We are not at each other’s throats.”
Tinsley praised County Engineer David Ricks for making a presentation recently to the City Council on experimental smart traffic signals installed on Hood Road.
However, she also criticized the length of time it took the county to add a right-turn lane at Military Trail and PGA Boulevard, a project she said she championed for 10 years. Construction alone took from September 2021 to October 2023.
On the potential for the county to seek an extension of the 1-cent sales tax surcharge to pay for transportation projects, a source of money to extend Tri-Rail on the easternmost tracks, she said she could not offer support without knowing the details, which have not been hammered out yet.
Her opponent, Gilow, said he would support the sales tax increase.
Among achievements she is most proud of over this term, she cited the three-year reduction in the property tax rate, renovation of the Burns Road Community Center and plans for a fieldhouse to complete the Gardens North County District Park.
Tinsley, like Gilow, lives in Evergrene, a community southeast of Donald Ross Road and Military Trail. Both are registered Republicans.
Save the skate park
On one issue, Gilow and Tinsley agree. They both advocate finding a new site for the Plant Drive Park skateboard park in the wake of the city’s decision to lease the park for 40 years to the Palm Beach North Athletic Foundation to build a $40 million, two-rink ice complex.
Gilow, 50, says the ice rink is the right idea in the wrong place. Tinsley did not vote on the project because her husband, Brian LaMotte is a civil engineer who worked for WGI, which represented the athletic foundation.
Gilow, 50, a county information technology employee, views the dispute in class terms.
“The rich are trying to take over a poor neighborhood. It’s David vs. Goliath,” he said. “Rich people play hockey. Most poor people don’t play hockey because they can’t afford to.”
But the free skatepark and the basketball courts that will be displaced were open to all, he said.
Aside from replacing the skatepark, he suggested the city pursue a pump track, in which skateboarders, bikers, roller bladers and others use their own motion to propel themselves over berms and rollers.
He pointed to cities like Ocoee and Okeechobee that have done so.
Gilow builds custom bikes as a co-owner of Draco Bikes in Abacoa.
The dispute over the ice rink helped Gilow form his opinions of the City Council.
“I don’t believe the people of our city are represented by our council,” he said. “They toot their horns very well. But I don’t feel, as a citizen of Palm Beach Gardens, represented on the council.
“It’s about doing a job. They should be doing a job for the people that live in the city.”
The firefighters’ fight: Millar vs. Kemp
In Group 4, Millar and Kemp are running for the seat of Carl Woods, who cannot run because of term limits.
Millar, 66, says his experience as a planner, first for the city of Greenacres in 1985 and then for a local law firm, Florida Power & Light, Kimley-Horn and now Atwell, gives him the edge.
He also served six years on the city’s Art in Public Places Board and four on the Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board, which he chairs.
“My value added is understanding the dynamics of growth management,” he said. “You can’t stop it (growth). You can manage it in a way that has the quality of life of residents in mind.”
He has opinions on the Gardens Mall — one of three county malls that will survive; the FPL office building at PGA and Interstate 95 — “a truly eye catching entry to the city;” and the next development at the Loehmann’s Plaza site — don’t let it turn an unsightly backside to I-95.
Fixing the PGA flyover traffic tie-ups will not be simple or cheap but can’t be ignored, he said. He supports eight lanes on western Northlake Boulevard, a position at odds with the City Council.
He saw merits to both sides of the ice rink debate, he said, but voted in December as a planning board member in favor of the site plan because it met all the city codes.
After Stet’s publication of stories about court complaints over his relations with women, he posted an open letter about his struggles with alcoholism, saying his opponent “wants to use my disease against me.”
“I will not be bullied into silence,” he wrote. “I stand here today as someone who understands hardship, who has faced darkness and refused to let the negatives win.”
He suggested Kemp, his opponent, would oppose annexation of neighboring areas because Kemp lives in Rustic Lakes on west Northlake Boulevard, which became part of the city in a controversial 2018 annexation that most of Rustic Lakes opposed.
Kemp, however, did not move into Rustic Lakes until 2021, so he did not vote in that referendum. “I love living in Palm Beach Gardens,” he said. “It’s a great place.”
He listed four points annexations must meet to gain his support, including the backing of those being annexed.
Millar, too, lives west of Florida’s Turnpike, in Portofino between PGA Boulevard and Hood Road.
As of Feb. 7, Millar had raised about $37,000, more than twice as much as Kemp. Both are registered Republicans.
Green truck or red truck?
Even though he is running against a firefighter, Millar secured the endorsement of the city’s firefighter’s union, which recently broke off from the county union. The county union endorsed Kemp.
A Jan. 24 posting by Mayor Chelsea Reed, who supports Millar, suggested the county might try to take over the city’s fire department. Her article, “Green Truck or Red Truck? Does it matter? Yes, it does!” favorably contrasted the city’s green fire trucks to the county’s red.
“Recently, Palm Beach County Fire Rescue expressed an interest in taking over multiple municipal fire departments, including ours,” she wrote.
Sometimes the city relies on county fire-rescue to respond to calls, under mutual aid agreements, she pointed out, adding “we believe our City deserves to keep our own first responders,” and urging voters to “vote to protect Palm Beach Gardens Fire Rescue.”
A few days later, Reed took down the post.
But the controversy didn’t go away.
Kemp, 47, called the takeover suggestion false. If elected, he said he has no intention of working to shut down the Gardens department.
“I want Palm Beach Gardens Fire Rescue to stay as the home town fire department and make it a destination fire department that firefighters want to work for,” Kemp said.
A merger could only happen at the request of the city department, he said. “Anyone suggesting otherwise is either misinformed or deliberately spreading falsehoods.”
He called the city union’s decision to back his opponent political.
Kemp, too, said he would fight to replace the skateboard park. He suggested the city should have invited more public comment before agreeing to lease Plant Drive Park for the ice rink.
John D. Kemp Jr. Day
Kemp, a firefighter for 27 years, moved from The Acreage into the city in 2021.
Like Millar, this is his first run for office.
For the past dozen years, his priority has been the health of his son, John D. Kemp Jr.
The child’s symptoms started in 2009 when he came home from preschool having trouble breathing and in pain, according to an account on the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center website. Despite treatment and seemingly endless doctor consultations, his condition worsened until by 2013 he was reliant on a wheelchair.
That’s when a doctor at the center in Baltimore identified a vascular malformation and performed surgery, Johns Hopkins wrote.
Since that time, he has been diagnosed with Graves’ disease, Hashimoto’s disease and atypical dysautonomia. At age 12, his photo on a poster helped Johns Hopkins raise $7 million.
In 2016, Palm Beach County declared June 7 to be John D. Kemp Jr. Day.
Now, John Jr. is 20, living in a dorm and attending Palm Beach Atlantic University.
He still spends months getting treatment in Philadelphia and Baltimore, his parents said.
He loves barrel racing and roping. And he wants to be a doctor.
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.
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
