Twelve candidates seeking to fill an open seat on the Port of Palm Beach Commission will have to wait another month as port commissioners deadlocked 2-2 Thursday on how to proceed with the selection.
While Commissioners Wayne Richards and Varisa Dass wanted to narrow the list and find a way to agree on a single candidate, Chair Blair Ciklin, supported by Vice Chair Deandre Poole, suggested taking a single vote to see if any of the 12 candidates could muster three votes.
If that failed, Ciklin said, he would support accepting new applications as he had heard from several people who were interested in the job but missed the Feb. 19 deadline to apply.
“The odds of getting three (votes) are slim to none (with 12 finalists),” Richards said. “It’s a waste of time.”
Dass suggested commissioners select every candidate they could support and let the one with the most votes fill the seat.
Ciklin, the dean of elected officials in Palm Beach County with 49 years on the Port of Palm Beach Commission, deemed that approach unacceptable.
“This is a big position,” he said to justify the need to have support from at least three commissioners. “I don’t think that’s so out of reach.”
But Dass and Richards argued that Ciklin’s approach was setting the board up for a prolonged period without a fifth member. The seat opened Oct. 24, when long-serving Commissioner Jean Enright announced her resignation less than a year after her reelection. The seat is not scheduled to be filled by an election until November 2028.
“My concern,” Dass said, “is that it seems there is almost a purposeful willingness to select a process that will guarantee there is no consensus. We’re basically sabotaging the process.”
Richards agreed, adding: “Let’s do our job. Let’s not be disingenuous and support a process that everyone in this room knows will fail.”
“I have no timeline. I don’t care if we delay it a week or month,” Ciklin said.
A motion by Richards, backed by Dass, to try her approach failed on a 2-2 vote. Dass and Richards rejected Ciklin’s request to allow more applicants.
“We’re obviously not going to get this solved today,” Ciklin said, before agreeing to bring it up for discussion again in April.
Port commissioners oversee a $27 million budget. Its largest customer is the cruise ship, Margaritaville at Sea Paradise, which travels several times a week to the Bahamas.
The port’s industrial tenants, led by Tropical Shipping, primarily serve the Caribbean.
Commissioners have been divided over expansion efforts and a proposal to livestream their meetings, which are among the few public meetings of elected officials in Palm Beach County that are not video recorded.
Who wants the seat
Commissioners did not discuss the candidates, although five candidates spoke during the meeting at public comment.
Among the 12 is Katherine Waldron, a former port commissioner and one-term state House member who lost her state House reelection bid in 2024.
Former Riviera Beach City Council member Terence Davis and former port commission candidates Jeffery Jackson, a retired sheriff’s office captain; Kelly Fleury, who runs a charity that helps Haitians; and Roderick Clarke, a sales manager for a car dealership, also submitted.
Clarke is running as a Republican this year for Ciklin’s seat, which also has drawn a Democrat but Ciklin has not yet filed to run.
Other candidates: Erik Range, chief of staff to Riviera Beach Mayor Doug Lawson; Joseph Russo, a one-time candidate for Palm Beach Gardens City Council; W. Bradford Gary, a Palm Beach resident and close observer of port activities; and Ann Marie Sorrell, president and CEO of a West Palm Beach-based marketing and advertising agency.
Also: Moeti Neube, a financial planner and co-owner of a Riviera Beach realty company; Greg Turner, a harbor pilot at the port for 37 years; Kevin Harris, a small-business owner with experience as a liaison to the ports of Los Angeles and Baltimore; and Taniel Koushakjian, who held communication positions with the Jacksonville Transportation Agency and the South Florida Water Management District.
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
