In her bid for reelection, Palm Beach County Mayor Sara Baxter has spent $10,700 in campaign cash on at least five stays at The Breakers in Palm Beach and three at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, state records show.
The money for overnight stays at the luxury resorts, along with $3,450 spent on trips to Washington D.C., came from her state political committee, Friends of Sara Baxter.
Donors to the committee, who include uber-wealthy county business tycoons Stephen Ross and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, are helping bankroll her Republican primary campaign against Elizabeth Accomando for the District 6 commission seat — a race that will be decided Aug. 18. The winner will advance to the November election.
In response to written questions, Baxter did not provide specifics on why her committee paid $7,150 for five stays at The Breakers since February 2025. Among them: $1,425 for “lodging” in August 2025, $2,014 for “lodging” in March and $1,190 for “lodging, food and beverage” in November at the iconic oceanfront Breakers resort, just 17 miles from her home in The Acreage.
Room rates at The Breakers this month top $690 a night, rising past $1,200 a night to reserve a room in November.
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The committee also reported spending $3,549 on the three stays at the Hard Rock since December 2024. The most recent expenditures came in June, when the committee reported spending $1,423 on “lodging” on June 1 and another $127 on “lodging” on June 30 at the resort, which is about 60 miles from her home.
In addition to spending $1,762 on a trip to the nation’s capital in June 2025, the committee in June doled out $1,688 for airfare to Washington, D.C., along with hotel and restaurant tabs.
The trip, which included a second $461 plane ticket for an unidentified person and upgrades, such as extra leg room, came days before Baxter announced she would run for Congress. Soon after that June 8 announcement, she reversed course and revived her campaign to seek a second County Commission term.
Bob Guzzardi, a local GOP activist, said the spending is part of a pattern that began when Baxter took office in 2022 and immediately began complaining about the carpet in her office.
“There’s a lot of self-aggrandizing in all of this. That she’s in it for herself,” he said. “She has been puffed up by the fact that she has all this power. The whole narrative has been her self-absorption, her self-aggrandizing, her self-promotion.”
Baxter’s attitude is one of the reasons Guzzardi said he is supporting Accomando. Had he backed Baxter, he said he would have been upset by her spending. “It’s not what you think will happen,” he said.
‘Legal, lawfully reported expenditures’
Having amassed $362,980 in donations to her political committee through July 24 and another $150,800 to her county election account, the travel and lodging expenses barely make a dent in her campaign war chest.
Her total haul, $513,780, far outstrips the $60,973 Accomando has raised, which includes $6,430 from her own political committee dubbed Friends of Elizabeth Accomando.
Baxter bristled at the suggestion that the spending on the trips may have violated state laws that require campaign money — whether it is donated to a county election account or to a political committee — be used solely for “influencing the results of the election.”
Baxter described her use of the campaign cash as “legal, lawfully reported expenditures of the Friends of Sara Baxter political committee.”
“Political committee expenditures and campaign funds are two distinct things under Florida law and conflating them is either sloppy reporting or a deliberate mischaracterization,” she wrote.
Requesting written questions via text, she declined to offer specifics about the trips, such as why she went, who accompanied her or even when exactly the trips took place.
No records could be found that show Baxter held campaign events at the hotels or that there were any gatherings, such as a meeting of Republican leaders, on the dates listed on the reports.
But, she said, the dates on the reports don’t necessarily reflect when an event took place. “The date a reservation is secured, or the date a stay is closed out and posted, often differs from the event date depending on the vendor’s system,” she wrote in a response to Stet News.
She described the events she attended as “Republican party-building events and other meetings supporting conservative leaders.”
The $1,423 booking at the Hard Rock on June 1 could have been to reserve a room for the Republican Party of Florida’s Sunshine State Showdown, which was held at the hotel on June 27. The committee report shows on June 30 she spent an additional $127 at the resort.
Baxter questioned why her use of committee campaign money for overnight trips was newsworthy. She pointed out a questionable expense submitted by one of her Democratic opponents in a previous unrelated race.
‘It can’t be used to take a vacation at The Breakers’
While neither Accomando nor other county candidates reported using campaign money for hotel stays or plane trips, state reports show that a smattering of candidates for state office have done so.
Experts in campaign finance law said Baxter’s expenditures probably pass legal muster but raise questions of optics that could anger voters.
Typically, candidates use donations to buy advertisements, buttons and flyers, pay consultants or host campaign events, including press conferences and fundraisers, said Robert Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University.
“No, it can’t be used for personal expenses,” he said. “It can’t be used to take a vacation at The Breakers.”
But, Jarvis and others said, there are many ways to work around the rules that are routinely described as complex and are often criticized for creating loopholes that can be easily exploited by candidates.
To justify the expenses, Baxter would only have to say that she met with potential donors, such as GOP leaders, during her stays at The Breakers or the Hard Rock, said Jennifer Blohm, a Tallahassee lawyer who specializes in election law.
While Baxter could easily drive to and from The Breakers, she could argue that the meetings were expected to run late or start early in the morning so she needed to stay at the hotel.
“It’s a legitimate expense if she was going to wine and dine donors and she was going to be there late at night,” Blohm said.
Friends of Sara Baxter paid for DC trip
Both Blohm and Jarvis said Florida election law specifically prohibits the use of state campaign money to explore federal office. Friends of Sara Baxter is a political committee under state law.
According to the committee’s spending reports, which Baxter says may not reflect the accurate date, it appears she flew back from Washington on June 8. On that day, the committee incurred a $59 charge on JetBlue and one for $62.33 at El Bebe, a Mexican restaurant, records show.
It is also the day Baxter issued a press release, announcing she had decided to abandon her reelection campaign and would instead run for a newly redrawn U.S. House District 22 seat, which extends from western Palm Beach and Broward counties to the Gulf Coast.
Days later, however, after she said she talked to President Donald Trump about his need for her to remain on the County Commission, she reversed course and dropped her short-lived congressional bid. Trump endorsed her in the commission race.
Based on comments from three political insiders, Stet News reported that White House officials told Baxter the president wouldn’t endorse her in the congressional race and wouldn’t promise not to endorse one of her opponents, prompting her reversal.
Before she was elected in 2022 on the coattails of a Republican wave, Baxter never held elected office. She has said that frustrations she encountered as she helped her husband build their auto repair business propelled her to run.
While Baxter is prohibited from using her state campaign cash to investigate her chances in the U.S. House race, Blohm said Baxter could simply say she went to Washington to raise money for her PAC.
“She could have been meeting with donors in D.C. to donate to her state committee,” Blohm said. “There are legitimate reasons why she might be in Washington, D.C.”
Further, Jarvis said, if he represented Baxter, he would insist that the trip was to talk about her County Commission race. Running for a congressional seat may have been part of the talks, but her real mission was to clarify her commission candidacy, he said of the points he would raise.
“It’s not a great argument, but there’s enough ambiguity there that a judge — and it would never come to that — would probably decide that it was a legitimate use of her state money,” he said.
Both also agreed that there is little chance Baxter would ever have to explain the expenditures to the Florida Elections Commission, which can fine candidates and committees for violating campaign finance laws.
Anyone filing a complaint with the commission would have to provide proof of wrongdoing.
“The complaint has to be based on personal knowledge rather than hearsay,” Blohm said. Without concrete evidence showing that Baxter didn’t meet with donors or attend other events to boost her campaign, the complaint would be thrown out, she said.
But, both Blohm and Jarvis said, there are other reasons a candidate may choose not to use campaign money to stay at luxury hotels.
“The optics aren’t very good,” Jarvis said. “You might be saying you’re a man or woman of the people, but you’re holding an event at a place where many of your constituents can’t afford to stay.”
Blohm agreed. “I do look at the appearance of things for my clients,” she said. “I tell them, ‘If you’re going to be doing this, you better be raising lots of money.’ It’s not always a legal question. Obviously, in politics, the legality of something and the optics of it mix.”
Security, football and a helicopter ride
Since taking office, bad optics have haunted Baxter. Many criticized her demand to have a sheriff’s deputy assigned to accompany her to community events. The security detail has since been expanded to provide police protection to the other six county commissioners and County Administrator Joe Abruzzo at a first-year cost of $3.3 million.
Questions were also raised when a deputy assigned to her security detail in January persuaded agency pilots to take her on a 9:30 pm helicopter ride. Sheriff’s investigators labeled it a “sightseeing tour” when the deputy was disciplined for demanding the pilots take Baxter on the ride.
She later claimed she was told it was to develop an “operational plan” to help the agency determine how long it would take to fly to her house. She said she was told other commissioners would be taken on rides over their houses as well.
Eyebrows were also raised after news surfaced that she and her husband attended the national collegiate football championship at Hard Rock Stadium. She watched the Jan. 19 game from the box owned by Ross, the billionaire founder of Related Ross and owner of the Miami Dolphins.
After The Palm Beach Post reported her attendance at the game, Baxter promised to reimburse Ross for the cost of the tickets, as required by state law. The average ticket price was a record high $5,589, Yahoo Sports reported.
Since then, an anonymous online campaign, complete with computer-generated videos satirizing her attending such events, has pilloried Baxter on a website dubbed Baxtergate.com.
Baxter’s account dwarfs Accomando’s
Accomando, who in recent days has been the target of a series of TV attack ads from Baxter, declined to comment on her opponent’s spending. “I don’t know why these expenditures were made,” she said.
Unlike Baxter, she said she has shunned donations from “special interest groups,” preferring instead to raise money from county residents.
According to their most recent filings, Baxter and Accomando received roughly the same number of donations to their county campaign accounts, where each donation is capped at $1,000 per election cycle.
Accomando, 59, who runs an animal rescue in Loxahatchee and is president of the Indian Trail Improvement District board, an elected position, received money from roughly 269 donors while Baxter got roughly 220.
The difference is in the amounts.
Baxter, 42, who has $150,800 in her county campaign account, received 109 contributions of $1,000 from agricultural interests, developers and political action committees. Among them: Companies affiliated with Pero Family Farms gave $10,000; two of the principals in Palm Beach Aggregate’s Project Tango project, Enrique Tomeu and Michael Klein, gave $1,000 each; and south county attorney Neil Schiller, his law firm and his wife provided $3,000.
Accomando received 27 contributions of $1,000, including ones from former County Commissioner Jeff Koons, West Palm Beach coffeehouse and restaurant whiz Rodney Mayo and Gulfstream Road Holdings and Swain Blvd Holdings, two related Lake Worth Beach-area real estate development companies. She received one donation from a political committee, a $500 check from the Fort Lauderdale-based Gay Conservatives.
Accomando’s reports are filled with $20, $50 and $100 donations from people who are identified as homemakers, retirees or technicians.
Donors gave nearly $363,000 to Baxter committee
The biggest disparity between the two is the amounts donated to their political committees, where there are no limits on how much people can contribute.
Friends of Elizabeth Accomando received $6,430 from four donors through July 24, including $3,000 from the Committee to Protect Florida and $2,430 from Wellington resident Patricia Bachi, the daughter of the late founder of Palms West Realty.
Baxter’s political committee, in contrast, has amassed $362,980 from 111 donors. The committee has received 84 contributions of more than $1,000.
Its biggest hauls came from companies linked to Ross and Ellison. Ross, who is pursuing County Commission approval of a 99-year lease for a convention center hotel, contributed $25,000 through a company and $7,500 in a personal donation.
Ellison threw in $50,000 through two companies. In addition to owning a 17-acre estate and the Eau Resort & Spa in Manalapan, in November he bought Lion Country Safari in Baxter’s district. He has yet to announce plans for it.
After getting criticized for accepting $10,000 from PBA Holdings, which is seeking to build the Project Tango data center in her district, Baxter returned the money.
She took $10,000 from the developers of Avenir, a nearly 4,000-home community under construction in Palm Beach Gardens; and $10,000 from Delaware North Cos., the sports and entertainment company controlled by the Jacobs family, influential advocates on equestrian issues in Wellington.
Another $20,000 came in over a three-year period from companies affiliated with Bedner Farms, a large county farming operation.
Broward lobbyist Ron Book contributed $21,500 plus another $5,000 to Baxter’s county account. He flew Baxter on a private plane to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2023 inauguration and hosted her at VIP events, The Palm Beach Post reported.
Baxter said she did not report the perks as a gift because she wrote checks totaling $600 to reimburse Book, although he did not cash them for 18 months.
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
