Palm Beach County Commission race pits one-term incumbent against jet pilot
By Joel Engelhardt | Stet News
September 28, 2026 at 1:15 PM EDT
The fastest that Marci Woodward, first-term Republican county commissioner from Boca Raton, remembers driving — and she wasn’t even behind the wheel — is slightly above 85 mph. That was the max on the speedometer of her parents’ Chevy Suburban. On a family trip to Texas, her father pushed the needle.
Curtis Calabrese, her opponent in the Nov. 3 County Commission District 4 election, has, on the other hand, driven a Boeing 777 at 900 mph. That was on a Hawaii-to-Los Angeles run with a good tailwind.
Calabrese, 36, is seeking to slow down long enough to knock Woodward, 49, off the track that she entered four years ago with her surprise victory over incumbent Democrat Bob Weinroth.
Woodward favors rigorous analysis over haste. Calabrese said he, too, can achieve that.
While driving fast may have taken him from the Navy to United Airlines, he left Boca Raton High School in 2008 aiming to be a nuclear engineer. His high school science fair project: “Decelerating the decay rates of radioactive isotopes.”
The election is open only to registered voters in District 4, but the winner will be one of seven commissioners who oversee taxing, spending and development countywide. District 4 includes parts of Boynton Beach, Delray Beach and Boca Raton and the barrier islands from South Palm Beach to Highland Beach.
The four-year term pays $127,320 a year.
Woodward, who ran her first campaign on a shoestring, has raised $253,000 in her county account and more than $240,000 in her Friends of Marci Woodward political committee. If reelected, she couldn’t run again because of term limits.
READ MORE: Florida governor’s race: Fact-checking Byron Donalds, David Jolly at WLRN’s Sunshine Economy Summit
Calabrese has self-financed his way beyond a shoestring, with $77,000 in loans to boost his campaign haul past $115,000, including $15,000 to his Jet Pac.
Both candidates agreed to lengthy interviews with Stet and talked openly about personal challenges that led them to this place.
Radioactive isotopes lose their luster
From his second-place finish in the International Science and Engineering Fair and his involvement in the Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps program at Boca High, Calabrese wanted to attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md.
Not for flight school. He had his eyes on its nuclear reactor.
But during a rotation, he flew in a Navy fighter jet. Radioactive isotopes lost their luster.
He just had to convince his superiors that he had committed to the shift. Toward that end, he worked as a civil flight instructor for the Federal Aviation Administration. Later he would investigate crashes for the FAA.
He was selected as a Navy pilot and deployed to Italy and Djibouti, in East Africa, where he flew surveillance missions over Somalia.
But it was on duty in Hawaii where he had the experience that turned him away from a military career.
As his unit’s legal affairs officer, he got a call to bail a drunken sailor out of jail. He was an hour away, swimming at a beach. With his boyfriend.
Still wearing swimsuits, they drove to the jail, bailed out the sailor and went to the base to type up the report.
When two superiors came in and saw him with his friend, they asked, “Who is that?”
That’s my boyfriend, he said.
And everything changed.
Even though the military had ended its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Calabrese felt his career’s upward trajectory crash to earth. He stopped getting training events and flight time.
Around that time, he changed his voter registration from Republican to Democrat.
He had two choices, he decided, launch an official complaint or get out of the Navy.
He left the Navy in 2018.
He married his boyfriend, Vance, an actor, and they moved to South Florida, buying Calabrese’s parents’ home just outside Boca city limits on the Palm Beach side of the Broward County line.
He got a master’s in aeronautics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach and a doctor of philosophy from the University of New South Wales in Australia.
As a United pilot, he flies large passenger jets on overseas trips. He’s also an accident and incident analyst. If elected, he said he plans to commit to the airlines for the minimum time required to keep his job — three days a month.
He dabbled with a congressional run in 2022, when U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch decided not to seek reelection. But after the state drew new district lines, Calabrese backed out of the District 22 race, won by Jared Moskowitz.
He supports the Ag Reserve, questions sugar-cane burning and opposes Amendment 3 and the Project Tango AI hyperscale data center.
The clash over Milani Park
But on one issue, he has staked out a position at odds with Woodward.
He’s against the county’s development of an ocean park in the tiny barrier island town of Highland Beach on land the county bought in 1987 from the Milani family.
The family now opposes the beach park with vehicle parking west of A1A and has combined to donate $13,000 to Calabrese’s campaign, his largest source of money outside of personal loans. Some neighbors have said they would prefer condos to a 5-acre public park.
He criticized Woodward’s stance to push forward with the park, saying she decided too quickly after taking office. The road is too busy for beachgoers to cross to reach their cars, he said. For safety’s sake, the county would need to tunnel under A1A.
The park, near Boca’s Spanish River Park, isn’t needed and the beachfront is small and hazardous, he pointed out.
Woodward said she began to engage on the issue because county parks officials said they couldn’t move forward in 2019 because they didn’t have the money to build the estimated $8.6 million park. Now they were nearing the end of a five-year extension and had lined up the money from developer impact fees that could only go to that park.
Woodward said she had been supported in her position, at various times, by Milani family members and some Highland Beach officials. The anger over the park comes from two nearby condos, she said, and after facing them down at a community meeting, she received death threats.
As she studied it more, worked with residents and the Milani family on plans, and saw those plans opposed, she realized the county would have to meet the 43 conditions of a 2010 legal settlement or face new legal challenges.
The settlement called for archaeological studies, which identified the beachfront’s heritage as a Native American burial ground and early settlement area.
“It deserves to be protected,” she said. “You are not getting this land for development.
“This is county land. It’s the last beach property that we have down here and it’s really special.”
The last holdup to construction is environmental permits, she said. But there may be one more. The permits are likely to come through in the heart of tourist season. So, the work may be delayed until April or May.
Finding home in Boca
Woodward, a native of Aiken, S.C., married her high school sweetheart after she graduated in 1999 from the University of South Carolina at Aiken.
Tough economic times forced her husband, Michael, and her to take a job at a local golf course as caddies. They needed to make enough to pay their income tax bill.
The cash was good but the connections were better.
Michael caddied for the CEO of an industrial paint company called Tnemec and left with the promise of a job interview in Kansas City, Mo. They both would work for the company and after a few moves, wound up in South Florida.
“When we moved to Boca, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is home.’”
They did not have children. But they tried.
“We lost six,” Woodward said matter-of-factly. She never made it past the fourth month of pregnancy. Two attempts at adoption fell through.
The lack of children, however, drives her performance in elected office, she said.
“It really is gonna be one of the only legacies I have because we couldn’t have children,” she said. “After two of those (adoptions) fell through, you kind of take the message that God doesn’t want you to have kids, so it’s, like, it wasn’t meant to be.”
They built friendships after Hurricane Wilma blew through in 2005.
“We didn’t know anyone … which is probably what’s made our marriage extra strong because we didn’t have children, and we moved away from both of our families. So we sort of had to be our own family, and then just make our own family here, make our own friends.”
Running for County Commission
Cut to 2019. Hip surgery put Woodward in a wheelchair for eight weeks. After COVID hit, she wanted to continue her recuperation at the beach.
But the county had ordered beaches closed to slow the spread of the virus. She wrote to Boca Mayor Scott Singer. He told her to write to her county commissioner.
“And, I’m like, ‘What is a county commissioner? Who is this person?’”
She wrote to Weinroth and received a perfunctory response.
“And it just made me so mad because it’s like, ‘Who is this person that can dictate how I enjoy stuff like this?’” she said. “I was very mad, and then, honestly, I kind of got mad at myself, because I had not been paying attention to local government.”
So she got involved. As a lifelong Republican, she began by volunteering on some local campaigns. She saw one candidate urge his followers to support him solely because he was running as a Republican and decided her focus would be on issues.
She opposed COVID lockdowns and wondered why big businesses, such as Home Depot, could remain open while small businesses were deemed nonessential and forced to close.
Residents opposed to mask mandates became angry at Weinroth’s stance requiring masks in public but no one had signed up to run against him. So Woodward did.
She raised $48,700 compared with his $416,000 but won on the coattails of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who became the first Republican gubernatorial candidate to win Palm Beach County in 36 years.
She dug into transportation, joining the Tri-Rail board, which she eventually chaired, and the county’s Metropolitan Planning Organization. What she learned is that with all the city, county and state planning and traffic calculations and careful deliberations, “no one’s talking to each other.”
Championing transportation master plan
She met with city officials and got behind the effort to create a transportation master plan for the county and its 39 cities. Weinroth had championed a sales tax increase to pay for future transportation needs, particularly the Coastal Link that would bring Tri-Rail to the Brightline tracks, which run through coastal downtowns.
The master plan would create a framework to build public support. Instead, the $1 million consultants writing it encountered withering criticism from county commissioners. With support from city officials who wanted to study the four-part plan and return with a critique later this year, the consultants won commission support to continue working during a lengthy discussion Thursday.
“It’s a beginning,” Woodward said in urging her colleagues to give the plan time to work.
The plan is a tool, she said in an interview before Thursday’s meeting.
“I can’t help that my fellow board members don’t see it for what it is, for what it’s going to be. They want the easy, quick wins, and that is not going to happen in transportation. None of this is going to be easy or quick.
“It’s going to require work, and it’s going to require cooperation. And that is what it took to get this thing off the ground in the first place, and I’m going to fight to make sure that all the work that went into this, in my next four years, is actually stuff that we all can together start making some real changes, and shifting how some of this stuff works.”
She takes credit for shifting affordable housing money used primarily to build rental apartments into a program to give homebuyers down-payment assistance as a way to keep younger workers.
Also she points to her vote in a 4-3 decision to reject a land swap that would have allowed more development in the county’s Ag Reserve, which aims to limit development west of Florida’s Turnpike in south county.
“If we just keep saying yes to everything,” she said, “I don’t know where this place ends up.”
On AI hyperscale data center at 20-Mile Bend, Project Tango, she absorbed criticism for taking campaign contributions from the landowners. But she voted against the project and embraced opponents’ argument that county rules simply did not contemplate the potential for a center housing computers to be a colossal drain on resources.
She supports shifting some of the sheriff’s spending to a special taxing district that would ease the tax bill for city residents and raise it for those living outside of cities. Her district is made up almost entirely of cities.
She’s torn about Amendment 3. She acknowledges that most governments won’t cut spending if they’re not forced to, including her own, but she fears the amendment goes too far without spelling out how basic services can be covered.
“I hate this question because as a commissioner I know we can do better but we won’t unless we are forced,” she said. “But who should force them? I believe the locals should hold us accountable, not the state.”
The first time she ran, she built her own website, draping it not in the American flag but a pink flamingo. This time, she started with one of the most prominent local campaign teams, Public Concepts, and switched to one of its hottest rivals, Cornerstone Solutions.
She said she and Public Concepts didn’t always agree on approach.
“For me, they wanted to run a little more of a partisan race than I was comfortable with,” she said. “Because I’m not particularly partisan, and the job is not partisan, so, I didn’t want to try to make it partisan.”
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.s
Curtis Calabrese, her opponent in the Nov. 3 County Commission District 4 election, has, on the other hand, driven a Boeing 777 at 900 mph. That was on a Hawaii-to-Los Angeles run with a good tailwind.
Calabrese, 36, is seeking to slow down long enough to knock Woodward, 49, off the track that she entered four years ago with her surprise victory over incumbent Democrat Bob Weinroth.
Woodward favors rigorous analysis over haste. Calabrese said he, too, can achieve that.
While driving fast may have taken him from the Navy to United Airlines, he left Boca Raton High School in 2008 aiming to be a nuclear engineer. His high school science fair project: “Decelerating the decay rates of radioactive isotopes.”
The election is open only to registered voters in District 4, but the winner will be one of seven commissioners who oversee taxing, spending and development countywide. District 4 includes parts of Boynton Beach, Delray Beach and Boca Raton and the barrier islands from South Palm Beach to Highland Beach.
The four-year term pays $127,320 a year.
Woodward, who ran her first campaign on a shoestring, has raised $253,000 in her county account and more than $240,000 in her Friends of Marci Woodward political committee. If reelected, she couldn’t run again because of term limits.
READ MORE: Florida governor’s race: Fact-checking Byron Donalds, David Jolly at WLRN’s Sunshine Economy Summit
Calabrese has self-financed his way beyond a shoestring, with $77,000 in loans to boost his campaign haul past $115,000, including $15,000 to his Jet Pac.
Both candidates agreed to lengthy interviews with Stet and talked openly about personal challenges that led them to this place.
Radioactive isotopes lose their luster
From his second-place finish in the International Science and Engineering Fair and his involvement in the Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps program at Boca High, Calabrese wanted to attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md.
Not for flight school. He had his eyes on its nuclear reactor.
But during a rotation, he flew in a Navy fighter jet. Radioactive isotopes lost their luster.
He just had to convince his superiors that he had committed to the shift. Toward that end, he worked as a civil flight instructor for the Federal Aviation Administration. Later he would investigate crashes for the FAA.
He was selected as a Navy pilot and deployed to Italy and Djibouti, in East Africa, where he flew surveillance missions over Somalia.
But it was on duty in Hawaii where he had the experience that turned him away from a military career.
As his unit’s legal affairs officer, he got a call to bail a drunken sailor out of jail. He was an hour away, swimming at a beach. With his boyfriend.
Still wearing swimsuits, they drove to the jail, bailed out the sailor and went to the base to type up the report.
When two superiors came in and saw him with his friend, they asked, “Who is that?”
That’s my boyfriend, he said.
And everything changed.
Even though the military had ended its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Calabrese felt his career’s upward trajectory crash to earth. He stopped getting training events and flight time.
Around that time, he changed his voter registration from Republican to Democrat.
He had two choices, he decided, launch an official complaint or get out of the Navy.
He left the Navy in 2018.
He married his boyfriend, Vance, an actor, and they moved to South Florida, buying Calabrese’s parents’ home just outside Boca city limits on the Palm Beach side of the Broward County line.
He got a master’s in aeronautics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach and a doctor of philosophy from the University of New South Wales in Australia.
As a United pilot, he flies large passenger jets on overseas trips. He’s also an accident and incident analyst. If elected, he said he plans to commit to the airlines for the minimum time required to keep his job — three days a month.
He dabbled with a congressional run in 2022, when U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch decided not to seek reelection. But after the state drew new district lines, Calabrese backed out of the District 22 race, won by Jared Moskowitz.
He supports the Ag Reserve, questions sugar-cane burning and opposes Amendment 3 and the Project Tango AI hyperscale data center.
The clash over Milani Park
But on one issue, he has staked out a position at odds with Woodward.
He’s against the county’s development of an ocean park in the tiny barrier island town of Highland Beach on land the county bought in 1987 from the Milani family.
The family now opposes the beach park with vehicle parking west of A1A and has combined to donate $13,000 to Calabrese’s campaign, his largest source of money outside of personal loans. Some neighbors have said they would prefer condos to a 5-acre public park.
He criticized Woodward’s stance to push forward with the park, saying she decided too quickly after taking office. The road is too busy for beachgoers to cross to reach their cars, he said. For safety’s sake, the county would need to tunnel under A1A.
The park, near Boca’s Spanish River Park, isn’t needed and the beachfront is small and hazardous, he pointed out.
Woodward said she began to engage on the issue because county parks officials said they couldn’t move forward in 2019 because they didn’t have the money to build the estimated $8.6 million park. Now they were nearing the end of a five-year extension and had lined up the money from developer impact fees that could only go to that park.
Woodward said she had been supported in her position, at various times, by Milani family members and some Highland Beach officials. The anger over the park comes from two nearby condos, she said, and after facing them down at a community meeting, she received death threats.
As she studied it more, worked with residents and the Milani family on plans, and saw those plans opposed, she realized the county would have to meet the 43 conditions of a 2010 legal settlement or face new legal challenges.
The settlement called for archaeological studies, which identified the beachfront’s heritage as a Native American burial ground and early settlement area.
“It deserves to be protected,” she said. “You are not getting this land for development.
“This is county land. It’s the last beach property that we have down here and it’s really special.”
The last holdup to construction is environmental permits, she said. But there may be one more. The permits are likely to come through in the heart of tourist season. So, the work may be delayed until April or May.
Finding home in Boca
Woodward, a native of Aiken, S.C., married her high school sweetheart after she graduated in 1999 from the University of South Carolina at Aiken.
Tough economic times forced her husband, Michael, and her to take a job at a local golf course as caddies. They needed to make enough to pay their income tax bill.
The cash was good but the connections were better.
Michael caddied for the CEO of an industrial paint company called Tnemec and left with the promise of a job interview in Kansas City, Mo. They both would work for the company and after a few moves, wound up in South Florida.
“When we moved to Boca, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is home.’”
They did not have children. But they tried.
“We lost six,” Woodward said matter-of-factly. She never made it past the fourth month of pregnancy. Two attempts at adoption fell through.
The lack of children, however, drives her performance in elected office, she said.
“It really is gonna be one of the only legacies I have because we couldn’t have children,” she said. “After two of those (adoptions) fell through, you kind of take the message that God doesn’t want you to have kids, so it’s, like, it wasn’t meant to be.”
They built friendships after Hurricane Wilma blew through in 2005.
“We didn’t know anyone … which is probably what’s made our marriage extra strong because we didn’t have children, and we moved away from both of our families. So we sort of had to be our own family, and then just make our own family here, make our own friends.”
Running for County Commission
Cut to 2019. Hip surgery put Woodward in a wheelchair for eight weeks. After COVID hit, she wanted to continue her recuperation at the beach.
But the county had ordered beaches closed to slow the spread of the virus. She wrote to Boca Mayor Scott Singer. He told her to write to her county commissioner.
“And, I’m like, ‘What is a county commissioner? Who is this person?’”
She wrote to Weinroth and received a perfunctory response.
“And it just made me so mad because it’s like, ‘Who is this person that can dictate how I enjoy stuff like this?’” she said. “I was very mad, and then, honestly, I kind of got mad at myself, because I had not been paying attention to local government.”
So she got involved. As a lifelong Republican, she began by volunteering on some local campaigns. She saw one candidate urge his followers to support him solely because he was running as a Republican and decided her focus would be on issues.
She opposed COVID lockdowns and wondered why big businesses, such as Home Depot, could remain open while small businesses were deemed nonessential and forced to close.
Residents opposed to mask mandates became angry at Weinroth’s stance requiring masks in public but no one had signed up to run against him. So Woodward did.
She raised $48,700 compared with his $416,000 but won on the coattails of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who became the first Republican gubernatorial candidate to win Palm Beach County in 36 years.
She dug into transportation, joining the Tri-Rail board, which she eventually chaired, and the county’s Metropolitan Planning Organization. What she learned is that with all the city, county and state planning and traffic calculations and careful deliberations, “no one’s talking to each other.”
Championing transportation master plan
She met with city officials and got behind the effort to create a transportation master plan for the county and its 39 cities. Weinroth had championed a sales tax increase to pay for future transportation needs, particularly the Coastal Link that would bring Tri-Rail to the Brightline tracks, which run through coastal downtowns.
The master plan would create a framework to build public support. Instead, the $1 million consultants writing it encountered withering criticism from county commissioners. With support from city officials who wanted to study the four-part plan and return with a critique later this year, the consultants won commission support to continue working during a lengthy discussion Thursday.
“It’s a beginning,” Woodward said in urging her colleagues to give the plan time to work.
The plan is a tool, she said in an interview before Thursday’s meeting.
“I can’t help that my fellow board members don’t see it for what it is, for what it’s going to be. They want the easy, quick wins, and that is not going to happen in transportation. None of this is going to be easy or quick.
“It’s going to require work, and it’s going to require cooperation. And that is what it took to get this thing off the ground in the first place, and I’m going to fight to make sure that all the work that went into this, in my next four years, is actually stuff that we all can together start making some real changes, and shifting how some of this stuff works.”
She takes credit for shifting affordable housing money used primarily to build rental apartments into a program to give homebuyers down-payment assistance as a way to keep younger workers.
Also she points to her vote in a 4-3 decision to reject a land swap that would have allowed more development in the county’s Ag Reserve, which aims to limit development west of Florida’s Turnpike in south county.
“If we just keep saying yes to everything,” she said, “I don’t know where this place ends up.”
On AI hyperscale data center at 20-Mile Bend, Project Tango, she absorbed criticism for taking campaign contributions from the landowners. But she voted against the project and embraced opponents’ argument that county rules simply did not contemplate the potential for a center housing computers to be a colossal drain on resources.
She supports shifting some of the sheriff’s spending to a special taxing district that would ease the tax bill for city residents and raise it for those living outside of cities. Her district is made up almost entirely of cities.
She’s torn about Amendment 3. She acknowledges that most governments won’t cut spending if they’re not forced to, including her own, but she fears the amendment goes too far without spelling out how basic services can be covered.
“I hate this question because as a commissioner I know we can do better but we won’t unless we are forced,” she said. “But who should force them? I believe the locals should hold us accountable, not the state.”
The first time she ran, she built her own website, draping it not in the American flag but a pink flamingo. This time, she started with one of the most prominent local campaign teams, Public Concepts, and switched to one of its hottest rivals, Cornerstone Solutions.
She said she and Public Concepts didn’t always agree on approach.
“For me, they wanted to run a little more of a partisan race than I was comfortable with,” she said. “Because I’m not particularly partisan, and the job is not partisan, so, I didn’t want to try to make it partisan.”
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.s