COLLIER COUNTY
Candidates for county commissioner in a Southwest Florida district are photoshopping their political flyers.
Four Republicans are gunning for the open seat in Collier County Commission, District Two, to replace Commissioner Andy Solis. Meanwhile, only one Democrat is running for the seat.
When Ted Raia of Naples went through his stacks of the daily mail, he saw two flyers he didn’t like. “Went beyond normal politics to degrade somebody like that,” Raia said.
Raia got two political flyers from two candidates running for the District Two seat on the Collier County Board of Commissioners. That spans from Pine Ridge Road to Bonita Beach Road at the Collier-County line. The first flyer shows candidate Chris Hall side by side with a photoshopped-in Governor Ron Desantis.
“I’m sure the Governor doesn’t know that he was being shown photoshopped with him,” Raia said. “Not that he would object.”
The second addressed to Collier County residents from candidate Reg Buxton, shows Buxton and Hall’s competitor, Nancy Lewis, with a hard hat on.
“It says, ‘Don’t be fooled by Nancy’. At first, when I received it, I almost had to laugh, because for the first time I had a face, usually, I just was a black shadow,” Lewis said.
In the fine print, Buxton talks about Lewis’ campaign contributions. It says she pledges not to accept money from developers. But, that, ‘A good portion of her funding is from developers’.
After reviewing her contributions from all individual entities, Lewis claims the accusations against her are false. “It was mentioning a supporter,” Lewis said. “And it was so far from the truth, the person that they were mentioning, as owning numerous properties, and that he was actually a developer, it was so far from the truth so that I was offended.”
