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Lakeland’s city elections are just over a month away. In the balance are three City Commission seats, including the mayor, as well as three ballot amendments that would make changes to the city charter.
LkldNow’s 2025 Voter Guide is your tool to make candidate research easy and to demystify how city elections and local government work.
We plan to update the guide through the end of election day with any additional information, including run-off election details if needed.
This year’s guide is built on the strong foundation created by LkldNow’s founder, Barry Friedman, plus a new section in which we tackle some of the common questions about how city government works.
Thank you to all the candidates. Once again, we have full participation on our questionnaire from all eight candidates seeking office. For the candidate profiles, we’ve worked to keep the answers true to exactly how the candidates submitted them with only the lightest editing for fit and format.
While we asked candidates to submit any third-party endorsements they’ve received, one of the things you won’t find here are endorsements from LkldNow. Our role is to report and let you decide.
I hope you find this guide useful as you make decisions on the future of our city. We consider this guide to be core to our mission of fostering community engagement through quality news and information.
This year’s expanded guide would not have been possible without three intrepid interns from Florida Southern College: Erin Grant, Alisia M Francisco, and Madeleine Meadows, as well as additional hours volunteered by the LkldNow team: Kayla Borg, Cindy Glover, Erin Hollenkamp and Anna Toms to review and edit the guide. Special thanks to Joe Mawhinney, former city attorney for being available for last-minute questions and, as ever and always, thank you to Barry Friedman for solving all my quandaries, answering format queries and fiercely debating font sizes.
–Trinity Laurino, Executive Director
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