Winter Garden entrepreneur Austin Arthur, 39 is challenging Nicole Wilson, the incumbent Orange County Commissioner for her District 1 seat on the Orange County Commission in the Aug. 20 election. County commissioners serve four-year terms and earn $113,608 annually. 

A longtime booster for Winter Garden, Arthur is co-founder with his brother Zander of Gymnastics USA ,and he runs the marketing firm Stars and Stripes Management. He’s also been deeply involved with One Winter Garden, the advocacy group working to improve Winter Garden’s historically Black neighborhood, Historic East Winter Garden, since the organization’s reboot in 2022.

But Arthur, who dropped out of high school, also has an arrest record, sits on the the board of an anti-abortion clinic and, until June, was featured as founder of a local political group that espouses Christian nationalist ideology.

As tight as he is with the other founders — one is running his campaign — Arthur swears he is not a Christian nationalist.

“I do not want to see the headline Austin Arthur is a Christian nationalist in VoxPopuli,” he told me after one interview. “That would not be fair or accurate.” (More on this further down.)

Infrastructure

Arthur’s campaign has focused on “infrastructure first.” For him, that means improving the roads and reducing traffic —and get developers to pay for it through impact fees. He acknowledged that Orange County “just raised their impact fees recently and they’re very high, so that is in place.” [Not for nothing, but Wilson was instrumental in getting that done.]

He wants to ensure communities have adequate sidewalks and bike lanes. And he’s in favor of public transportation projects, such as the Sunshine Corridor, potentially connecting East Orlando to Tampa, which could include stops at Orlando International Airport, I-Drive near Walt Disney World and the Convention Center.

“I think the solution is to get cars off the roads,” Arthur said. “What we need to do is we need to work on that now and simultaneously stop the bleeding. “It's just like when I was a paramedic … first, you stop the bleeding … then you figure out holistically what's going on. So multimodal is the holistic part of the solution, and we need to do that, but first we stop the bleeding, which means road widening. I do agree with the sentiment that we cannot… widen our way out of the problem. I totally agree with that. That's why I believe in public transit.”

Housing and homelessness

Central Florida consistently ranks among the top three worst housing markets in the country, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. For years, the Coalition has said the the region lacks 94,000 units of very low income housing and nearly 57,000 units of extremely low income housing. 

At the same time, Florida’s controversial law banning public camping and sleeping on public property goes into effect Oct. 1. The law mandates that when shelters are full, cities and counties are obligated to sweep the homeless they find in public areas into homeless internment camps that cities must construct — though almost no funds were allocataed to do so. Municipalities that don’t comply can be sued by residents, businesses and the state attorney general. Advocates for affordable housing and the homeless say the new law criminalizes homelessness and poverty and point to the state’s high property insurance premiums and lack of housing as drivers of the deepening homelessness crisis.

Arthur is frustrated that “there's no funding for the solution that's being proposed by this legislation.” Still, he believes that “a lot of good is going to come from [the law] in the sense that we will find Orange County, Orlando, and other municipalities coming together to figure out solutions to get shelters that are government fueled with private partnerships ... and to bring people into those places …The solution is not to complain about Tallahassee. It's to figure out how do we work together down here in Orange County ... to address this crisis.”

Reaching the commissioner

“Access to your elected official is probably the biggest thing for me because through that, you'll be able to address all the other concerns,” Arthur said. “We need a commissioner who's present, who is available, who is willing to pick up the phone and call people back.”

He’s hammered Wilson on this point repeatedly, painting her as inaccessible to constituents. That stems, he told VoxPopuli, from a situation about three or four years ago as Winter Garden was in the process of annexing the remaining pockets of Historic East Winter Garden, the historically Black neighborhood to the city’s east, still under Orange County control.

“They had all these flooding issues — they still do, by the way — so I said, Look, we have a new commissioner, let's get her to come meet with you guys. So we set it up. And on four different occasions, back to back, it was a mix of didn't show up, had her assistant come instead, or called out last minute, and that's four times. I was shocked by that. This is the minority community, the under-resourced community that we hear about all the time when people are running, including Nicole Wilson. But on four occasions, these people are taking off of work …to meet with their commissioner, and she doesn't show up, or she sends her aid, or she cancels last minute.”

Family man

Driving through Winter Garden, you can’t miss the signs for Arthur’s campaign, featuring his wife Kellie and his three children. Arthur was married previously, to a woman named Molly (now remarried herself). She is the mother of Arthur’s oldest daughter.

At one point the Orange County Clerk of Court produced a delinquency notice for child support payments that Arthur and Molly only became aware of once VoxPopuli began asking questions about it. Molly, told VoxPopuli in a March 28 email, that they had handled the child support privately, without going through the court system, that Arthur “consistently fulfilled his child support obligations.” and that she and her husband “seamlessly co-parent with Austin and Kellie without any issues.”

On Christmas Eve in 2018, however, the family dynamics were more volatile. Arthur was charged with assaulting his former father-in-law during an argument about his daughter being able to staying longer at her grandparents’ house because she wanted to play with a new Barbie. During the argument, Arthur put his hands around the older man’s throat. 

Arthur's  former mother-in-law, Loree Hocker, told VoxPopuli that it was a family situation that had quickly spun out of control because feelings were still raw because of the divorce. She said regretted calling the police once they got involved. She added that the family went to court on Arthur’s behalf to request leniency. They’ve both been ardent supporters of Arthur's campaign.

Arthur was arrested twice twice for driving with a suspended license: In 2011, in Orange County the charges were dropped. In 2014 in Marion County, he pled guilty, paid a fine of $502.50 and had his license suspended an additional three months.

In February, VoxPopuli reported on Arthur’s felony arrests, and you can read more about that here. We reported on Arthur’s connection as a board member to Life’s Choices Women’s Clinic here. Florida Politics reported on Arthur’s financial issues — resolved — including federal tax liens, credit card debt and a lawsuit over nonpayment of rent for the Longwood location of Gymnastics USA. 

Florida Christian Patriots

In June, Arthur had his name and photo removed as a founding member of the Florida Christian Patriots website after his affiliation with the organization became public on Facebook.

Florida Christian Patriots is a local “grassroots organization” whose mission, according to the version of the site accessed via the Wayback Machine in June when Arthur was still listed as a founder, is to “encourage Christian Patriots in the Central Florida area and beyond to stand up for truth, liberty and Biblical values … We are ready to rise up, fight and defend our God-given rights …”

Arthur told VoxPopuli in a July interview that he was not a founder of the site, even though his photo was  featured among five other founding members and in a group photo. [The home page has since been re-designed.] 

Arthur said the group was already up and running when he was invited to join. He got involved with the group when they were doing nonpartisan candidate events. After one such event at his office, that's when the invitation came. 

“Obviously the insinuation is that I’m trying to hide something, and that’s not accurate because I’m sitting here,” he said, referring to our interview. "There's nothing I'm hiding because these people are still very active in my life and in my campaign."

Founder Tracy Main is his campaign manager and the two other founders, Crystal and Nathan Cassidy, are active volunteers. But even as Arthur says he’s not creating “distance,” he wants it clear that he’s “not associated with anything partisan” that could “misrepresent what I’m doing running for [Orange] County.”

He described his request to remove his picture as "housecleaning."

“It just doesn’t represent what I’m doing right now. I'm not part of it," he said of the site, "so my face shouldn't be on there. It's just that simple." 

Which begs the question, as he steps away without distancing himself, where does Arthur stand on the idea of America as a Christian nation to be governed by Christian principles?

“Theocracies are not good," he said plainly. "America is not a theocracy, and it shouldn't be.”

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