Historic East Winter Garden Neighborhood advocate Chloe Johnson, 36, is running for District 3 city commissioner. She squares off against her neighbor  Karen Mcneil in the March 19 election.

Mail-in ballots are starting to arrive in mailboxes — you can request a mail-in ballot until 5 p.m. March 7. Early voting begins March 4 and runs daily, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., through March 17.

Regardless of the election outcome, there will be a Black woman on the commission for the first time since 2006 when Charlie Mae Wilder was appointed to serve out Commissioner Mildred Dixon’s term after her death.

Born in the Historic East Winter Neighborhood and raised in Rex, Georgia, Johnson returned to her birthplace in 2012 where she raised her own family of four with her husband Adelle Brunson, Jr.

Johnson began doing community work through the nonprofit she founded in 2021, I Am Her Women’s Empowerment Ministry. She distributed flowers to women going through difficulties and hosted financial literacy seminars and popup shops for small businesses. According to its Facebook page, the nonprofit’s last event was in December 2022.

Johnson has served as vice president of the neighborhood advocacy organization One Winter Garden, which fought to prevent a plastics recycling plant from opening in the neighborhood and in 2022 stopped Orange County Public Schools from building a school bus depot on the site of the former Orange Technical College-West Campus. At the time she told VoxPopuli, “You just don’t put that in the center of someone’s neighborhood. It’s too close. It’s air pollution. It’s traffic control. It’s not safe.”

Most recently, the organization petitioned the City of Winter Garden to change the area name from East Winter Garden to Historic East Winter Garden Neighborhood, a change the city approved Feb. 8 — with accompanying street signage and a website —to reflect the area’s rich historical significance.

Austin Arthur, the secretary and treasurer of One Winter Garden and candidate for District 1 county commissioner, has mentored Johnson through the campaign process. He said she was focused on the community on a “micro level.”

“She's not distracted by the issues that are not in the purview of the city commission,” Arthur told VoxPopuli in a phone interview. “I think that's great when you have a local official or a local candidate in this case, that is not overly plugged into state and federal issues.”

Johnson’s campaign website states: “I have worked on the needs of our residents by being a member of the Community Redevelopment Agency Advisory Board for Winter Garden and as a representative from our community on Orange County’s Citizens Safety Task Force. Being a member of Winter Garden’s Planning & Zoning Board has given me insight and an education on the true workings of our local government and how to retain our small-town character and prioritize infrastructure when considering development.

That experience totals four Community Redevelopment Agency Advisory Board meetings and eight Planning and Zoning Board meetings. The Orange County Citizens Safety Task Force, which works to prevent violence in the community, last met in March 2023.

Johnson says she’s “ready to take it to the next level.” And yet voters would be hard-pressed to find any details about what that “next level” might look like beyond “bridge[ing] our people together by retaining our historic character, fighting for our family-based values, and keeping growth wise.”

If Johnson has specific plans for achieving those goals, she’s keeping them to herself. She’s declined to participate in the Feb. 21 Candidates Forum sponsored by the National Congress of Black Women at West Orange High School, 6-8 p.m.

Johnson also no-showed two interviews to discuss her platform with a VoxPopuli reporter. When we caught up with her at Winter Garden’s Martin Luther King Parade on Jan. 15 to ask why, she haughtily said the reporter had called on her personal line, not her campaign line. If she won’t respond to a reporter calling on the “wrong” phone, what hope does a constituent have to get through to her?  Although Johnson invited the reporter to get in touch again, she has not responded to multiple requests made on the “right” phone line and through email.