Candidate Profile: George Oliver III

George Oliver III, who was first elected to the District 4 seat of the Ocoee City Commission in 2018, has traveled a winding and arduous journey over the last two years in his bid to represent his constituents.

In January 2023, two years into his second four-year term, Oliver stepped down to run for mayor, a race he lost. Then in November 2023, the city commission disqualified him from running in the March 2024 special election to fill the remaining year of his term. Oliver filed a lawsuit in the Ninth Judicial Circuit to gain access to the ballot and won. (

That case was the impetus behind three proposed city charter amendments on this year’s ballot. 

Oliver also won the 2024 special election to serve out the remaining year left on the term.

Now Oliver, Ocoee’s first Black commissioner, is running again on March 11 for his third term on the commission. He faces Ages Hart, also Black, whom the commission appointed on an interim basis to represent the district during the year before the 2024 special election. (Hart, incidentally, was the sole commission vote in favor of Oliver participating in the March 2024 special election.) 

Ocoee city commissioners serve four-year terms and earn $4,000. They also receive health insurance. 

The last day to register to vote in the municipal elections is Feb. 10. Early voting takes place March 3-7, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily at the Supervisor of Elections Office at 119 Kaley Street in Orlando. The last day to request a mail-in ballot is Feb. 27 at 5 p.m. Ballots need to be returned to the Supervisor of Elections office by 7 p.m. on March 11. 

The District 4 commission election is nonpartisan and open just to District 4 residents. However, all Ocoee residents can vote on the city charter amendments. On Election Day, Districts 1 and 4 vote at the Jim Beech Recreation Center at 1820 A.D. Mims Road. District 2 votes at the Lakeshore Center at 125 N. Lakeshore Drive. District 3 votes at Ocoee Fire Station 39 at 2515 Maguire Road. 

“Change agent”

A U.S. Navy veteran, Oliver was raised in Atlanta and relocated to Ocoee in the early aughts. He has five sons with his wife Deborah and a granddaughter. (He also has a sixth son with another woman.) 

Oliver describes himself as “a change agent,” an outlier on a commission that doesn’t agree with him. “ I just think that some of the other elected officials may not be too in-tune with [his plan for the city] because of the change,” he told VoxPopuli in a January interview.

For instance, he said that after years of requesting that the city conduct an operational audit, the city has revised its process with a new auditing firm. Oliver said, “No one's in the position to say, Yep, we're doing this because Commissioner Oliver has been hollering about this for years and years and years.” He wants a forensic audit completed for each department, which he said would cost more than the $100,000 that was quoted to him a few years ago. 

Oliver also has pushed for full-time salaries for commissioners, which failed to gather enough support from his colleagues. Last year, Section § C-16 of the city charter was amended in the March 2024 special election to codify that part-time salaries were to be “commensurate with the part-time nature of the duties of the office.”

He started the Ocoee Youth Council, created by commission vote in 2019, to involve high schoolers in local government and said he wants to create more small advisory boards to “keep their finger on the pulse of the communities.” 

40-Year Plan 

Oliver’s platform revolves around his 40-year strategic plan for Ocoee’s growth — a community-driven “mission and a vision” — something that he talked about during his mayoral run. He said while Ocoee has a comprehensive plan with future goals, it has no plan on how to get there.

Oliver said establishing funding for a new plan would need a vote on the commission, and from there he suggested hiring local government consultants to help establish what Ocoee’s “vision” should be, as well as sending “surveys, email blasts, all kinds of different things” to residents to get their take on what they want for the city. 

 ”We're acting and we're growing haphazardly, to just organic growth,” Oliver said. “ It has to be put in our budget first, and once it's in the budget, then we can actually instruct our staff to put out an RFQ [request for quote] to companies that's in the local area — hopefully Central Florida area — that can help us to start structuring what a mission and vision would look like.”

Affordable housing

Housing prices are outpacing household income all over Central Florida because of shortages in available houses and apartments, and Ocoee is no exception. Oliver said he supports mixing affordable home development with higher-priced homes in the same neighborhoods, all with the same “aesthetic,” i.e. “colors, landscaping, elevations.”

Oliver said that affordable housing could be financed through various means. He suggested Orange County could build affordable homes in Ocoee on unincorporated county land that would later be annexed into the city. He also pointed to “infrastructure compromises” or agreements with developers to include affordable housing units. Oliver said the city should try to find a middle ground between affordability and appearance. 

Infrastructure and business 

Oliver said infrastructure is an essential issue as the city expands. As the city grows “30, 40, 50 years down the road” and as it looks to annex unincorporated Orange County lands into the city limits, infrastructure will need to keep pace so that new residents can benefit from the city’s trash pick up, water and sewer services. 

Oliver wants to see improvements in the city’s technological infrastructure as well — installing more utility poles that provide 5G service, and continuing to add more traffic lights and pedestrian safety lights. He said new traffic lights have already been put in place on Ingram, Clarke and Clarcona-Ocoee roads. 

He supports adding “safety devices” at the intersections along the West Orange Trail — which he said he’d like to widen “a little bit” where it passes through District 4 —  at Clarcona-Ocoee Road and Clarke Road and at Arden Park Boulevard North and Clarcona-Ocoee Road. Oliver said the county has already set funds aside for pedestrian safety measures along the trail, such as yellow or red lights that indicate when pedestrians are crossing.

Oliver’s solution to solving traffic and congestion along Ocoee-Apopka Road is to take over the road from Orange County and widen it. He added that he hopes Apopka will agree to partner with Ocoee on the project. Oliver said “conversations are being had by the city manager … to let them know we have an interest in taking over Ocoee-Apopka Road as a city road."

Oliver said another key issue facing District 4 is a need for more retail. For instance, he said he wants to approve more mixed-use commercial properties in District 4 to go along with the Shoppes on the Bluff on Clarcona-Ocoee Road, now being developed. He said interested developers have submitted proposals that he hopes will be approved.

And like many in the city, Oliver said he would like to see an upscale restaurant downtown, like a steakhouse. 

With Ocoee’s events attracting more people to its downtown, parking is becoming more of a discussion. Oliver said the city is exploring the acquisition of the empty lot on McKey Street that it already uses for event parking. While the numbers don’t yet support a garage, Oliver said it should be in the city’s three-to-five-year plan.

SROs and a new school?

Oliver has been saying Ocoee needs a new middle school for years. A former substitute teacher with Kelly Education, Oliver said that “ sometimes you get like 30, 35 kids in a classroom” in Ocoee’s public schools. A new school, he added, also would accommodate the city’s projected growth. 

But District 7 Orange County School Board Member Melissa Byrd told VoxPopuli via email that there aren’t enough students in Ocoee to warrant a new middle school.

Ocoee Middle School’s student-to-teacher ratio is 19.46 and Ocoee Elementary School’s is 16.14, while Florida’s average for public schools is 18, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. 

Oliver said recently his goal is to get a K-8 school in Ocoee. He said the county has built K-8 schools over the past six or seven years that have been “highly successful.” OCPS has nine K-8 schools, some of which are magnets. He told VoxPopuli that there is land for a school on Ingram Road.

Another school-related issue that still needs to be sorted is the contract for school resource officers. Ocoee is one of the five municipalities in Orange County that did not sign its contract with the Orange County School Board for maintaining sworn school resource officers in its public schools. The cities, which are currently operating without a contract for 2024-2025, are negotiating with the school board now. An agreement had been anticipated by the end of January. 

At issue are salaries for school resource officers and how the cost sharing between the county and cities will be split. The five municipalities requested $75,000 as a year one salary in a three-year contract as a counter to the school board’s offer of $72,000. The school board floated utilizing armed Guardians, which receive less training than sworn law enforcement officers, if an agreement can’t be reached as a pressure tactic. 

Oliver said the county is “being unreasonable” but that student safety is his priority and SROs “will be there” at Ocoee schools.

“If it comes out of our [Ocoee’s] budget, it comes out of our budget because what we want to do is keep our children safe,” he said. “I think we’re asking for maybe 600 bucks. I had a long conversation with the Ocoee chief of police and we talked about this and he broke the number down to me.” 

School Board Member Byrd said in her email that increasing funding for all five municipalities “will add another $2 million to [the SRO reimbursement] budget.” She added that school boards’ budgets are determined by the Florida legislature and are “drastically inadequate to cover [OCPS’] costs,” including the allocation for school safety.  

“The only way we can do it is to make cuts to more classroom programs or staff,” she said in her email.  

Racial unity and diversity

Oliver was instrumental in bringing attention to the 1920 Ocoee Election Day Massacre and negotiating an official apology from the city ahead of the 100th year commemoration of the event in 2020, Ocoee Remembers. In November, the city unveiled a memorial in downtown Unity Park to the Black residents murdered or displaced in the violence that claimed lives, property, businesses and churches. 

Oliver was also the motivator behind the Unity Day Festival, which in 2022 was part of the annual Ocoee Remembers, organized at the time by the Human Relations Diversity Board where Oliver was the commission liaison. Oliver said he wants to bring the festival back. However, that event went vastly over budget. Since then, Ocoee Remembers has been a smaller, private event for the descendants of survivors.   

In terms of other steps to promote diversity and inclusion, Oliver said that he supports an official Juneteenth proclamation, saying that while he read the history of Juneteenth at a commission meeting last year, Ocoee has not yet issued a proclamation like its neighbor the Town of Oakland. 

Asked whether he would further support Ocoee following in Oakland’s footsteps by supporting a Pride Month proclamation, Oliver said he’s “very open to it.” He made a note on his phone to propose such proclamations to the commission. On diversity, equity and inclusion (widely known as DEI) programs, Oliver said he supports “any program that would be inclusive,” and would “voice [his] opinion” if there’s pushback from the state.

Ethics and spending 

Oliver has had some financial challenges that VoxPopuli has reported previously, such as filing for bankruptcy, defaulting on credit card payments and multiple liens, including one that led to a home foreclosure in 2020. He also faced backlash from the commission for overspending on his city credit card and how he’s used his $10,000 discretionary fund, which Oliver said he tapped to help a resident in need. 

When VoxPopuli asked Oliver what he thought of the commission putting spending limits on commissioners’ discretionary funds allocated from taxpayer money, he said, “I don’t think that’s something that we should really even be too concerned about” and that “commissioners are actually bound by ethics to spend their money the way they should be spent.” 

Adherence to ethics standards is a main tenet of Oliver's campaign, and yet he has made some head-scratching choices. Like making a campaign video soliciting donations for his mayoral campaign from within the Ocoee City Hall Commission Chambers. (Soliciting donations in government buildings is a violation of campaign finance law and a first-degree misdemeanor.) At the time, Oliver told VoxPopuli that he was unaware that soliciting campaign donations from government buildings was a violation of the law. City officials attend ethics training annually. 

Oliver created another video, in 2022, also in the commission chambers, that accused another commissioner, without evidence, of working "behind the scenes" with Ocoee Mayor Rusty Johnson to claw back monies the commission had allocated to the Human Relations Diversity Board for cultural events. As a result, the city commission last year passed a rule that the commission chambers were off limits for political activity other than forums that included all candidates.    

Oliver said he has worked for the Internal Revenue Service, part of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, since December 2022, providing tax help to small businesses. When asked for a photo of his IRS identification badge, Oliver sent one to VoxPopuli with his last name and the signature of the IRS commissioner redacted. He later told VoxPopuli that for security purposes he works under a pseudonym that is listed on his badge. 

IRS employees are allowed to use pseudonyms if there is a risk of harassment while doing their job and the use of only their last name doesn’t provide enough protection. VoxPopuli has been unable to independently verify Oliver’s employment with the IRS.