Candidate Profile: Anne Fulton

Who can forget the 2024 Seat 3 nomination workshop? Eleven Oakland residents eagerly answered questions during a town workshop about why they wanted to fill Seat 3 on the town commission, a seat that had remained open after Sal Ramos vacated it to run unsuccessfully for mayor.

After all of the applicants had had a chance to speak, they left the room, and the floor was open for discussion. Instead, Commissioners Joseph McMullen and Rick Polland and Vice Mayor Mike Satterfield opted to jump ahead to nominations.

McMullen went first.

“I nominate Sal Ramos,” he said.

“I nominate Sal Ramos,” said Polland

"I nominate Sal Ramos,” said Satterfield.

The meeting hall erupted in anger and disbelief as gasps and murmurs of No! flew around the room.

But Anne Fulton had come prepared for just such an occurrence.

She immediately set up a table outside the meeting hall with petitions to recall the commissioners, including McMullen.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst is a favorite motto, she said at the time.

“ I'm going to stand up and say something if there's an injustice to the town,” Fulton told VoxPopuli recently, recalling that night. “And I believe with my whole heart that that was a complete injustice to the town by re-seating Ramos after he was overwhelmingly voted out. So I stand behind that, and I stand behind everything that I've done and said and stood up for in the meetings.”

Fulton, 47, ultimately fell 138 signatures short of the 338 needed to recall both McMullen and Polland.

Now she’s is running to replace McMullen through the ballot box.  [Polland resigned from the commission of his own accord on Dec. 30, 2024.]

“You know we can’t be apathetic. If we want things to change, someone has to step up for that change,” Fulton said over lattes and croissant on a recent Sunday at Rosallie Le French Cafe in Winter Garden.

“My opponent has been in his position for 20 years. By all accounts he’s a wonderful man and does great things with HAPCO [McMullen’s nonprofit music and arts foundation] and all of that. I feel like it’s time for a fresh look at the way things operate in town, the way the commission operates.”

This race marks the first time anyone has challenged McMullen for his seat.

“All this time [the commissioners] were like, We just stayed in office because no one ran against us,” Fulton says. “Well, here I am.”

The Seat 4 election takes place March 10. Mail-in ballots must be returned to the Supervisor of Elections office by 7 p.m. on that day. Early voting takes place daily March 2-8, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. See our guide for locations.

Town commissioners serve part-time for four-year terms and earn a $50 monthly stipend, plus health insurance.

Fulton noted that while she favors all of the charter amendments on the ballot, she's "disappointed" term limits didn’t make the cut.

A new Oakland

Fulton got into politics working on Shane Taylor’s 2024 upset campaign for mayor when he swept 65 percent of the vote.

“ Something about the last election awakened the town. We realized through the overwhelming success of Shane's campaign that Hey, when we speak up, we can accomplish something. We can make changes. We can have the town we want. We don't have to say, Well, this is the way it's always been done. We can say, Hey, this is the new Oakland. We've evolved. We've grown. We’re flourishing. And we can do that together.”

Fulton gained some notoriety when she stood her ground during former Mayor Kathy Stark’s last commission meeting and asked for the town’s comprehensive plan to be re-evaluated to see if it still suited the residents’ needs. That sparked a furious outburst from Stark, who demanded Fulton sit down and and come back when she was no longer mayor.

“My whole point in standing up in that meeting was to say, Hey, we haven't been paying attention. That's our fault. I'm at fault. The neighbors are at fault. We're all at fault. We haven't been paying attention. Can we please push pause now that we've woken up out of our slumber and let's look at this and make sure that it's still applicable to who we are today versus who we were however many years ago that was written?”

She would like to see a committee formed to re-examine the comprehensive plan.

“My point was it had not been updated for years. And the amount of residents has changed. The needs have changed. So much as changed since that comprehensive plan was put into place it may not be what today’s Oakland still wants.”

Available, accessible

Fulton was born on a naval base in Portsmouth, Virginia. Her father was in the U.S. Navy as was an uncle and her paternal grandfather. Her maternal grandfather survived Pearl Harbor. Her brother was in the U.S. Air Force.

“The military runs deep for us,” she says.

Still, Fulton, who’s given to wearing T-shirts that say Nevertheless, she persisted and Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, chose a different path. Raised in Lakeland and living in Oakland for the past 15 years, Fulton works as an insurance adjuster. She’s spent nine years as an all-in band mom for West Orange High School. In 2024, she launched the Oakland Society to help Oakland residents in need.

She's a helper. A large part of her platform is that she will be accessible, available "to listen, research, investigate and communicate ... to have an open door policy" and that constituents can call, text, email or meet with her.

She points to the recent confusion about what residents are supposed to do when there's a problem with trash pickup. Fulton told VoxPopuli she requested the contract between WastePro and the town, which she said clearly outlines procedures for remedying complaints like missed pickups. But when she asked town officials about the procedures, she got a different response.

"They changed it via verbal agreement," Fulton says. "But nobody knows that." She says people, especially seniors, don't always have the wherewithal to hunt down information on the internet. "I feel like having one person who says, I care and I see you, and I see everything that you need. You don't have to search the web and call 500 different phone numbers. I will find the answers for you."

No place like home

Fulton’s latest endeavor, created with her husband Shaun, is My Backyard Initiative and Haven BuildWorks. It’s a clapback to NIMBYists who want homeless services, like shelters and transitional housing, just “not in my backyard.”

My Backyard Initiative is intended to be a nonprofit “connector between the builders and the municipalities and the service providers,” Fulton explains. Kelly Taylor, Mayor Shane Taylor's wife, is on the board.

Haven Buildworks is a for-profit builder, constructing what are called “comfort cubes,” sturdy modular housing built of steel-reinforced, insulated panels. They were developed by Fulton’s father-in-law, Geoffrey Fulton, an architect in Australia. The mayor, with his background in construction, was on the board until last month.

“Our mission is to get our big old Rolodex of people who have everything need[ed] to take care of those that are most vulnerable,” she said. “We want to be able to connect all the people who are working on the same problem and make a network of support to work together because you accomplish more together than you do separately.”

The project dovetails with another fundamental plank of Fulton’s platform, which is the disappearance of housing that’s affordable to average homeowners in Oakland.

“I’m concerned  that as these new developments come up, and we have $3.5 million houses, which raises the value of everyone else's home and offers or causes a trickle down effect of unaffordability, and that's not fair to our longtime residents. It's not fair to our elderly, and it's not fair to young families who may want to live in the same town as their parents or grandparents. It's impossible for a young family with kids to come in and buy a home. You know, my son couldn't come and buy a home and live by us. My mother can't come and buy a home and live by us. And that's not good. And it's not good for the people who've lived here forever when they can't afford their taxes."

Fulton understands financial pressures firsthand. About 10 years ago, she defaulted on two credit card loans totaling about $9,900 and was sued in Orange County Court. (One case was settled, the other dismissed.)

At the time, she told Voxpopuli, she was managing end-of-life care for two grandparents and then handling their estates following their deaths. She was driving back and forth to Georgia to where they'd lived and raising four children.

“Yeah, I didn’t manage my personal finances that well at the time. I’ve since made it right,” she explained. “I know a lot of people will say, She couldn’t manage her credit card, how will she manage the town’s money? It’s not my job to manage the town’s money. The town has a finance person who manages the money.”

The bait-and-switch that The Avenue developers pulled on the town commission — commissioners signed off on an assisted living facility with a 55+ community and when the project changed developers, ended up getting four stories of luxury rentals — means that apartment buildings are essentially a nonstarter. Commissioners have openly referred to the building as a “mistake.”

“Apartments definitely are not the answer,” Fulton says. “When I refer to affordable housing in Oakland, I'm speaking about vacant lots that are privately owned and houses that are dilapidated.

“Over the past several years, some of the high-end builders have been buying up those lots and building million-dollar homes on them. I would like to work on approaching builders to build something that middle- to low-income people can afford to have either a rental home or purchase a home that is affordable and safe and nice for their family.  The organizations are out there, it's reaching out to them … and making the connections with the landowners to make it happen.”

Taking a page from The Wizard of Oz, Fulton is emphasizing that everything residents need is right in their own backyard.

"We have an amazing community of people who can make things happen in Oakland,” Fulton says. Where this is headed is that she’s eyeing McMullen’s travel to Tallahassee and Washington, D.C. — “hoping to catch someone's ear and say, Hey, can you support Oakland? Can you funnel some grant money to Oakland?” — as a waste of taxpayer money.

Through a public records request of McMullen’s expense reports for the past two years, VoxPopuli learned that the Town of Oakland paid $5,934 for McMullen to attend the National League of Cities conferences in Washington, D.C. in 2023, 2024 and 2025. The town also paid $1,637.67 for him to attend the Florida League of Cities conferences in Tallahassee in 2024.

“That time and money could better be spent here on the streets with our community,” Fulton says. “I feel if we need to get county or state or even national help, all of those people have offices here in Orlando. I can call them. I can email them. I can drive downtown and go to their offices and get face time with them without doing an expense report to go to Tallahassee and D.C. and not bring back any money.”

“I could be incorrect, but I don't know of a single award grant, award funding, whatever, that he has personally championed by going on these trips and brought back to Oakland and said, Here's a million dollars for sewer. I recognize that what we have and what we need is right here in town.”