Navy veteran and former Florida House representative Tom Keen filed paperwork on Thursday to run for Orlando City Commission this fall, after losing his seat in the Florida House last November to Republican State Rep. Erika Booth.
Keen, 68, is running for the city’s District 1 seat, which is currently held by city commissioner Jim Gray. The district covers parts of Lee Vista, the Lake Nona area, and the Orlando International Airport. Just one other candidate — realtor Kevin Kendrick — has filed to run for the seat so far.
“I want to serve the community,” Keen, a 20-year Navy veteran and aerospace business manger, told Orlando Weekly in a phone call, citing that call to action as — in short — the very basic reason he decided to run for local office. Keen, a Democrat, was elected to the Florida House last January through a special election. He lost his bid for re-election last November, securing 48 percent of the vote in a swing district to Booth’s 52 percent — a difference of roughly 3,600 votes.
Keen, who’s now running for a nonpartisan city-level seat, claims his Florida House campaign was “derailed by the Trump train,” due to higher voter turnout during the presidential election — and enthusiasm for the top of the ticket — affecting overall election results.
Election data shows turnout for the 2024 presidential election in his district was roughly four times as high as voter turnout for the special election held last January that secured him his short-lived term in the Florida House.
Keen said he believes the Republican Party also “put a huge target” on his back during his re-election campaign. “They spent literally millions of dollars on TV and mailers and things that were quite frankly disgusting misinformation that was being sent out,” he said. “So I think I ran a great campaign. That’s just the way politics runs sometimes.”
In his bid for Orlando City Commission, Keen feels more hopeful. “I think this is a very winnable seat,” he argued. “We’ve got a growing city here in Orlando, and we want to be able to prioritize the needs of working families and small businesses. So to me, it’s just a natural fit for where I was in the Navy and now continuing to serve in the community.”
It’s not his first bid for a City Commission seat. Keen also ran for Gray’s seat back in 2017, but came in second, securing 32 percent of the vote. Gray was first elected to the District 1 seat in 2012, and has held onto it ever since.
“I ran in this area before. I’ve got good name recognition. So I think that this is a great opportunity for voters to see a change here in District 1,” said Keen.
An Orlandoan of roughly 10 years, Keen formerly served as a member of the now-defunct Citizens Police Review Board in Orlando — a volunteer position — and also served on the mayor’s Veterans Advisory Council.
Keen admitted he believes there have been instances in the past where issues in his district were resolved long after they should have been. He named Lake Nona residents’ bid for a local library branch — a push he was part of — and lacking public safety resources in the Lake Nona area as examples.
“While the city has grown tremendously here in the southeast part of Orlando, we had police protection added, but we had no fire protection added,” Keen explained. “We were in danger, if you will, of being overwhelmed.”
Now a new fire station, to be built in the heart of the Lake Nona neighborhood, is on its way. “The fire stations that we have sometimes are undermanned, understaffed, so we’ve got to make sure that those kind of things are taken care of first before, you know, we think about annexations and other expansion of the city,” he argued.
Keen’s campaign for City Commission has already been endorsed by a range of newly elected and seasoned elected officials, according to his campaign announcement, including freshman Orange County commissioner Kelly Semrad, public defender Melissa Vickers, school board members Maria Salamanca and Anne Douglas, as well as state electeds such as Sen. Carlos Guillermo-Smith, Sen. Kristen Arrington, Rep. Lavon Bracy Davis and Rep. Leonard Spencer.
But Keen has also faced criticism from some who take issue with his accessibility during his term in the Florida House as well as his votes on some controversial bills.
Jen Cousins, a LGBTQ+ rights and education advocate and co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, told Orlando Weekly that she felt unheard as a former constituent of Keen’s.
An example that comes to mind for Cousins is when an 2024 anti-transgender bill that would, among other things, require Florida driver’s licenses to list a person’s sex assigned at birth, instead of their gender, was winding its way through legislative committees.
Cousins said she “called and emailed him multiple times asking for him to use his voice in committee hearings.” She claims Keen largely remained silent on the issue during a public hearing on the bill — still voting it down nonetheless — with the exception of a question about how the bill would affect Real ID at TSA.
Keen also voted in favor of a bill last year allowing chaplains in schools — a bill Cousins personally opposed because she worried it “could [be] used as a weapon against queer and trans students.”
“He NEVER responded to any of my attempts to get thru to him and we were on good terms then,” she told Orlando Weekly in a direct message over BlueSky. “The day AFTER session closed one of his aides called me and said he had gotten all of my emails but he doesn’t have time during session to listen to constituents.”
Keen also voted in favor of a controversial bill restricting social media use among minors under 16, as well as a bill pushed by the agricultural industry that banned lab-grown meat. Cousins sees him as opportunistic. “I’m sick of these ‘dems’ only running for ego and not helping the communities they’re supposed to fight for,” she said.
Keen, for his part, defended his votes and defended his accessibility as a state legislator. “I would think that we were actually more accessible than any other state legislator in Central Florida,” he told Orlando Weekly, sharing that his team held satellite office hours throughout the district on a weekly basis. “We made a very big effort for outreach, and I would push back to, that we were not accessible.”
“I would think that we were actually more accessible than any other state legislator in Central Florida”
On the school chaplains bill, Keen said he reached out to the local teachers’ union and school board members, and didn’t hear any stark opposition to the proposal. Signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last April, the bill allows religious chaplains to serve as counselors in public schools for students whose parents approve.
“It’s totally voluntary for a parent or a student to participate. No one’s being forced to do anything. But to exclude religious groups from campus, that is discrimination. You’re basically saying that God has no place. That’s wrong. That’s not what our Founding Fathers intended,” DeSantis said, upon signing the bill into law.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Education Association — a national affiliate of the local teachers’ union — and other civil rights groups disapproved of the law.
Keen did not respond to our inquiry on his vote regarding the 2024 social media bill banning social media accounts for minors under 14 and restricting access for Florida minors aged 16 and older. Of his vote for a bill banning “lab-grown meat,” Keen admitted he was aware that such products weren’t being sold in Florida anyway, but said he was “OK with voting at that first step.”
Keen said he and his team make a point to be present in the community “a lot.” He has been known to make an appearance at the rare picket line in Orlando, like the local picket line during the UAW strike or the recent Hilton hotel workers strike. In a state that is considered hostile to unions, with just 6 percent of the workforce unionized, any show of support from elected officials is generally appreciated by working people.
Kevin Kendrick, the only other candidate who’s filed for District 1 city seat, did not respond to a request from Orlando Weekly for comment. Gray, the incumbent, hasn’t filed paperwork (yet?) to run for another term.
City commission seats are nonpartisan positions. Commissioners serve four-year terms and receive an annual salary of $76,292, according to the Orlando Business Journal.
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This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.