The Money Maze: A look at who’s funding Boca’s $1,000,000 election.

ICYMI, Boca Raton voters are in a “Vote the Bums OUT” mood. On social media and at city hall, residents are questioning perceived financial links between “developers” and decision makers on Boca Raton’s City Council and Planning & Zoning boards. Money is pouring into selected candidate campaigns and now, five Boca Raton candidates have created Political Committees or PACs to collect even more. As Boca Magazine projected, as of 4Q25, there is over $1,000,000 in Boca’s election. That is the direct result of the influx of $619,099 from PACs into the campaigns of Thomson, Nachlas, Weinroth, Wigder and Ritchey.

With so much speculation about campaign finances, we decided to dig into it and find out where the money came from. In this article I present our analysis of the election finances as reported in the public campaign treasurers reports of the City of Boca Raton, the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections PAC filings and the Florida State Department of Elections PAC filings. Click here for more about our data. Below are some infographics of the election as a whole. At the end, I introduce and explain the BocaFirst PAC Browser Tool that organizes the infographics for each campaign and 30 odd PACs that flow funds directly and indirectly into Boca’s election.

Boca’s March Election: This is not normal.

As of the 4th quarter 2025 filings with City, County and State, the total City of Boca Raton Election eclipsed $1,000,000 and counting. It isn’t the norm for Boca Raton elections to total over $1,000,000. That is an insane amount of money for a local election. How much should a local election need? Are all the glossy mailings necessary? And, since when did a bombardment of slick TV/Social Media/Texting ads be anything other than annoying?

One of the most common questions we see raised on social media regards what is perceived to be an unfair influence of real estate development special interests on elected officials. To see where such potential influence comes from, I went into the data. Below is a stacked column infographic depicting categories of donations. Each segment of a candidate’s column represents how much was donated from each of four categories of donations. We used the information provided on each donation along with our collective years of civic advocacy to categorize each donation as:

• Self Donation – Funds given by the candidate. Unspent donations go to charity.
• Individual – Donations from people not included in another category.
• Business – Donations from a business that we did not categorize as a real estate development donation.
• Real Estate Development – Donations from companies and professionals in real estate and development related occupations or businesses.

But this is only half the picture. Self loans and Political Committee or PACs were filtered out so as to be able to see the donation categories for each candidate. We’ll go deeper into PACs in a minute but for an overview of PACs, see the companion article “Before You Vote“.

In Boca Raton, whose election is this anyway?

The next frequently voiced concern is outside influence. To evaluate this, we used donation address information to mark donations as either INSIDE or OUTSIDE of Boca Raton. It’s important to recognize some outside donations are friends and families but others are not. It isn’t knowable from the data so the visualization below goes strictly by address. As in the previous chart, self loans are not counted. But for judging outside influence using location, this chart does include donations from endorsement PACs. It DOES NOT show the candidate PACs. As before, they are so large, you couldn’t see the breakdown in the campaigns not using PACs. Here’s an example of two endorsement PACs from outside Boca Raton.

Altogether, donations to campaigns from outside Boca Raton added $93,766 to the election. Again, some are friends and family, some are not.

Multi-Donations – Sneaky but legal

Donations to campaigns are governed by state laws that limit how much a person can give to a local election. That limit is $1000. But the legal definition of a person isn’t what you think. Here is the Florida Division of Elections definition of a person:

A “person” is an individual or a corporation, association, firm, partnership, joint venture, joint stock company, club, organization, estate, trust, business trust, syndicate or other combination of individuals having collective capacity.

So while the spirit of the law is a $1000 max per person, owners of other entities are able to exceed the maximum. Sorting the CITY DATA by address and name uncovered 49 of these “multi-donations” over $500. They were spread across candidates Thomson ($14,000), Nachlas ($3,000) and Weinroth ($17,000). Multi-donations added a total of $34,000 to the election. Here’s an example of a “multi-donation” from a developer in Sunrise to the Weinroth campaign. Again, sneaky but legal.

Enter the PACs

So you want to run for local office. In its simplest form you,

• Open a bank account
• Deposit a self loan or self donation
• File some forms at City Hall
• Pay fees
• Take donations from $10 to $1000 to pay for yard signs, campaign flyers, some advertising, maybe a new suit or dress
• Get a haircut

In Boca’s 2026 Municipal election, apparently that isn’t enough. The $1000 cap and multi-donation scheme are manifestly inadequate. Now, five Boca Raton city council candidates (Thomson, Nachlas, Weinroth, Wigder and Ritchey) have created “Candidate PACs”. These are additional bank accounts that DON’T have the $1000 donation limit and bear the mission to defeat their opponents. Here is a slideshow of the PAC info for each.

What is a PAC?

According to the Florida Polical Committee Handbook a Political Committee, Political Action Committee or PAC for short, is defined as: A combination of two or more individuals, or a person other than an individual, that, in an aggregate amount in excess of $500 during a single calendar year and:

1. Accepts contributions for the purpose of making contributions to any candidate, political committee, affiliated party committee or political party;
2. Accepts contributions for the purpose of expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate or issue;
3. Makes expenditures that expressly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate or issue; or
4. Makes contributions to a common fund, … from which contributions are made to any candidate, political committee, or political party.

How PACs affect each race in Boca’s election

As of 4Q25, Thomson’s “Running with Andy Thomson” PAC had a bewildering $290,100. Nachlas’s “Fran for BocA” PAC had $253,794. To grasp the impact of these numbers, an infographic is really needed. The problem is that the two mayoral numbers are so large compared to the other 10 candidates, it is difficult to chart them all at the same scale.

The best I could do is a sideways stacked bar chart. This infographic shows the ratio of campaign donations received vs the donations made to a Candidate’s PAC. The ratio in the race for Mayor is alarming. THIS:

There is more money from each Candidate PAC in the Thomson and Nachlas campaigns than from individuals.

The Pin-ball machine of PAC Money

The Florida State PAC Handbook explains that PACs not only take donations from individuals and businesses, they also receive/donate funds from/to other PACs; all without the $1000 donation limit. The upshot of this in the race for mayor is a web of PACs behind PACs behind PACs. That aside, for those interested, the donation information in state and county filings is enough to follow the trail. So I followed it about 4 levels deep on the two campaigns whose Candidate PACs took donations from other PACs: Thomson and Nachlas. To distill the influence of the External PACs on the Candidate PACs, the donations were organized into categories and charted:

The white wedges of the pie show that the majority of donations to those two Candidate PACs comes from other PACs. When I followed the PAC to PAC trail, I made a map of how the money flowed to and from each one. As happens with visualizations, relationships hidden in spreadsheets pop out in pictures:

Three PACS (highlighted) that are upstream of the Thomson and Nachlas candidate PACs account for $344,944 of the money in Boca’s mayoral race with one of them donating to both Nachlas ($1000) and Thomson ($90,000).

Boca’s Election: “Where’d the Money Come From?” Infographics

To answer thr question “Where’d the Money Come From?”, I processed all the filings plus roughly four levels worth of PAC to PAC to PAC donations and categorized each one using the occupation, address and name data. For each campaign or PAC, the data was then turned into pie chart infographics showing the sources.

Here is an example of the “Where’d the Money Come From?” infographics for the Seat A campaigns. They depict the breakdown of each campaign’s donations by category.

PAC donations were similarly charted and incorporated into the infographic for candidates using a PAC as shown here:

The result of crawling through the web of PACs was over 30 “Where’d the Money Come From?” infographics. Each one shows the breakdown of donations to the PAC or campaign.

The BocaFirst PAC Browser Tool

In order to allow voters to turn a deaf ear to the campaign flyers, ads, and rhetoric, do their own research and come to their own conclusions, we created the BocaFirst PAC Browser Tool. This tool organizes all the “Where’s the Money Come From?” infographics for every campaign and PAC into one large map. This is what’s in the PAC Detailed Map:

1. Each campaign in the election
2. Each Candidate PAC
3. 4 Levels of External PAC
4. Total funds received in 2025 (or most recent year funds were received)
5. PAC Agent or Treasurer
6. Connecting lines showing how much flowed where

Below is the map used in the PAC Browser Tool. Some may find it interesting to look at on its own.

To explore more about each node on the map, use the button below to access the BocaFirst PAC Browser Tool on your laptop, desktop or tablet:

Summary – Campaign dollars are not votes

It may be important to ask “What are donations for and why does anyone donate?” Perhaps more importantly, why do business and individuals skirt the spirit of the law and donate multiple times? Why use PACs? When is enough enough?” After yard signs, flyers in the mail and a TV ad or two, what is the rest for?

Donations are not votes. A memorable Boca Raton David and Goliath showdown was the 2009 resident take down of a Chamber of Commerce backed “Goliath” incumbent by a “David” grassroots candidate. With $16,000 in campaign funds against an incumbent with $65,000, the “David” wasn’t taken seriously. But he had a grassroots campaign that got the vote out and he caught “Goliath” off guard to win. Sometimes it isn’t about the money.

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ABOUT THE DATA IN THIS ARTICLE

The county and state are very transparent and provide PAC filings as downloadable spreadsheets from votepalmbeach.gov and myflorida.com. The City of Boca Raton is not. Its treasurer report filings for each candidate are image PDF files that require a labor intensive conversion. They can be downloaded at myboca.us.

However, BocaFirst reader Howard Greenberg and fellow “data junkie” who has experience in this area, volunteered to do the job of transcribing them. When completed and checked, Howard made the data available to us to use for this article and the BocaFirst PAC Browser Tool. And, in the interest of critical thinking and transparency, Howard created a web portal so everyone can browse and search the City Campaign Treasurer report data with just a few clicks. Click the button below for a tutorial and link to his treasurer’s report portal.

Finally, elections have filing dates when candidates must provide information periodically. As of this writing the most recent reporting date was for donations through 4Q2025 so all our analysis is as of that date.

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LINKS TO RELATED INFORMATION

Before You Vote	How PACs are used by certain candidates in Boca’s election and not others.
This Isn’t Our First Referendum	How residents fought for and won to keep the City Council from turning it into a restaurant and the one council member who fought them every step of the way.
Park Wars Episode 3: The P3 Menace	The 411 on three Boca Raton resident petitions and how City Councils maneuvered to block them

Florida Division of Elections: FAQ – Political Committees