Manatee County mourns the death of its 'feisty' commissioner

In the span of a year, Carol Ann Felts went from being thrown out of the Manatee County Commission chambers to sitting behind the dais as the District 1 commissioner. 

Just 15 months into her current term, the 68-year-old Felts died suddenly at her Myakka City home Feb. 24 of natural causes.

She is survived by two sons, Nicholas and Kiel Felts, who were scheduled to speak at the March 2 commission meeting that was set to honor Felts. Her cause of death has not been released by the District 12 Medical Examiner's Office, but the Manatee County Sheriff's Office said there was no evidence of foul play. 

In 2023, Felts had been ordered out of the commission chambers by former commissioner Kevin Van Ostenbridge after she told the board, “We are going to be basing our votes in 2024 on how you conduct yourselves with the wetlands issue.”

Photo by Lesley Dwyer

Commissioner George Kruse was the only commissioner to vote against reducing wetland buffer protections and the only incumbent to be reelected in 2024. 

Felts was as surprised as anyone that she was elected to join him on the board. After hearing that she won her race with 54% of the votes, she held a napkin over her mouth that read, “I’m speechless.”

But when Van Ostenbridge told Felts she was out of order and had bailiffs escort her out of the chambers that day in 2023, she was not nearly so meek when she replied, “I am not out of order, sir. I have not yet begun to fight.” 

Out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of messages posted to social media since her death, one word has been repeated over and over to describe Felts — warrior. 

Photo by Lesley Dwyer

“She fought with everything she had,” friend Judy Rudd said. 

Rudd spent many afternoons with Felts “eating triple their weight” at Mila’s on the Manatee or putzing around Felts’ garden and sipping sweet tea on her porch. 

Rudd said Felts’ passion for protecting Florida heritage and rural living wasn’t Carol Ann Felts the politician, “That was Carol.”

Felts was an involved citizen long before she was a commissioner, although she ran twice for the commission before she won in 2024. During the 2020 and 2022 elections, Felts knew she was a long shot, but said she enjoyed learning the process. She encouraged others to get involved, too. 

Charlene Kow volunteered for Felts’ 2024 campaign, even though she couldn’t vote for Felts because she lives in District 4. 

“I strongly believe in that kind of representation,” Kow said. “Her fire for her constituents was unmatched.” 

Photo by Lesley Dwyer

Kow recalled Felts’ typical introduction on the campaign trail with a hearty laugh. She asked everyone she met the same three questions: How are you doing? How’s your mama? Do you know who your county commissioner is?

Felts was a true believer in citizen involvement in local government. If she taught one person how to research a pending development, she expected that person to then teach someone else. She often said, “People need to know how a cow pasture becomes a condominium.” 

“I’m invested in local politics and started a nonprofit because of Carol,” said Stacy Jessee, one of the founders of the nonprofit East Manatee Preservation. 

Jessee moved to Parrish from Great Britain in 2022. Wanting to learn more about her local government and politicians, she asked for help on Facebook. She was criticized for trying to gather such information from a social media post. 

But Felts, she sent Jessee a private message, asking if she wanted to meet up and come pet her horses.

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When Jessee visited Felts' 9-acre property in Myakka City, Felts realized that Jessee's children had never been on a farm or in a rural setting, so the family was given a full country experience. 

Before playing with the horses, the Jessees cleaned out the stalls and fed, brushed and bathed the horses. Then, Felts taught them all how to crack a whip. 

“She was larger than life,” Jessee said. 

But Felts was also humble, or as Kruse put it, she knew what she didn’t know.

She wasn’t afraid to admit that it was scary turning from a citizen activist to a county commissioner. 

When it was announced she had won the 2024 election, Felts told the East County Observer, “I’m as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Now, people expect things from me.” 

Felts worked around the clock to deliver on those expectations. Her aide, Selena Cunningham, noted that they worked seven days a week.

“If there was something we had to take care of right then, I don’t care if it was 9 o’clock at night, Carol was on it,” Cunningham said. “Our first phone calls would start around 7:30 in the morning, and a lot of nights our phone calls wouldn’t end until 10 or 11.”

Kruse commended Felts for the amount of time she spent speaking to directors and learning how everything in the county worked.

“I told her, ‘You’re not an activist anymore. You need to understand every aspect,' and she did,” Kruse said.

Residents applauded her fight against urban sprawl, but Kruse noted that “fighting developers” was only about 10% of her job. As a commissioner, Felts had to understand how the budget, roads, parks, libraries, fire and police departments worked.

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Cunningham said Felts set the bar for what a commissioner should be. 

“In a world where people are so fake, she was genuine,” Kow said. “She was so unique in that she was always trying to be respectful to people and trying to build bridges to understand. That’s a rare trait.”

Even on her own election night, despite not liking to drive at night, Felts held her party in west Bradenton because that's where most of her volunteers lived. 

She drove with Cunningham that night and joked that between the two of them, they drove in Braille.

Nothing about Felts, the citizen, changed when she became Commissioner Felts. She maintained both her convictions and her humor. 

Commissioner Jason Bearden noted how rare it is to see a politician as authentic as Felts. He described her as pure, smart and feisty. 

“In her last days, God gave her the desire of her heart, which was to become a county commissioner, and she did a phenomenal job representing her constituents,” Bearden said. “There wasn’t anybody like Carol, and I loved her for that."