Election Day in Pembroke Pines: Three vie for District 1 seat. Meet the candidates
If you live in east Pembroke Pines — anywhere from Hiatus Road past Pembroke Road through Florida’s Turnpike — how your neighborhood is run could change this year.
The city’s District 1 commission seat is up for grabs Tuesday, March 10, as part of Broward County’s municipal elections.
The three candidates: Incumbent Commissioner Tom Good, first-timer and retired Pembroke Pines police sergeant James Henry, and insurance agent Dennis Hinds, who is running for the third time.
The winner will serve a four-year term and take an oath to fulfill the duties asked of every member sitting on the Pembroke Pines City Commission:
“... Represent the public interest, promote prompt, courteous responses to citizen problems and concerns, provide clear leadership and direction, and assure the present and future fiscal integrity of the City.”
They’ll also be tasked with finding solutions to Pembroke Pines’ most pressing issues, including traffic and public safety improvements, state property tax reforms that could limit city services, and negotiating what might become of two elementary schools that will soon shut down.
Curious about who could fit the bill? Here are the District 1 candidates for Pembroke Pines’ 2026 election.
Tom Good
Commissioner Tom Good — the District 1 incumbent who considers himself “a product of Broward County” — was elected in 2018 and is vying for his third term.
His resume includes a six-year stint in the Navy post-high school and a 30-year career in public service, including two decades as Miramar’s director of public works and three years as Deerfield Beach’s assistant city manager.
He’s lived in Pembroke Pines for nearly 30 years — crediting the city to where he met his wife and raised his children — and now serves as district manager for the Central Broward Water Control District along with his government duties.
Good says his re-election campaign and priorities are simple: “continuing on with the vision and strategic planning that we’ve done in past.”
“Most everybody that I talk to in Pembroke Pines as I canvass ... are generally happy with Pembroke Pines,” Good told the Pembroke Pines News. on March 4. “In order to keep Pembroke Pines at the level of liveability and satisfaction, we need to address those (Strategic Plan) issues.”
For Good, that looks like staying the course with the city’s blueprint for key goals in the coming years — dubbed the Strategic Plan in 2024 — which targets fixing lack of public transportation and traffic management, improving parks and recreation facilities, expanding affordable housing, reinstating a recycling program and upgrading the city’s Water Treatment Plant to remove contaminants.
What’s got to change, the commissioner says, is how those objectives will be funded.
Last March, a $230 million bond referendum — which would’ve revamped police and recreation facilities, acquired land for new spaces and financed roadway improvements — was rejected by 65% of voters despite the ballot item targeting resident concerns.
“Everybody said, ‘These are the things we want.’ Problem with that bond issue is that it was a little bit too much,” he said. “We are in the face of some financial uncertainties with high prices, with all this inflation. Everything is becoming all of a sudden unaffordable.”
Prior to the March 11, 2025, special election for the referendum, he proposed breaking up the ballot item into multiple referendums to give residents more of a choice for which to vote ‘”yes.”
Following its failure at the polls, Good now proposes outsourcing funds to meet the Strategic Plans goals, suggesting county, state and federal grants, public private partnerships and leveraging surtax monies as alternatives the commission is considering.
“A lot of people may have reacted to that bond issue in a way that was, uncertain, not really happy, but the point was is that they got to vote. They got to choose,” Good said. “A lot of moving parts here, but we heard the public loud and clear, and so we’re addressing this piece by piece.”
Good also wants to make sure the public is heavily involved in decisions regarding a state-sponsored property tax repeal that could descrease revenue used for city services and what becomes of the emptied buildings of two city elementary schools closing starting with the 2026-27 academic year.
He says citizen advisory boards will be “the first set of eyes” to get insight into city services or projects that would be impacted and has already petitioned Broward school board members to consider their residents before agreeing to “grossly negligent” developments.
The expertise and connections gained in his decades-long public service career and his commitment to Pembroke Pines are why he believes he’d be the best fit for the District 1 seat.
“I’ve been here 30 years, I have a vested interest in this city like no other. Certainly within my district I will make sure that people are happy,” Good said. “What was the value in my career is the fact that I developed relationships with many different other agencies. ... We all know that the most important thing about how to get a problem resolved is to know who to go to.”
James Henry
James Henry is this election’s sole first-time candidate and says he chose to run because “I see a lot of things going on that I want to fix.”
“If I see something wrong, I’m not going to complain about it. I’m going to do something about it,” Henry told the Pembroke Pines News.
His background includes a seven-year career in the Coast Guard followed by almost three decades of service at the Pembroke Pines Police Department, where he was a Community Affairs sergeant and team lead for its Crisis Response team.
Formerly a Coral Springs resident, he’s lived in Pines for the past four years.
Henry’s grassroots election campaign — which he described as “getting out and meeting people” — is entirely self-financed, with city records showing his largest expense has gone toward “mailers.”
“It’s been a learning process for me. Fun, meeting a lot of people, hearing what’s going on, but it’s a huge learning curve,” he said. “What is actually the root cause of the problem? That’s what I’ve found out and that’s what I’ve looked at and that’s what I can help address.”
The retired police sergeant noted three issues he’d tackle that frequently came up when speaking with District 1 residents: traffic, North Perry Airport crashes and building a highway exit for Broward Community College on 72nd Avenue.
Finding solutions for these problems is as simple as seating the right people at the table to solve them, according to Henry.
Fixing overcrowded roads could look like conducting traffic studies with PPPD’s Traffic Unit, he says, and reinstating safety at North Perry Airport could be achieved by gathering local and federal aviation agencies as well as environmental experts and flight instructors.
Like Good, he also says the $230 million bond referendum — which sought to finance those projects — was fruitless because it asked too much of residents.
He believes it may have been speculative when determining what Pembroke Pines residents want to see changed in their community.
But one of the main obstacles to finding solutions is the “theatrics” of the City Commission, according to Henry.
“Right now, the current commission is divided. ... You can see the hostilities and the nonsense that’s going on, and it has to stop,” he said. “Find the problem, solve the problem, and move forward. ... I want to take the politics out of politics.”
Before determining how to navigate the state’s looming property tax repeal or move the needle with empty school spaces, he says commissioners need to be informed before “just throwing blanket stuff out there.”
Also on Henry’s to-do list if elected is to create a membership program with the Miramar Pembroke Pines Regional Chamber of Commerce where high school students are paired with professionals in industries they’re interested in pursuing.
“Why would you choose me? I’m energetic, I’m honest, I have integrity, I’m for the people, but most importantly, I want to make things better,” Henry said. “I’m going to make informed decisions and move the city in the right direction and make this the best place to raise your family,”
Dennis Hinds
Dennis Hinds — who is making his third attempt at the District 1 seat — declined an interview with the Pembroke Pines News, citing his busy schedule and dwindling time left to canvass voters.
Hinds is a New York-born Jamaican-American who’s lived in Florida for the past 24 years and brings to the ballot a two-decade career in corporate banking. He’s now an insurance agenct for the Georgia-based Legacy Real Estate Group.
“I only have seven more days left to knock on as many doors as I can just to talk about togetherness, unity, change and love,” he told the Pembroke Pines News in a brief statement on March 3.
Those four words — togetherness, unity, change and love — encompass Hinds’ campaign slogan, he says, and branch off into target goals per his website: economic growth and jobs, families, youth and seniors, and public safety and quality of life.
Some of his priorities include hosting workshops to help residents start businesses, expanding recreational programs for kids and wellness initiatives for seniors and build city-county relationships to improve services.
If voted in, he’d be one of the first Black elected officials in the Pembroke Pines Commission’s history, according to news publication Caribbean National Weekly.
This story was originally published March 6, 2026 at 4:30 AM.
