The choice for voters in Orange County Commission District 1 is not complicated: It’s either business as usual or change.

This pandemic has illustrated what business as usual looks like — a service class of workers whose families teeter on an economic knife’s edge, while big money interests throw a party.

Nicole Wilson represents change, a new face on the commission that’s not beholden to big money, liberating her to represent the people who have been under-represented for way too long.

Wilson, an environmental attorney, has a heart for workers who can’t afford a decent place to live, even on two incomes. People who earn so little that they struggle with paying for day-care and gas and groceries.

Wilson’s first political inkling came when, as a PTO mom, she was forced to wage an unreasonably difficult battle just to stop the county from widening a road in front of a school, which she believed would present a danger to kids.

That inkling took on a firmer shape when Orange County supported a decision to extend a highway through the Split Oak Forest environmental preserve to accommodate more development in east Central Florida, a measure Wilson opposed. (This Editorial Board supported that decision, but only because the alternative routes were worse.)

She decided to run for office, her advocacy demonstrating a heart for environmental causes and growth management that’s been lacking in recent years. Wilson advocates for solutions to the lack of affordable housing, the need for policing reforms and the Orange County’s “unique opportunity to raise the stock of all essential workers making them our primary concern.”

In contrast to Wilson’s inclination toward change is incumbent Commissioner Betsy VanderLey’s impulse to maintain the status quo, including her acceptance of dirty politics as simply the way things are done.

VanderLey’s the establishment candidate, and she’s proving it by racking up tons of endorsements from politicians and many thousands in contributions from Realtors, builders and hospitality interests that want to preserve the status quo.

Exhibit A: VanderLey has demonstrated zero interest in revisiting the way Orange County’s tourist tax money is spent. Right now, nearly all of it flows either into projects and promotion that benefit businesses or into venues that benefit people with the kind of incomes that can afford tickets to Broadway plays and basketball games.

When fellow Commissioner Emily Bonilla recently noted the growing income gap and suggested it might be time to revisit spending decisions that first took shape in 1978, VanderLey waved off the idea as she might a mosquito.

Her website doesn’t even bother with lip service to the plight of thousands who work hard every day in jobs that keep them in virtual poverty.

Instead, in senior yearbook fashion, she trumpets endorsements from real estate and chamber of commerce groups and the many ways she’s been honored by those groups, along with lists of the countless boards she’s served on and chairmanships bestowed upon her.

So eager is she to win, VanderLey was unconcerned that her political mentor, Scott Boyd, was involved in recruiting his stepdaughter to become a last-minute, write-in candidate in the District 1 race. Because of Orange County’s interpretation of election laws, that means the race moved from the general election in the fall to the primary in August, giving the lesser-known Wilson less time to campaign and enhancing VanderLey’s huge advantage in campaign contributions.

VanderLey claimed she didn’t know about any of this until after the fact, because we’re supposed to believe that one of her key supporters — Boyd — set the write-in scheme into motion without consulting with her beforehand. Sure.

(We would have asked VanderLey about that, and her positions and record, but after a news article was published about the write-in candidacy, she ducked our interview, claiming the Editorial Board couldn’t be fair.)

Wilson is, by every measure, the underdog in this race. Powerful businesses and politicians do not want her on the County Commission, for fear that Wilson would interfere with the economic system that’s rigged in favor of special interests and against the people who make the economy work.

We welcome the interference and the voice that would speak up for workers who are bearing the brunt of this recession and bearing witness to the neglect that Orange County enables.

We’re endorsing Nicole Wilson so those people might have a voice.

Election endorsements are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board, which consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick, David Whitley and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Sentinel Columnist Scott Maxwell participates in interviews and deliberations. To watch the candidate interviews, go to OrlandoSentinel.com/interviews.

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