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A Lee County candidate forum Tuesday morning was missing something — the incumbent.

District 3 Commissioner Ray Judah refused to attend the weekly breakfast hosted by BUPAC, Business People United for Political Action Committee, saying it was a foregone conclusion the organization would endorse one of his opponents.

“The membership and composition of BUPAC has changed drastically over the last several years,” Judah said. “The endorsement process is a fait accompli. There would be no need to go through a process with a predetermined outcome.”

Those opponents, Republican candidate Anita Cereceda and unaffiliated candidate Les Cochran, each made a case for election.

“I think the public deserves an open forum,” said Cochran, former president of Youngstown State University in Ohio from 1992 to 2000. “As many open forums as possible.”

Cochran, 69, said his experience as a university president will translate well to county government.

“Anyone in the university has to have academic excellence,” he said. “You have to go through that to be a professor. Usually you don’t decide to be an administrator. Someone else decides.”

The problem-solving skills he exhibited as university president are needed on the board, Cochran said, and it takes common sense.

“How do you deal with 450 Ph.Ds?” he asked. “You’re not going to out-debate them.”

Cochran repeated the common-sense theme.

“When you see a disconnect from the values you know and cherish, you see leaders who don’t share those values. In county government common sense is not so common,” he said.

Cochran recalled the Amendment 1 vote in January when 82 percent of Lee voters called for cuts in property taxes.

“If you’re in business and 82 percent of your clients say they don’t like your product, what do you do?” he asked. “They’ve done nothing, like it didn’t happen. They’re clueless.”

Cereceda is the former mayor of Fort Myers Beach. She served three terms as mayor, then two on the town council before leaving to challenge Judah in 2000. She won 44 percent of the vote in the Republican primary.

Cereceda said she is running now for the same reason she ran for mayor in 1995.

“I got into the race mostly because of a passion for public service,” she said.

Cereceda said she’d bring an open-mindedness and nonadversarial manner to the board. The current commission is dysfunctional, she said.

“I’d much rather have said this with Ray Judah here, because I feel like I’m talking behind his back,” she said. “He’s using the dais as a bully pulpit.”

Cereceda said the county needs someone in office with real-world experience.

“Not someone who’s lived their lives inside the walls of the county courthouse,” she said.

Judah has served as commissioner for District 3 for 20 years, and before that was a county planner.

Cereceda and Judah will square off in a closed Republican primary Aug. 26. Cochran will face the winner in November.

BUPAC past Chairman Glee Duff said he was distressed Judah chose not to come, and by the reasons he gave. He said the organization, the oldest PAC in Lee County, was always known as a fair nonpartisan group.

“I wish there was some way we could get this organization back to that level,” he said.