Meet the Finalist for President and Chief Executive Officer of Broward College

(Information provided by the candidate)

  Torey Alston has spent nearly 20 years as a public servant in the State of Florida. In 2010, Florida Governor Charlie Crist appointed him to serve on the Florida A&M University Board of Trustees. Subsequent to that, Florida Governor Rick Scott reappointed Mr. Alston to serve out the full five-year term ending January 2015, where he served as Chair of the Student Affairs/Academic Affairs Committee and Governance Committee.  Mr. Alston then served two stints under former Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s senior leadership team with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, leading implementation of the 2012 General Obligation Bond Program updating technology, academic programs, school construction and renovation of existing facilities. In October 2021, Mr. Alston became the first leader of the Greater Miami Expressway Agency (GMX), where he led the transition from the dissolved MDX to the new GMX, today an agency with $3 billion in assets and $270 million in revenue.  Previously, Mr. Alston served as Chief of Staff for the Florida Department of Transportation.  With more than 6,200 employees and then an annual $10.3 billion budget, he served as the principal advisor to the FDOT secretary and main facilitator for other state agencies on matters of administration, policy, and overall agency operations.  In November 2021, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Mr. Alston to the Broward County Commission (District 9), where he served as a member of the Broward Metropolitan Planning Organization, Value Adjustment Board, Circuit 17 Juvenile Justice Advisory Board and Pompano Beach N.W. Residential Advisory Board.  In August 2022, Governor DeSantis appointed Mr. Alston to the School Board of Broward County, Florida, where he would go on to be the Chair.

Mr. Alston is a Broward County native and a product of Broward County Public Schools, having attended Walker Elementary, Parkway Middle and Blanche Ely High School.  Mr. Alston received his undergraduate degree in business administration from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) and a master’s in business administration with a concentration in marketing and management.   Recently, Mr. Alston was admitted into the Doctor of Education Program at the University of Miami.

Mr. Llontop is currently an Independent Director of the Board at the Barton Group, a manufacturer of garnet material used in Waterjet cutting and sandblasting applications, where he serves as the Chair of the Audit & Finance, and as a member of the Nominating & Governance Committees. Additionally, he is an Executive Partner at Salt Creek Capital, a San Francisco Bay Area-based private investment firm. He brings more than 30 years of general management experience in the Building Materials and Industrial Manufacturing sectors. Prior to these roles, Mr. Llontop was the President & CEO, at Giant Cement Holding Inc. a $250 million revenue Cement Company, where he led the company’s turnaround from a negative operating profit position to $37 million in EBITDA within a four-year period, prior to selling a majority stake – at a premium valuation – to a Mexican conglomerate owned by the Carlos Slim group. He has lived in 10 countries and has had extensive domestic and international experience, having led five post-merger integration acquisitions and performing an equal number of business turnarounds in several regions primarily at CEMEX, a Global Building Materials Company, most notably as the Regional President of a $1 billion vertically integrated business in Central Eastern Europe & Israel. Before that, Mr. Llontop was the President of the Company’s $250 million Egyptian operations.

His success at branding commodity products and shape strategy in the cement industry caught the attention of academia, most recently in a Darden School of Business case study which he co-authored. Prior to that Mr. Llontop was the main protagonist in a Harvard Business case study (“CEMEX: Rewarding the Egyptian Retailers,” HBS, March 22, 2006). He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Virginia, an MBA from Rice University and graduated from the general management pro-gram at Harvard Business. Mr. Llontop lives in the Washington, DC area with his family. An active sports enthusiast, he received a full scholarship to play soccer at the University of Virginia after being chosen as a Soccer All American in Junior College.

Public Forums

Public forums for each of the finalists have been scheduled at 1 p.m. at Bailey Hall on the A. Hugh Adams Central Campus, 3501 Davie Rd., Davie.
The forums are scheduled as follows:
Wednesday, January 29 and Thursday, January 30
In addition, there will be a final interview by the Broward College District Board of Trustees of the finalists, starting at 8:30 a.m. Friday, January 31 at the College’s Willis Holcombe Center, 111 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale.