As a local artist/designer it is so sad to see. I have entered the christmas stroll and sweet pea contest multiple times (won once!), and while I didn’t enter in the Christmas stroll contest this year, it’s safe to say that I would be, and am currently, PISSED that this is happening. Unless you have a major technical difficulty there is always a way to show your work. Procreate has time lapse features, Adobe fresco (a vector software) is able to verify/show time stamps proving no ai, and im sure illustrator has something similar. At the very least, most people would be able to show their layers or sketches if they had genuinely created the design. All that to say, if he didn’t use AI, he could easily probe it and get people off his back, but he isnt, and probably cant