The Fight to Lead

On the same ballot for president in one of the most divisive national elections in American history, will be the two candidates vying for Miami-Dade County Mayor.

After emerging with the two highest vote counts in a crowded seven-way race in August, county commissioners Esteban “Steve” Bovo and Daniella Levine Cava will face off again on Nov. 3. The victor will replace outgoing Mayor Carlos Giménez, and lord over a more than $9 billion budget with the power to hire and fire most county administrators and veto legislation.

If Levine Cava wins, she'll be the first woman Miami-Dade County mayor and the first Democrat to sit in the mayor's chair since Alex Penelas. If Bovo wins, he'll continue the succession of Cuban American men to hold the seat since 1996.

Bovo, a Republican, has been a county commissioner representing District 13 in northwestern Miami-Dade since 2011. Previously a Hialeah councilman and still a resident, he runs an international consulting business. Bovo is endorsed by the Republican Party of Miami-Dade County.

Levine Cava has been the county’s District 8 commissioner – which covers part of South Dade – since 2014. A lawyer and social worker by training and a resident of Pinecrest, she is the founder of what’s now known as Catalyst Miami, a nonprofit organization that seeks to alleviate problems affecting low-income communities. She’s backed by the Miami-Dade County Democratic Party.

The county’s elected posts, including mayor, are technically nonpartisan races, as are many issues facing Miami residents. In the infamous words of former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, "All politics is local."

Traffic jams and mass transit

Andres Althabe, president of the Biscayne Neighborhood Association in the City of Miami’s Omni-Edgewater area, said traffic is an important issue, noting it takes more than 30 minutes to drive between downtown and Aventura.

“The traffic is not going to be resolved until public transportation is increased,” he said.

Bovo said he’s a proponent of improving mass transit, expanding rail and implementing the county’s Strategic Miami Area Rapid Transit plan that aims to establish rail and rapid bus transit corridors throughout Miami-Dade.

“I believe strongly that we should create a robust master plan, like the SMART plan, and actually fulfill it, so that we can help a lot of people to move in our community,” he added.

However, he also thinks the county should be ready to reevaluate parts of that plan in light of COVID-19 realities. That includes assessing rush-hour patterns now altered due to people working from home.

Levine Cava said traffic jams have already returned, and the county should “double down” on implementing SMART corridors. Nevertheless, she’s against giving the Genting Group around $770 million over 30 years to build a monorail between South Beach and an existing Metrorail station by the company’s 44,000-square-foot Omni Center.

“I thought the price tag was inflated and there are ethical concerns on how the procurement was handled, which was raised by the inspector general’s office,” she explained.

Genting, which employed two former Giménez campaign advisors as lobbyists, made an unsolicited proposal to construct the monorail last year. When a formal RFP (request for proposals) was issued in May it was the sole bidder. That same month, a report by the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics surfaced detailing an undisclosed 2018 meeting Giménez had with Genting executives in Hong Kong regarding a monorail project. In a June 1 memo, Inspector General Mary Cagle stated that the ethics report findings raised “serious concerns about the integrity of this corridor project.”

But Bovo doesn’t want to rule out making a deal with Genting just yet.

“We’ve been talking about connectivity from downtown to the beach since I was in grade school,” Bovo said. “We should study what is being offered.”

He’s optimistic about a Brightline deal that will create an affordable commuter line along the FEC tracks between the MiamiCentral station in Park West and the Ojus area west of Aventura.

“We have already committed to building a station [west of] Aventura. I think that is going to be a game changer for the folks in the northeast sector of the county,” Bovo said.

Levine Cava said she’s “very eager” to establish a commuter line on the FEC tracks, but insisted she’ll only support a deal that the county taxpayers and commuters can afford. She voted against investing $76 million to develop Brightline’s Aventura Station in Ojus.

“The reason I voted against it was that a round-trip fare would cost $20. How would that alleviate traffic?” she asked.

Because commissioners Cava and Xavier Suarez were the only two dissenting votes, the $76 million allocation was passed by the county commission last November.

Clean water and the bay

Another issue raised by residents is the health of the bay, which is experiencing algae bloom and major fish kill. The Biscayne Bay Task Force in an August report blamed fertilizer runoff, compromised septic tanks, stormwater runoff and cracked sewage lines. Brent Latham, mayor of North Bay Village, which is surrounded by Biscayne Bay, blames the county.

“Here in North Bay Village, we passed a local ordinance [restricting] fertilizers and pesticides, but we really need countywide action on that,” Latham said. “We have pesticides leaching from El Portal and Miami Shores and that affects our water quality. It’s not a one municipality thing.”

Levine Cava has been pressing Giménez’s administration for reports on Biscayne Bay, septic tanks and replacing the county’s aging sewer lines and plants.

“I’m extremely frustrated by the delay,” she said, and vowed that finding ways to finance improvements to the county’s sewer system and addressing septic tanks will be a priority of her administration.

Cleaning up Biscayne Bay and ensuring clean water is also of huge importance to Bovo.

“I think we do need to [regulate] fertilizers … and more important than that is this issue with the septic tanks and our archaic water and sewer system,” he said.

Bovo believes “the septic tank issue” is something on which the county must be “ready to move,” which will be expensive. A 2016 county estimate projected that hooking up just 83,000 properties to a sewage system will cost $3.8 billion, with a significant portion of that bill falling to property owners. He expects the county will likely have to partner with homeowners to pull it off, possibly through a ”Ygrene-like program.”

Levine Cava said she’s constantly working on ways to make Miami-Dade more resilient to climate change and sea level rise, including championing solar power legislation (which has yet to pass), regulations that will reduce the carbon footprints of buildings and electrifying county vehicles. Most importantly, she stressed, is upgrading county infrastructure and updating future urban development plans.

Bovo agrees that county officials have a “fiduciary responsibility” to plan for sea level rise, otherwise things “will go sidewise very quickly” as insurance rates and other costs skyrocket.

“Once it starts hitting people in the pocketbook, people are going to react. We need to work now to avoid those things in the future,” which he insisted the county is already doing. “Everything we do has a resilient effort to it, [taking into account] what it will mean for the county 10, 15, 20, 40 years from now.”

COVID-19 and the health crisis

Both candidates expressed disappointment on how Giménez has handled the pandemic, though for different reasons.

“Our mayor was very slow, in my opinion, to acknowledge the crisis, to move forward with a testing regiment, to close down at the time we needed to close down, to have a universal masking requirement and many, many more things,” Levine Cava said.

She believes Giménez didn’t put enough emphasis on the testing, contact tracing and isolation needed to control the disease, nor did the state or federal government.

“It’s been pitiful. The state has been so far behind in implementing [contact tracing]. I pushed and pushed the mayor to do it at the county level. He resisted,” Levine Cava said. In May, Giménez relented and committed to hiring up to 1,000 contact tracers.

Bovo laments how local government’s reaction to COVID-19 has adversely affected the economy.

“We need to understand that unless there is a vaccine, we’re going to be living with this virus for a while. That means I would rather sit with businesses and have a conversation and just point-blank ask them: ‘How are you going to open and keep your customers and employees safe?’ and then hold them to it. It’s very simple, in my opinion,” he said, adding that he’ll also consult with health care experts.

To encourage small businesses shuttered by the pandemic to reopen, Bovo is in favor of suspending “some” regulations.

“The only way we can recover is to get [people] back to work as quickly as possible,” he said.

Levine Cava, on the other hand, developed an intricate plan to help the economy bounce back called RECOVER Miami-Dade that includes reinvesting in small businesses and ensuring that at least 5% of county contracts are obtained by local businesses under 5 years old – with special consideration for businesses owned by minorities, women and veterans – among other things. But first, she asserted, the community must be confident it will be able to safely patronize businesses.

Affordable housing

Levine Cava wants to increase affordable housing, enable more low- and moderate-income households to purchase a home, and lift more people out of poverty. To lower the poverty rate she’d like to diversify the economy beyond tourism, and work with school systems and “a number of industries” to create internships and apprenticeships. To increase affordable housing she wants the county to utilize funds earmarked for that as well as for homeownership assistance, money she insists isn’t being spent, plus explore lowering construction costs through “form building and construction-related matters.”

“We need to put out 10,000 new units per year … that are within affordable limits for the majority of our workforce,” she said. “We can also change our density requirements and we can get developers to build mixed-income housing.”

Bovo is all in favor of encouraging private developers to build affordable residential units through incentives, and diversifying the economy by providing good county services and “safe streets” that will encourage more industries to come to Miami-Dade. But he’s against creating more workforce and affordable housing subsidies, and is wary of county government getting too involved in trying to solve “social issues.”

“Maybe the federal government has the ability to print money and do these other things, but at the county level we don’t,” he said. “We have to have a balanced budget and that balanced budget is not based on just printing money, so to speak. We can’t turn to the taxpayer … and say ‘Give me more money so I can fix these problems.’”

Levine Cava said she that although the county shares geography with its 34 municipalities, the county’s administration hasn’t looked at city governments as partners.

“I actually plan to push the reset button on the relationship between the counties and cities,” she said. “We are only going to solve our challenges if we work together.”

Bovo said the first thing he’ll do if elected mayor is meet with all mayors and managers within the county.

“We need to work together,” he said, and added that doing so was especially important during the pandemic.

Not everyone lives in a municipality, however. C. Mark Robson, a board member of the Skylake/Highland Lakes Homeowners Association, said he’d like to know which candidate’s administration will “encourage unincorporated areas of the county to be left as is,” and if they’ll assist residents in forming their own cities or urge unincorporated pockets to be annexed by existing municipalities.

Levine Cava admitted Miami-Dade may be “approaching the point where we have to make a decision as a county whether we should get more full incorporation or not.”

But, she said, “I would not stand in the way of incorporation or annexation where it’s in the best interest of those in the area.”

Bovo said when unincorporated residents seek cityhood, it’s usually because they’re not pleased with the services the county provides.

“That should be something we should pay close attention to, as to why that has happened,” he emphasized.

If an area’s residents petition the county to establish their own city or become part of an existing one, Bovo said he won’t oppose it – so long as it comes from that community, and not from a county commissioner.

“I will oppose any attempt to do it from the dais,” he said. “To build a city for the sake of building a city is not the right thing to do.”