Let’s thank the Miami Foundation for having and recording a series of forums this month with candidates for several races on the August 20 ballot — and posting them on their website for all voters to see. We are lucky that they think it’s important. It is part of the Vote Miami awareness initiative to increase voter participation, after a 47% turnout in the 2022 election.
They stressed that the forums, which are about an hour long each, were not debates — which is too bad. Ladra misses real debates. But we have to applaud the use of the mute button when the candidates’ time was up. Wish we could do that to sitting electeds.
The most recent is Thursday’s forum for the Miami-Dade County Commission District 11 candidates, incumbent Roberto “Rob” Gonzalez and history teacher Bryan Paz-Hernandez. A third suspected plantidate, Claudia Rainville, didn’t show up, por supuesto, because she’s a plantidate.
Gonzalez, who dialed in from his car, didn’t make it to the end. Ladra doesn’t know if he hung up or if the connection was lost, because he did have technical difficulties. But it wasn’t before they addressed campaign reform (thanks for the question, Dani Rivera) and Gonzalez made an unfortunate comment about Paz-Hernandez being a “poor gentleman” that his opponent immediately seized on.
“A lot of the companies that this poor gentleman is talking about have contributed to the mayor, have contributed to every commissioner on that dais,” Gonzalez said, referring to his political action committee’s special interest donations. “Let me be clear, every single one of those donors understands that to me, those contributions mean nothing.”
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At the same time, he said the contributions equaled influence and support and said people donated to his campaign because he was going to win. “I am the current county commissioner and I am the future county commissioner,” he said, quite confidently.
The “poor gentleman” thing was likely not about his economic status, but, rather, his limited knowledge of county issues and policies. Didn’t stop Paz-Hernandez from running with it in the wrong context, posting an outraged video on social media saying that the phrase was a slight to working people.
In fact, the high cost of living was pretty much the theme of this forum.
“I’m sick and tired of traffic congestion, sick and tired of over development and sick and tired of the high cost of living,” the teacher said. “Property taxes are really high, property insurance is really high. We are also seeing political corruption go left and right without being stopped.
“We have so many folks in their 20s and 30s who are leaving Miami because it is unaffordable,” Paz-Hernandez said, adding that seniors and middle class families are left out. “It’s becoming a city almost for the rich by the rich.”
He championed county incentives for homeowners to do resiliency upgrades and turn those into insurance savings and he pushed his big platform items — Metrorail extensions to Kendall that includes stops at Florida International University and Miami-Dade College’s Kendall campus.
“With all due respect, I’m sick and tired of politicians talking about the Metrorail. This is something that was promised by Alex Penelas over 30 years ago,” Gonzalez said. “This is something that simply is not going to happen at this point in time because of the amount of money that needs to be spent.”
He said a better idea was to create live, work and play nodes to keep traffic circulating more locally. “We have plenty of live in District 11. We need more work and play,” Gonzalez said, citing Coral Gables and Doral, and adding that it was not feasible for people to take a bus 90 minute to get to work.
Gonzalez said that the job of local government was to provide public safety and the best possible parks and to “make sure that people have the ability to have a good economic position, to make it so that people can go out there, make living and have the best life they possibly can.”
Oh, and he loves America.
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The other defining topic was the Kendall Parkway, an extension of the expressway that Gonzalez is working to get built and Paz-Hernandez is against. “The idea that it will reduce traffic congestion is just false. It is as false as Santa Clause comes every Christmas and drops off presents.
“When you build more highways and more roads, traffic congestion gets worse. It’s called induced commute,” he said, citing studies and adding that there needs to be more affordable, attractive transit options and less overdevelopment.
Paz-Hernandez said he was a good option as an NPA registered voter because he can work with everyone on both sides of the aisle while Gonzalez, a Republican, has alienated people by posting very extreme positions on his socials. Gonzalez said he gets along with everyone, his “best friend” on the dais is Democrat Commissioner Kionne McGhee and that he is the only commissioner with a standing monthly meeting with the Democrat mayor, Daniella Levine Cava.
“Sometimes we talk for half an hour, sometimes we talk for hours,” he said.
Gonzalez also brought up the issue of his new district office by himself, even though that is one of the things working against him. He tried to spin the issue to say that he is bringing more services to the area, but Paz-Hernandez reminded everyone that this second district office — the first one is still under a lease — will cost about $1 million over the course of nine years.
Earlier in the week, there were two other forums. One was for the county commission District 3 candidates, incumbent Keon Hardemon and former Commissioner Audrey Edmonson, who said she was running “due to popular demand.” A long shot third candidate, Marion Brown, did not participate.
Edmonson said she would go back to what she was doing before, and added the establishment of a business hub in Little Haiti. She also took shots at Hardemon. “I think a better District 3 would have a commissioner who returns calls, a commissioner who is accessible to the community, a commissioner who will meet with the residents,” she said, adding that he doesn’t got to condo association meetings.
Hardemon said that was false and that he had met with constituents throughout the district. “It’s interesting to me that the commissioner would say such a thing,” Hardemon says near the end. “Audrey Edmonson is going to lie about my record. I’m going to tell the truth about her.”
Hardemon, who said he was raised in public housing, also actually gave Edmonson props for making investments in the renovation of the historic Lyric Theatre but said that Overtown “did not become a proper destination until I became a city of Miami commissioner.”
Later he said that Edmonson has “a strange relationship with the truth,” and that she called the District 2 position “my seat,” several times. “She doesn’t realize that this is the people’s seat. There are term limits and elections for a reason.
“I’ve knocked on thousands of doors, literally, and nobody is begging for Commissioner Edmonson to come back,” he said, stressing at least twice that she already served for 16 years. “We don’t need a shoulder to cry on in our community. We need a commissioner that is going to lead the district forward.”
The other forum last week was for the tax collector, one of the new constitutional countywide races, which are partisan, but Community Council Member Dariel Fernandez did not show up so it was an open mic for Hialeah Councilman Bryan Calvo, who is on the ballot Aug. 20, and former Miami Beach Commissioner and Democrat state rep David Richardson, who has no primary, but looks much older with that patchy facial hair.
The week prior, the Foundation had a forum for District 7 Commissioner Raquel Regalado and former Pinecrest Mayor Cindy Lerner. The third candidate, Miami-Dade School Board Policer Officer Richard Praschnik, was not present. Ladra suspects he’s a plantidate, too (more on that later). But it’s just as well, since this is really a rematch between the two women.
And that allowed the forum to show the real difference between the two real candidates.
Regalado, who beat Lerner in a runoff in 2020, sounds like a know-it-all, but she really does know it all, reciting projects off the top of her head, studies, funding sources and mechanisms, talking fast so she can get everything in because there’s a lot, citing what she’s been able to do already — she has sponsored the most legislation of any commissioner in 15 years — and what she’s in the middle of doing.
She’s a true policy wonk, a government nerd who knows and is deeply involved in infrastructure, water and sewer projects — she is the architect of the septic to sewer plan — restoring recycling services (at a savings) and providing safety and quality of life to neuro-divergent residents, which include her two autistic children, and their families.
Lerner seems stuck in the past, saying over and over again that she was the mayor of Pinecrest and again talking about government by committee. She never met a committee she didn’t like. She said community policing was the way to build trust, like we were in the 1980s. Lerner also seemed ill prepared — “um” was a favorite word — and leaned on generalities and buzz words instead of specifics.
She has nothing to run on. So, she decided to use most of her time, yet again, to attack the incumbent and say that the people of Kendall do not feel represented. Lerner promised to open a West Kendall district office.
The former state rep knows what to say. Kendall is where Regalado is probably the weakest, having pissed off voters in the Calusa community with her vote to develop the golf course and the rest of the unincorporated area in her district with the vote to move the Urban Development Boundary, which she justifies with the acquisition of more than 200 acres of environmental endangered lands, like it’s a swap. The Sierra Club and the Kendall Federation of Homeowners Association’s political action committee have both endorsed Lerner.
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The Foundation also had a forum last week for the Democrat candidates in the race for Supervisor of Elections and, lo and behold, all three of them were there: Former state rep and election attorney JC Planas, political operative Howard Willis and digital media entrepreneur Arnold “Arnie” Weiss.
Planas, who Ladra has already established is the most qualified of the three (or of anybody in the world except, maybe, current election chief Christina White), said he had been involved in 20 recounts across the state working as an election lawyer and has been at the election department to count ballots both as a part of a voter protection team and as a candidate’s attorney.
He said “transparency, efficiency, speed and accuracy,” were the most important things to accomplish and that he would work with the new sheriff, when elected, to protect the sanctity of the vote. Weiss warned that a “delicate balance” would be needed. “We don’t want people to be intimidated by a law enforcement presence at the poll,” he said.
Planas also has a better grasp of what’s actually happening already in the elections department when it comes to early voting, access for disabled voters, how voting irregularities and allegations are handled.
“We need to listen,” Weiss said, because he had nothing really to contribute.
Willis is slick, but he, too, seemed to be grasping at straws. When asked about the new law that purges the mail-in ballot rolls every two years, he didn’t really have a plan, but he had good words. “I’m very, very, very adamant about updating, changing and moving some of these laws around,” Willis said.
Moving some laws around? ¿Como?
Weiss said that there needed to be a better way to verify candidates so that there aren’t so many ghost or plantidate candidates on the ballot trying to screw things up for a real candidate.
Ladra thinks that’s a fabulous idea. Wish we already had something this year.
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