How ballot only had 1 candidate for seat

Lawyer Danielle Cohen Higgins won an appointment Monday to the MiamiDade County Commission after commissioners opted not to consider the other six candidates who applied for the South Miami-Dade seat vacated by Mayor Daniella Levine Cava last month.

Cohen Higgins, who started running for the seat in 2019 after Levine Cava announced her mayoral run, was the only nominee when commissioners were given the chance to select from the seven people who submitted applications for the post last week.

The appointment required seven votes, and the commission procedure established by acting Chairwoman Rebeca Sosa allowed any commissioner to add a candidate’s name to the ballot. When Sosa called for nominations, Commissioner Kionne McGhee nominated Cohen Higgins, and none of the remaining 11 board members nominated a competitor. Minutes later, Cohen Higgins was accepting her appointment to serve as a Miami-Dade commissioner until the 2022 elections.

“Many people are hurting,” Cohen Higgins, 38, said in brief remarks inside the commission chambers after the vote. “I look forward to working with you to revive Miami-Dade.”

A Jamaican American, Cohen Higgins was born in Miami and raised by a single mother after her father died. The family lived briefly in public housing, and in her application letter she said she had no doubt COVID-19 would have brought desperate times for her family had it hit 30 years ago. “I would have been that little girl sitting in the back of [her] mother’s car ... waiting for a bag of groceries,” she wrote.

Commissioners appointed Cohen Higgins in a 10-1 vote during a special meeting called to fill the seat Levine Cava held for six years before winning the 2020 mayoral election. The lone No came from René

García, the commissioner who led the charge to call a special election to fill the seat. Joe Martinez said he abstained from the vote to protest the appointment.

The other candidates for the post were neighborhood activist Alicia Arellano, former state senators Frank Artiles and Dwight Bullard, former Cutler Bay mayor Peggy Bell, Palmetto Bay vice mayor John DuBois, and counselor Leonarda Duran Buike.

“The process was skewed,” Bullard, now political director of the

New Florida Majority advocacy group, said after the vote. He sat on a folding chair in the lobby of the county’s Stephen P. Clark Center, the new designated area for the public during Miami-Dade commission meetings after access to the chambers was restricted as a COVID measure. Commissioners did not give the candidates a chance to speak.

“It’s not a question of sour grapes,” Bullard said. “There was a lack of transparency in the appointment process.”

With the Cohen Higgins appointment, which takes effect immediately, the partisan balance for the officially nonpartisan board tips back to a seven-seat majority for Democrats on the 13-seat commission.

Cohen Higgins, a trial attorney and married mother of two, was sworn in shortly after the noon special meeting called for the appointment. She took the District 8 spot on the dais during a second special meeting called to manage the final weeks of the county’s $474 million allocation of federal CARES Act funding. The program expires Dec. 30.

Her first vote was in favor of a resolution by Commissioner Keon Hardemon loosening the rules for how cities can spend $75 million set aside for relief programs and government expenses tied to COVID.

After that, she filmed a video addressed to District 8 residents and posted it on a new Twitter feed, @CommishDCH.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” she said. “Thank you for this incredible opportunity to serve.”