Former Miami-Dade Commissioner Steve Bovo files to run for Hialeah mayor
Esteban “Steve” Bovo, a former Miami-Dade County commissioner who ran unsuccessfully for county mayor in November, filed to run Monday for mayor of Hialeah, where he got his start in politics.
Bovo announced his long-rumored campaign during a press conference outside Hialeah City Hall at 11:45 a.m., and then went inside the building to fill out the paperwork to run.
“I’ve raised my family here. I care deeply about what goes on in my community,” Bovo said at the press conference, calling Hialeah a “blue collar” community that cares about “family values.”
“What we hope to do here today is begin a process of what does Hialeah look like 30 to 40 years from now,” Bovo continued, adding that he wants to make the city “sustainable, not only for all of us, but for future generations.”
Hialeah, the county’s second-largest city by population, will hold its municipal election Nov. 2 for four seats — including the seat being vacated by Mayor Carlos Hernandez, who is term-limited after serving as the city’s most powerful official since 2011. In Hialeah, the mayor is the city’s top administrator.
Bovo became the fourth person to file in the mayoral race. Former Hialeah council members Vivian Casáls-Muñoz and Isis Garcia-Martinez had already submitted paperwork, along with former mayoral candidate Juan Santana.
Bovo’s stepson, Oscar De la Rosa, was elected to the Hialeah City Council in 2019. De la Rosa told the
Miami Herald Monday that he would resign should his stepfather become mayor to avoid any appearance of a conflict.
The mayor doesn’t vote on the city council, but the council frequently votes on measures proposed by the mayor.
“I really don’t want there to be any perception at all of a conflict because I sit on that council,” De La Rosa said.
Bovo said the final step in his decision to run for mayor was for De la Rosa to approve.
“He knows my passion,” Bovo said. “He just made a decision to say, ‘If you go and win, I’m out.’ ”
De la Rosa said he’s considering a run for state office next year if Bovo becomes mayor. He declined to specify what position he might seek.
Bovo’s decision to run for mayor is no surprise. In January, a consultant for Bovo hinted at the possibility, and Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested during a Feb. 8 press conference that he would support Bovo if he seeks the mayor’s seat.
Hialeah is a Republican stronghold, though the mayor’s seat is officially nonpartisan, as was Bovo’s seat on the county commission.
Hernandez, the current Hialeah mayor, has clashed with DeSantis over the past year. In July, he was snubbed from attending a COVID-19 roundtable DeSantis held with a group of Miami-Dade municipal mayors. And last week, he showed up uninvited to a DeSantis press conference at a Navarro Discount Pharmacy in Hialeah, criticizing the governor’s vaccine rollout.
Hernandez broke from his fellow conservative politicians in Northwest Miami-Dade last year to support Alex Penelas, a registered Democrat, for county mayor instead of Bovo, a registered Republican. But Bovo said Monday that there’s no ill will between him and Hernandez.
“I’ve got a good relationship with him,” Bovo said. “Our agendas don’t collide.”
Bovo was appointed to the Hialeah City Council in 1998 before winning reelection twice and serving as council president. In 2008, he won the first of two terms in the Florida House, then a special election for the County Commission’s District 13 seat in 2011.
In last November’s race for county mayor, Bovo received 46% of the vote and fell short against Daniella Levine Cava.
Bovo ran on a platform that was supportive of former President Donald Trump as he criticized the “liberal agenda” of his opponent.
On Monday, Bovo said his views of Trump haven’t changed in light of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, suggesting it was violence in the same vein as protests for racial justice last summer.
“I condemned what happened on Jan. 6 and I think that’s something that no sane person would be able to tolerate,” Bovo said. “I condemned what was going on during the summer with [Black Lives Matter] and antifa. If you’re gonna be against violence, you’re gonna be against violence.”
Bovo said Trump
“tapped into a nerve” with people who are “frustrated with government’s inability to put them first.” About two-thirds of voters selected Trump in November in Hialeah, the sixth-largest city in Florida by population and the city with the highest percentage of Cuban Americans in the country.
“I think Donald Trump tapped into a nerve that’s undeniable,” Bovo said. “The message of the [former] president, which was to move an agenda that puts the working class and working people first, I think that’s still strong today.”
A woman who worked for the Miccosukee Indians has been charged with stealing $11,000 from the tribe, according to a new indictment filed in Miami federal court.
Vianka A. Gomez, 42, was employed as a secretary for the Miccosukee Tribal Council and as a manager of the tribe’s village gift shop. These jobs provided her with access to credit cards and purchase accounts to carry out the embezzlement of the tribal funds, the indictment says. The funds were supposed to be spent on supplies, inventory and furnishings for the tribal offices and gift shop.
Gomez is charged with 10 counts of theft from an Indian tribal organization between December 2018 and May 2019, according to the indictment. Each count represents more than $1,000 in embezzled funds, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas A. Watts-FitzGerald. Each count also carries up to five years in prison.
Gomez has not been arrested yet on the theft charges filed last week, so the court record does not list her defense attorney. She could not be reached for comment.
The Miccosukees, based in West Miami-Dade County, make the majority of their money from casino operations.
Last year, a former supervisor at the Miccosukee Tribe’s gaming complex was sentenced to four years in prison for a casino caper that churned out more than $5 million.
With the U.S. vaccination drive picking up speed and a third formula on the way, states eager to reopen for business are easing coronavirus restrictions despite warnings from health experts that the outbreak is far from over and that moving too quickly could prolong the misery.
Massachusetts on Monday made it much easier to grab dinner and a show. In Missouri, where individual communities get to make the rules, the two biggest metropolitan areas — St. Louis and Kansas City — are relaxing some measures. Iowa’s governor recently lifted mask requirements and limits on the number of people allowed in bars and restaurants, while the town of Lawrence, home to the
University of Kansas, now lets establishments stay open until midnight.
Mike Lee, who owns Trezo Mare Restaurant & Lounge in Kansas City, said he hopes increased vaccine access, combined with warmer weather, will improve business.
“I think that people are excited to put this past them and be able to start to get back to their ways of doing things,” Lee said.
The push to reopen comes as COVID-19 vaccine shipments to the states are ramping up. Nearly 20% of the nation’s adults — or over 50 million people — have received at least one dose of vaccine, and 10% have been fully inoculated 2 1⁄2 months into the campaign to snuff out the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Johnson & Johnson shipped out nearly 4 million doses of its newly authorized, one-shot COVID-19 vaccine Sunday night to be delivered to states for use starting on Tuesday. The company will deliver about 16 million more doses by the end of March and a total of 100 million by the end of June.
That adds to the supply being distributed by Pfizer and Moderna and should help the nation amass enough doses by midsummer to vaccinate all adults. The White House is encouraging Americans to take the first dose available to them, regardless of manufacturer. In New York City, where limited indoor dining has resumed, officials said the J&J vaccine will help the city to inoculate millions more people by summer, including through door-todoor vaccinations of homebound senior citizens.
But the efforts come with strong warnings from health officials against reopening too quickly, as worrisome coronavirus variants spread.
On Monday, the head of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, urgently warned state officials and ordinary Americans not to let down their guard, saying she is “really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures that we have recommended.”
“I remain deeply concerned about a potential shift in the trajectory of the pandemic,” she said. “We stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground that we have gained.”
Cases and hospitalizations have plunged since the end of January, and deaths have also dropped sharply, but they are still running at dangerously high levels and have even risen slightly over the past several days.
“We cannot be resigned to 70,000 cases a day and 2,000 daily deaths,” Walensky said.
Overall, the outbreak has killed more than a halfmillion Americans.
The vaccine already is contributing to a decrease in severe cases and deaths among older people, and is “quickly becoming a bigger contributor” nationally, Justin Lessler, an expert in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University, said in an email.
“I suspect we will see it overtake natural infection as the biggest driver of immunity late spring earliest, more likely midsummer,” Lessler said.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University, said he believes states and cities have leeway to ease some restrictions because hospitals no longer are at capacity in most communities. But “I do think that masks are likely going to need to be kept in place for some time until we get more of our vulnerable populations vaccinated,” he said.
“It is important for restaurants who are increasing their capacity to remember that we are still in a pandemic and to continue to follow some of those rules,” Adalja said.
The Biden administration wants to see all three vaccines distributed evenly, while also acknowledging that the easy-tohandle J&J vaccine will be used in pop-up mobile sites and locations without freezer storage capacity.
States are hoping that the surging vaccine supply will help tamp down new infections.
Colombia became the first country in hard-hit Latin America to receive coronavirus vaccines through COVAX, a World Health Organizationbacked alliance aimed at getting shots to countries with fewer resources.
A plane carrying 117,000 Pfizer/BioNTech doses landed at Bogota’s El Dorado Airport Monday, arriving as many in the region grow impatient over the slow pace of the COVAX vaccine rollout.
“Today marks a very important milestone,” Colombian President Iván Duque said. “Today COVAX makes its first delivery in the Western Hemihave sphere. And the first country to receive it is Colombia.”
Colombia reached an agreement in October to purchase 20 million doses through the COVAX initiative, enough to vaccinate 10 million people, or about one-fifth of the country’s population. But like many in Latin America, the Andean nation has scrambled to obtain more doses as the COVAX rollout drags on. So far the country has received 409,620 vaccines, including those that arrived Monday, and has one of the region’s lowest inoculation rates.
With more than 50 million confirmed cases and 1.2 million deaths, countries in the Americas are among the hardest hit by COVID-19, and the WHO estimates the region will
to vaccinate nearly 700 million people in order to contain the pandemic — a feat that at the current rate would be many months away.
Still, health officials were praising Monday’s shipment as an important first step.
“The arrival of these first doses in Colombia through the COVAX Facility is an encouraging step in the fight against this virus in the Americas,” said Carissa F. Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, the Americas branch of the WHO. “In a context where the availability of doses is still very limited, PAHO will continue to support the great efforts of countries in the region to obtain as many vaccines as soon as possible.”
Monday’s delivery is part of the so-called “First Wave,” a pilot program to deliver a limited number of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, which require ultracold refrigeration. Other doses from AstraZeneca/ Oxford are scheduled to be shipped in the coming weeks to 36 countries in the region that participate in the mechanism, WHO said.
Besides Colombia, Peru, El Salvador and Bolivia are expected to receive doses as part of the first vaccine deployment.
The COVAX vaccines are arriving as frustration in Latin America grows as political leaders and citizens watch wealthier nations stock up on millions of doses. Many are also furious over a series of scandals in which political elites have jumped the vaccine line. The limited availability through COVAX has forced low-income countries to try to negotiate bilateral agreements with pharmaceutical companies or turn to India for donations.
In recent days, Caribbean nations have called on wealthier countries to share their supplies.
Jamaica’s health minister, Christopher Tufton, wrote in one of his nation’s daily newspapers that rich countries like the United States have left smaller nations like his at a disadvantage. The U.S., Tufton noted, struck unilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies for all of its 1.2 billion dose supply, four times more doses than its population.
“Wealth has moved some countries to the front of the line,” he wrote in the Jamaica Gleaner. “Other countries may have to wait until 2022 or later before supplies are widely available.”
As of Feb. 28, Colombia had administered 0.26 doses per 100 people, far lower than the United States, with 22.73, as well as other countries in the region like Argentina, with 2.27, and Mexico, with 1.9, according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data. The country has negotiated the purchase of another 41.5 million doses, but was slow to do so. Colombia has identified over 2.25 million cases, the second highest total in Latin America.
Paola Lichtenberger, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, said countries like Colombia will need to pick up the pace soon to stay on track.
“These 100,000 or the 50,000 that arrived previously are really nothing,” she said. “Colombia and other countries are behind the curve.”