Public records raise questions about Sunny Isles Beach mayoral candidate’s residence
Public records raise questions about Sunny Isles Beach mayoral candidate Anita Funtek, who was registered to vote and had a homestead exemption at a Broward County home this year.
During her campaign to become the next mayor of Sunny Isles Beach, candidate Anita Funtek has emphasized her status as a longtime resident of the resort city in northeast Miami-Dade County.
On her official candidate website, Hungarian-born Funtek chronicled her family’s international relocation to Sunny Isles Beach in August
2011. She described herself as someone who has lived there ever since, in areas of the city that have grown at different rates as developers swooped in to erect luxury beachfront skyscrapers.
“I lived in a condo on the east side of Collins Avenue, and now I live on the west side of Collins Avenue. I can relate to and understand the challenges of the city because I work here, my children go to school here, I buy my groceries here and I worship here,” she wrote.
But public records from Miami-Dade and Broward counties raise questions about Funtek’s eligibility for office in this election based on residency requirements, and highlight the legal ambiguities over what determines a candidate’s residence.
Under the city’s municipal election law, “only electors of the city who have resided continuously … for at least one year preceding the date” of filing their documents with the Sunny Isles Beach city clerk can run for the top office in city hall. This year, the qualifying period was Aug. 16-19.
A city office administrator documented on
Aug. 17 that Funtek had sworn she had lived in Sunny Isles Beach for at least one year prior to that date. She provided a driver’s license replaced in 2019, a voter card issued this year, and 2020 and 2021 real estate property tax statements listing her address in the city at Winston Towers 500, among other documents, to the city clerk.
But in January, Funtek listed a home she owns on Hollywood’s Washington Street as her legal residence on a Broward County voter registration application. On April 12, she listed her address as Winston Towers 500, according to voter registration documents that she filed in Miami-Dade County.
In February her husband removed a homestead exemption on the Winston Towers 500 home, according to a Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser’s document, marking the reason as the condo in Winston Towers 500 “was not my permanent residence.” It had first been granted in 2018. Meanwhile, the couple applied for a homestead exemption, which gives permanent residents a tax break, on the Washington Street house this year, which Broward County granted.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Funtek said that she never lived at the Hollywood residence. She called the allegations she lived elsewhere “gossip” and said that she had not slept “a single night” at the Washington Street home.
“We never moved there, we never lived there, we never stayed there,” she said.
In response to follow-up Miami Herald questions about the public records, Funtek’s campaign said in an email that the candidate launched her bid for mayor after “due consideration of eligibility criteria of running for mayor — so as to ensure full compliance with applicable laws.”
Her campaign said that her eligibility to run for Sunny Isles Beach mayor had been established after submitting to the city clerk all documents for “detailed review, analysis and approval.”
“Anita Funtek is and has been a resident of Sunny Isles Beach since she moved to the United States 11 years ago, and her eligibility and qualification to run for mayor [in] the ‘22 election is a
matter of fact,” the campaign said.
The campaign did not directly respond to questions about why Funtek had changed her address on her voter registration to her Hollywood home and then back to the Sunny Isles condo, or why she and her husband applied for a homestead exemption for the Washington Street house for 2022.
Sunny Isles Beach City Clerk Mauricio Betancur could shed no light on the matter, describing his role as “truly ministerial.”
“If it’s complete on face value and they submit the documents according to our code, I have no other option but to qualify them,” he said, “I’ve heard the rumors. To me, they are rumors. I have no authority to go in and investigate why she had a homestead exemption in another county.”
It’s the first time that Funtek, who became a
U.S. citizen in November 2021, has run for office in the U.S. She’s in a heated three-way race with incumbent Dana Goldman and former Vice Mayor Larisa Svechin, with the Nov. 8 election just days away. Goldman became mayor last year after winning a contentious and tight runoff race against Svechin, then interim mayor, following the resignation of former Mayor George Scholl.
HOLLYWOOD HOMESTEAD EXEMPTION
On Monday evening, a Miami Herald reporter visited Funtek’s Sunny Isles Beach home in Winston Towers 500. The front desk rang Funtek, who told the reporter that she was busy with family. Less than an hour later, no one answered the door at the Hollywood address. There were lights on over the driveway and in the garage, but the rest of the home was unlit.
Miami-Dade Property Appraiser records list her and her husband as owners of the unit in the Sunny Isles Beach condominium. Funtek and her husband are also both listed as owners of the Hollywood home, according to Broward County Property Appraiser records.
Both property appraisers’ offices confirmed that Funtek and her husband had filed for a homestead exemption on the Washington Street home in Hollywood for 2022.
However, the homestead exemption on the Broward property was being removed as of mid-October, following a Broward County Property Appraiser’s investigation. When the agency received an anonymous tip that the property was vacant, it sent an investigator to conduct a field inspection. He spoke to workers outside the home, who said Funtek would be coming in 10 minutes.
When Funtek arrived, a report on the investigation says, she confirmed to the investigator that the property was empty and that she lived in Sunny Isles Beach. The investigator’s report also states that Funtek told the agency official that she and her family had meant to live at the Washington Street home but stayed back in Sunny Isles Beach.
“Anita is running for Sunny Isles mayor; she said that when they applied for the [homestead exemption] in Broward County, they intended to reside at the subject property, but now her family is going to stay in Miami Dade,” the report says, adding that Funtek had asked the investigator to voluntarily remove the homestead exemption.
RESIDENCY REQUIREMENTS
Lawyers who spoke with the Miami Herald said that residency cases are complicated and established by the totality of circumstances because there is no clear-cut legal definition of residency, and eligibility requirements based on a candidate’s residence vary from public office to public office.
“What a court will look to, to determine somebody’s residence, is where they intend for it to be, and whether there are objective facts that support subjective intent,” said Ron Meyer, a Tallahassee-based elections attorney who said he has never interacted with Funtek.
He said along with homestead exemption and voter registration, where someone has their license, files personal income taxes, and gets correspondence and bills are all factors a court considers when an individual’s residency is contested.
“Homestead exemption and voter registration are two important facts, but they are not the exclusive ones,” said Meyer.
Juan Carlos Planas, a lawyer and former state legislator, said that members of Congress don’t sleep most of the time in their home states and members of the Legislature don’t sleep most of the time in their districts while still keeping residency there.
“If she’s correct about her driver’s license never being at a different address, and it’s always been at Sunny Isles Beach, and she has mail there, I think that’s a well-established residency,” he said, adding that “there has to be a smoking gun to kick someone off the ballot for lack of residency.”