100 days in office: Here’s what new Dade mayor has been doing
After 100 days, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is asking residents countywide to complete a survey that could help her agenda during this summer’s budget process. COVID is her top crisis, guns second.
Months after winning the election for Miami-Dade mayor, Daniella Levine Cava once again has canvassers going door to door on her behalf.
Throughout February, progressive advocacy groups Engage Miami and We Count! joined other nonprofits in dispatching staff across Miami-Dade to help people complete the online “Thrive305” survey Levine Cava’s office created on county issues.
Results from more than 25,000 entries will help set the agenda for town halls this spring. Those will lead to the drafting of a community “Action Plan.” That’s scheduled to come out before Levine Cava — who founded a Miami nonprofit in the 1990s dedicated to community activism — submits her first budget to a newly constituted county commission with its own agenda.
“I spent a lifetime preparing people to be active citizens,” a masked Levine Cava, 65, told the Miami Herald from a round visitors table in her 29th floor office overlooking Biscayne Bay in County Hall.
“And I came into government to make sure they were heard.”
Friday marked the end of the first full 100 days in office for Miami-Dade’s first female mayor, who is trying to push a
progressive agenda and navigate a new and uncertain power structure in county politics — all while managing a pandemic.
New commissioners occupy six of the 13 board seats, the results of term-limit rules in place since 2012 but only now forcing retirements. The next wave comes in 2022, resulting in a commission emboldened by newcomers eager to make their mark and veterans facing their final months in power.
Already something of an outsider with her former colleagues — Levine Cava never chaired a committee during her six years on the board — the new mix has meant some early friction on the dais for the new mayor.
On Feb. 1, commissioners ignored Levine Cava’s request to defer a lastminute vote advancing a bridge project she had opposed in a South MiamiDade area she represented during her time on the county commission prior to becoming mayor on Nov. 17.
SHE HAD A DEAL WITH LORIA, THEN DIDN’T
Two weeks later, a nearly unanimous commission granted Chairman Jose “Pepe” Diaz’s request to replace Levine Cava as the top negotiator to settle a county lawsuit with former Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria. Diaz secured $1 million more than Levine Cava did. Commissioners accepted the $5.5 million deal, which resolved a 2018 profit-sharing lawsuit filed after Loria claimed his $1.2 billion sale of the franchise would yield no money to Miami-Dade.
Levine Cava, who after the election invited individual commissioners to her Palmetto Bay home for lasagna, Thai food and fish, said she didn’t consider the move a snub from Diaz. He had voted for the original 2009 Marlins stadium agreement that sparked the the 2018 suit.
“The chairman had a long relationship with this guy — after all, he was there when the deal was negotiated,” she said. “If I had realized the chairman had that relationship, I may have asked him to make the call.”
Levine Cava won office after galvanizing fellow Democrats in a county Joe
Biden won by 7 percentage points. She beat Republican Esteban “Steve” Bovo by 8 points, injecting party preference into a race that remained officially nonpartisan. She’s mostly avoided partisan pot-stirring since taking office, and declined to take sharp jabs at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis while pressing his administration for more doses at county vaccination sites.
She has also kept in place the COVID-19 policies and relief budgets she inherited from Carlos Gimenez, a Republican now representing Florida’s 26th Congressional District. Even so, she’s won public support from city mayors of both parties who spent much of 2020 criticizing Gimenez over what they called slights of municipal governments in COVID talks and decisions.
‘A PLEASANT CHANGE’
On her first day as mayor-elect on Nov. 4, she was with Republican Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. While Suarez led Miami’s opposition to the curfew Gimenez imposed in July to discourage late-night socializing, his city changed policy in December to begin enforcing the midnight shutdown for businesses.
“It’s been a pleasant change, no doubt about it,” said Juan Carlos Bermudez, the Republican mayor of Doral. “It’s very different when you have someone reaching out and saying, ‘OK, what can we do together?’ ”
She’s also reworked the mayor’s 29th floor suite of offices since Gimenez left, adding black-and-white wallpaper for an accent wall in a waiting area, and a reading nook with throw pillows where a cupboard once stood. Gallery-sized prints of the Everglades, including an approaching squall, decorate the walls.
Visitors recently found her on the floor ahead of an afternoon appointment, trying to fix a recycling bin that had toppled under her desk. When senior policy advisor George Andrews arrived for a meeting with a mask inching down off his nose, Levine Cava hopped up from the table. “Would you like another mask?” she said, opening up a desk drawer with a stash of spares. “Here’s one: Miami City Ballet.”
A founder of the nonprofit Catalyst Miami, a group that encourages residents to get active in local government, Levine
Cava has continued to tap into Miami-Dade’s network of nonprofits. She turned to the county’s philanthropic network to fund the Thrive305 survey, which is housed at a website purchased by the Miami Foundation, thrive305.org.
Introductions to survey questions contain admiring descriptions of Levine Cava as being committed to “a stronger, healthier and more inclusive county” and someone who will “build trust” with people.
Options on the public safety section of the survey struck Commissioner Joe Martinez as one-sided for focusing on alternatives to more police staffing, such as deploying social workers along with law enforcement. “What about asking, ‘Would you like to see more police officers patrolling your neighborhood,’ ” said Martinez, a former police officer. “Very onesided survey.”
Loren Parra, the Miami Foundation’s director of public affairs, said the mayor’s office crafted the language in a partnership with the foundation. “This is to create a thoughtful and more inclusive community,” she said.
A NEW OFFICE ON RACIAL GAPS
While running for mayor, Levine Cava often hit on themes of inclusion. She said Miami-Dade needed to address “systemic racism” in county government, and in early February she created a four-person Office of Equity and Inclusion to focus on racial gaps and other disparities throughout Miami-Dade.
It’s an encouraging but familiar message for Daniella Pierre, a local civil rights leader who praised Levine Cava for bringing attention to the equity issue but said the mayor should be judged on results.
“Already, we are filling out another survey, to answer questions we have responded to year after year,” she said. “It’s time for deliverables now.”
Levine Cava did deliver for union leaders when she terminated the Miami International Airport contract for Eulen America, an airline vendor under fire for allegedly poor working conditions and the target of union organizing efforts.
Her early actions on climate and the environment mostly involved holdover issues from the Gimenez administration — including releasing reports on septic tanks and the health of Biscayne Bay that she had requested as a commissioner.
Her first major environmental initiative, a non-binding agreement by cruise companies to bring pollution-cutting electric hookups to the county port, only came after the Miami Herald detailed the environmental problems that stem from the missing infrastructure.
Levine Cava is preparing to interview candidates to run the county’s Water and Sewer Department after asking for the resignation of Gimenez’s director, Kevin Lynskey. He was one of three department heads who left their jobs once Levine Cava took over, including Transportation Director Alice Bravo and former Deputy Mayor Jack Osterholt, who also served as director of Regulatory and Economic Resources.
Laura Reynolds, an environmental consultant who worked for Levine Cava’s political committee during the campaign, said the mayor should get credit for a $10 million matching grant for Biscayne Bay projects that DeSantis announced in a joint appearance with Levine Cava in December in Key Biscayne.
“I think I’ve already been on at least five or 10 meetings where the environment, at the county level, has taken the priority,” Reynolds said. “While it isn’t apparent to the general public yet, that’s the case because of COVID, and that’s consuming a lot of time.”
Levine Cava was in office 16 days before she and her husband, a physician, both were diagnosed with COVID after a weekend canoeing trip through the Everglades. They traced their cases to a patient in Dr. Robert Cava’s practice. Though she continued working through home video conferences, Levine Cava now describes dread at what the virus would do.
“I was scared,” she said. “You didn’t know how it would turn . ... It was worrisome.”
LEVINE CAVA CAMPAIGN MANAGER STILL ON THE JOB
The mayor’s first day in office coincided with new terms for five commissioners, the most since the 1990s as voter-approved term limits forced the retirements of long-serving politicians. While board members were confined to small ceremonies inside the commission chambers, Levine Cava invited hundreds to an event at the county’s Adrienne Arsht performance hall.
Our Democracy, Levine Cava’s political committee, paid $12,000 for the event, with campaign manager Christian Ulvert helping stage manage. “Need Padron ASAP,” Ulvert wrote in a text message when the program began to drag. Shortly after, former Miami Dade College President Eduardo Padrón began his remarks on stage.
Ulvert’s firm, Edge Communications, received $15,000 from the committee in January. He said that was to cover prior expenses, but that he remains on contract with the committee as Levine Cava wraps up her first 100 days. “Anything political, I handle,” he said. “She’s invited for fund-raisers, and asked for endorsements . ... And we’re going to still fund raise.”
Levine Cava calls COVID the obvious top crisis she faces as mayor, but described a spike in gun violence a close second. Miami-Dade’s homicides are up 46 percent in 2021 so far, part of a nationwide trend in rising violent crime. They were up 30% in 2020. After two teenagers were shot in South Miami-Dade on Tuesday, Levine Cava said she got county police director Freddy Ramirez on the phone until nearly midnight to talk about changes.
“It’s just too much. It’s just too much . ... We’re all just in despair,” she said. A lawyer who once headed up the child-welfare legal division in Miami-Dade, Levine Cava said the administration is planning to dispatch more police and social services into areas seeing increased violent crime, which she ties to disrupted daily life from COVID.
“Look, we’ve got children out of school. We’ve got people without jobs. We’ve got people who are stir-crazy,” she said. “We need to be in the community. We need to be on the street.”