Carpetbagger claims roil politics in paradise after candidate leaves Miami for the Keys
In a three-way Republican race for a state House seat that includes the Florida Keys, questions about the residency of one candidate have erupted into a name-calling spat over who can truly claim the island chain as their home.
At the center of the controversy is candidate Rhonda Rebman Lopez, vying to replace termed-out Republican Rep. Holly Raschein in Florida House District 120. The Republican-leaning district extends from the Florida Keys in Monroe County into southern Miami-Dade County and the Everglades.
In September 2018, fresh off a failed primary race for House District 115, Rebman Lopez changed her voter registration from a home owned by her husband on Southwest 67th Street in Miami-Dade County to a Key Largo residence in the posh and private Ocean Reef Club. The house — which is owned by a trust with Rebman Lopez as the main beneficiary — is undergoing more than $500,000 in renovations which she says have rendered the home’s top floor temporarily unlivable.
Two days after changing her voter registration to the new address, according to state election records, Rebman Lopez filed again to run for a state House seat — this time, in the Keys district.
When questions arose recently about the timing of her registration change, she initially told the Miami Herald that her husband, Jorge Lopez, lived “part-time” in their Miami home because of their Doral-based electrical distributor business. She later clarified, saying that both of them live “full time” in the Ocean Reef home.
And she dismissed suspicions raised by her opponents, calling one an “ambulance-chasing lawyer” and saying she’d made the change simply to “avoid any confusion whatsoever about my full-time residence in the Keys.”
But some of those running against her were not convinced by her words.
Homestead-based lawyer Alexandria Suarez, said the timing of her voter registration change shows that Rebman Lopez is telling “half-truths” about where she lives and that she spends little time in the district.
“The Keys is very parochial. Everybody knows everybody... People in Ocean Reef don’t know her,” Suarez, 49, told the Miami Herald. “She did it for the purposes of jumping into the race... which is insulting because it’s pandering. You’re pretending to be something that you’re not.”
“We will not be viewed as a rung on the ladder of someone’s political career,” added Suarez, who spent the majority of her early years in Kendall and now lives in the Redland area of southern Miami-Dade.
Another opponent, Islamorada Village Councilman James Mooney — a Keys native — said he thinks residents need a state representative who has a “working knowledge of the Keys.
“I couldn’t go into Fort Lauderdale and claim to know very much what’s going on there,” said Mooney, who has been on the Islamorada Council for a decade. “The Keys being an area of critical concern, that is dynamically different than any other place in the state of Florida, ... you can’t just waltz in here and think you got it. It’s impossible.”
Mooney said that part of what makes the district so different from the rest of Florida is its urgent concerns with water quality and how it affects residents, leading to the state “critical concern” designation.
“If we don’t have clean water in the Florida Keys, we don’t have an economy,” Mooney said. “You don’t get any second chances to know what needs to be done to better our district.”
Rebman Lopez is leading the race when it comes to money, even though she was the last one to file to run. In five months, she’s raised over $180,000. Mooney trails her with $74,000 and Suarez has $45,000.
But the issue of where she lives is less clear. Rebman Lopez’s husband still has a homestead exemption on the Miami home, according to the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser’s office. She told the Herald her husband is in the process of transferring the exemption, which reduces the taxes on a home, to their current Keys residence. But according to the Monroe County Property Appraiser’s office, the couple has not filed an application for a homestead exemption there. The application deadline is less than a month away, on March 2.
The house the Lopezes own in Key Largo is held in a trust called 33 Baker Road Living Trust. The couple also owns a home on Sugarloaf Key that was passed down to Rebman Lopez’s husband from her late father-in-law.
“My husband’s family has owned homes in Miami-Dade County since 1995, one of which my husband resides in part-time due to its proximity to our family business and [he] is otherwise in our Key Largo home,” she said in an emailed statement to the Miami Herald.
Rebman Lopez insisted she has been a longtime resident of the Keys community, including being part of the homeowner’s association in Ocean Reef and attending church locally when she is not campaigning. To illustrate her ties to the area, she also provided records to the Herald of what she said was a 1972 world fishing record held by her father-in-law for catching a 21-pound little tunny in Key Largo.
She said the property taxes her family has paid in the Keys were additional proof of their Keys roots, and she lashed out at her political opponents for raising questions about her.
“To be honest, I’ve paid more property taxes there, or my whole family has, than all of them put together,” Rebman Lopez said of her opponents’ criticism. As for Suarez, she said, “no one in the Keys cares what an ambulance-chasing, slip-and-fall California transplant accident lawyer who now lives in Homestead has to say about anything.”
Suarez, the Homestead lawyer running for the seat, was born in San Jose, California, but moved with her family to South Florida when she was a year old. As an adult, she worked as a teacher and then as a pharmaceutical sales representative for AstraZeneca, a biopharmaceutical company, in a position she said meant she drove through the district daily.
The sole Democratic candidate, Clint Jay Barras, is a resident of Key West. He is the vice president of business development for Two Oceans Digital, a digital development company based in Key West.
Rebman Lopez’s previous House race in 2018 raised different questions about her after she dropped her maiden name — Rebman — from her campaign and began going by Rhonda Lopez. Her opponents slammed her for it, saying it was a strategy they viewed as pandering to Hispanic voters in the Miami district.
“Rhonda Lopez is my name. That’s what people call me,” she said in an interview with the Miami Herald in 2018.
The district she wants to represent, though, includes more than just the Florida Keys. And the demographics of the district are changing, according to Monroe County GOP chairman Nick Mulick.
Though the Keys encompass the largest physical area of the district, the growth in southern Miami-Dade could be outpacing the population increase in the Keys. According to 2010 Census figures, close to 50% of the district’s voting age residents identified as white non-Hispanic, compared to 40% Hispanic, including white Hispanics; and 9% black, including black Hispanics.
“I know in the Keys we’re approaching build-out and we’re noticing the … winter residency, the long weekend and holiday owners of houses, that population is increasing,” Mulick said. “The reality is more likely than not that the Dade County part of the district is growing.”
That growth could mean that the Keys’ regionalism is no longer a huge voter priority.
“Any candidate, or any successor is going to have to pay attention to the Keys,” Mulick said. “But I don’t think that necessarily will drive the race.”
This story was originally published February 14, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
