Miami-Dade cities plan to reopen businesses and parks, hoping COVID-19 is on decline
Mayors of most of Miami-Dade’s largest cities plan to allow many businesses to reopen May 20, meaning next week is likely to mark a major step toward restarting a South Florida economy left in tatters by two months of closures during the coronavirus pandemic.
The mayors of Miami, Miami Beach, Hialeah and Miami Gardens announced their plans Wednesday, hours before Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez released details of his own plan.
Like many turning points since COVID-19 first threatened South Florida, there are differences between the decisions made by Gimenez and the city mayors, leading to a patchwork of policies where city governments break from the county.
Meanwhile, Broward County leaders were still finalizing the details Wednesday night, making completion of their proposed order unlikely until Thursday.
Gimenez plans to let a broad variety of businesses reopen starting Monday, including restaurants. The mayors of Miami, Hialeah, Miami Gardens and Miami Beach have agreed to target May 20 for reopening many nonessential retail establishments, with restaurants reopening one week later, all with limitations on capacity and spacing. In the cities that coordinated efforts, barbershops and beauty salons can reopen, with regulations. Bars, movie theaters, performance spaces, gyms and casinos will remain closed. Miami’s 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew will be lifted.
A new swath of public parks will also reopen May 20 in several communities that kept them closed after Miami-Dade reopened parks April 29. On Thursday, Miami’s marinas will reopen, though boat ramps will stay closed. Many large parks in Miami, Hialeah and Miami Gardens will reopen next week, with social distancing requirements.
All told, about 70% of the county’s population is expected to take a step toward some semblance of normalcy next week.
Political leaders are underscoring their announcements with statements from public health experts suggesting Miami-Dade County is in a position to allow people back to work because of a declining percentage of positive infections. Still, data from the Florida Department of Health and Miami-Dade hospitals show some key statistics have mostly leveled off, but they are not steadily decreasing.
Dates for reopening in Miami and other cities are not yet finalized, depending on when Gov. Ron DeSantis approves the county reopening plan. If that approval doesn’t come in the next few days, the May 20 date may be pushed back. The goal, several mayors said, is to provide proprietors one week to buy supplies and get ready to open up shop.
Even though the four cities broadly agree on their approach to reopening, there could be some specifics that apply only within certain municipal boundaries. In Miami Gardens, for example, Mayor Oliver Gilbert said he doesn’t expect restaurants will reopen until June 1, five days later than the other cities propose.
Miami Beach City Manager Jimmy Morales said while beaches will remain closed until June at the earliest, more than 750 businesses in the seaside city can plan to open their doors May 20. Restaurants can reopen May 27.
In a virtual press conference hosted Wednesday afternoon by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, Hialeah Mayor Carlos Hernández and Gilbert touted their collaboration as a way to minimize confusion among county residents and present a united plan to reignite commerce.
Gilbert said even though Gimenez and city leaders have differed, he commended Gimenez’s approach. He said the conflict in policies is a function of serving different populations in a difficult time.
Cities must adhere to the emergency county orders but they’re free to be stricter with local rules, meaning Gimenez’s effort to reopen more of Miami-Dade’s economy depends in part on municipalities giving their own green lights.
“I don’t necessarily agree with everything [the county does], but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” Gilbert said. “When you’re building a plane in the air like we’re doing right now — we’re going through our first global pandemic — we’re not going to necessarily agree all the time. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work together all the time.”
Flags for phases in reopening plan
Later Wednesday afternoon, Gimenez unveiled a 185-page plan for easing emergency orders on businesses across the county, starting with allowing most of the economy to reopen Monday.
The new plan centered around a system of color-coded flags to symbolize the current status of restrictions. While Miami-Dade is in the newly designated Orange Flag Phase this week, a time when parks are allowed to be open, Gimenez said he expects the county to shift to the Yellow Flag Phase on Monday when restaurants, offices, shops and hair salons can open under new rules limiting the number of people inside and requiring space between them.
The new countywide restrictions would end two months of blanket closures required under emergency orders Gimenez issued in March. But many businesses would remain closed, including hotels, gyms, and nightclubs, and the county order closing beaches would remain in place as well. Gimenez said the county hopes to let restaurants maintain capacity at up to 50 percent of what they’re allowed under normal circumstances, double the current 25 percent cap that exists statewide.
DeSantis must approve the higher cap, and Gimenez said he will issue a detailed decree once he gets the go-ahead from Tallahassee.
Gimenez’s office recruited dozens of business executives and health professionals to serve on multiple groups that drafted the baseline rules cities must follow as the county mayor lifts emergency restrictions that apply countywide. Gimenez did not include the mayors of the largest cities on the panel or senior members of their administrations. Instead, he relied on the nonprofit League of Cities, an association of municipal leaders, and a similar group representing local city managers to provide the city-level representation.
At an online press conference after announcing the county’s reopening plan, Gimenez said having cities enact their own rules and schedules will confuse residents.
“It’s unfortunate. But they have that right. I would hope most of the guidelines would be consistent,” Gimenez said. The county mayor said city leaders are free to reach out to him if they have concerns or questions about the county process that aren’t being addressed by league representatives. “My phone is always open. Anybody can talk to me. I usually call the governor.”
It would appear there are fractured communication lines between some city leaders and County Hall. In the mayors’ press event, Suarez said he hadn’t spoken to Gimenez in weeks. Hernández, Hialeah’s mayor, said he hadn’t communicated with Gimenez in a month and a half.
Overall, mayors also expressed a similar interest in a broadly uniform policy.
“Whatever we fail to do in one city is going to affect another one,” Hernández said. “We might have thirty-something cities in the county, but this virus doesn’t know where Miami starts and Hialeah ends.”
Is Miami ready to reopen?
County and city officials pointed to public health markers in announcing their plans. The numbers of new infections, deaths and hospitalizations have largely stabilized in recent weeks, though the reopening of businesses is still expected to occur against a backdrop of many new infections each day.
Still, Suarez said an analysis from Florida International University experts, including an epidemiologist and two biostatisticians, showed that the city is ready to begin reopening. Mary Jo Trepka, an infectious disease epidemiologist at FIU who has worked for the county health department, said in a statement that the proportion of positive COVID-19 cases has significantly declined during the last two weeks.
Gabriel J. Odom, a professor of biostatistics at FIU, said he looked at the number of patients admitted to local hospitals with COVID-19, the number of such patients who went into intensive care, the number of those who were put on ventilators and the number of discharged patients.
“A few weeks ago, we reached the crest of that curve,” Odom said. “What happened was, we increased very, very rapidly, but then we made a turning point. And after that turning point, we didn’t decrease very, very rapidly, even though we would have liked to have seen that. What we saw was a very slow and gradual decrease over a few weeks.”
Political leaders acknowledged that infections will rise with the wave of reopenings, but they feel confident in local health officials’ ability to isolate infected individuals and the people with whom they’ve come into close contact to end chains of transmission.
“The experts have said that having capacity for contact tracing will allow you to deal with any spikes that happen, which most assuredly will happen no matter what you do,” Gelber said.
Social distancing will remain a blanket policy across the county. Elected officials warned that reopening businesses and parks would backfire if people do not adhere to distancing guidelines and other regulations meant to curb the spread of the virus.
“If we take the path of responsibility, we have a much greater chance of succeeding,” Suarez said. “If we take the path of irresponsibility, we could very, very quickly and dramatically be back to having to reverse some of the things we are planning on doing over the next few days.”
Governments in other countries have had to reverse reopenings after surges in COVID-19 cases. The Washington Post reported that after a spike in cases last week, South Korea rescinded an order allowing bars and clubs to reopen. A spike in infections led Lebanon to reimpose restrictions two weeks after it appeared the country had gained control of the spread of the virus.
in Wuhan, China, where the virus was first observed, a cluster of infections spurred the government to test all 11 million inhabitants, according to The New York Times. The infections came five weeks after the city had celebrated the end of months of lockdown.
Data from test results and hospitalizations near the end of May into early June will likely show whether the curve is bending upward again.
Broward still undecided
In Broward County on Wednesday evening, officials were still hashing out the details of an executive order that will allow businesses to reopen Monday in coordination with Miami-Dade County.
In a draft version of the order, Broward County Administrator Bertha Henry proposed that restaurants would be allowed to operate at only 25% of their indoor capacity, as opposed to the 50% Miami-Dade is asking the governor to allow. But after Henry conferred with local mayors Wednesday, several mayors said they expected Broward to make the same request for 50% capacity at restaurants.
“Restaurateurs are telling us that at 25% it’s not worth it to even open,” said Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis. “They can’t produce the volume they need to be profitable. We’re respecting that request.”
Unlike Miami-Dade, Henry may let gyms, pools and other common areas in multi-family buildings reopen at 50% capacity, a step that Miami-Dade doesn’t want to take until a later phase of reopening.
A spokesman for Henry, Ric Barrick, said Wednesday that the proposed order likely wouldn’t be finalized before Thursday.
The mayors of Broward’s coastal cities, including Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood, are pressing county leaders to reopen beaches May 26, the day after Memorial Day. But Henry and Broward County Mayor Dale Holness aren’t prepared to commit to that date and potentially open beaches ahead of Miami-Dade, according to several Broward mayors who discussed the topic on a conference call Wednesday.
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 11:58 AM.
