Miami-Dade votes Democrat for president. Levine Cava wants to extend that trend to mayor

When a key committee vote arrived for Daniella Levine Cava’s bill to require paid sick leave for Miami-Dade’s private airport and transit security guards, the two-term commissioner and county mayoral candidate had a few things going for her.

Since the 2018 election of ally Eileen Higgins, her fellow Democrats held a majority on the 13-seat County Commission and paid leave is a priority for the party. Miami-Dade already required pay boosts above the state minimum wage for the guards and other county contractors covered by Levine Cava’s legislation.

And the vote before fellow Democrat Audrey Edmonson’s policy committee arrived on May 7, two months into a coronavirus pandemic when the county was urging people to stay home if they felt sick.

Even so, when the vote came, Levine Cava’s proposal died for a lack of a second.

“We think it’s kind of crazy. People should have paid sick leave,” said Martha Baker, a nurse for the county’s Jackson hospital system and president of a local union that backed the legislation and later endorsed Levine Cava. She blamed the failure on commissioners not wanting to give Levine Cava a win in 2020. “Nobody is letting Daniella look good. If you want to get something done, you’re almost better off not having Daniella put it out.”

As she campaigns from the left as a former social-work executive and the commission’s leading environmental advocate, the 64-year-old hopes her appeal will win more converts countywide than it has on the commission. She has the backing of leading local Democrats, including freshman U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, and the four Democratic state senators representing Miami-Dade. The Sierra Club endorsed her, and so did Baker’s SEIU union and the county union representing employees of the Water and Sewer Department.

A vote against dropping Miami-Dade’s ‘sanctuary’ policy

Levine Cava sits on the more liberal wing of the nonpartisan commission’s collection of Democrats. A bipartisan majority in 2017 backed dropping “sanctuary” policies at county jails under pressure from the newly inaugurated president, Donald Trump. (Of the three commissioners running for mayor in the nonpartisan Aug. 18 primary, Levine Cava and Xavier Suarez, an independent, voted against the change; Esteban “Steve” Bovo, a Republican, voted for it.)

“It has become a whole lot more progressive with the addition of Commissioner Cava,” said Jean Monestime, a former commission chairman who has been on the board since 2010 and endorsed Levine Cava after dropping out of the mayoral race this spring. He also voted against dropping the sanctuary policy. “She’s a natural ally.”

A lawyer who unseated a conservative commissioner to win her South Miami-Dade commission seat in 2014, Levine Cava blamed county politics for her more recent obstacles on the board.

“Until I ran for mayor, I got over 500 pieces of legislation passed. ... I was extremely successful in building consensus,” she said. “I am not out of step with what the public wants.”

Levine Cava touts her environmental record by calling herself the “Water Warrior,” and one of her first campaign ads in December showed her in a superhero cape with the title painted on the back. For her campaign slogan, Levine Cava uses “A Mayor Who Cares” to highlight her message of the county’s needing to provide more help on affordable housing and other pocketbook challenges.

“It’s often debated whether county government is responsible for social services. I think county government is responsible for the welfare of our people,” she told an audience in December during a discussion on the needs of older residents. “I don’t think the county should shy away from that.”

At a pizza reception in her campaign’s Miami Gardens office on July 3, Levine Cava gathered about a dozen people inside the former tattoo parlor for a question-and-answer period. Mary Turner, a retired bank employee who lives nearby, said through her mask that one of her daughters moved to Orlando after college because she found it too hard to find a good job in Miami without speaking Spanish.

“We need opportunities,” Levine Cava said. Later, she ticked off statistics showing women in Miami-Dade earning 87 cents for every dollar earned by a man, a gap that drops to below 70 cents for Black women. “Its shameful. It’s really embarrassing,” she said, pledging to address the issue with legislation mandating racial parity for employee compensation in county contracts.

“I’ve been calling it Black Flight,” Levine Cava said. “You know, I have to have the cooperation of the commission. But we’re going to have some new commissioners. They’re going to think about things in a new way. And I’m going to be working the heck out of them. To do the right thing.”

A victory for the recent grandmother would mean the first female mayor in Miami-Dade, and the first mayor who wasn’t Cuban-American since Stephen Clark held the post in 1993.

Born to a wealthy family in New York, the Columbia Law graduate moved to Miami in the early 1980s to be with a young Miami doctor she was dating, Robert Cava. After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, she headed up the county’s foster-child program. In 1995, she founded the Human Services Coalition of Dade County, an advocacy group and social-services provider that’s now known as Catalyst Miami.

In 2014, she quit her job as Catalyst’s director to run for the District 8 county commission seat, covering South Miami-Dade. With backing from the Democratic Party she unseated incumbent Lynda Bell, a conservative former Homestead mayor and president of Florida Right to Life.

She was Daniella Levine until she ran for office

The win made Levine Cava the commission’s wealthiest member, with a net worth now topping $6 million thanks to stock holdings and property she owns with her husband, Robert. Though known as Daniella Levine professionally since moving to Miami, the candidate used her more Spanish-sounding name to run for the commission. “I did think it would communicate that I spoke Spanish — even though it’s not a Spanish name, it’s an Italian name,” she said at the time.

She won reelection in 2018 by a comfortable margin against a candidate backed by the developers of the American Dream retail theme park planned for Northwest Miami-Dade. She was the lone commissioner to vote against the project. Levine Cava also infuriated some residents in her district by opposing a canal bridge designed to reduce traffic in Palmetto Bay.

She’s giving up her final two years on the commission to run for mayor because Florida law required her to resign before qualifying for the race in May.

Rather than quit right away, she made her resignation effective in November, requiring either an appointment or special election in early 2021. If she had left office immediately, the seat could have been filled during the regular county elections in August.

Critics on the commission complained of the cost of a special election in the midst of an economic crisis caused by COVID. The scenario also would let Levine Cava run for her seat again if she doesn’t become mayor, but the candidate ruled out that possibility. “I’m done being a county commissioner,” she said.

After the coronavirus hit, Levine Cava became the commission’s top critic of outgoing Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s response. In a series of letters released to the media by her office, Levine Cava demanded the county hire contact tracers to bolster the state’s lackluster efforts, provide hotel rooms to give isolation options to people in cramped living quarters and issue a countywide directive to stay at home.

Gimenez, a candidate in the Republican primary for Florida’s 26th Congressional District, did eventually take those steps as the COVID crisis worsened. Levine Cava pointed to Gimenez’s steps as vindication for her COVID plans. Gimenez suggested Levine Cava was more interested in COVID publicity than guiding the county’s response. “This is not the time for politics and is not the time to be campaigning for the next elected office,” Gimenez, now a regular on national news programs, wrote Levine Cava on March 23.

On the fundraising front, Levine Cava is a distant second behind the other leading Democrat in the race, former county mayor Alex Penelas, who left office in 2004. At the start of July, he had about $3 million to spend, compared to Levine Cava’s $2 million. She remained competitive in the money race thanks largely to two sources of donations.

Hillary Clinton’s top donor is Levine Cava’s top donor

The first is Donald Sussman, a Fort Lauderdale hedge fund mogul and Hillary Clinton’s top 2016 donor, who contributed nearly $900,000 so far to Levine Cava’s mayoral effort. The second is Levine Cava and her family, with more than $40,000 coming from the candidate’s husband and corporate entities they own together. Levine Cava’s mother, Lois Levine, donated more than $170,000.

Levine Cava is counting on a superior get-out-the-vote operation and grassroots support to overcome her money deficit with Penelas and name-recognition gap with Suarez, a former Miami mayor whose son holds the office and is one of the best-known elected officials in Miami-Dade.

While the other six candidates for mayor paid the $2,800 qualifying fee to get on the ballot, Levine Cava’s campaign submitted more than 14,000 signatures. That made her the first candidate to qualify for a Miami-Dade mayoral race by petition.

Penelas, the last Democrat elected county mayor, said Levine Cava shouldn’t count on Miami-Dade’s partisan breakdown giving her a mandate if she can’t build support on the commission. He said he supported Levine Cava’s sick-leave legislation, but that the effort reflected poorly on her.

“To not even get a second in the middle of a pandemic on a sick-leave policy shows she hasn’t built relations,” he said. “Going to the 29th floor doesn’t solve that problem.” The mayor’s office is on the 29th floor of county hall.

Levine Cava proposed the legislation before the pandemic. It would have required all but the smallest companies performing outsourced functions for county government — including security at the airport and Metrorail stations and janitorial crews in county buildings — to provide seven days of paid sick leave a year.

The May 7 vote in the commission’s eight-member Policy Council gave Levine Cava a limited speaking role, because she’s not on the panel. Bovo is a member, and slammed the proposal as part of a “Bernie Sanders world” and the kind of policies implemented “in countries like Nicaragua, and Venezuela and in Cuba.” He and others on the board warned the higher costs for contractors would lead to fewer jobs during rocky times for Miami-Dade. There was no discussion of public health.

“Obviously, politics played into it,” Levine Cava said in a recent interview. “To have the gall to say this would break the bank, when it was pennies on the dollar.. At what expense to the public? How many thousands of people are exposed to the virus because we don’t have paid sick leave in county contracts. It’s unconscionable.”

The Miami Herald has written articles about other candidates for Miami-Dade mayor, and has more to come. Click here to read about Esteban “Steve” Bovo, Daniella Levine Cava, Alex Penelas, Xavier Suarez, and first-time candidates Monique Nicole Barley and Ludmilla Domond.

This post was updated to include more details on contributions from Daniella Levine Cava and her family.

This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 6:00 AM.