Want to be a politician? This Miami-Dade village doesn’t have enough candidates
El Portal, a landlocked village of about 2,400 residents in northeast Miami-Dade County, is no stranger to political upheaval in recent years: A legal battle with its fired police chief. An investigation into its FEMA submissions. The abrupt resignation of one councilman. The arrest of another.
But the latest twist is perhaps as significant as any for the village’s ability to function: No one, except for three incumbent council members, wants to run for office.
By last Friday’s filing deadline, only those three candidates had filed to run for five seats in the Nov. 3 election. Vice Mayor Omarr Nickerson will run unopposed for mayor. Councilmen Anders Urbom and Luis Pirela will keep their seats. But two other seats will be empty until the village can hold a special election to fill them — which could be weeks or months after the general election — and find at least two residents willing to serve.
Until then, all it will take is one absence at a council meeting to prevent the five-person body from achieving the quorum it needs to govern.
“The only thing of concern to me is if there were not enough council people to conduct the city’s business,” said interim Village Attorney Norman Powell. “So long as there are enough to conduct business, that is the silver lining.”
The development includes the impending departure of Mayor Claudia Cubillos, who has served on the council since 2008 and became the first Hispanic mayor in the village’s 80-year history in 2014. She was re-elected without opposition twice and has held prominent roles on Miami-Dade’s League of Cities, including a stint as president until earlier this year.
Friday’s filing deadline in El Portal also passed without a submission from Councilwoman Vimari Roman, a political ally of Cubillos who is serving her second two-year term.
On Aug. 7, a group of village residents invited elected officials to attend a town hall style Zoom meeting where they tried to gauge who would be seeking re-election. Nickerson, Pirela and Urbom told the group they planned to run, according to Nickerson, while Cubillos and Roman didn’t respond.
Three or four residents on the call expressed interest in running themselves but ultimately decided against it. Nickerson said they seemed uneasy at the time about the possibility of facing incumbents.
“Sometimes people can get intimidated with the idea of running against an incumbent,” Nickerson said. “I wish that they would just run, man.”
Cubillos announced in her State of the Village address in 2018 that she didn’t plan to seek re-election in 2020. But Nickerson said he wasn’t sure whether she was sticking to that plan until Friday’s deadline.
“I was just willing to run for mayor regardless of what anybody was gonna do,” he said.
On the one hand, elections without any competitive races aren’t unusual for small municipalities in Miami-Dade. West Miami, for example, canceled its election in April because all four candidates ran unopposed. And vacancies happen fairly often when an elected official resigns or faces criminal charges — as El Portal Councilman Harold Mathis did in December for allegedly embezzling funds from his law firm, prompting Gov. Ron DeSantis to suspend him from office. Pirela ran unopposed to fill the seat.
But failing to field a single candidate to fill a council position — let alone two — is rare even in small towns.
Take the town of Medley, whose population is less than 900 and which has four seats up for grabs on Nov. 3. The incumbent mayor has a challenger; two incumbents and four challengers are vying for two council seats; and three residents are running to replace a councilwoman who is vacating her seat to run for mayor.
“Our constituents are very involved,” said Medley Town Clerk Victoria Martinez, adding that she has never seen an open council seat go unfilled in her decade working for the town.
In her 2018 address, Cubillos stressed the importance of having a plan to transition to new leadership. “Especially with where we’re at in our village, especially because we have so much going on, there needs to be a plan,” she said. “I wouldn’t even think of not having a plan. It would not be the best thing for the village.”
Cubillos didn’t respond to a question Tuesday about the impending vacancies after the November election. Roman, Urbom and Pirela couldn’t be reached for comment.
In an Instagram post Saturday, Roman said she had been “leaning towards shifting [her] focus” since last year. “Then COVID-19 happened and it put a lot into perspective. I decided that after two terms it was time to focus on family and my business,” said Roman, who works as a career and life coach.
Village Clerk Yenise Jacobi said Roman had recently reached out to her with candidate-related questions on behalf of another El Portal resident, but the resident never contacted Jacobi directly, she said.
El Portal residents will still vote Nov. 3 in the general election. The clerk will need to coordinate with the county elections department on a subsequent date to hold a special election for the two vacant council seats.
The village has been in a financial bind since August 2018, when it took out a $1.25 million loan to pay for debris cleanup after Hurricane Irma. The plan was to pay off the loan once FEMA reimbursed the village for about $2 million, but that money still hasn’t come through as FEMA, its inspector general and possibly the FBI probe “questionable invoices” for debris removal from El Portal, Miami Shores and Florida City.
Officials in the village, whose annual budget is around $2.5 million, recently negotiated with Synovus Bank to extend the deadline to pay off the loan for a second straight year.
Nickerson, the incoming mayor and a councilman since 2010, told the Miami Herald he respects what Cubillos has done for the village, but also hopes to shift the political culture to promote transparency and unity on the council.
Nickerson was arrested on misdemeanor domestic violence charges in November 2017. He later pleaded no contest and was placed on probation and ordered to stay away from his ex-wife, according to court records. He was arrested again in January 2018 on felony charges of stalking and burglary. A jury acquitted him a year later, records show.
This story was originally published August 18, 2020 at 10:44 AM.
