How did Miami-Dade County fare in the 9-year era of Carlos Gimenez as mayor?

At the center of county government and Miami-Dade politics for nine years, Mayor Carlos Gimenez officially leaves his post at midnight Monday, a term-limited former mayor now on his way to Congress as the Republican representative for Florida’s 26th Congressional District.

He was the first mayor to operate without a county manager, a post voters eliminated just as Gimenez took office in 2011 after the recall of then-Mayor Carlos Alvarez. He served the final year of Alvarez’s term, then won two full terms himself.

The position is considered one of the most powerful in Florida, because Miami-Dade is the state’s most populous county, with 2.7 million people. The mayor presides over a government with a $9 billion budget and more than 28,000 employees, giving him or her authority over the county police department, Miami International Airport and PortMiami.

Here’s a look at some of the categories that help define the Gimenez era before mayor-elect Daniella Levine Cava gets sworn in on Tuesday:

Transit

The toughest vote Gimenez, 66, faced on transportation arrived in late August 2018, when he presented his $300 million plan for a rapid-transit bus line in South Miami-Dade.

Mayors in the region revolted against the idea, demanding the $1 billion Metrorail extension pitched to voters in a 2002 sales-tax referendum under then-mayor Alex Penelas. Miami-Dade never secured the federal dollars needed for a major rail expansion, and Gimenez touted the bus line as the next best thing.

Gimenez won his vote, over the objection of Levine Cava, a county commissioner representing parts of South Miami-Dade.

Two years later, a developer has been hired and about $200 million in state and federal dollars secured to create the county’s first rapid-transit bus line.

Designed to mimic the perks of rail service, the South Miami-Dade line plans climate-controlled stations with advanced ticket sales, allowing passengers to board in groups and then travel unimpeded on a busway with intersections blocked from incoming traffic.

Six corridors were studied in the county’s 2016 SMART Plan initiation, and that effort was part of Gimenez’s 2016 reelection campaign that included a commercial touting “More Rail Lines.” The South corridor is the only one with a major project underway as Gimenez leaves office, though talks have advanced for a monorail to South Beach and a commuter rail line to Aventura.

There’s a chance the South Miami-Dade bus line will be the start of the trend. A county transportation board in October endorsed a recommendation from the Gimenez administration to pursue a $265 million rapid-transit line along State Road 836 and another one is being pursued for Flagler Street.

Azhar Chougle, executive director of Transit Alliance Miami, said the South Dade bus system shouldn’t be cause for too much admiration, since it’s running along an existing dedicated busway. The real test will come if the Gimenez win on that project helps propel county leaders to take the tougher step of converting roadways for traffic into new, dedicated bus lanes.

“One express bus can’t solve anything,” Chougle said.

The Transit Alliance recently completed a redesign of the county’s bus network after securing funding from the Gimenez administration, and Chougle credited Gimenez for recognizing the county needs to rethink how it parcels out bus resources.

“I think Gimenez recognized pretty early the system needs reform,” he said

Environment

In August, dead fish drifted to the shores of Biscayne Bay. Environmentalists pointed to them as evidence of lost years in Miami-Dade for improving water quality and preventing an ecological crisis.

The Gimenez administration cautioned against blaming the fish kill on infrastructure failings, saying heavy rain during high-temperature summer days can lead to the kind of unusual drop in oxygen levels that temporarily make parts of the bay hostile to fish.

Rachel Silverstein, head of the Miami Waterkeeper monitoring and advocacy group, pointed to years of pollution, unchecked storm-water run-off, sewage leaks and failing septic tanks that the county has left unaddressed.

“I think the fish kills this summer were a clear indication we have not made the investments we need to protect Biscayne Bay from pollution that’s coming from the land,” Silverstein said Friday. “County government has a lot of jurisdiction over what happens in Biscayne Bay.”

PortMiami

When the coronavirus pandemic cratered PortMiami’s finances and sent the cruise industry into a financial tailspin, the Gimenez administration didn’t let the crisis stop plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new terminals.

The push forward on a $1.5 billion plan for five new cruise terminals with a mix of private and public dollars keeps on course the remake of the port under Gimenez.

PortMiam’s cruise terminals have largely been designed as industrial boxes. Those are now being replaced with curved glass structures that are bringing signature architecture to the island port between downtown Miami and Miami Beach.

“Drive along the MacArthur Causeway on the way to South Beach, and you’ll see an exciting new skyline,” Gimenez said in a Nov. 6 speech at the port. “Imagine what you’ll see in a couple of years.”

The decision to keep the port projects on track raises the stakes for a rebound in cruising post-COVID, as ratings agency place negative outlooks on PortMiami’s debt. Gimenez authorized reworking terminal deals that temporarily free cruise companies from minimum rent payments until business resumes.

Should cruise and cargo revenue not be enough to cover the payments, some bondholders can pursue tax dollars that fund general government expenses.

Housing

Gimenez was running for reelection in 2016 when he gave the green light to what would become the fiercest procurement fight of his administration: the $300 million contract to redevelop the Liberty Square public housing complex. Related Group won out over Atlantic Pacific, but not before a fierce lobbying and community-relations battle that divided residents and county commissioners.

Gimenez’s recommendation for the Related plan prevailed, and the first phase of the new project — built with a mix of county, federal and private dollars — opened in July 2019. They represented the first modern units built to replace the “Pork ‘n’ Beans” Liberty Square complex, one of the oldest public housing projects in the country.

That project was a prelude to a broader, slow moving revival of public housing in Miami-Dade spearheaded by Gimenez appointee Michael Liu, the county’s housing director.

Tapping a federal program aimed at privatizing some public housing units, Miami-Dade qualified for a string of “Rental-Assistance Demonstration” projects that let developers bid to rehab existing complexes using a new stream of federal Section 8 rental income.

Miami-Dade secured permission to rebuild or renovate more than 6,000 units, with the redevelopment process underway for several complexes, including Culmer Gardens and Robert King High. The county also used HUD rules to move forward with redevelopment of the Annie Coleman and Harry Cain complexes.

Residents have complained of inadequate assistance to find new places to live temporarily. “Nothing was fair for us,” said Rose Adams, a resident and advocate in the Annie Coleman complex, who earlier this year secured a new house in public housing in Miami Gardens. “I ended up in a hotel for over two months.”

Redevelopment programs guarantee residents the right to units in the new complexes, and developers must retain the same amount of housing reserved for low-income residents. Housing advocates describe the effort as a milestone in securing federal help for an under-funded network of housing falling into more disrepair each year.

“We were at the point of losing some of that public housing,” said Annie Lord, executive director of Miami Homes for All. “They’ve been quite creative.”

Budget

When Gimenez won the 2011 mayoral special election to replace Alvarez, his first budget fulfilled a campaign promise to roll back the tax-rate increase approved by the last administration.

The unpopular hike, coupled with pay raises for union members, helped topple Alvarez. The higher rates also were a response to the housing crash, and values had dropped low enough that the amount of property taxes collected in 2011 fell 3%. When Gimenez rolled back the higher rates for the 2012 budget, tax revenues dropped 14%.

The newly elected mayor closed much of the gap by negotiating temporary pay cuts with unions, along with service cuts and other austerity measures.

The approach became a primary selling point as Gimenez, a former Miami city manager, later campaigned for two full terms as mayor. With countywide tax rates at roughly the same level as he set them in that 2012 budget, Gimenez touted his tenure as saving property owners more than $1 billion in taxes over nine years.

He leaves Levine Cava an existing budget with significant deficit projections in the coming years and dozens of listed needs without funding. They include $13 million in staffing needs at parks, about $10 million for park-and-ride stations near express bus routes, and about $4 million in staffing needs in the county’s social services agency, which has a waiting list of 3,400 people for in-home eldercare services.

Crisis management

As mayor, Gimenez deployed unprecedented mosquito spraying during the Zika outbreak in 2016, ordered the largest evacuation in Miami-Dade history ahead of Hurricane Irma in 2017, and even dealt with a Miami earthquake in early 2020.

Nothing compared to the COVID-19 response, when the former fire chief used emergency powers to shutter much of the economy, order residents to clear the streets during overnight curfews and mandate masks in public.

His administration harnessed hundreds of millions in federal and local dollars to prop up fare-free transit, deliver home meals to seniors and launch relief programs for tenants, landlords, restaurants and businesses.

Economy

In 2015, Gimenez announced a land deal to bring America’s largest mall to vacant property n Northwest Miami-Dade, the $4 billion American Dream Miami.

Slammed by opponents as a traffic nightmare bringing low-wage retail jobs, the project by the company behind Minnesota’s Mall of America was also hailed as Miami-Dade’s answer to Orlando’s theme parks and a chance to create the county’s largest private employer, with 25,000 people working there.

Gimenez called the project historic, though it remains on the drawing board as the mayor leaves office. When he ticked off his “legacy list” at farewell speech earlier this month, Gimenez pointed to Miami-Dade’s “tech ecosystem” and county funding he steered to the Emerge Americans conference.

“It started with our vision of Miam-Dade becoming a high-tech hub for the Americas,” Gimenez said. “It paid off.”

The Gimenez administration has made the county’s zoning and building bureaucracy less daunting and easier to navigate, said Jose Gonzalez, an executive at the development company behind Brightline and president of the Builders Association of South Florida.

“To Gimenez’s credit, he did put people in there who used common sense,” Gonzalez said. “Before, the red tape was just nauseating.”

Immigration

In the first days of Donald Trump’s presidency, Gimenez changed county policy to mollify the new president. Gimenez ordered county jails to begin accepting federal detention requests for inmates held on local charges but also being sought for possible deportation.

Miami-Dade’s 2013 policy to reject those 48-hour detention requests called “detainers” landed the county on the Obama administration’s list of “sanctuary” jurisdictions. Gimenez’s switch brought praise from Trump himself, who declared the decision “Strong!” on Twitter.

County commissioners backed Gimenez’s new “detainer” policy in a bipartisan vote, brushing off accusations by activists and immigration groups that Miami-Dade was betraying its immigrant roots and reputation for tolerance of undocumented residents.

Four years later, Trump lost Miami-Dade by the narrowest margin of any Republican since 2004, and Gimenez was elected to Congress with Trump’s endorsement. Levine Cava voted against the Gimenez change in 2017, saying the policy might change again under the new administration.

“I am definitely eager to explore reversing it,” she said ahead of the election.

This story was originally published November 16, 2020 at 6:00 AM.