Levine Cava, Miami-Dade’s new mayor, plans to ‘come out swinging’ against COVID-19

Two days before becoming Miami-Dade mayor, Daniella Levine Cava and aides pulled up to a Liberty City gathering of campaign workers and local Democratic Party leaders.

Sunday’s thank-you gathering turned into a small rally against gentrification when a man wheeled a wireless speaker to the lawn and handed the mayor-elect a microphone.

“We can’t just be building new things. We’ve got to be helping people who live in the homes right now. I’m all about neighborhood planning at the neighborhood level,” Levine Cava said, standing before a backdrop of herself, a campaign mural featuring the candidate. “We’ll find a way. With your help. And with God’s help.”

Elected after a campaign centered on her status as a Democrat in a blue-leaning county, Levine Cava, 65, now faces the challenge of scoring victories on the governance side of county politics as she succeeds Republican Carlos Gimenez as the government’s top administrator.

An environmentalist who donned a sequined “Water Warrior” cape for campaign ads on climate change, she inherits the nearly $900 million Water and Sewer budget that’s at the center of her plan to accelerate converting septic tanks to the municipal sewer system before sea-level rise swamps them.

An outsider during her two terms on the county commission, Levine Cava was left out of leadership posts and committee chairs by the board she now must corral for legislative wins.

“I think the pandemic does make it difficult to build relationships with new commissioners,” said Raquel Regalado, a former school board member and one of five incoming commissioners elected to seats left open by the first wave of retirements required by term-limit rules voters approved in 2012. “In a normal world, we’d all be sitting down and having coffee with her. And she’d be building a coalition.”

A former nonprofit executive and social-work administrator, Levine Cava has staked much of her success on building consensus.

Gimenez spent most of 2020 in a public feud with local mayors over COVID orders and CARES Act funding. The day after she beat fellow commissioner Esteban “Steve” Bovo Jr. by eight points in the mayoral election, Levine Cava joined Miami Mayor Francis Suarez for a Miami food-distribution event.

‘I do have a bully pulpit’

Discussing the importance of early childhood learning, Levine Cava offered no specific fixes but said she wants to convene various agencies, the school system and nonprofits to tackle the problem.

“I don’t have the levers of these funding sources. But I do have a bully pulpit,” she said. “And I do have a vision, and I do have my collaborative ways. I’m hopeful in my administration we’ll be able to bring all of these entities to the table.”

A married grandmother of two, Levine Cava looks back at her time as a child-advocate lawyer as the moment she saw government do the most good. She worked for the state agency that represented the legal interest of children in trouble, and later went on to run the county foster-child program after Hurricane Andrew in the 1990s.

Intervening for a child in a dangerous home or one desperate for services was “in many cases the difference between life and death.”

“It wasn’t like you could solve all of the problems for these children, who obviously had been born into some truly difficult circumstances,” she said. “But you could truly make a monumental difference in each child’s life.”

A leading critic of Gimenez’s approach to COVID-19, Levine Cava takes office in the midst of what county authorities say is a surge in cases and facing a Thanksgiving holiday that’s poised to make the spread even worse.

Levine Cava said her first major appointment as mayor would fulfill a campaign promise to establish a chief medical officer for the county — someone who could advise her on COVID-19, and serve as the administration’s voice on the science behind the pandemic.

“I think we have a short window to try and tamp it down,” she said. “I’m going to come out swinging this week.”

Nearly two weeks after being elected mayor of Florida’s largest local government, Levine Cava said she still hasn’t spoken to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Orders from the Republican governor forced Miami-Dade to reopen nightclubs and end virtual commission meetings, and Levine Cava said she’s been trying to get a meeting with the state leader to pitch a COVID plan from her and city mayors. “We want the governor to listen to us,” she said.

Miami still ignoring county curfew

She faces local COVID political challenges, too: The county’s midnight curfew survived a court challenge on appeal, but Miami still won’t enforce it under Suarez. “That’s a conversation we’re having,” Levine Cava said.

As Miami-Dade’s first female mayor, Levine Cava said she’ll also have the first female security detail. She said she requested a female county police officer be assigned as her driver, and has begun the interview process.

Levine Cava ran on making Miami-Dade government more responsive to the needy. She takes office as the county burns through much of the nearly $1 billion in federal COVID-relief dollars that have sheltered the budget from plunging sales and hotel taxes.

Gimenez left her with a budget with revenue shortfalls in the coming years, and that’s with property-tax revenues still growing in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis. Should values take more of a hit, the situation will be worse.

“I am going to start talking about austerity,” Levine Cava said during a break between stops Sunday on a tour that took her from farm country in South Miami-Dade to a reunion of young campaign workers in Miami Gardens. “There will be some very tough decisions. But I’m going to bring everyone along with me.”

She said she hopes to enjoy more commission support than she did as a sitting member of the board, where she wasn’t picked to run committees or elected to serve as chair. “The commission was kind of right leaning,” said former commissioner Juan C. Zapata, a Republican on the nonpartisan board until 2016. “Here’s this new commissioner, kind of left leaning. It caused some friction.”

A new seat for the mayor in commission chambers

Levine Cava’s debut meeting as mayor will find her physically in a lower position than Gimenez. A new COVID-safety design by acting chairwoman Rebeca Sosa moves the mayor from the commission dais to a seat in the well of the chambers, leaving board members to look down when the mayor speaks.

Along with commission politics, Levine Cava must navigate the expectations of the liberal groups and youth activists who helped fuel the first mayoral campaign to qualify for the ballot through a petition drive.

This year a coalition of activist groups organized members to oppose a Gimenez plan to spend about $400 million upgrading the county’s jail system as part of a campaign to shift tax dollars from law enforcement to social services. The movement included Catalyst Miami, the nonprofit Levine Cava founded in 1996 and then left to run for county commission in 2014.

The jail plan remains on the drawing board, and Levine Cava said she’s prepared to advance a plan to replace a county pretrial detention center that’s in such disrepair she considers it “inhumane.” At the same time, she said she’ll insist her Corrections director find ways to reduce the number of nonviolent offenders housed in county jails.

“I’m not satisfied with their projections,” she said. “There’s work to be done. They say they’ve been innovative. And they have been. I don’t take that away for a minute. But we need to keep going.”

At a Sunday stop in a Miami Gardens campaign office rented through a joint agreement with the Democratic Party, Levine Cava met with a group of volunteers and staffers in their 20s and 30s.

“We need change in our community,” said Diaundrea Sherill, 33, who ran the Miami Gardens office. “Yes, we elected the first female mayor. But she’s coming with change.”

Another volunteer, Francesca Hawthorne, 32, said she expects some friction between what Levine Cava delivers as mayor and what her younger supporters want.

“I think there’s no doubt there’s going to be a difficult conversation,” she said. “The fact that Daniella’s here to have those difficult conversations is the first step.”

This story was originally published November 16, 2020 at 6:59 PM.