Cleaning up trash and holding the gavel: Miami’s newest commissioner gets to work
Miami Commissioner Christine King’s Instagram notifications have been popping off with a bunch of trash.
In office for about a month now, she has been regularly tagged in photos of heaps of trash strewn about District 5 — plastic bottles and bins, paint cans, splintered wood, tree trimmings and even a door. A social media account called @miamiesbasura (Miami is trash) has been posting pictures of littered corners and sidewalks, and King has been making calls to get city crews out to pick up the mess.
“I will clean District 5 up one block at a time if I have to,” King, who represents Liberty City, Little Haiti, Wynwood, Overtown and the Upper Eastside, told the Miami Herald in an interview Tuesday.
The speedy response on multiple trash reports earned her a positive mention on another post on @miamiesbasura’s account.
“Thank you Commissioner King for keeping Miami beautiful!” the anonymous account posted.
Tackling these sorts of street-level issues has occupied the first woman elected to the commission in a decade as she transitions into her new role as elected official. She’s also assembling a staff, formulating a legislative agenda and grappling with the demands of a newly public life despite her preference for privacy.
“I’m very shy and very media averse,” she told the Miami Herald in an interview Tuesday. “I have to get used to that.”
She’ll also have to get used to playing traffic cop on a City Commission known for vacillating between being cautiously cordial and outright combative. King said she was caught by surprise when on Dec. 7 Mayor Francis Suarez appointed her to be commission chairwoman, two days before the last commission meeting of the year. She passed the gavel to the vice chairman, Commissioner Joe Carollo, to give herself a month to prepare for the responsibility.
King said the appointment — which made her Miami City Hall’s first chairwoman — was an honor. She said she looks forward to getting started in January, when she’ll have the power to control the flow of legislation, the pace of the commission’s conversations and the way in which the public interacts with elected officials at City Hall.
“I know sometimes the City Commission has gotten a black eye for their passion, for the way they serve,” King said. “I want to clean up our image, so to speak, because we’re all here and we’ve all been elected to do the same thing with dignity and integrity.”
Born in Guyana and raised in Liberty City, she might be new to the limelight, but she is no stranger to community work in Miami.
She previously worked in constituent services at the county, she’s a practicing attorney and now former president and CEO of the Martin Luther King Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit that has received funding for social programs from the city for many years. The organization is known for providing hot meals to seniors and cars to low-income residents who need dependable transportation to get to work and childcare.
King said she immediately resigned from the MLK EDC after winning election on Nov. 6, capturing nearly 65% of the vote and easily outstripping six other candidates, including appointed incumbent Jeffrey Watson.
Looking ahead, King said she’s working on crystallizing her ideas for promoting more affordable homeownership in District 5. She said she wants to push for economic development, see wages increase and promote programs to give youths an outlet and curb gun violence.
“How is that going to take shape? We are in the process of developing that,” she said.
This story was originally published December 15, 2021 at 4:06 PM.
