New Surfside mayor wants condo collapse victims remembered. ‘It was our residents’
Newly elected Surfside Mayor Shlomo Danzinger didn’t talk much about the Champlain Towers South collapse during his campaign because he said he didn’t want to politicize a tragedy that killed 98 people just a few blocks from Town Hall.
But in his first weeks in office since unseating former Mayor Charles Burkett, who became the face of Surfside’s response to the June 24 disaster, Danzinger is making it one of his first priorities.
He called for a special Town Commission meeting for Tuesday — his first meeting as mayor — to be dedicated solely to issues related to the condo building collapse, including planning an event marking the one-year anniversary, creating a memorial to the victims and installing signage at the site to remember the lives lost there.
“This is the town’s responsibility,” Danzinger told the Miami Herald in an interview.
The town government needs to continue focusing on the victims, their families and the residents who lost their homes in the tragedy, he said.
“It’s our town. It was our residents. It was our neighbors and our friends,” he said.
Who is Surfside’s new mayor?
Danzinger, who has never been elected to public office before, pulled off an upset election victory over Burkett and Vice Mayor Tina Paul. He won the March 15 election by a margin of 25 votes over Paul.
“I woke up with a million, billion phone calls and text messages,” Danzinger said.
The 42-year-old Toronto native, who moved to Surfside in 2012 from New York, lost his first run for a commission seat in 2020. He previously served as a volunteer member of the city’s Parks and Recreation Committee.
He has five children — ages 8 to 19 — and is the CEO of a company that designs and sells electric standing desks. He is also working on a patent for a non-lethal police weapon. Danzinger, who said he studied at Jewish Yeshiva schools but ended his education early to care for his grandfather, previously worked for JPay, an IT and financial services company that works in the American prison system.
Danzinger said he doesn’t want his position to be defined by being an observant Jewish person elected Surfside mayor. He said he wants to represent the entire community.
“While I am proud of who I am, I don’t want that to define me as the mayor,” he said in a text responding to a question. “I am here to change my town for the better and I want to make sure I represent the best interest of all the residents.”
Danzinger volunteers at The Shul of Bal Harbour synagogue, where he ran a children’s program and helped develop the building’s security protocol amid rising antisemitism in the United States.
While he has no formal law enforcement or private-security background, Danzinger is a gun enthusiast who has undergone weapons training and holds a concealed-carry firearm permit. His grandfather taught him how to shoot, and he said he has taken most of his children to the gun range.
“The more you train, the safer this is,” he said.
Danzinger said he likes to buy and sell weapons, some for nostalgia, others for self-defense. He keeps them locked in safes at home. He couldn’t estimate how many he has, but he said it wasn’t a “crazy number.”
“I think we get a bad rap,” he said of gun enthusiasts.
Danzinger said he wanted to be a police officer and had applied to join the New York City police force, but the department didn’t contact him until years later after he had moved to Florida. He is a registered Republican who said he holds Libertarian views against government overreach.
Danzinger said he was living in Brooklyn during the “traumatic” Crown Heights riots in 1991, a violent period of racial unrest that originated with the death of a 7-year-old Black boy in a car crash and led to the fatal stabbing of a Hasidic Jewish man. And his home was once burglarized in Bal Harbour, he said.
In an emergency situation, he said, having a gun is critical for self-defense.
“My family is my responsibility,” he said.
Mayor’s plans for Surfside
As a member of the commission, Danzinger has one of the five votes involved in passing legislation. The town has a manager-run form of government, where Town Manager Andrew Hyatt is in charge of the day-to-day operations of the government and implementing legislation.
Danzinger said he has ideas for how to make the streets in the single-family neighborhood safer, possibly through strategic dead-ends, one-way streets or walking paths. He also wants to add more parking to fix congestion on Harding Avenue, the busy street that runs through Surfside’s downtown business district.
Amid a debate about protecting Surfside’s small-town character from over-development, Danzinger said residents should embrace “natural growth” but he doesn’t want the town to become a new Sunny Isles Beach or Miami Beach.
“There is natural growth and healthy growth that happens within the town and you need to allow that to happen, but at the same time you need to kind of protect the town from over-development,” Danzinger said.
He said he knows development and parking may be controversial issues in town, but he hopes the new commission can work amicably and debate the issues without attacking anyone personally. The previous commission, he noted, made headlines for its political bickering and a couple of middle-finger salutes.
Robert Lisman, a seven-year resident who supported Paul for mayor, said he was concerned with Danzinger’s inexperience in government and his, at times, “dismissive” attitude toward longtime Surfsiders who are wary about how new construction projects might threaten the town’s charm.
“Evolution is inevitable, the town will evolve, changes will come, but it doesn’t need to happen in a drastic and dismissive way,” he said.
Lisman agrees that Surfside needs more parking and said he is happy that Burkett is out of office because he fostered divisiveness on the commission.
“I do have faith that he’s going to do the right thing and bring everyone in Surfside together,” Lisman said of Danzinger.
This story was originally published March 28, 2022 at 2:54 PM.
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