MIA’s broken escalators, elevators and walkways spark frustration and a blame game
The escalator would have been a welcome sight for Kathy Jones as she made her way to the main level of Miami International Airport on Thursday, but there was a familiar sight awaiting her: a yellow barricade announcing that it wasn’t working.
“My heart sank,” the 75-year-old said after she climbed more than a dozen stairs to get to the top. “They make a lot of money here. This shouldn’t happen.”
READ MORE: Miami airport’s grounded Skytrain should be rolling again in weeks, director says
Feeling the heat from other travelers with similar sentiments, the elected official in charge of the county airport, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, held a press conference Thursday morning pledging improvements ahead and blaming the problems on inaction before she took office in 2020.
“I have prioritized deferred maintenance since day one,” said Levine Cava, a former county commissioner. “Critical improvements have been delayed for decades, and I am turning that around.”
Though serving her first term as mayor, Levine Cava and her administration aren’t new to MIA and its construction and maintenance contracts.
In her six years on the County Commission, she voted with the majority to approve the Aviation Department’s budget. As mayor, she ousted her predecessor’s Aviation director, Lester Sola, in 2021 and promoted Ralph Cutié, the MIA administrator who was in charge of repairs and maintenance as the department’s director of Facilities Management since 2017.
Flanked by MIA workers and administrators, Levine Cava said in the coming years, passengers should see improvements regarding two sources of regular complaints: dated, dirty bathrooms and broken conveyance systems — the airport’s elevators, escalators and automated walkways.
Bathrooms: In October, commissioners approved roughly $40 million in contracts to upgrade 141 airport bathrooms by 2030, part of a large renovation the administration said will cost about $100 million.
Moving systems: Cutié said about 7% of the airport’s more than 600 elevators, escalators and motorized walkways aren’t working on any given day. He said his goal is to cut that in half. The commission last year approved nearly $700 million in contracts to replace the aging equipment and repair what has more years to function. “This is historic, unprecedented investment,” he said.
READ MORE: Miami-Dade fires an MIA elevator contractor. Was it for safety or to reward a union?
Cutié was named facilities director under Carlos Gimenez, the term-limited mayor before Levine Cava. Now a Republican congressman from Miami, Gimenez said Thursday that Levine Cava, who is running for reelection, is off-base in suggesting his administration neglected MIA while avoiding blame for issues at an airport she oversees.
“The airport always had the money needed to perform the maintenance,” he said in a text message. “And she’s been the Mayor for 3 years!”
The Levine Cava administration has already announced a coming end to a major maintenance issue at MIA: the September shutdown of Skytrain, which lets passengers avoid mile-long walks in Concourse D. Repair crews are expected to fix cracks in concrete supports for the train and allow a reopening of three of the four stations by March.
On Thursday, Helen Shepherd, 80, encountered mostly working walkways in her trek from an MIA parking garage to the main terminal, where she and her partner were catching a flight back to Mexico. But one walkway had maintenance barriers up, forcing a longer trudge with their wheeled luggage. Shepherd said she’s had a mostly good experience at the airport.
“Up until that, it’s been excellent,” she said.
For the 75-year-old Jones, who was at MIA to renew a federal travel pass, the disabled escalator was the second mechanical problem that brought her some frustration on the morning of the mayor’s press conference. “The elevator wasn’t working in the parking garage,” she said. “I had to walk to the other elevator.”
Complaints about MIA breakdowns could go beyond social media blasts and passenger frustrations. County commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez earlier this month said he’s concerned lawmakers in Tallahassee will use perceived shortcomings at MIA to justify legislation imposing state control of the county-owned airport, similar to how Miami-Dade last summer lost control of a local toll board, the Greater Miami Expressway Agency, which is now run by state appointees.
In late December, footage went viral of dingy water pouring from an MIA terminal ceiling, a debacle presented as a burst sewage pipe on social media. Cutié later said the liquid was kitchen water unleashed from an American Airlines contractor repairing a pipe from the carrier’s VIP Admirals Club.
At a Jan. 10 meeting of the county’s Airports and Economic Development Committee, Bermudez warned Cutié that videos like the one showing the leak need quicker explanations or risk adding to a quiet campaign to strip MIA from county control.
“We’re in a situation now, it’s no great secret, with our friends in Tallahassee,” Bermudez said, adding that losing MIA and PortMiami, another alleged takeover target, “could at some point really cripple county government.”
“You need to be able to respond,” Bermudez said of viral incidents like the burst pipe. “Once you create that public perception, it’s very hard to get rid of it.”
This story was originally published January 18, 2024 at 2:19 PM.