Running to lead Miami-Dade, this suburban mayor promises slashing spending won’t hurt

Seated in the suburban diner where he learned to cook eggs under pressure, Manny Cid breezes through his plans to impose an historic spending cut on Miami-Dade government if he gets elected county mayor.

Top on his agenda: a 10% reduction on the countywide property-tax rate, a cut that would likely wipe out $200 million in revenue a year.

“It’s beyond doable,” said Cid, whose lunch-and-breakfast joint, the Mayor’s Cafe, is a nod to his part-time job for the last eight years, mayor of Miami Lakes. “Anything that was added over the last four years, it’s 100% on the chopping block. I’ll renegotiate the health contracts. Look, $200 million is not hard to find.”

READ MORE: Are Democrats still strong enough in Miami-Dade for Levine Cava to win in August?

The last time Miami-Dade saw a rate cut that large was in 2011, when a newly elected mayor, Carlos Gimenez, cut the countywide rate by 11.5% at the tail end of a nationwide housing crash and imposed austerity measures that included pay cuts for police and other county employees, eliminating hundreds of positions and reducing services, from fewer code inspections to letting grass grow taller at county parks.

While real estate values had collapsed when Gimenez was mayor, they’re climbing now, providing more breathing room at budget season for local governments across Miami-Dade.

Daniella Levine Cava, the county mayor seeking reelection against a challenge by Cid and five other candidates, secured a pair of 1% reductions on the countywide tax rate in her last two adopted budgets while still increasing spending. She rejected Cid’s proposal as both reckless and disregarding the kind of services and improvements most residents expect from Miami-Dade government.

“We are bringing the things that people want,” she said. “It does cost money to build them and operate them.”

Levine Cava, 68, pointed out Miami-Dade received more than $500 million in federal COVID relief money since 2020, money that helped boost the budget during her tenure. Her budgets include new money for improving the county’s sewage system, expanding rapid-transit buses to South Miami-Dade and beefing up building inspections after the 2021 condo collapse in Surfside.

Cid, 40, offers few details on how he would pay for the lower tax rate, but does mostly rule out the pay cuts and service reductions that Gimenez used to balance the budget before the real estate market recovered.

Instead, Cid insists he can engineer a mostly painless tax cut paid for with a more efficient county government, an organization with more than 30,000 employees and a budget topping $12 billion.

“The current mayor made a lot of promises, and her promises weren’t to be efficient,“ Cid said. “Her promises were to a lot of unions, to a lot of different interest groups, that she was going to grow government. And she did.”

While the Aug. 20 mayoral election is officially non partisan, the small-town Republican mayor is using his tax-cut promise to paint the Democratic incumbent as a big-spending liberal. He knocks Levine Cava for proposing a 2025 budget weeks ago that is $3.6 billion higher than the one she inherited from a term-limited Gimenez after taking office in 2020 as the first Democratic mayor in 16 years. Under her tenure, the county workforce increased 9% as well.

READ MORE: Miami-Dade’s tax rates stay flat in 2025 budget plan by Levine Cava

Running up against that argument are the 1% rate cuts Levine Cava secured in the 2023 and 2024 budget, which brought the county’s overall tax rate to its lowest level since the early 1980s. Rising property values cushioned the budget from revenue cuts for Levine Cava, who won bipartisan support on the County Commission for both budgets.

Her 2025 budget proposal keeps the 2024 rate in place, with total spending up 8% to $12.6 billion. The countywide property tax pays for most of the $2.5 billion general fund that covers police, parks, transit and roads, and it is up about $160 million, a nearly 7% increase.

Though Levine Cava has spent 10 years in county government – six as a County Commissioner and four as Miami-Dade’s top administrator – Cid brings the most time in elected office to the seven-person race.

The married father of four, including a two-month-old, won his first Town Council race in 2012 at the age of 29, two years before Levine Cava won her South Miami-Dade seat on the County Commission.

In 2016, Cid defeated the incumbent Miami Lakes mayor, Michael Pizzi, after Pizzi was acquitted on federal bribery charges.

As mayor, Cid runs the town council meetings and has a vote on the board. A town manager administers Miami Lakes, a government with a yearly budget of $60 million – roughly what is spent each year by the county’s Cultural Affairs Department.

He earns about $28,000 a year as mayor, plus another $26,000 teaching part time at St. Thomas University and at a local high school.

His main occupation is running the diner he opened in 2019, the Mayor’s Cafe. He describes the saga of opening the rented establishment and the meticulous permitting hurdles he had to clear with the city – “It was worse being mayor” – before he could start serving food.

A year later, Cid was trying to keep the diner afloat during the COVID pandemic, taking over cooking duties when staffing became challenging and the carry-out window was slammed with breakfast orders.

He recalled running Miami Lakes council meetings remotely from the grill on Zoom, and the stress of sorting through breakfast orders with egg preferences that were beyond his repertoire at the time.

“It was over-hard eggs for everybody,” Cid said. “But I got a lot better. Now I could walk into any IHOP and jump behind the line blindfolded.”

The son of Cuban exiles leads a prosperous town of about 30,000 people, not even half the size of a commission district in a county with 13 of them. But Cid says his time as a suburban mayor has given him insight into county government as he negotiated with commissioners and administrators for flexibility with transit dollars to allow “Freebee” shuttle services in Miami Lakes, a municipal takeover of guard-gate and lake taxing districts, and the contentious fight over a closed flyover bridge between his town and Hialeah.

READ MORE: Bridges that divided Hialeah and Miami Lakes now part of a deal to open one of them

Though the most experienced Republican in the race, Cid hasn’t gotten much support from his party. No Republican mayor or member of the County Commission has endorsed the campaign, while Levine Cava has endorsements from 25 of 34 sitting municipal mayors in Miami-Dade. His $530,000 in fundraising is a tiny fraction of the $6 million the incumbent mayor brought in during the last four years.

Cid, a former legislative aide for Republicans in Tallahassee, is counting on a partisan reset after the Aug. 20 election, which will head to a November run-off between the top two finishers if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote. Levine Cava is telling supporters she expects to win outright in August, but Cid thinks he has a shot of pushing her into a fall campaign when leading Republicans will be under pressure to jump in with both endorsements and fund-raising help.

Levine Cava, a married grandmother and lawyer who worked as a non-profit director, has the support of unions representing most of the county workforce, which has seen pay rates increase under her first term.

In 2021, the County Commission’s budget office estimated that Levine Cava’s three-year labor agreements with pay bumps would add nearly $250 million to the budget over 36 months.

The head of the county police union said he was shocked to hear about Cid’s tax-cut plan.

“Ten percent? I find that ridiculous,” said Steadman Stahl, president of the Police Benevolent Association, which in 2020 backed Levine Cava’s Republican opponent, future Hialeah Mayor Steve Bovo, before endorsing her reelection earlier this year.

Stahl said the 2012 tax cut had “great impact” on public safety. He said he would expect police staffing cuts again if Miami-Dade tried to squeeze $200 million out of its budget in 2025. “Before you promise to cut a budget, find out the implications,” he said.

The Gimenez rate cut reversed a tax hike imposed the prior year by his predecessor, Carlos Alvarez, at a time when falling real estate values sent government dollars plunging.

Cid laid out several paths to paying for his tax cut, but didn’t offer specific details assigned to cost amounts. He said he would ask all county department heads to submit plans that rolled back staffing to where it was in 2022 and he would seek to renegotiate union contracts.

One would be eliminating all vacant positions. The latest county report shows about 10% of the county’s 30,000 positions listed as vacant, so the savings would be significant if those jobs dropped from the county payroll. But it would also mean major staffing reductions long term: vacancies include nearly 300 people at the county’s jails, more than 200 in the police department and almost 400 in the Department of Transportation and Public Works, which oversees roads and transit.

Cid also wants to eliminate Levine Cava’s senior level of management – she has chiefs of public safety, community service, operations and administration overseeing more than two dozen departments and earning a combined $1.3 million a year.

His most substantive target is waste and inflated prices in county purchasing, which he described as weighed down by a set of requirements and minimum standards that cost taxpayers too much money. “I would eliminate the entire procurement code,” he said.

Miami-Dade’s countywide property tax rate is currently $457 for every $100,000 of taxable value. For a home worth the county median assessed value of roughly $218,000 this year, that means a $768 charge for the countywide tax this year. (Depending on where they live, Miami-Dade homeowners may pay three additional county property taxes funding municipal services, the Fire Rescue Department and libraries.)

A 10% cut in the countywide property would likely mean a savings of about $50 in 2025 for the median home, if inflation remains elevated. Florida caps annual increases in assessed value at the inflation rate, up to a maximum of 3%.

Increases in assessed values also meant homeowners still saw slightly higher tax bills under the 1% rate decreases passed in Levine Cava’s 2023 and 2024 budgets.

Five weeks before he filed for county mayor last year, Cid helped secure a tax-rate cut in Miami Lakes.

He was on the winning side of a divided council vote to approve an 8.5% reduction in the town’s municipal tax rate, which went from $226 for every $100,000 of taxable value to $207. He said he later voted against the town budget because it put money into pay increases instead of adding two new police officers to the town force.

“The number one goal is public safety,” he said. “The money was there to hire more officers, even with the tax cut.”

A note prepared by town staff said the $20 million general-fund budget was balanced by transferring about $470,000 out of a $1.8 million long-term improvement fund for a park.

READ MORE: It’s mayor versus mayor in 2024 as Levine Cava gets a GOP challenger from Miami Lakes

Joshua Dieguez, a council member now running to succeed Cid as town mayor, voted for the tax cut last year. But he said it didn’t go over well with some constituents who want Miami Lakes to provide better parks and improve services. Weeks ago, the council voted preliminarily to keep tax rates flat for 2025.

“The vast majority of people want to see more services, not less. In the form of more tree trimming, more police officers and things like that,” Dieguez said. “I think the general consensus I learned is people would rather pay that $30 or $40 and get the services they expect.”

Even so, Dieguez said Cid’s plan for a lower Miami-Dade rate would be popular because the county tax takes up a larger chunk of residents’ overall bills. “Personally, I would love that,” said Dieguez, a Cid supporter in the county mayor race. “I think that could go a long way toward helping residents we have who are more working class. They’d feel the most benefit from doing that.”

For Cid, he’s confident Miami-Dade residents will embrace a lower rate and not miss the lost revenue to the bureaucracy. The prospect of a major spending cut doesn’t bother him.

“We’re at $12.7 billion.… We might even be able to do 20%,” he said. “Let’s double down. Ten percent is the promise, but if we can do 20%, I’ll do 20%”

This story was originally published August 9, 2024 at 4:35 PM.