The Miami mayor’s race is heating up. This former city commissioner is planning a run
After a two-year hiatus from public office, former Miami City Commissioner Ken Russell wants to return to City Hall to “clean up” a city he says is “contaminated with bad government.”
On Tuesday, Russell, 51, plans to officially file paperwork to run for mayor of Miami, which would make him the first prominent candidate to formally enter the 2025 mayoral race.
“The city of Miami is bad enough that you’d wonder, who would want to be the mayor?” Russell said in an interview last week. “It’s like, who would want to be the captain of the Titanic?”
After his climactic exit from City Hall in late 2022, Russell says he didn’t have plans to return. But a siren’s song of controversies throughout the past two years has lured him back. Russell believes he can right the ship through reform initiatives like amending the city’s charter to increase the number of commissioners and implementing stricter term limits.
Russell said his objectives as mayor would differ from his goals as a commissioner.
“This is an entirely different mission of reshaping the city, and it’s not the type of thing you can simply steer gently in one direction or another or advocate for,” Russell said. “You literally need to break this wheel.”
Russell was first elected to the Miami City Commission in 2015 as the representative for District 2, which includes Miami’s coastal neighborhoods like downtown, Brickell, Edgewater and Morningside. At the time, Russell was considered a “dark horse” candidate whose win came as a shock. But Russell went on to be reelected in 2019, leaving office nearly a year before his term was up after an unsuccessful run for Congress.
Since his departure, Russell has focused on consulting. He joined London-based firm Longevity Partners in late 2022 and left the firm early last year. He’s since started his own consulting company, Arquest Partners. Russell is registered to lobby in Miami-Dade County on behalf of the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group, and has lobbied against a county proposal to build a controversial trash incinerator.
Aside from his advocacy for the Sierra Club, Russell in recent years has largely stayed out of public discourse. But that changed earlier this year when Miami Mayor Francis Suarez announced a proposal to ensure the entire $20 million parks contribution from the Miami Freedom Park soccer stadium developers could be spent exclusively on a public park attached to the soccer stadium site.
READ MORE: Soccer stadium developers can keep $20M on site. Miami parks to get $10M in city funds
The mayor’s proposal contradicted the terms that Russell — as the swing vote — agreed to in 2022 when the City Commission approved the billion-dollar soccer stadium deal. Under Russell’s conditions, half of that $20 million was to be spent on park space elsewhere in the city. The issue prompted Russell to file a pair of Florida Bar complaints against Suarez and former City Attorney Victoria Méndez last month, accusing them of “misconduct” relating to the soccer stadium legislation.
Russell says the Miami Freedom Park situation is one example of his accomplishments as a commissioner “being undone one by one,” saying he has watched the city “get worse and worse” since he left office. He also pointed to a recent effort by the current city commissioners to approve lifetime pensions for themselves as a point of concern. Suarez ended up vetoing the proposal after Commissioner Miguel Angel Gabela — one of the item’s sponsors — announced that he was walking back the proposal.
Being the mayor of Miami is a part-time, largely ceremonial role. While the mayor does not have a vote on the commission, they do have veto power, which Russell described as an important tool.
“The mayor has an obligation to use the veto on any piece of legislation that he believes is wrong,” Russell said, adding that it’s a “cop out” for a mayor to not veto legislation that they oppose. He also noted that the mayor has power in appointing the chairperson of the commission, who is tasked with running the City Commission meetings.
Since he left office, Russell has also testified in the 2023 civil rights lawsuit filed by Little Havana businessmen Bill Fuller and Martin Pinilla that resulted in a $63.5 million judgment against City Commissioner Joe Carollo, and he was interviewed as a witness in the now-dropped money laundering and bribery case against former City Commissioner Alex Díaz de la Portilla.
“My issue is with a system that perpetuates a cycle of bad elected officials making bad decisions and empowering bad people,” Russell said.
Reform ideas
One of Russell’s most sweeping proposals for improving city government is increasing the size of the City Commission from five commissioners to seven.
Under Russell’s vision, all seven commissioners would have their own voting district rather than some of them being at-large and representing the entire city. That sort of change would “reset everything,” Russell said, by requiring the city to redraw its district map and triggering elections to fill those seats.
Russell also supports a proposal by Commissioner Damian Pardo to restrict elected officials in Miami to two terms as city commissioner and two terms as mayor. The proposal would need to pass multiple City Commission votes before going to city of Miami voters for approval, possibly as soon as the upcoming November election. The City Commission is slated to take a preliminary vote on the matter Thursday.
If the legislation were to pass in its current form, Russell would be prohibited from running for a commission seat again — a restriction he says he’s OK with.
“I’ve served my two terms in office, and that should be sufficient for that position,” Russell said. “This isn’t meant to be a career. ... There’s no reason this should be a revolving door that continues to perpetuate the same names over and over again.”
The proposal on term limits could affect the very makeup of the race Russell is entering. Other rumored contenders include Carollo and Xavier Suarez, who is the father of the current mayor. Both Carollo and the elder Suarez have served multiple terms as mayor and could be barred from election to the position again under the new proposal.
Commissioner Manolo Reyes announced back in May that he plans to run for mayor, but the District 4 commissioner has not officially filed.
Another familiar face, Díaz de la Portilla, has also stated that he plans to run for mayor, but he has yet to file.
Four candidates have officially filed to run for mayor so far: June Savage, Maxwell Martinez, Michael Hepburn and Ijamyn Joseph Gray.
This story was originally published March 10, 2025 at 4:30 PM.
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