‘Swim at your own risk’: Mayor’s cuts to Miami-Dade parks hit lifeguards, security

Roadside landscaping crews will get fewer hours, leaving roadside grass to grow taller. A pair of tax-funded senior centers will close. And some Miami-Dade parks will lose lifeguards and adopt a “Swim at Your Own Risk” approach in the new era of austerity Mayor Daniella Levine Cava proposed Tuesday to close a $402 million budget gap.

Her $12.9 billion spending plan for 2026 ends five years of relatively flush spending in which federal COVID dollars flowed into the Miami area and real estate values boomed. With Washington and Tallahassee cutting back and home sales cooling off, Levine Cava is proposing a series of service reductions, layoffs and fee increases to balance the 2026 budget.

“We’ve been through some good times together, and now we face some challenges,” Levine Cava said in a morning press conference at County Hall in downtown Miami.

County commissioners will vote to approve the final budget in September, so the Levine Cava proposal is just a starting point for months of negotiating, lobbying and public pressure over how Miami-Dade should spend its tax dollars.

Commissioners will get their first crack at the plan on Wednesday, when they’re scheduled to vote on caps for the property-tax rates that fund Levine Cava’s 2026 budget proposal.

Levine Cava, a Democrat, has proposed flat tax rates for the five property taxes that fund daily county spending, but some commissioners want them lowered.

Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez, a Republican, is advocating for lower rates and recently criticized Levine Cava as a liberal over-spender now facing reality. “It’s easy to be compassionate when you’re spending other people’s money,” he wrote in an op-ed the Miami Herald published Monday.

Last week, the Herald reported that Levine Cava planned on cutting spending to some of the initiatives she launched after winning the mayor’s office in 2020. That included closing the Office of New Americans, which helps permanent visa holders become citizens, and removing more than $40 million in county grants to nonprofits — funding that grew with the infusion of federal COVID dollars.

“It’s very painful,” Levine Cava said of the budget cuts she’s proposing for 2026.

The budget proposal released Tuesday outlines other cuts and fee hikes that could go into effect when the 2026 fiscal year begins Oct. 1. They include:

• Closing two senior centers: the Little River and South Dade adult daycare facilities. Both operate with a mix of county and federal dollars. The budget describes them as “underperforming,” with only about two dozen people using them, and says the closures will save about $450,000 in county dollars.

• Letting grass grow taller at county parks and roadways. The Parks Department plans to save $3.5 million by cutting back lawn mowing by 25%. Another $1.6 million comes from defunding a tree-planting initiative.

• Shuttering a 10-person team dedicated to dealing with substance abuse issues. The Treatment Alternatives to Street Crimes costs about $1.5 million to run. The budget was tied to a federal grant.

• Ending lifeguard coverage at an unknown number of county parks, which would adopt a “Swim at Your Own Risk” policy. That would save about $770,000 a year. To save about $430,000, the Parks budget also gets rid of dedicated security guards at three park facilities: Arcola Lakes Senior Center, North Pointe Community Center and Oak Grove Park.

• Ending free parking at multiple county parks. Budget summaries that Levine Cava circulated to commissioners include $5 parking fees at A.D. Barnes Park and Tropical Park. The budget says the new $5 parking fees will raise about $3.6 million a year.

• Closing three places where older residents can get free meals. The “congregate meal sites” — Florida City, Leonard Batz Center and Perrine — are also described as underperforming in the budget, which says closing them saves $272,000 in local funds. Miami-Dade would continue operating 13 other meal sites across the county.

While the full budget includes self-sustaining county agencies like Miami International Airport and the sewer system, the bulk of the budget friction happens around expenses tied to property taxes. That part of the budget started at roughly $3.6 billion earlier this year, with only about $3.2 billion in projected revenues to pay for it.

Levine Cava said the $402 million deficit came in part from Miami-Dade adjusting to a state-mandated change in local government.

This is the first county budget that includes a full year’s worth of spending on newly independent offices for sheriff and tax collector — positions that used to report to Levine Cava before Florida voters enacted a constitutional change requiring those agencies be spun off into their own governments.

While Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz now controls what used to be the Miami-Dade Police Department, the County Commission still approves county funding for the agency. The Levine Cava plan includes a 12% increase in spending for the Sheriff’s Office, with a projected budget of $1 billion.

Meanwhile, Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez, who took office in January, has been taking over the state-run DMV offices that became a Miami-Dade responsibility with the change in local government. The change did not come with state dollars to issue driver’s licenses, though. State law does give Fernandez the authority to retain 2% of the county’s property-tax revenue each year — a figure topping $120 million in 2026. While Fernandez does plan to retain the 2%, he said he expects to rebate a large portion of that to Miami-Dade by the end of the fiscal year.

Decisions by Levine Cava and the commissioners drove the deficit, too.

Commissioners approved $46 million in subsidies and free county services for the 2026 World Cup games, with $36 million coming due in the 2026 budget. Levine Cava endorsed the latest $10 million subsidy installment in a May 6 memo, despite saying the cash giveaway might require the county to cut government services.

Slight cuts to property-tax rates that Levine Cava secured in the 2023 and 2024 budgets also will cost the 2026 budget about $48 million in lost revenue, according to Herald calculations.

And rather than hold back dollars for a rainy day, Levine Cava and commissioners funded a number of one-off programs and payments in recent years, including issuing $25 million in property-tax rebates for low-income seniors over the last two years and using more than $50 million in federal COVID dollars to minimize increases in county trash fees.

State tax cuts are costing Miami-Dade millions, too. The elimination of a statewide tax on commercial leases and changes in a Florida utility tax are expected to remove about $65 million from the county budget in 2026. Federal and state revenues are down about $78 million in the 2026 budget proposal.

While her administration sees the proposed cuts as the steepest since the lean years following the 2008 housing crash, the Levine Cava budget proposal increases spending by a modest 1.3% over current levels.

The county’s workforce, including the Sheriff’s Office, would grow 2% to 31,900 positions. The new positions largely come from the newly independent agencies, including about 500 additional jobs under the Office of the Tax Collector. Despite the overall number of positions growing, the Levine Cava budget proposal eliminates about 360 positions, including 142 currently filled by employees who will lose their jobs by Oct. 1, according to budget documents.

Levine Cava’s budget also doesn’t provide long-term fixes to the county’s financial challenges. Deficits are projected to return in 2027 and approach $250 million within five years.

In an interview, Levine Cava said the county can’t afford to reduce spending more without severe service disruptions.

“We don’t have any ideas where else to cut,” she said. “We’d have to cut bus routes. We’d have to cut parks entirely. It’s pretty dire.”