What to know about Miami’s ballot referendums: Term limits, land sales and more
With less than two weeks to go before the city of Miami’s Nov. 4 election, much of the chatter has been focused on the two dozen candidates vying to be mayor and city commissioner.
But there are also four referendums on the ballot. Those votes could change the rules for selling city-owned land, tighten term limits for elected officials, create a redistricting oversight body, and establish a committee that would regularly review the document that functions as the city’s constitution.
Here’s what to know about the referendums on the city’s Nov. 4 ballot.
1: Establishing a Charter Review Commission
The first referendum is asking voters to establish a Charter Review Commission that would conduct a “comprehensive review” of the city charter at least every 10 years.
Freshman Commissioner Ralph Rosado, who sponsored the proposal, described the charter as “the city’s constitution.” Rosado said he was surprised to learn the city didn’t have a streamlined process for reviewing the charter, which he said should be “standard practice.”
“When I got to the city of Miami, it’s one of the many things that sort of caught me off-guard,” said Rosado, who was elected in June.
Under Rosado’s proposal, each of the city commissioners, the mayor and the city manager must appoint a member to the Charter Review Commission within one year of the federal census. The clock to convene the Charter Review Commission would start after the next census in 2030, although Rosado said the group could begin meeting sooner than that, potentially as early as next year.
As part of its review, the Charter Review Commission would hold public hearings to solicit resident input. Within 12 months of its first meeting, the group would then issue recommendations to the City Commission, which would decide whether to send the proposed charter changes to voters in the form of a ballot referendum.
2: Loosening requirements for selling city-owned land
In another referendum, the city is seeking to eliminate the requirement that it get voter approval to sell its own land if it doesn’t receive enough bids.
Under the current rules, the city must get voter approval to sell or lease city-owned non-waterfront land valued over $500,000 if it doesn’t get a minimum of three bids after publicly advertising the property. But the city has run into issues offloading certain properties, according to City Manager Art Noriega, whose administration is pushing for the change.
The charter amendment, if passed, would scale back the current requirements by allowing the five-member City Commission to approve the sale of valuable city land, at market value, through a four-fifths vote in lieu of three bids.
Asked if there was a particular piece of land that inspired the legislation, Noriega said there were two residential lots in The Roads neighborhood that the city had purchased “for the purpose of building a pocket park, that were later deemed as excess due to a shift in park location.”
“We bid them twice and never received more than one bid. We could have received fair market value for the properties but were unable to sell them,” Noriega said in a statement.
Noriega said that, if passed, the change “would give the City more flexibility to sell non-waterfront property, as long as we always receive fair market value and it’s indeed determined to be excess.”
City-owned waterfront property, on the other hand, would still need voter approval to be sold or leased.
The city’s real estate and asset management department manages a portfolio of over 500 properties worth an estimated $17.5 billion, according to the city website. The portfolio includes stadiums, hotels, malls, office space, theaters, multifamily buildings and parking garages.
3: Strengthening the redistricting process
The third referendum closes the loop on a racial gerrymandering lawsuit brought in 2022 against the city by residents and community groups, including two branches of the NAACP and Grove Rights and Community Equity (GRACE), with legal representation from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Last year, a federal judge threw out the city’s voting map after ruling that commissioners had approved unconstitutional and racially gerrymandered districts. As part of the settlement agreement, the city redrew and approved a new voting map and agreed to pay out nearly $1.6 million in attorneys’ fees.
The settlement also required the city to include a ballot question in the November 2025 election to establish a citizens’ redistricting committee that would draft maps and propose them to the commission in future redistricting processes.
The referendum, if approved, would also amend the charter to prohibit gerrymandering so that “City Commission districts may not be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a candidate or incumbent.”
4: Creating lifetime term limits
The fourth ballot referendum is asking voters to weigh in on a proposal to create lifetime term limits for elected officials.
As it stands now, elected officials in Miami are limited to two consecutive terms and mayor and two consecutive terms as commissioner, but they can run for the same seat again after sitting out a term. Those rules have allowed legacy politicians who are still active today to have cycled through City Hall since the 1970s and 1980s.
But that could change under Commissioner Damian Pardo’s term limits proposal, which he has described as a “transformational policy.” The change, which would apply retroactively, would restrict elected officials to two four-year terms in each position for their entire lifetime, for a maximum of 16 years in office.
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The City Commission voted 3-2 to send the term limits proposal to the ballot. Commissioners Miguel Angel Gabela and Ralph Rosado joined Pardo in voting yes. Commissioner Christine King, who is up for reelection, and Commissioner Joe Carollo, who is running for mayor, voted no.
An earlier version of the proposal threatened to block Carollo — a former mayor who was first elected to the City Commission in 1979 — from elected office in the city again. But the commission approved a watered-down version of the legislation that doesn’t count terms in which the official was elected to fill a vacancy. Such was the case for Carollo, who was elected to his first of two terms as mayor in 1996 to fill the vacancy created by the death of Mayor Stephen Clark. That means that under Pardo’s proposal, Carollo would still be eligible for another term as mayor.
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Meanwhile, former District 3 Commissioner Frank Carollo is running for the same seat again. Frank Carollo previously held the seat for two four-year terms, from 2009 to 2017. It’s unclear what would happen if Frank Carollo wins the District 3 election and the lifetime term limits proposal passes.
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