There’s a fight to block voters from picking Miami-Dade’s next county commissioner

Will voters get to pick Miami-Dade County’s next commissioner? Not if a majority of the existing commissioners decide to pick one instead.

How to fill the District 5 commission seat left vacant by Eileen Higgins has divided the remaining 12 commissioners, with one camp wanting to hold a special election to fill it and the other wanting to appoint Vicki Lopez, a Republican member of the Florida House. Higgins submitted a resignation this summer that was effective on Nov. 5 in order to qualify as a candidate for mayor of the city of Miami.

A showdown vote is set for Tuesday, when the appointment camp will need a majority to bypass those who want an election in District 5, which includes Miami’s Little Havana and Miami Beach’s South Beach neighborhoods.

Leading the charge for an appointment, according to multiple insiders, is the board’s powerful chairman, Anthony Rodriguez, himself a former Republican House member.

“A special election remains an option,” Rodriguez said in a statement Nov. 6 when he announced a one-week window for appointment candidates to apply to the board ahead of Tuesday’s vote. “The Board’s discussion will include consideration of both an appointment process and a special election, as well as the timelines, costs and implications associated with each.”

On the other side of the fight is the board’s Democratic vice chair, Commissioner Kionne McGhee, who is calling for a special election on Jan. 27.

“I believe in an election,” he said in a brief interview. “We’re going full steam ahead toward an election.”

But the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting already looks to be stacked against McGhee.

Rodriguez largely controls the board’s agenda, and the agenda released last week for Tuesday’s meeting only has legislation to appoint someone to the District 5 seat. The competing legislation that McGhee requested to hold an election didn’t make the agenda.

Recent commission history is also working against McGhee. Twice in the last five years, commissioners have had the chance to hold a special election to replace one of their own. Both times, the commission voted to appoint instead.

In 2020, the board appointed Danielle Cohen Higgins, who took the District 8 seat that Mayor Daniella Levine Cava left vacant when she won her first term as mayor, and more recently, in May, commissioners appointed Natalie Milian Orbis, who took the District 6 seat that was left vacant when Kevin Cabrera became U.S. ambassador to Panama.

The last time commissioners voted to hold a special election to fill a vacancy was in 2018, when then-Commissioner Bruno Barreiro resigned to run in a Republican congressional primary and thought voters would pick his wife for his commission seat. That turned out to be a faulty prediction. Higgins, then a largely unknown community activist, won the District 5 special election in an upset.

Seven years later, Barreiro is hoping to reclaim his seat. He’s one of five applicants in the appointment process that Rodriguez launched on Nov. 6, the day after Higgins’ resignation took effect. Lopez is also an applicant, along with three hopefuls who are already announced candidates if a special election happens.

Those are David Richardson, a former Miami Beach commissioner and a Democrat; Joe Sanchez, a former Miami commissioner and a Republican; and Tony Diaz, a Republican who owns a nursery business that specializes in exotic fruit trees.

Lopez, who did not respond to an interview request, brings a complicated background to her role as the leading contender for a commission appointment.

In her two terms in the Florida House, she’s staked out a role as a top advocate for reforming the state’s condominium laws. She’s considered an ally of a leading Miami Republican, House Speaker Danny Perez, a close friend of Rodriguez.

She also served 15 months in prison in the 1990s on an “honest services fraud” conviction related to her time as a member of the Lee County Commission in the Fort Myers area.

Prosecutors alleged Lopez violated the law through a romantic relationship with a lobbyist pursuing favorable votes on the commission — a lobbyist, Sylvester Lukis, she later went on to marry and then divorce. President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence in 2000, freeing her from prison, and the conviction was later tossed in the appeals process after a judge ruled that Lopez shouldn’t have been found guilty without a jury concluding she had accepted a bribe, which it had not.

Though Sanchez is a recently retired state trooper, the county’s police union on Monday released a letter supporting Lopez’s appointment to the District 5 seat.

“Vicki has been an exemplary public servant in this county for years,” Steadman Stahl, president of the South Florida Police Benevolent Association, wrote in a letter to Rodriguez.

Who will replace Eileen Higgins on the County Commission?

On paper, the District 5 fight could be seen as a partisan battle, with Democrats set to lose their one-vote majority on the commission if Lopez replaced Higgins, a Democrat. But the plot lines running through the District 5 drama are more complicated than that on a commission where alliances and grudges often defy party loyalty.

One of Lopez’s top backers on the commission is a Democrat, Commissioner Oliver Gilbert, who endorsed Lopez’s reelection bid last year for her Florida House seat.

The next District 5 commissioner may hold the swing vote in the slow-moving contest for who will succeed Rodriguez as chair next fall. McGhee hopes to become the next chair.

Privately, insiders say Lopez has declined to commit herself to any chair candidate in discussions about a District 5 appointment. But if McGhee can assemble a coalition to hold an election that Rodriguez doesn’t want, it could be an indicator that he’ll have the votes for chair, too.

Miami-Dade’s charter gives the commission 30 days to appoint someone to a vacant seat, or else an election must be held within three months. Privately and publicly, the commissioners who are backing an appointment cite two factors: not wanting District 5 to go weeks without a commissioner and the estimated $1.2 million expense of a special election.

“I don’t want to incur the expense of an election,” Gilbert said, adding that the applicant list looks solid for the District 5 seat. “We have really extraordinary people who are available to us. If we can [appoint one] and save the money, I don’t see why we wouldn’t.”

But spending decisions rarely block other commission actions. Tuesday’s agenda has commissioners poised to award more than half the cost of a special election — roughly $700,000 — in allocations from their district budgets in nonprofit donations, event expenses and other local grants.

Over the last two years, commissioners approved $46 million in subsidies to host the seven World Cup games coming to Miami Gardens next year, making a District 5 special election roughly as expensive to taxpayers as about 17 minutes of a global soccer match at Hard Rock Stadium.

The Miami-Dade charter mandates that an appointed commissioner only serve until the next countywide election, meaning Lopez would likely have to face voters in an August race if she secures the District 5 seat through appointment. If a special election is held, the winner would serve out the rest of Higgins’ second full term, which ends in November 2028.

At a press conference Monday at the county’s Elections Supervisor’s Office, Sanchez vowed to run for the seat in August if commissioners appoint Lopez to the post. But he urged commissioners to hold a special election instead.

“The District 5 seat should not be up on auction to the highest bidder in Tallahassee,” he said. “The District 5 seat belongs to the voters.”