Homestead’s vice mayor sought a restraining order against the mayor. Here’s why.
Moments after the Homestead City Council adjourned its December meeting, Mayor Steven Losner stood up and turned to speak to Vice Mayor Patricia Fairclough-Staggers, who sits directly to his left on the dais. After a brief exchange, the vice mayor walked away visibly upset.
Later that night, Fairclough-Staggers filed a police report saying she felt scared and threatened by Losner’s behavior. A few days after that, she filed a petition for a restraining order against the mayor, which she later decided not to pursue.
According to a sworn written statement that Fairclough-Staggers gave to Homestead police, Losner made several comments that she saw as threatening, including: “How dare you disrespect me”; “You watch, I’m coming after you”; and “Stop playing the victim, bitch.”
He spoke to her “forcefully and in an intimidating manner,” she said.
“I walked away fearful and afraid of what Mayor Losner’s intentions as it related to ‘retaliation’ are,” wrote Fairclough-Staggers, who was more than six months pregnant at the time. “As a pregnant female, the ... intimidating encounter has caused stress on me and my unborn child.”
Losner disputes the vice mayor’s account, telling the Miami Herald this week that he didn’t make any threats or use the word “bitch,” and that Fairclough-Staggers was responsible for escalating things.
“Totally inaccurate, blown way out of proportion, and I’ll even use the word ‘false’ when it comes to her characterization and statements as to what happened,” he said. “I am really shocked at the level the opposition is willing to take it to in Homestead.”
Losner chalked up the vice mayor’s reaction to a political ploy, saying that Fairclough-Staggers was trying to get him out of office.
The exchange between them took place just after the council had declined to confirm Losner’s preferred candidate to fill an empty council seat, which was vacated after Elvis Maldonado resigned to run for the County Commission. Fairclough-Staggers said during the Dec. 18 meeting that the mayor’s choice, Bradley Compton, doesn’t reflect the diversity of Homestead, telling Losner that other applicants “stand head and shoulders above your [proposed] appointee.”
One other council member, Sean Fletcher, vocally supported Compton, but a motion to appoint him failed for lack of a second. Under the city charter, the mayor had 60 days to secure council approval for his preferred nominee. Because he didn’t do so, the council will now vote among five applicants, including Compton, at its Feb. 19 meeting. The winner will fill the seat through 2021.
Compton was one of four candidates for mayor last year and finished last in the primary with 16% of votes.
After the December meeting adjourned and the city’s video stream was shut off, Losner confronted Fairclough-Staggers about her opposition to Compton, asking her if this was payback for a feud between Losner and Fairclough-Staggers in 2007.
That dispute involved Fairclough-Staggers’ then-boyfriend and now-ex-husband, Melvin McCormick, choosing not to endorse Losner for an empty council seat after he had initially pledged to support him. Losner said he believes Fairclough-Staggers convinced McCormick to change his vote, which led to a tense conversation between the three in the council chambers.
The mayor acknowledged that he brought up the 2007 incident after the December meeting, but he said it was meant as a joke. Fairclough-Staggers “immediately escalated” the situation, he said, accusing him of attacking her.
The interaction on the dais lasted less than 30 seconds, and it ended when the vice mayor “threw her hands up in the air and said, ‘I just can’t take this,’ and stomped out,” Losner said.
“I probably did indicate to her that she needed to stop playing the victim,” he said, but he added: “I did not use the word ‘bitch.’ Absolutely not.”
The mayor said he learned the next day that Fairclough-Staggers had gone into the City Hall lobby after the exchange and “made a big show of being distraught, wailing and moaning and loudly professing that I had attacked her and threatened her,” he told the Herald.
Fairclough-Staggers said she was afraid at the time and did what she thought was necessary.
“The only reason I did the police report is because I was concerned for my safety, and I wanted a record if something was to occur as a result of it,” she said this week. “As long as I’ve been on the dais, I’ve never experienced anything like that. I know what happened and I stand on the truth.”
Vice mayor sought restraining order
A few days after going to police, Fairclough-Staggers went a step further: She filed a petition for a restraining order against Losner in Miami-Dade Circuit Court.
But the case was dismissed when Fairclough-Staggers didn’t appear for a scheduled hearing on Jan. 15, according to county records. The case file is now sealed, with only a judge’s order dismissing the case still publicly available.
She told the Herald she decided to abandon the effort because of recent health concerns about high blood pressure and anxiety in the late stages of her pregnancy. She is due to give birth in six weeks.
“I needed to let this go for my health,” she said. “Mentally, I had to let it go.”
The vice mayor suggested she never intended for the details of the interaction to become public.
“I really wasn’t trying to make a public spectacle of it, because it was very traumatizing for me,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to play a victim, I didn’t want any sympathy. I just did it for safety.”
But during a tense political transition period in the city, Losner ascribed more cynical motives to the vice mayor’s actions. Her decision to pursue a restraining order, he said, was nothing short of an attempted “coup” to remove him from office. Losner was elected to a two-year term as mayor in November.
“If a restraining order had been issued, how would we both attend council meetings?” Losner said. “I think there is a bigger agenda at play here.”
Losner and Fairclough-Staggers are serving together on the council for the first time. Losner was previously a councilman from 2001 to 2007 and ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2011, the year Fairclough-Staggers was first elected. Her second and last four-year term ends in November.
Fairclough-Staggers said the December incident was her first uncomfortable encounter with Losner, and that their relationship had been cordial in the past.
But the mayor now perceives Fairclough-Staggers as the most vocal among several council members trying to consolidate power against him. She supported Jeff Porter, a former mayor who resigned in 2018 to run for Florida agriculture commissioner, in the November mayoral election that Losner won.
Now, Losner said the question of who will fill the seventh and final seat on the council could be key in solidifying opposition against him.
But Fairclough-Staggers brushed off that suggestion, saying she has never seen Losner as a rival. Councilman Stephen Shelley, who also declined to support Losner’s nominee for the vacant seat, said he doesn’t see anyone trying to form a coalition against the mayor — although he acknowledged that relationships among council members aren’t as smooth as they could be.
“I think as a body, we’re still adjusting to the new members on the council,” he said, referring to Losner and Fletcher, the lone council member who supported Losner’s nomination of Compton. “It’s something that we’re going to have to work through and adapt.”
Request for footage denied
Both Fairclough-Staggers and Losner say no one else heard the heated exchange between them on Dec. 18. Losner said there’s no audio of the moment, and the city attorney orally denied his request to release surveillance footage from the council chambers and the lobby.
The city rejected the Herald’s request for the surveillance tapes Wednesday, citing an exemption in Florida public records laws for information that “reveals a security system.”
The four other council members all told the Herald they didn’t hear what happened. Shelley and Fletcher said that when the exchange took place, they were busy talking to the city attorney.
But Shelley said he later saw the vice mayor “in tears” as people consoled her in a hallway between the dais and the lobby.
“She was still visibly shaken by the events, whatever occurred,” Shelley said.
Fairclough-Staggers said she believed Councilman Larry Roth heard comments that Losner made after she walked away, but Roth said he left the chambers as soon as the meeting ended.
He dismissed questions about the allegedly explosive exchange between the mayor and vice mayor, saying it wasn’t relevant to city business.
“It didn’t affect me in any way, it hasn’t affected the city in any way, and it hasn’t affected any decisions on the council at any point,” Roth said.
Councilwoman Jenifer Bailey said she didn’t witness the exchange or its aftermath. And, like her colleagues, she denied being part of any coalition forming within the council.
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m not with or against any person,” she said.
Homestead, a South Dade community whose population has nearly tripled to more than 70,000 in the 28 years since it was ravaged by Hurricane Andrew, is continuing to build out its downtown and chart its future course, debating issues related to traffic and housing density. The city council, Roth said, has bigger issues to worry about than personal feuds.
“It goes way beyond a little incident after a council meeting,” he said. “We as a council have to work together, and we are working together.”
Fletcher said Compton had strong support in the so-called Waterstone communities in District 5, in the northeast part of the city, and in Fletcher’s District 2, which includes the Keys Gate communities.
But Fairclough-Staggers suggested at the December meeting that Compton didn’t have citywide support.
“I was looking for someone who was more of a unifier,” she said. “One who didn’t come up here to work with a certain sector of the council, but all of the council.”
Miami Herald staff writer Monique O. Madan contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 14, 2020 at 6:15 AM.