Surfside came together after the collapse. Now an election is dividing the town
As political candidates walk door to door in the small town of Surfside, most reminders of the tragic building collapse that killed 98 people just eight months ago have gone away.
The memorial wall along busy Harding Avenue, which was once adorned with photos of victims and stuffed animals, was dismantled to be preserved. The remaining portion of Champlain Towers South was demolished, the site quickly cleared. And after the tragedy bound them together, the unity among the town’s elected leaders has seemed to dissipate.
The lead-up to Tuesday’s local election — in which all five seats on the Town Commission, including mayor’s, are up for grabs — has divided the community once again with campaign attacks, negative rhetoric and disagreements over the future of the town.
“They’re right back to their old vicious ways,” Jorge Romani, a 15-year resident of Surfside, said of the commissioners.
Residents and commissioners say the town is still healing after the June 24 condo collapse, which thrust Surfside into the national spotlight and choked its streets with out-of-town traffic from media, rescue teams and a presidential visit.
They have condemned the personal attacks and negative campaigning that has defined an election that also includes a debate over the proposed $40 million undergrounding of utilities. But the candidates blame their opponents for creating the animosity.
Mayor Charles Burkett, who is running for re-election, says incumbent Commissioner Eliana Salzhauer is creating a toxic “undercurrent” that he said has permeated the election and their previous two years in office.
“The tone of all the campaigns is excellent,” he told the Miami Herald. “What you have is a continuation of an undercurrent coming from one person. It’s unproductive, it’s disrespectful, it’s unhelpful.”
Salzhauer, a self-described “fire-breathing dragon” who flashed her middle fingers at the mayor during two commission meetings, has called Burkett a “big brat,” “elitist” and an “unethical A-hole.”
But Burkett, even though he isn’t running against Salzhauer, has posted a video to his campaign’s YouTube with jump cuts of different faces she has made at meetings and her middle-finger gesture. He blames Vice Mayor Tina Paul, who is running against him for mayor, for allowing Salzhauer to interrupt commission meetings and not voting to censure her after the middle-finger incident.
Burkett has also criticized Paul for complaining about not being able to meet President Joe Biden when he visited Surfside shortly after the tower fell. Burkett, the only elected official from Surfside allowed at the July meeting with the president, created a campaign ad from text messages between Paul and Town Manager Andy Hyatt, during which Paul asked Hyatt to let her in and said she was “disappointed” in him.
Burkett’s ad says he was “exclusively focused” on saving people from the building collapse while Paul was focused on seeing Biden.
“We were trying to get those bodies out of the rubble, trying to figure out how to do that,” Burkett said in an interview. “I didn’t ask to see the president. The president asked to see me.”
Paul was not the only commissioner frustrated by not being allowed inside the event. Commissioner Nelly Velasquez, who is running for re-election as Burkett’s campaign partner, wrote in an email that it was “highly offensive” the rest of the commission was not present.
Burkett’s opponents say he must also take responsibility for mistreating other commissioners and being overly controlling during meetings.
Paul said the attacks in the mayor’s race have all come from Burkett.
“To me it’s just really sad because we’ve come so far as a community to come together, and that’s the momentum I’m trying to build on,” she told the Herald. “Keeping people together and keeping the hope alive and moving forward as a community together to handle our issues and solve the problems we face — that’s where the focus should be and not on personal attacks. To me, it’s just very sad where we are right now.”
The battle lines have been drawn. Burkett has teamed up with Velasquez and candidates Fred Landsman and Marianne Meischeid. Salzhauer and Paul have joined forces with candidate Shannon Gallagher.
The other candidate in the mayoral race is Shlomo Danzinger. Home builder Jeff Rose is also running in the commission race.
The issues
At at a campaign event in front of a supporter’s home Wednesday, Salzhauer said the election should be about the issues and not someone’s personality. Some of the big issues in the election have to do with the five ballot questions — including undergrounding and amending the charter to prohibit overnight storage of beach chairs and to allow bigger hedges — and whether the town should rein in how big single-family homes should be.
But Salzhauer has focused a lot of time talking about Burkett. She said it’s more important that Burkett be defeated than for her to win re-election. Burkett, she said, used the collapse to “grandstand on TV” about rescuing victims and wants to change Surfside from sleepy, quaint town into the “Aspen of Florida.”
Salzhauer, who gave the mayor the finger when he wanted to add Christians to an ordinance denouncing anti-Asian and anti-Semitic hate, said it’s sexist for Burkett to cast her as the antagonist in the town’s political drama because she sees her role as standing up to him.
“I’m not contributing to anything toxic, I’m just making people aware of his behavior. His behavior is the problem,” she said.
Burkett and Velasquez have campaigned on lowering taxes and water fees, even if the undergrounding referendum passes and a new debt-service tax is approved. Salzhauer has accused them of lying to voters. A town spokeswoman said commissioners could elect to lower water bills, but “doing so would be a major financial setback” to the water and sewer fund that pays off debt related to infrastructure projects
Casey Woods, 47, said she has noticed that her neighbors are not as engaged in the local election as they have been in previous years. Discussions about zoning changes and other political issues are mundane compared to what happened in town less than a year ago, she said.
“I think that when horrible things like that happen to us as a community, I don’t know if you’re ever the same,” she said. “You move forward and you try to heal but it changed all of us.”
Woods, a former Miami Herald reporter, said seeing how the tone around town changed from after the collapse to now is stark.
“That’s one reason why right now feels so bitter,” she said, “Like, why can’t we have a civil discussion about this?”
Velasquez noted how the current crop of commissioners were elected in March of 2020, as the pandemic began in the United States. Then the building collapse came.
“We’ve been under a lot of adversity,” she said. “In the midst of all of this, we still got a lot accomplished ... What we need is a commission willing to work together.”
This story was originally published March 11, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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