South Miami activist becomes mayor, two incumbent commissioners re-elected
Sally B. Philips, who was endorsed by outgoing South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard, handily won the mayor’s seat Tuesday night in the city’s municipal elections.
Incumbent commissioner Josh Liebman also soared to victory.
Philips, chair of South Miami’s planning board and a retired psychologist, raised $16,120 leading up to the election, according to the most recent campaign finance reports.
Philips received 34.02 percent of the vote. Her opponents Horace G. Feliu, a former mayor, won 22.79 percent. Feliu had only a 12-vote — 0.55 percent — lead over Mark Lago, the third-place candidate.
Feliu, a former South Miami mayor and commissioner, is an adjunct professor at Fortis College in Cutler Bay and director of SterilQuip Inc., a biomedical engineering company. He had raised $9,135.
Lago, a commercial real estate appraiser, is a special magistrate for Miami-Dade County’s value adjustment board and previously served on the South Miami Planning Board. He had raised $18,908.
Both Philips and Lago had run for commission seats previously but lost those elections.
Another incumbent commissioner, for Group III, Robert Welsh, was unopposed and was automatically re-elected.
Voter turnout was 27.7 percent, which is high when there was only the municipal election on the ballot.
Stoddard, 62, declined to run after five two-year terms as mayor. He made a name for himself as an environmentalist.
The other two candidates were Lina Sierra, an educator and chief operating officer at Academica Virtual Education, who won 17.5 percent of the votes, and Bruce B. Baldwin, an attorney at Debt Defense Law, who won 3.45 percent.
Liebman, a real estate agent in South Miami, was first elected in 2012. He did not face opposition in 2016 and was automatically reelected.
Liebman, who also runs the popular Team FootWorks running program in South Miami, received about 55 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s election.
He defeated Cindy Franz, the director of operations of ComReal International, Inc., a commercial real estate firm, and Levy Kelly, who retired from the National Park Service and served on South Miami’s Community Redevelopment Agency.
As for Stoddard, he’s looking forward to life after running a city.
“I’m glad to get my weekends back, “ he said Tuesday night.
Philips and the two incumbents will be installed in office at 8 p.m. Wednesday at South Miami City Hall, 6130 Sunset Drive.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that there would be a runoff election. There aren’t any runoff elections.
This story was originally published February 11, 2020 at 9:07 PM.
