Two incumbents and a challenger compete for two open Bay Harbor Islands council seats

Three Bay Harbor Islands residents are fighting for two available Town Council seats come August, both of which are occupied by candidates.

Incumbents Joshua Fuller and Elizabeth Tricoche are competing against challenger Roger Santana, who ran for a seat and lost by 21 votes in 2017. The 2020 race’s issues mirror elections past for the town of nearly 6,000, with pedestrian safety, traffic and overcrowding concerns dominating.

Council members are elected at-large, with seats up for election each year. The two candidates with the highest number of votes are elected.

Santana, 58, swore he would never run for Town Council again after his 2017 loss. But he decided the council needed fresh blood, preferably from a member that could represent the town’s Latino population.

Fifty percent of the Bay Harbor Islands population is Hispanic or Latino, according to the United States Census Bureau, but Santana said all seven sitting council members are non-Hispanic white. Santana is originally from Brazil.

However, Mayor Stephanie Bruder, who was Santana’s running mate in 2017, is the daughter of Colombian immigrants and speaks Spanish. Bruder said while she didn’t know if Santana knew of her background, she doesn’t “hide” her heritage and has spent time in South America. Additionally, Council Member Isaac Salver’s father is from Havana, and Salver said he considers himself Hispanic.

Santana said he knew Bruder spoke Spanish but wasn’t aware of her heritage. He said he would still consider himself the first “outsider” Latino member, despite members of Latin descent currently serving on the council.

“We need to make sure that [Latinos] come out and vote and have some sort of representation on the council,” said Santana, who serves on the Planning and Zoning Board.

Santana, who owns a livestock product export company, said his top concern is still pedestrian safety, as it was for his 2017 run. He said the council lacks when it comes to the issue, especially for kids, and that council members have done “absolutely nothing” about the “disaster waiting to happen.” Santana’s son, Danny, 17, went to school in the islands but now attends Miami Beach Senior High School.

“There’s no school bus here, so [kids] all walk to school. And it is extremely, extremely dangerous because there’s no sidewalk on the island,” Santana said, adding that he will implement speed bumps and traffic signs to control speeding, modeling it after neighboring areas Surfside and Bal Harbour.

Santana is also concerned about water quality and raising the city’s seawall. But more than anything, he’s invested in changing the makeup of the council. The council doesn’t currently implement term limits, but Santana says it should.

“I’d like to see more people throwing their name in the hat to run for elections instead of just letting, you know, the current council members get reelected without a fight,” Santana said. “It’s just not fair for any elected official to be elected without a fight, needing to go out and talk to people and express to people exactly what your plans are, what’s in your agenda and what you want to do for them.”

Both Fuller and Tricoche said they don’t support term limits, arguing some races don’t draw enough candidates to begin with.

Vice Mayor Joshua Fuller

Vice Mayor

Fuller, 46, was motivated to first get involved in the same way Santana was: he just wasn’t satisfied with the council’s decisions.

“I always spoke up when I thought there was something that needed to be done, needed to be changed, or if I thought the council was making a decision in an incorrect manner,” Fuller said. “But very often, the council would disregard what I was saying and go in a different way. So at that point, I decided you know what, if you want to get something done, get involved and actually get elected.”

But Fuller, an attorney at Fuller Lawyers, disputed Santana’s claims that the current council members are “arrogant” and can only be seen by residents during campaign season.

“I give out my cellphone to everybody. I give out, you know, my number to any resident, anybody who wants to call me, and I get calls all the time,” Fuller said. “They’re not constituents, they’re neighbors and friends. There’s no disconnect. People call me directly.”

Fuller was appointed to fill a vacant seat in 2013, and was later elected to serve the rest of a departed council member’s term. He was elected to his first full term in 2016. He said he’s running again to “maintain Bay Harbor as an oasis,” with a particular focus on addressing traffic by tightening student admittance to Ruth K. Broad K-8 center.

Fuller asserts students are applying to the school from outside the feeder district with false documents. Mayor Stephanie Bruder made the same claim when she ran for reelection in 2017.

An employee at the school said it is overcrowded and not taking new student registrations unless the incoming student lives in Bay Harbor Islands.

But Jackie Calzadilla, director of media relations for Miami-Dade County Public Schools, said overcrowding should not be an issue for the 2020-21 school year if classes are held in person. She wrote in an email that a new building with 17 classrooms opened in January. Additionally, Calzadilla shared the district’s aggressive system used to verify students’ addresses.

In terms of improvements during his term, Fuller said the town has worked on traffic and pedestrian safety by beginning to construct walking and bike paths on the causeway and adding “special walkways” on streets for pedestrians. Santana pushed back against the green walkways as an effective measure, saying he’s seen people swerve into them while on the phone and driving.

Council member Elizabeth Tricoche

Tricoche, 37, was first elected to the council in 2016 after serving as the chair of the Parks and Recreation Committee. Tricoche said she’s running because she wants to demonstrate a “service lifestyle” to her 9-year-old twin boys, Jacob and Luca.

“It’s funny because sometimes they don’t even want to walk the dog with me because we get stopped so many times. But they get to really see it and we’ll talk about it afterwards,” Tricoche said. “That living message to my children is just invaluable.”

Tricoche, the director of client partnership at Spectrum Billing Solutions and owner of North Miami hair salon Kids Go Kuts, said this cycle, she’s focused on pedestrian safety, addressing sea level rise, council transparency and adding more “pocket parks” for resident use.

Both Fuller and Tricoche are also concerned about promoting “responsible development.” They voted to increase ceiling height minimums in new residential buildings, which would reduce the amount of residents allowed to live in developments.

“We absolutely do not want to be in a town filled with canyons of towers. That’s not our intention,” Fuller said. “We want to make sure this still retains the feel of a small community.”

While Fuller and Tricoche both deferred to the town for statements on Black Lives Matter protests and calls to “defund the police” (Santana said he supports peaceful protests but not defunding efforts), Tricoche said that being married to her husband Danny, who is Puerto Rican, and raising mixed-race children has shaped her perspective on council.

“There are realities that I am acutely aware of and so there is a high level of engagement, I can tell you, in ensuring that we are supporting our community in the best way possible,” Tricoche said.

Tricoche said she voted to ban conversion therapy in the town and supported gender and sexual orientation awareness training for parks and recreation staff and police officers. She said she hopes to expand that training to all town employees and members. Both Tricoche and Fuller are endorsed by the SAVE Action PAC, which advocates for equal rights for members of the LGBTQ community in South Florida.

“We represent every single person that lives here, and we have to represent all of them with equity,” Tricoche said.

The Bay Harbor Islands Town Council election was originally scheduled in April but was pushed back out of concern for the novel coronavirus. It will now take place August 18, and the two elected members will serve a four-year term.

This story was updated after being published to reflect the Latin heritage of Mayor Stephanie Bruder and Council Member Isaac Salver.

This story was originally published July 1, 2020 at 6:00 AM.