Voters in Sunny Isles Beach sent two mayoral candidates to a runoff election — where they will decide who should serve the remainder of the term vacated by George “Bud” Scholl.
Scholl resigned from his position in August to focus on his full-time job as president and CEO of the OneBlood blood bank.
Current Commissioner Dana Goldman and Mayor Larisa “Laura” Svechin, who assumed mayoral duties on Sept. 1 pending Tuesday’s special election, will compete again on Nov. 16 to determine who will serve out the rest of the term, which ends in November 2022.
With all precincts reporting, unofficial results from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department show that Goldman captured 41% of the vote and that Svechin captured 37%. Since neither candidate received more than 50% of the vote, a runoff election will be held.
Just 2,273 out of 12,155 registered voters participated in the election.
Svechin was first elected to the commission in 2016, and was reelected in 2020. She immigrated with her family to Miami Beach from the Soviet Union in 1979 through religious asylum and moved to Sunny Isles in 1987.
Goldman, a real estate attorney, filled a vacancy on the commission in 2014 and won a special election in 2015. She was reelected again in 2016 and 2020. Goldman was raised in Miami Beach by the family behind the famous Pumpernik’s Restaurant delicatessens.
Entrepreneur Jerry Joseph and lease broker David Grossman, who lost in a runoff election for Sunny Isles Beach commissioner in 2018, also ran in the mayoral race.
Svechin, who watched results among supporters and former mayor Scholl at Don Pedros Tacos in Sunny Isles, said she is “celebrating all the people who supported me” and hopes that the run-up to the election is less tense.
“My hopes for the next couple weeks is that people run on their own merits and not try to smear people or bring people’s children into it,” she said, referencing negative campaign advertisements. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
In an emailed statement, Goldman wrote that she is “very pleased” residents voted for her to “protect their city’s west side from absurd upzoning” and to “tame the deadly chaos on our streets.”
“There’s a very clear choice in the runoff. We either protect our residents’ homes and their quality of lives, or we continue morphing into a place where the majority of residents will be forced to move out in 5 or 10 years,” she wrote.
This story was originally published November 2, 2021 at 8:02 PM.
Samantha J. Gross is a politics and policy reporter for the Miami Herald. Before she moved to the Sunshine State, she covered breaking news at the Boston Globe and the Dallas Morning News.
