Herald recommends: Democrats in Florida House District 120 have a superb choice in primary | Opinion

The Democratic primary for this Florida House race features two candidates with a solid understanding of the issues challenging District 120, which takes in all of Monroe County and a portion of South Miami-Dade.

Daniel Horton-Diaz and Adam Gentle are vying for a chance to fill the seat held by Republican Jim Mooney, who is facing his own tough primary challenge.

Horton-Diaz and Gentle, both attorneys, are appalled at Gov. Ron DeSantis’ culture wars that — aided by the Republican-led Legislature — have intruded into Floridians’ classrooms, businesses and even bedrooms.

“On Day One, when I’m going to Tallahassee, I’m going to suggest that everyone read the Florida Constitution, because the Florida Constitution has two things that we don’t have at the federal level: the right to privacy and something called Home Rule,” Gentle told the Editorial Board. “What you do in the bedroom, the right to contraception, who you marry, all of these things are in jeopardy.”

For Horton-Diaz, parental rights need balance: “I don’t think that there is much room in the public education space for parents to have a really strong say in what’s taught in a classroom, other than making sure that the primary topics are taught, and you want students to learn the important things so that they can either go to college or go to a trade school, find a good job when they get out of school.”

But he thinks Florida’s heavy-handed approach is “intrusive.”

“I mean, we’re seeing books being banned. . . . It’s not even critical race theory. We were just talking about the history of this country when it comes to race,” Horton-Diaz said.

Gentle, a former anti-corruption attorney, said: “Parents have a right to know what their kids are learning. The issue here was, it was an attack on sensitive areas of history and lifestyles and, as a gay man, it was offensive.”

But it’s on issues that are most important to the quality of life in the district that Horton-Diaz shows why he is the better — and better informed — candidate in this race.

On the affordable housing shortage, Gentle called for “a more aggressive approach” to development in the Keys. “Like if you build 100 market-rate units, you must build 30 units for low-income.”

He also said businesses and developers should provide affordable housing. “I think if you’re going to develop for profit, you need to make sure you’re also developing what we need for our bartenders, our city employees, our firefighters.”

Horton-Diaz, however, is thinking more like a state lawmaker with a clear local focus: “First, I’m going to be a big supporter of the Sadowski Trust fund. . . . You’ve got a Miami-Dade problem and a Keys problem. In the Keys, we’re limited in how much we can build, because of a hurricane evacuation requirements,” he told the Board. “We’ve got to take a hard look at short-term rentals in the Keys. You’ve got people and investment firms and hedge funds that are buying up the housing units down there, renting them out for really egregious [amounts]. I mean,, $6,000 to $8,000 a week.”

“On the Miami-Dade side, I think that we’ve really got to focus making housing affordable, but we also need to get rail down in South Miami-Dade. It would alleviate a lot of the congestion concerns that locals talk about,” Horton-Diaz said. “It’s not just the lack of housing, but it’s also a lack of infrastructure to enable the production and maintenance of that housing. That’s a big problem. So those are things I’d be happy to work on in the state Legislature.”

Then there’s preemption, a lingering sore spot for the candidates and for the residents of Key West, who, in 2018 voted to curb the size and the number of passenger ships cruising into the city’s port, causing environmental damage and dumping thousands upon thousand of passengers onto the small island.

With extraordinary arrogance, the state Legislature overturned the will of the people.

“The spirit of it is that the government should only take power from a local government if it’s necessary to protect the health and safety of Floridians,” Gentle said. “So I propose legislation that defines what preemption is and when we do that, a lot of those laws that are currently causing problems will be reviewed and will protect us going forward.”

Horton-Diaz said that he sees an opportunity to preserve cities’ autonomy with the change in House leadership — Speaker Wilton Simpson is running for commissioner of agriculture. “I think that issue actually has a lot of potential to work across Republican and Democrats and start to build coalitions based on municipalities within the district,” he told the Board. “That local government knows best is really a mainstay — or at least it was — of Republican policy.”

This is the third time that the Editorial Board has interviewed Horton-Diaz as a legislative candidate. The first time he was just out of law school, earnest but, perhaps, naive. We commend him for taking government service seriously over the years, learning the issues and how the political system works.

He became a legislative aide for former Florida Sen. Annette Taddeo, a Florida state director for the voting rights organization All Voting is Local and became a congressional district chief of staff for former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.

In addition, Horton-Diaz served on the board for Chapman Partnership as head of its young professionals group. He says it informed his thoughts about confronting homelessness. “It’s a real problem down in the Keys,” he said.

And though the Keys makes up the bulk of District 120, Horton-Diaz says he already has paid particular attention to the challenges residents and business face in South Miami-Dade, a part of the district that, he said, incumbent Mooney has ignored.

In short, we like how Horton-Diaz thinks, bringing concrete proposals for solutions to accomplish district goals, even though he would be in the minority party. The Herald recommends DANIEL HORTON-DIAZ in the House District 120 Democratic primary.

This story was originally published August 4, 2022 at 11:52 AM.