Herald recommends: Florida Senate District 36, reject tone-deaf lawmaker, choose thoughtful candidate | Editorial

State Sen. Ileana Garcia, who won a controversial election in 2020 to represent District 37, is running this year to represent the newly drawn District 36. The district takes in Miami Beach south of 41st Street and heads west to Sweetwater along Florida International University’s campus.

Garcia’s opponent, Raquel Pacheco, a Democrat, last year ran for the Miami Beach City Commission. The Editorial Board recommended her for that position, and we are recommending her again for this seat in the state Senate.

Pacheco is a community-engaged candidate who is well-versed on the issues that are degrading many Floridians’ quality of life, and one fewer legislator willing to propel Gov. Ron DeSantis’ divisive and dangerous culture wars against immigrants, Blacks and LGBTQ residents would be all to the good.

In her candidate interview with the Editorial Board, Pacheco said, “There’s just too much at risk here, particularly as it relates to women’s-choice issues, women’s healthcare issues, and also as it pertains to cost of living and inflation and other critical issues like home insurance.”

Fighting to create more affordable housing in the district is a priority. “We have funds set aside, Sadowski funds, that should be exclusively used for building workforce housing,” Pacheco said. “Instead, they have been being dipped into by the GOP for other purposes.”

She is referring to the Sadowski trust fund created by the Legislature in 1992 to funnel dedicated revenue to build affordable housing. It was a big pot of money that successive legislatures raided to address other needs. Last year, however, lawmakers dropped the pretense permanently, divvying up Sadowski funds to tackle sea-level rise and provide wastewater remediation — with affordable-housing programs getting a scant 9% of the money.

Pacheco added: “New development needs to have a certain percentage of their development allocated to affordable housing.”

She is right on both counts.

Pacheco also is appalled, along with many homeowners, at the soaring cost of property insurance. “We need to diversify our insurance market for starters,” she said. ”We have no providers, we have insurance companies that come in and pick and choose what type of coverage they want to offer our residents,” she said.

Pacheco is the former president of Miami Beach United, a non-profit community-based organization working to ensure residents’ voices are heard by city government, and the chair of Miami Beach’s personnel board. “Service is important to me,” she told the Editorial Board.

We like her down-to-earth, straightforward articulation of the state’s challenges, some of which have been afterthoughts for the Republican-led state Legislature. When she ran for the Beach Commission, the Editorial Board had some concerns that she had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy twice because of a Small Business Administration loan, tax debt and out-of-pocket maternity costs that depleted her savings. At the time, she assured the Board that she had paid off about $70,000 of the SBA loan and had addressed her other financial challenges.

Republican Garcia is the founder of Latinas for Trump and was deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security under former President Trump. She did not respond to the Editorial Board’s invitation to participate in an interview, which, unfortunately, has been typical of most Republican candidates leading up to the Nov. 8 election.

However, she does have a voting record in the Florida Senate. Had she talked with us, we would have asked her whether she still believes that “gay is not a permanent thing.” She made this declaration on the Senate floor in March during the debate over the Parental Rights in Education bill — dubbed the “Don’t say gay” bill and now, unfortunately, Florida law. Her comment was insensitive, ill-informed by science and irrelevant to the issue that was at hand.

She eventually tweeted an apology that said, in part: “As a senator, and more importantly, as a lifelong member of this community, I fully understand the responsibility and impact of words on others that’s why I want to apologize to anyone I offended by my comments on the floor of the Senate during the debate on HB 1557, parental rights in education. My comments in no way were intended to generalize or disregard the experiences of any member of the LGBT+ community.”

It’s too bad that she didn’t seem to “fully understand the responsibility and impact of words on others” earlier, in January, when she encouraged Black colleagues in the state Senate to “move on” from racism. She further cited former President Obama’s election as evidence that the Black experience in America is “not at all” different from what white Americans and people of other races experience.

Garcia is tone-deaf and in denial, but in lockstep with the governor undercutting Black Floridians. Again, had Garcia, who founded the group Latinas for Trump, talked with us, we would have asked her how she characterized DeSantis’ redistricting map that unilaterally eliminated two Black-majority congressional districts.

As far as her support for Florida’s 15-week abortion ban is concerned, she told a group of Miami Beach residents earlier this year that the ban was one way to rescue victims of sex trafficking: “When the girl or the woman gets pregnant, and they can’t make her get an abortion, or she doesn’t want to get an abortion, or they can’t get her to a place to get an abortion, they don’t use her anymore. So, they release her from the human-trafficking ring. That’s why we went to that point.”

Had she talked to the Editorial Board, we would have asked, “For real?”

At that same Miami Beach get-together, she said, “I am not an environmentalist, by all means, but I do understand that it’s very important. We enjoy where we live. We have to take care of it.” Though she shuns being labeled an “environmentalist,” she played a major role in creating the Biscayne Bay Commission, SB 1482, to oversee the health of the bay. The commission is housed under the Department of Environmental Protection.

She has also secured funding for food banks, youths in foster care who are aging out of the system and infrastructure improvements.

Still, Garcia presents at least a couple of problems. First, she has every right to hew to the conservative ideology in which she believes. However, her words convey shallow, tone-deaf thinking that both offends and befuddles. She is not a leader, she is a party hack.

Second, though she won her Senate seat in 2020, she did not win it fair and square. Rather, she was the beneficiary of the presence of a sham candidate on the ballot. Alex Rodriguez ran as a no-party-affiliation — and same-last-name — candidate who drew votes away from then-incumbent Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez. Garcia won by a scant 34 votes, not a resounding voice of the people.

Alex Rodriguez pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations and lying on state documents. He was sentenced to 36 months’ probation and 12 months of house arrest. Former state Sen. Frank Artiles, a Miami Republican, faces charges in connection with recruiting Rodriguez and illegally funding his race. Garcia has not been implicated in this alleged subterfuge.

Pacheco is our choice in this race. She speaks like a thoughtful leader and is well grounded on the issues that matter in the day-to-day lives of the people in District 36 and in Florida.

The Miami Herald Editorial Board recommends RAQUEL PACHECO for state Senate District 36.

This story was originally published October 18, 2022 at 1:40 PM.