Two of the Miami-Dade County Commission races will be decided in August without a runoff because they are head-to-head contests, 
meaning someone is going to get 50% plus one of the vote.
This means that in less than a month, we will have two brand new commissioners at both ends of the numbered districts. They will be taking the place of termed out Commissioners Barbara Jordan in District 1 and District 13’s Esteban Bovo, who is running for mayor.
Bovo will be replaced by State Sen. Rene Garcia. There is no doubt about that. The former Hialeah councilman got a last minute challenge from Adrian Jesus Jimenez, but Garcia is beloved in Hialeah and has the Republican bad boy machinery there to help him. “Whosus” Jimenez doesn’t stand a chance, not just because he hasn’t raised a dime outside the $750 he gave himself, but also because nobody 
knows who he is and he’s not really campaigning.
Garcia, meanwhile, has been coasting, spending only $142,000 of the $245K he raised through July 17, according to the latest campaign reports. And he has the Republican establishment support.
“René has a track record of supporting Miami Lakes in Tallahasee,” said Miami Lakes Mayor Manny Cid, referring to the years García spent as a state legislator. “He represented the town very well all those years. Whenever he got into a leadership position he always secured much need funds for infrastructure.”
Is it too early to say felicidades? It’s not like we can jinx it.
But District 1 is turning out to look like a real race between Miami Gardens Mayor Oliver Gilbert and 
Black Lives Matter poster mom Sybrina Fulton, a former Miami-Dade employee turned activist after her son, Trayvon Martin, was killed in 2012 by a neighborhood crime watchman with a cop complex.
Fulton, who has used her “celebrity status” to get campaign contributions from across the nation and an endorsement from none other than Jay-Z and, oh yeah, Hillary Clinton, has amassed almost as much as Gilbert, the defacto incumbent, who was a Miami Gardens Council member for four years before becoming mayor in 2012. As of the last campaign reports submitted last week, Fulton has $464,000 to Gilbert’s $504,000 (though it is reportedly closer to $1 million if you count his political action committee money).
Read related: Hillary, Cory Booker back Trayvon Martin’s mom in Miami-Dade race
Both of them are experienced in government. Gilbert, 47, was a state prosecutor before serving the last 12 years on the council in Miami Gardens, where he really hasn’t done very much. And voters
think he’s soft on the Hard Rock Stadium people, who are ramming Formula 1 racing up their, um, throats. He’s also taken campaign contributions from them and from lobbyists.
Additionally, while he won’t face prosecution for using his elderly mother’s credit card to pay for the rental of a luxury vehicle he reportedly intended to pay for with 2016 campaign funds, a two-year investigation completed recently showed that his mother originally had no recollection of the payment.
“Ms. Gilbert’s amendment to her testimony, unsupported by any documentation of the averred repayment, further added to the troubling circumstances surrounding the payment of the Infiniti QX80 rental,” wrote the assistant state attorney in the close-out memo, according to a story by Francisco Alvarado in the Florida Bulldog.
Fulton, 54, worked in five different county departments in 25 years, including transportation and public works and housing, where she was both a hearing officer for Section 8 applicants and a relocation adviser for residents displaced by the razing of the Scott/Carver public housing project in Liberty City. She says she will push for more from the Miami Dolphins and stadium owner Stephen Ross, who she says has to give more back to the community.
Read related: Carlos Gimenez likes to be above the law; vetoes civilian police review panel
District 1 encompasses the predominantly black Miami Gardens, Opa-Locka and Carol City. According to data from the Miami-Dade Elections Department, 23,674 absentee or vote-by-mail ballots were requested by voters in this commission district. As of Tuesday, 2,878 had been returned. Of those, only 
885 were from outside the city of Miami Gardens.
Jobs, crime and transit are part of the conversation in this race, as usual, and both candidates want to make sure the North corridor of the mass transit SMART plan is complete. But this race is sort of overshadowed by the recent protests after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the awareness of police brutality and Black Lives Matter.
But while neither candidate supports defunding the police — although they both spoke about investing more in preventative services — Fulton, whose father was a cop and who went to Floyd’s funeral, is expected to get more of that support simply for being who she is.
Two mano-a-mano Miami-Dade County races; one a real match, one not so much added by Ladra on
View all posts by Ladra →
