Miami-Dade transit workers: Director Alice Bravo has to go, be replaced

The top name on that “clean house” list that people are passing around — hoping that new Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has one, too — is Alice Bravo, the director of the Miami-Dade public works and transit departments.

“We do want to see some change,” says Jeffrey Mitchell, president of the Transit Workers Union Local 291. “Transit needs a transit director, not a political hack to come in and find ways to give lavish contracts to their friends.”

He says former Transit Director Roosevelt Bradley, a mayoral candidate in the 2011 recall primary, is advising Levine Cava — who apparently believes in recycling people — on how to move forward.

Hired in 2015, Bravo has long been a thorn in the side of workers and anyone who relies on public transportation. Brought in from the city of Miami by former Mayor Carlos Gimenez, she rubber-stamped his friends and family deals and championed the misuse of the half-penny funds. She campaigned for Gimenez and couldn’t do his bidding fast enough.

This includes the Chinese-funded, Genting-connected monorail rammed through the commission this year that is going to make Gimenez pals Ralph Garcia-Toledo and Jesse Manzano very wealthy men. She covered for Gimenez when he cooked the deal up on a China trip using burner phones.

She had already basically decimated an already-struggling transit system, privatizing it piece by piece, when the coronavirus started to spread.

And as the bus drivers, train operators and mechanics continued to work as essential workers, they were forced to bring or buy their own protective gear for months. In May, they were still getting one Clorox wipe and one pair of gloves a day.

The county couldn’t and wouldn’t enforce social distancing or mask rules, forcing drivers to keep taking passengers past the halfway capacity mark.

Five Miami-Dade transit workers have died from COVID-19, Mitchell says. At least 152 have tested positive and more than 350 had to quarantine, he added. The 200,000-square-foot William Lehman Center depot facility has been nicknamed “Little Wuhan.”

And while mechanics and drivers were dying and getting sick, Bravo was shopping around for another job and touting her success in increasing ridership. In a news conference with other American transit executives in July, Bravo expressed little or no concern about COVID impact on the county’s transit workforce. Instead, the $248,000-a-year botella boasted about transit ridership that rose from 74,000 trips per weekday in April to about 110,000 in June.

The union filed a lawsuit in April charging that the 2,800 transit employees across Metrobus, Metrorail and MetroMover were put at increased risk for COVID by a county that was not providing proper personal protective gear and not enforcing CDC protocols such as social distancing.

The lawsuit was withdrawn once DLC was elected so they could try to work with the new administration, Mitchell says. So they’re giving la Alcaldesa some time to get things right. “It’s not officially dropped, but the agency is bending over backwards to provide PPE.”

Of course they are. Not because of the lawsuit. It’s because now they have federal CARES money to funnel through. Ka’ching!

But things got so bad during the spring spike that the TWU started a virtual campaign called the “Ride NOT Die Challenge,” and got people to tweet the director, daring her to ride the bus under the same conditions the workers endured, which included standing room only buses with unmasked passengers piled on top of each other.

They also had mobile sign trucks follow certain high traffic buses with a message: “Are these buses COVID-19 sanitized? Enter at your own risk.”

Bravo’s COVID inaction is inexcusable in and of itself. How many of the 216,097 positive COVID cases reported in Miami-Dade as of Monday — almost a million statewide — got it on a Miami-Dade bus? How many of the 3,789 who had died as of the latest numbers on the Florida Department of Health COVID dashboard — might not have died if transit had been safer?

But Mitchell has a whole laundry list of non-COVID grievances against Bravo. Like the radius on a new rail curve at “Little Wuhan” that has been determined to be too tight. “The train will go off the rails,” Mitchell explains. “We knew it would be too tight. But nobody listened.”

The company with the contract for the job, he says: Munilla Construction Management, the firm owned by one of former Mayor Gimenez’s in-laws. “We paid them to give them a product we can’t use,” Mitchell says. The price: $1.8 million. After several years, it’s still unusable. Wasted space.

The city had to turn to a group of activists to get the Better Bus Project, an improved public transportation network that actually makes sense. Because it may very well be a fantastic idea and the first advocacy-led and community-drive bus redesign, but Bravo couldn’t do it in house.

Mitchell also says they have complained about a waste of funds by renting vehicles — the wrong vehicles — for traveling mechanics to use. “Not maintenance equipment industry stuff, but literally rental cars for our mechanics to go out and service our fleet,” Mitchell says, adding that the department is paying up to $600 a week for vehicles that they would pay less for if they purchased.

“We don’t need an F150 Lariat with leather and a sunroof and satellite radio,” he tells Ladra. “It’s going to get messed up. We need vans and utility vehicles. We’re hauling stuff and parts.”

For four or five years, Mitchell says, nobody at the agency has been looking at grants that would pay for the vehicles. Bravo doesn’t care about the saving on costs the same way she doesn’t care about the workers, he says.

“She says, ‘Bill the county.’ That’s her motto.”

“We’ve been pretty much starving on the vine for the past seven or eight years,” he says.

It’s time to let them eat cake, Alcaldesa.

Alice Bravo, Daniella Levine Cava, transit

Miami-Dade transit workers: Director Alice Bravo has to go, be replaced added by Ladra on November 24, 2020
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