It wasn’t even close. Laura Dominguez trounced Sabrina Cohen in a run-off Tuesday to replace former Miami Beach Commissioner Mark Samuelian, who died suddenly in June. Dominguez was Samuelian’s life partner. Dominguez, who owns a digital marking company, got more than twice as many mail-in votes and ended up with a 22-point lead against Cohen, […]
There are eight referendum questions on the Miami Beach ballot, including two that are carefully camouflaged giveaways to rich millionaire developer friends of Mayor Dan Gelber. Even former Mayor Philip Levine — who was caught in a secret meeting with Gelber and developers trying to form a political action committee to turn South Beach into […]
Calling the non-binding referendum vote five months ago a mandate — as if 57% was a landslide — Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber and city leaders have been working since January to ban alcohol sales after 2 a.m. Fresh off the Spring Break curfew that was more about development than crowd or crime control — […]
Party on, spring breakers! The city of Miami Beach can’t ban alcohol sales from 2 to 5 a.m. like they wanted to this week and next for the peak of the Spring Break season, when thousands of college students from around the country descend. Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Beatrice Butchko blocked the city’s attempt to […]
Updated: Miami Beach Commissioner David Richardson, who was a state representative in District 113, announced Tuesday that he would be stepping down from his city seat to run for state House in District 106, with its newly-drawn boundaries. He was only city commissioner by default, anyway, running for that after he lost a bid for […]
The distribution of hateful, anti-Semitic flyers in Miami Beach and Surfside over the weekend, blaming the “COVID agenda” on a list of Jewish doctors and officials, has not just alarmed that community. Everyone is disgusted. Police from several jurisdictions are investigating the source of the crude, false and inflammatory flyers, which were carefully left on […]
Leaked audio of a September Zoom call organized by former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine shows that current Mayor Dan Gelber offered developers and real estate investors an inside track to get their projects built — in exchange for contributions to a political action committee. You scratch my back, I’ll get your mixed-use mega complex […]
Property owners would have to make it up with increased taxes For weeks, critics of the Miami Beach referendum to rollback alcohol sales from a last call of 5 a.m. to 2 a.m. have said that it would cost at least $40 million in lost tax revenue. But now we have an actual study from […]
Miami Beach voters have a familiar straw ballot question to answer before Nov. 2: Do they want to ban alcohol sales in South Beach after 2 AM? It’s the same question voters solidly rejected in 2017, by a very comfortable 65% of the vote. Sort of a mandate. So why’s it coming back? That’s a […]
There are 16 people running for four seats in Miami Beach, but many of them are somewhat known to voters already. They include incumbent Mayor Dan Gelber and Commissioner Mark Samuelian, former Commissioner Kristin Gonzalez Rosen, who left her office to run for Congress, and repeat candidates Stephen Cohen, Blake Young, Raquel Pacheco, Michael “Mike […]