Why It Really Doesn’t Matter Who the Voters of
District 5 Elect as Their Miami City Commissioner

The Persistent Power Void

By Rebecca Wakefield
Columnist

Miami’s District 5 is screwed no matter who wins its City Commission seat for reasons larger than any one candidate. District 5 in the city of Miami is the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. It is the figuratively swampy ghetto just waiting for a storm of gentrification to roll right into it.

The bottom line on why the current residents of Overtown, Liberty City and Little Haiti are in this quandary comes down to a general lack of priority, plus an enormous leadership gap. Nobody is really looking out for them, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

I wrote this column before Tuesday’s election, so I’m just going to guess that there will be a runoff between Michelle Spence-Jones and Richard Dunn, the proxies for a larger struggle for the soul of black Miami. Spence-Jones has been propelled chiefly by the political machines of Mayor Manny Diaz and County Commissioner Barbara Carey-Shuler. Dunn attempted to harness the legacy of the late Arthur Teele, a former commissioner and ally, and to capitalize on the fight the city unions are having with Diaz and the majority of the commission.

I’m not even going to get into the actual qualifications and baggage of the candidates because I don’t think it matters at this point. Worth noting is that City Manager Joe Arriola, who I’m assuming won’t be sticking around City Hall much past election time (he’s pretty much fulfilled his purpose to the greater Diaz agenda at this point, plus I’d lay money he’d love to run for office himself), propped up his own candidate in the person of barbershop owner Willie Williams. Basil Binns II, a 23-year-old aide to Commissioner Johnny Winton, drew on his boss’s substantial fundraising network for his bid as well.

I held off writing about this until now because I was concerned there might be a perceived conflict of interest. For the past six months, I have had a hell of a good time playing co-host on an obscure local talk-radio show called JWalkin’, on WMBM (1490-AM). The weekly show is hosted by Jason Walker and runs at the inconvenient hour of 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Wednesdays. Walker’s day job is working for Winton, a job he got after precociously running for the District 2 seat at the age of 23. For a couple of months, Binns sat in on the show, along with other regular members of the talk-show crew, attorney Marlon Hill and political consultant Christopher Norwood. We’re all volunteers and Walker foots the bill for the airtime. But we’re all busy and so may end our run in a few weeks.

The show started out with conversations I used to have with Walker and a number of other young black professionals about the issue of black leadership in Miami. We would argue the finer points of this every time we ran into each other and Walker thought having a reporter familiar with black Miami would add a different perspective to the show. The basic idea was, “Let’s change the way Miami talks about itself.” This being Miami, my first question was, “Is this just a clever ploy for you to run for office?” He said no, partially because he doesn’t live in District 5, not that that seems to be a barrier to some of the candidates.

The station is owned and operated by New Birth Baptist Church, headed by Bishop Victor T. Curry. The AM signal is weak after dark and our lead-in is canned sermons. We estimate our audience to be in the high dozens, but still, we’ve managed to attract some great guests, including then-Herald columnist Jim DeFede, former Congresswoman Carrie Meek, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rod Smith, as well as local activists, reporters, Nation of Islam leadership and a pretty good Bill Clinton impersonator.

We’ve talked about police abuse of Tasers, the affordable housing crisis, gentrification, unequal treatment of Haitian immigrants, election reform, the urban boundary, the fight between the mayor and County Commission. One guest, Robert Meyers, executive director of the Miami-Dade County Commission on Ethics and the Public Trust, confessed on air that I’d made his wife cry when I wrote about him a few years ago. Sorry, again, Mrs. Meyers.

We impulsively started a “Wanna Be a Commissioner?” contest to recruit candidates to run for the District 5 seat. We actually got a half-dozen applications, and even nurses listening to us at Jackson inquired about getting in. At the deadline, however, the candidates either didn’t qualify, or weren’t prepared to make the commitment to run. Then Binns decided to leave our show to run on his own.

One of our most compelling shows was the night Arthur Teele shot himself in the lobby of the Miami Herald building. A Herald reporter called me a few minutes later. I called Frank Alvarado, a friend and former colleague from the Miami New Times and broke the news that the sensational article he’d written that day about the police investigation into Teele’s life may have contributed in some way. I asked him if he would come on the show that night. Frank was in shock, but he called in from the hospital where Teele was taken and we grilled him on air, his first of many interviews on the subject, and the rawest.

Curry even called in from Atlanta to give us extra time. He was on vacation and asked us to take over his popular Tuesday Talk program for a couple of weeks. Teele was the only thing people were talking about, and hearing the angst of the callers made me realize afresh how far apart black, white and Latin Miami are from each other.

The consensus among political cognoscenti in Miami, especially in Anglo and Latin camps, was that Teele was a brilliant man with an ego and appetites much too large to allow for mere public service. In the community he represented, the attitude was mixed. Teele had both allies and enemies in black Miami, from jaded politicos and operators to residents cynical and weary of all politicians. But love him or hate him, the man had a style and a swagger you had to admire. Watching him lap the less mentally agile on the commission, or even better, volatile Joe Arriola, was a sublime treat.

Unfortunately, Teele’s status as the king meant a lot of potential leaders who should have been groomed and ready to eventually take his place were squashed before they could become threats. Thus, when Teele was removed from office, a huge power vacuum was left in District 5. Enter the operatives with agendas and inexperienced candidates to sell.

Whoever wins the seat will be beholden, to an extent, to people who have little interest in the welfare of District 5, except as part of a larger agenda. Real leaders must be nurtured from the ground up; rooted in the community, but also able to work with people who are not like them. In general, Miami is an immature city with little in the way of socio-political infrastructure. Leadership, such as it is, has tended to focus on itself and on making individual deals rather than strategically pursuing a larger vision. That’s true of all politicians to a degree, but the impact of the lack of a deep bench among black political leaders is harsher on a community with more to lose than others.

Greater Miami is a world of separate, self-involved communities, but at the same time, people can and do reach across those boundaries more freely than in more established places. This town is still young and wild and change is not only possible, but inevitable. In District 5, what is needed more than anything is community leaders who will back the next commissioner in important fights, hold him or her accountable, and start grooming the next wave of young leaders who can bridge the gap between Miami’s history and her destiny.