By Rebecca Wakefield

District 3 is the most diverse and interesting of Miami-Dade County’s 13 gerrymandered domains. It includes parts of Liberty City, Little Haiti, Overtown, the Upper Eastside, Allapattah, Wynwood and Miami Shores. Everything that Miami is can be found in this district.

With the appointment of El Portal mayor Audrey Edmonson to fill Barbara Carey-Shuler’s commission seat, we witness the last gasp of the old guard in black Miami politics. Very soon, the hegemony of the few that has dominated will be replaced by the messy vitality of immigrant politics. Carey-Shuler, like her mentor, former congresswoman Carrie Meek, managed to name her own successor on her way out the door. She also got protégé Michelle Spence-Jones elected in the city of Miami district that overlaps hers.

If she can escape the g-forces of the scandal at Miami International Airport, the powerful and popular former commissioner will be in a good position to truly earn the name some evil-minded wag once bestowed on her – Cash-n-Carey. Both those districts are primed for development. There’s also the little matter of the Urban Development Boundary, which is a cash herd for developers and the people they have to pay off to get it done.

I don’t know Audrey Edmonson, other than to the extent I know that politics in tiny El Portal have always been just as feisty as in any municipality in South Florida. Upfront, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. Her challenge is going to be not drowning in the legacy of her mentor, nor the whirlpool of commission politics, all while fending off political rivals from the Haitian-American community in 2006. That won’t be easy.

I am disappointed that the rest of the County Commission admitted so openly that it knows almost nothing about District 3, and thus is content to abdicate its duty to make an informed decision to a former elected official. This gets at another issue voters countywide should consider. Has the grand experiment with single-member districts truly produced the promised gains for minorities? Or, have these districts merely become fiefdoms presided over by the dissipated on behalf of the disinterested and disillusioned?

Carey-Shuler represented roughly the District 3 area from 1979, when she was appointed, to 1990, when Arthur Teele won her seat out from under her. She came back in 1996 and rose to become the powerful chairwoman of the commission from 2002 to 2004. Her resignation was not surprising to those who had been hearing rumors of it for weeks.

I’d heard about it at least two or three times before it happened. I was told that members of her staff were quietly looking for other positions within the county. The day the county commission was hearing the proposals to allow development outside the Urban Development Boundary, a well-placed source told me to expect Carey-Shuler to resign, probably in January, officially for family reasons. He whispered, as many have, that a little deal was probably being cut between State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s people and Carey-Shuler's people to let her slip out of office with dignity as the investigation into corruption at Miami International Airport moves closer to her.

I don’t know if that is true, but it sure says a lot about the state of this town that it seems feasible to more than a few. It would even be understandable, looking back at the events of this past summer, when the SAO, Miami Herald and Miami New Times all took massive heat in the aftermath of former city commissioner Arthur Teele’s suicide. As the logic of conspiracy goes, would a state attorney with an ever-narrowing hold on her elected office want to risk enraging a black community vital to her political survival? Time will reveal such mysteries.

Earlier this year, a 12,000-word investigative report released by the SAO revealed that someone linked Carey-Shuler to fraud and corruption at MIA. The allegations came from Richard Caride, the murderous ex-cop who ran the airport’s jet fuel facilities until it was discovered that millions of dollars worth of fuel had been stolen. In the report, Caride described how Antonio Junior, a businessman with longtime ties to Carey-Shuler, paid him bribes in exchange for lucrative contracts. He implied that Junior was paying off Carey-Shuler.

Carey-Shuler, of course, denied any involvement in illegal or inappropriate activities, although she did admit to former New Times columnist Tris Korten that she had attended some meetings with Caride that were set up by Junior. As Korten pointed out months ago, if Caride’s testimony is all the evidence the SAO can muster against her, a good defense attorney would be able to tear it apart, given Caride’s record.

But Carey-Shuler’s record is mixed as well. The Carey Technical Institute, which she founded in the early ’80s, defaulted on a $300,000 loan from the city of Miami and was later accused of financial irregularities (although Carey herself was not). She was also part of the well-established group of do-little public officials the school district used to employ (and still does in some cases). While certainly not the only one (Ralph Arza, my favorite state legislator, also springs to mind), Carey-Shuler did have a part-time job that required little of her and she abused it just as many others have. After a WPLG-TV (Channel 10) reporter ran a story in 2002 on her no-show status at her school district job, an SAO investigation concluded she had falsified time sheets, but that the matter was not criminal. The county’s ethics commission took a crack at the complaint, but it was dismissed. Carey-Shuler maintained she’d done nothing wrong.

It's too soon to identify the legacy of Carey-Shuler, but we can hope that the future for District 3 is bigger than one politician.