There is no greater sign of the hopeless nature of South Florida politics than the indication Hialeah county commissioner Natacha Seijas may not have a challenger in the fall election.
Seijas represents Fortress Hialeah, the redoubt of the South Florida construction and development community that has imposed its will on the Florida landscape to devastating effect.
One way to measure the effect is to understand that the current real estate and banking crash has wiped out--for the largest publicly traded homebuilders--the entire profits generated during the building boom itself; in other words, taxpayers are left funding infrastructure for a degraded landscape, fleecing common shareholders but enriching key executives (of the order that fund Seijas' campaigns) in the process.
The crash in real estate markets has its trace straight back to Hialeah, although you would never know it from the behavior of voters there. Why?
Eyeonmiami has documented the pothole politics that keep Hialeah voters calm and complacent-- partly by invoking, over the decades, the shadow of Castro only a few hundred miles away. Miami's Cuban policy and politics has always had more to do with influence over government contracts and influence peddling at County Hall than Havana.
When Seijas faced a recall election last year, waged mostly by citizens determined to shake up the status quo, the tactics employed against petition gatherers--including false imprisonment by the Hialeah police--had the effect of casting an even deeper pall over those who might emerge to challenge her in November. Who could bear that kind of treatment, to run for county commissioner at a salary of $6000 per year? (Of course there are perks, each county commissioner in Miami Dade doles out hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars in discretionary funds. Seijas sallies forth to distant parts of the globe on "trade missions" coddled by flunkies; India, Poland, Africa.) Check out our archive feature: Seijas.
It is sad, really, that the unions have allowed Seijas to manipulate them, too. Their support of Seijas is against the interest of their own members. The unions are so flattened by economic circumstances that, even during the unsustainable building boom that is now in cinders, they still can't begin to explain how their members, in supporting Seijas, are voting against their own interests.
If there was ever a time for a candidate to make the case how our politics have failed Miami's voters, it is now. Miami Lakes city councilman Michael Pizzi has been an effective voice for Hold The Line, the informal coalition of interests that have fought Seijas and the unreformable majority of the county commission on the Urban Development Boundary issue in Miami-Dade. He has also spoken forcefully against rock mining companies whose blasting shook the foundations of nearby residences and families .He has the visibility and name recognition to take on Seijas and make the case to the broader public for campaign contributions.
Seijas targeted Pizzi in his own recent election, pushing forward a straw candidate who attracted big campaign contributions from the development lobby in Miami-Dade. Still, Pizzi won. At the very least, the voters of Hialeah need to hear what they are not hearing about Seijas, who appears wholesome as apple pie when she is buying seniors breakfasts and shuttling them to the polls.
The bigger issue is what she has done, in leading Miami-Dade County to a hostile landscape of suburban sprawl and overdevelopment, postponing the costs of water infrastructure and wrecking the environment in the process, all to please her campaign donor base. Someone needs to come forth and explain the facts: Michael Pizzi could do it.
4 comments:
Pizzi is not going to jump into the ring with Natasha. He would have to resign his seat in Miami Lakes, and he has no, I repeat, no shot to win in that district when you look at the demographics. If anyone is going to challenge Natasha, it has to be a forward thinking hispanic candidate. I don't see anyone in the district that fits the bill. She will remain on the Commission until 2012, and then, she will not seek reelection.
It's almost too late. The "fall" election is late August
Candidate filing deadline is next week.
The sorry state of our County is never in greater focus than when nobody challenges these people.
I can understand when partisan districts do not draw a challenge from the opposite party, but Commission districts are non-partisan.
Commission campaigns are too expensive to run and no one will give you money fearing retribution from a sitting commissioner. You can't raise money and it is almost impossible to run a campaign without money.
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