Levine Cava’s gamble: Asking voters for $2.5 billion while seeking a second term

When Miami-Dade’s mayor unveiled her plan to borrow $2.5 billion to tackle flooding, housing costs and other challenges during a January speech at Zoo Miami, even her closest allies in county government were stunned to hear the news.

“What about f------ transportation?” Commissioner Eileen Higgins was overheard saying from the board members’ seats in the fifth row for Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s Jan. 24 State of the County address. At that moment, a top aide texted Higgins from a few seats away: “What?!?!!!?!?”

The negative reaction from Higgins, one of the most reliable supporters of Levine Cava on the County Commission, captures the challenges ahead for the Democratic mayor navigating reeleection in an increasingly red Miami-Dade while also trying to orchestrate public support for the county’s largest bond referendum in 20 years.

“I was elected to make sure that we can take care of our community — not just right now, but into the future,” Levine Cava, a former commissioner elected mayor in 2020, said in a recent interview. “We have some critical needs.”

READ MORE: Miami-Dade mayor wants county voters to approve $2.5B borrowing plan in November

If passed, the plan would generate between $100 million and $200 million a year to reduce groundwater pollution by septic tanks, fortify downtown Miami against hurricane surges, jump-start construction of apartment complexes with rent caps and working-class pricing, and fund other long-term projects. Spending on parks projects could go up 35% a year and more than double county money for housing projects, according to borrowing estimates from Levine Cava’s office and current budget figures. The mayor’s plan is to divvy up the $2.5 billion into four borrowing packages: $800 million for housing; $750 million for flood-control and climate-change projects; $700 million for parks; and $250 million for neighborhood-level spending.

The tax impact would be relatively small: On the $1,427 yearly tax bill for county services for a home worth about $400,000, the median value in Miami-Dade, the proposed $2.5 billion bond would add less than $6 a year, according to Levine Cava’s budget office.

READ MORE: Can Trump finally win Miami-Dade County? An early poll highlights Democratic worries

But a Republican challenger is already releasing attack ads against the borrowing proposal Levine Cava wants voters to approve in a November referendum. The government of GOP stronghold Hialeah on Feb. 13 took the extraordinary step of opposing the bond plan, even though it would likely steer millions of county dollars to projects inside city limits of the county’s second-largest municipality. Miami Lakes, a town led by a Republican challenger to Levine Cava, took a similar position.

To get permission to borrow $2.5 billion from Wall Street investors over the next three decades, Levine Cava must first get a majority of 13 county commissioners to put the referendum on the ballot and then persuade voters to endorse paying more property taxes to pay off the debt.

Here are some of the challenges facing Levine Cava for both tasks.

Her $2.5 billion target is much smaller than the last time Miami-Dade borrowed money for decades of spending. The politics of 20 years ago helped drive this year’s $2.5 billion target. In November, the mayor’s campaign quietly polled support for a bond package — and landed on $2.5 billion because it was in line with what passed in 2004 when Miami-Dade commissioners last sent a sprawling, countywide bond plan to county voters. That borrowing program, branded the “Building Better Communities” plan, passed by wide margins on Election Day. “I picked this amount because it was consistent with the previous successful bond program,” Levine Cava said in an interview. “I think it’s a meaningful amount of money at minimal cost to taxpayers.”

In today’s dollars, the 2004 target would be worth about $4.9 billion now, according to a federal inflation calculator. That’s leaving Levine Cava with less money for the kinds of projects that could build support from commissioners, municipal leaders and the public. “I will guarantee there are requests I have [for my district] that she has not included in her plan,” said Keon Hardemon, a Miami-Dade commissioner.

She kept her plan a surprise, then left her administration to play catch up. Public records and interviews show the mayor’s campaign team knew the framework of the bond plan months before the professionals in Miami-Dade government, who spent the weeks after the speech working tight deadlines to compile project lists. “You need this input by Friday, correct?” Lourdes Gomez, director of the county’s Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources, wrote on Tuesday, Feb. 6, to a staff member who asked for her feedback on a list of would-be bond projects circulating within the agency. Gomez wanted her department, which oversees the county’s resiliency office, to work with its municipal counterparts on flooding priorities, and time was running short ahead of the budget office’s Feb. 9 deadline for submissions for the full bond target list.

“I am not sure when/who will reach out to cities but as soon as we get more guidance, we can share that with you,” Patricia Gomez, head of the county’s resiliency office, wrote in an email that day with “Urgent coordination call” in the subject heading.

Two months after the Jan. 24 speech, the Levine Cava administration has yet to release a list of proposed projects for the bond program.

Miami-Dade has many more needs than what the bond dollars can cover. Emails the Miami Herald obtained through a public-records request offer an early look at the projects under consideration for the final bond proposal, which the administration expects to submit to commissioners in April. A February spreadsheet of potential resilience projects alone, including purchasing wetlands to fortify the Everglades and upgrading canals to reduce flooding, totaled $2.8 billion for a bond category that’s only assigned a $750 million budget in Levine Cava’s plan. The county’s Public Housing and Community Development Department produced a list of more than two dozen projects that would build more than 12,000 new housing units, which would require $3.1 billion from the 2024 bond — far more than the $800 million for housing in Levine Cava’s borrowing plan.

Even so, the bond would generate significant new dollars Miami-Dade could use for loans or grants to housing developers awaiting funding to launch projects aimed at low-income and working-class renters.

“It would be the most the county has ever done before. It would be a very meaningful step,” said Annie Lord, executive director of the advocacy group Miami Homes For All. She described Levine Cava’s proposed $800 million housing bond as jump-starting the development of lower-cost apartments that rely on a mix of state, federal and local funds to make the projects viable. “When the locality takes that kind of big step, others follow suit and follow the lead,” she said.

Easy victory or tough sell?

Levine Cava sees the referendum as a bold use of her political standing while she seeks a second term. Rather than playing it safe in what her polling says should be an easy reelection in August, she’s asking voters for a small increase in property taxes to invest in a generation’s worth of county projects that will mostly be funded after Levine Cava leaves office.

“This historic approach will turn around the follies of the past and build for the future,” Levine Cava said in January in the open-air Zoo Miami auditorium when announcing the “305 Future Ready” bond plan in English, Spanish and Creole. “The future will be stronger, safer, and more resilient than ever before.”

Miami-Dade already has a half-percent sales tax that can fund debt for transportation projects, passed in a 2002 referendum. Asked why she didn’t include transit in her bond proposal, Levine Cava pointed to existing funding but noted that county commissioners will have the final say on the project list for the “305 Future Ready” bonds and could add funding for transportation if they’d like.

Christian Ulvert, Levine Cava’s longtime consultant who runs her political committee Our Democracy, said the mayor raised the idea of a bond referendum in September after internal polls showed her in a strong position for reelection with voters.

He remembers her argument: “That’s political capital,” she told him. “I want to be bold and go to the voters with something that will make a difference. I’m not afraid to go to the voters.”

Minutes after Levine Cava’s State of the County speech concluded in January, Ulvert released a summary of a November poll by the mayor’s political committee stating that 79% of the 500 likely voters polled by EMC Research approved of the proposal.

But a full report from the poll, obtained by the Herald, shows a more challenging task ahead for Levine Cava.

When told that Miami-Dade was considering “asking voters to approve a property tax increase” for a bond that would fund better sidewalks and other neighborhood improvements, 60% of the respondents were against it. Only when pollsters used vague legalese for property taxes — saying money for housing, resilience and parks would come from “ad valorem taxes” — did the bond proposals win support by comfortable margins.

“I think it’s a liability for her,” said Emiliano Antunez, a political consultant working for one of Levine Cava’s Republican challengers, Miami Lakes Mayor Manny Cid. “This will be a controversial issue. I’m happy about that.”

Cid released an online attack ad against Levine Cava’s bond proposal two weeks after her speech.

“Mayor Daniella Levine Cava now wants us to trust her with an additional $2.5 billion of our tax dollars,” the ad posted on YouTube says. “We’ve had enough … ”

Miami-Dade already has a property tax dedicated to paying off voter-authorized debt.

Currently it covers payments for about $2.3 billion in debt. That’s mostly from the 2004 referendum and one passed in 2013 that pledged $830 million for the Jackson public hospital system, according to a March 18 memo by the commission’s Office of Policy and Budgetary Affairs. The tax currently costs about $44 for every $100,000 of a property’s taxable value. It rarely gets attention: When the county commission in 2021 voted to increase it 6% to cover the next year’s debt payments, the change passed unanimously without debate.

But asking voters for permission to increase the tax can be a challenge. In 2014, voters rejected increasing the debt tax to fund a new county civil courthouse, which is now being constructed with other funds.

Presidential politics could be a boon for Levine Cava in a fall bond campaign — or it could be a problem. The November survey showed Democrats favoring all four bond spending categories — housing, resilience, parks and neighborhood improvements — but a majority of Republicans were against all but the housing proposal. Democrats remain on top of voter rolls in a county that Joe Biden won by seven points in 2020, but Republicans are narrowing the gap and Levine Cava’s own survey showed Donald Trump winning Miami-Dade by double digits.

In 2004, county leaders targeted a presidential election for the bond campaign, correctly predicting that higher voter turnout would help get the referendum passed. But Levine Cava’s launch departs from how that rollout unfolded 20 years ago.

Then-Mayor Alex Penelas was not the face of the proposal. Instead, county commissioners in 2003 instructed administrators to study what the county needed and come back with a list of projects. County staff conducted dozens of meetings over 10 months with civic groups, municipal governments and other organizations to get feedback and make the case for a massive borrowing plan.

“The more we listened to people express their concerns and their interests, and the more you explained things, you started building support,” said George Burgess, the county manager at the time.

Penelas, who tried to win back his old job in the 2020 race that Levine Cava won, predicted she’ll be facing far more organized pushback to her bond proposal than advocates did two decades ago.

“A lot of politicians are speaking up against it,” he said. “We didn’t have any of that.”

For now, Levine Cava’s biggest challenge may be getting the bond question to voters in November. Miami-Dade has a July deadline for submitting referendum questions, and she’s expecting a commission vote in May.

That leaves about eight weeks to lock down support on a board where some members have been cool or hostile to the plan. Commissioners Kevin Cabrera and René Garcia have both said they’ll vote against the plan.

Oliver Gilbert, the board chairman who controls the legislative agenda, declined an interview request but did go public with how surprised he was to learn about the $2.5 billion plan from Levine Cava’s speech. A few seats away from Gilbert, Higgins was exchanging texts with Maggie Fernandez, the commissioner’s chief of staff, who once worked for Burgess, the county manager during the 2004 bond.

“I can’t,” Fernandez wrote back after Higgins noted that Levine Cava hadn’t mentioned transit in the bond priorities. “This is NOT how you roll out a bond program. It will die before it starts.”

Weeks later, Higgins said she isn’t ready to support Levine Cava’s proposal.

“I still haven’t seen a plan,” she told the Herald on March 22. “If transit is not included, I’m a hard no.”