Dear Editor:
Re: A Petition Drive to Reform Miami City Hall:
I know this ballot initiative is derived from a good place but if you go this route first, you will be putting the cart before the horse and our people will get run over by the current political structure that’s in play.
We have an enormous civic empowerment gap here in the City of Miami with our residents. We must fix this problem FIRST, by raising the consciousness of our citizens, so the vast majority can understand the value of being involved with their government and how to work it.
We need to lean into cultivating our people power in numbers by creating strong neighborhood associations, citizen 101 academies, public campaign financing mechanisms, participatory budgeting initiatives, etc., so our citizens have access to the knowledge and skill set needed to activate their democracy.
Just increasing the Miami City Commission from 5 to 9 commissioners when we already spend $24,551,000.00 on covering our commissioner’s salaries and operational cost will balloon the budget designated to our commissioners to $44,191,800 a year.
I don’t know about you, but there’s so many better ways we can utilize our taxpayer dollars.
Switching our elections to even years instead of keeping it where it is now just dilutes our messaging power and will widen the gap even further at this time because the civic education foundation for the vast majority of City of Miami residents is just not there yet.
Our City of Miami election and initiatives will be located towards the end of the ballot; our mayoral and commission elections and ballot initiatives will be thrown into the pot with so many other races including high profile and not; and we would just be relying on HOPE that the majority of our residents are doing their homework on all of the candidates, judges, ballot questions, charter amendments, etc., before they vote.
We conducted a survey of over 10,000 City of Miami households this year and 92% of the respondents indicated that when they voted in the November 2024 general election, they did not totally understand everything that they voted for or against.
In particular, the survey respondents mentioned that they did not have solid background information on multiple races, candidates and their stances on the issues.
The majority of the respondents mentioned they had no idea who the judges were on the ballot, 80% of the respondents could not correctly name or select their assigned elected officials based on their address, and 77% of respondents did not know the difference between living in the City of Miami and Miami Dade County.
Please understand just increasing commissioners from five to nine does not fix this. Moving our elections to even years at this time does not fix this either. The only thing that I can support about this ballot initiative at this time is the fair redistricting mandate.
To my fellow residents here in the City of Miami, we have some serious work to do to fix our democracy, so that it works for all of us.
Implementing all of these initiatives at the same time without changing the current climate in our city first will hurt working class people in my city more than help us.
Michael A. Hepburn
Miami
Editor’s Note: Michael Hepburn is running for mayor in the City of Miami. The election is Tuesday November 4.
