The coalition of civic groups pushing to expand Miami’s City Commission from five to nine seats – some with deep roots in Coconut Grove – is facing a July 30 deadline to return enough voter signatures to force a November ballot referendum.
An effort to force a citywide referendum on expanding the Miami City Commission from five to nine seats has collected more than 2,600 signatures – just 10 percent of the roughly 26,000 needed – but organizers say volunteers are gearing up for a heavy push throughout the city.
The deadline for submitting the signatures with enough time to place the measure on the November ballot is July 30.
“We think we are off to a great start. We are very pleased,” says Mel Meinhardt, founder of the Coconut Grove civic group One Grove Alliance and lead organizer of Stronger Miami, a group spearheading the petition drive.
(Editors’ note: Meinhardt is also publisher of the Coconut Grove Spotlight. He was not involved in the reporting, writing, or editorial decision-making related to this story.)
Backers of the charter change say the additional commission seats will make elected officials more responsive to neighborhood-level concerns, encourage more diverse policy discussions on legislative issues, and reduce the chance of distinct communities being divided into multiple commission districts.
In addition to adding commission seats, the proposed referendum calls for local elections to be held in even-numbered years, aligning with state and federal races which generally attract higher voter turnout.
The Stronger Miami initiative was launched by a coalition of progressive advocacy and civic engagement groups. Stronger Miami chairman Andy Parrish is a longtime Coconut Grove neighborhood activist and until earlier this year a member of the city’s Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board.
Besides One Grove Alliance – which organizes town halls and community forums on issues related to Coconut Grove and the City of Miami – other groups backing the campaign include the ACLU of Florida, Engage Miami, Florida Rising, and the Miami Freedom Project, Meinhardt says.
Meinhardt said he expects more civic groups and neighborhood associations to sign on as organizers ramp up outreach efforts. “The essential message takes five or six words to convey… and that is smaller districts serve neighborhoods better,” Meinhardt says.
Florida Rising is a nonprofit advocacy and lobbying group created by the merger of Miami-based New Florida Majority and Orlando-based Organize Florida in 2021. New Florida Majority campaigned for former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum in the Florida Democratic primary in 2018 and collected one million signatures for Amendment 4 (abortion rights) to be placed on the 2024 statewide ballot.
Miami Freedom Project organizes get-out-the-vote campaigns, environmental cleanups, and other events. The group was founded in 2019 by food and culture writer Ana Sofia Paláez and the late Patrick Hidalgo, a former campaign staffer for Barack Obama.
Florida Rising and Miami Freedom Project did not respond to interview requests for this story.
The Stronger Miami campaign has direct lineage with the federal lawsuit, settled in 2024, that blocked a new district voting map approved by the City Commission in 2022. The city’s map divided Coconut Grove and other neighborhoods into multiple districts.
The plaintiffs in that case – West Grove-based Grove Rights and Community Equity (GRACE), the Miami-Dade Branch of the NAACP, and Engage Miami, among others – claimed that the City Commission drew its new voting map to guarantee that at least three of the five seats were held by Hispanics while leaving Blacks and non-Hispanic whites with the two remaining seats.
A federal judge agreed with the plaintiffs, ruling that the city’s 2022 district map amounted to “racial gerrymandering” in violation of the Voting Rights Act. After the court rejected a second map drawn by the City Commission, a map backed by the ACLU of Florida, which represented the plaintiffs, was adopted.
In the wake of that decision, GRACE vice chair Carolyn Donaldson recalls, the conversation between ACLU attorneys, Grove activists, and fellow plaintiffs shifted to strategies to improve Miami’s governance structure, including the commission expansion.
The sales pitch for such a move, recalls Rebecca Pelham, executive director of Engage Miami, was fairly obvious: Miami remains an outlier among major U.S. cities for the relatively small size of its elected legislative body. A poll commissioned by her group found strong citywide support for reforming Miami’s government, she added.
Miami’s present governance structure dates to a 1997 voter referendum that replaced at-large, citywide commission elections with five single-member districts expressly and admittedly gerrymandered to produce racial balance.
The referendum also created a new executive mayor post with no vote on the commission but the power to veto legislation and nominate city managers.
(Voters also weighed in on a proposal that year – backed and financed by a small group of Grove activists – to incorporate the City of Miami, thereby allowing its neighborhoods to join adjacent towns or cities or to seek municipal independence. While a majority of Grove residents approved the measure, it was overwhelmingly rejected citywide.)
Those arguing for an expanded city commission note that since 1997, when the present commission structure was approved, Miami’s population has increased nearly 35%, leaving each of the city’s five commissioners struggling to address the simple neighborhood issues that residents prioritize.
More districts mean smaller districts, which means elected officials can be closer to the people they serve, argues Parrish.
“The overall motivation is to get to better government, that’s it in a nutshell. A government that is more responsive to the neighborhoods they serve.”
Outside Coconut Grove, the Stronger Miami campaign is gaining qualified support – with a dose of skepticism.
Biscayne Neighborhood Association president Rick Madan likes the idea of commissioners being more focused on smaller territories but he worries that more elected officials raise the risk of adding to the dysfunction that has long plagued City Hall.
“It’s so difficult to find five good commissioners,” says Madan. “What is it going to be like to find nine good commissioners?”
Former Miami Neighborhoods United president Grace Solares, a resident of Brickell, agrees. “[Nine] gives us more of a chance of having even more battles on the commission,” she says. “We have people up there who are constantly fighting. Nine people? My God.”
Solares says a seven-seat commission might offer a better balance – a suggestion also endorsed by Miami Downtown Neighborhood Alliance president James Torres.
And Ernesto Cuesta, president of the Brickell Homeowners Association, offers yet another suggestion: five at-large commission seats and a strong mayor system to keep the legislative body – and the politics that surround it – in check.
“Bigger government doesn’t work,” he says.
Not everyone in Coconut Grove is in favor of adding more commission districts either.
Former Miami District 2 Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, a Grove resident, questions the bigger-is-better rationale, arguing that voters should simply pay more attention to whom they elect.
“You need to have the right people in place,” Sarnoff says. “By swamping the commission with additional districts, it does not change anything. It just makes it better for lobbyists.”
Damian Pardo, District 2’s sitting commissioner, shares a similar concern.
“When people are not happy with their government, they want change. When you add more commissioners and we get new faces, new people, it’s not necessarily a good thing,” Pardo tells the Spotlight.
But Pardo does see merit in Stronger Miami’s provision requiring all future city elections be held in even years, so much so that he’s been floating his own proposal to legislate such a move – and delay this year’s November elections by a year – through a simple commission vote. Delaying the 2025 election would extend the terms of the current mayor and two commissioners by a year.
While the election delay, which Pardo says is based on a legal opinion shared with commissioners by City Attorney George Wysong, is seen by some as a tactical move designed to garner commission support for his previously floated proposal to limit city officeholders to two terms of any given position with their lifetimes, some activists view it as a brash legislative power grab designed to usurp the voter authority that the city’s charter prescribes.
The possibility of commissioners extending their own terms in office, Meinhardt says, is its own argument for the Stronger Miami voter amendment.
“If you don’t have something in the charter, then politicians can change it on a whim.”
Civic-minded leaders like Madan, Solares, Cuesta, Torres and Elvis Cruz (see “Letters”) are all excellent examples of qualified, caring, committed and balanced individuals who might win a seat if the city’s districts were aligned with its neighborhoods. Leaders like Donaldson, deeply committed to equity for all, are already helping groom the future leadership our city’s growth requires.
In Allapattah, Overtown, Liberty City, Little Haiti, Shenandoah and Flagami, other community leaders are building the future of our city and learning the ropes of governance through service. Those that suggest Miami doesn’t have the principled actors that could serve well in an expanded commission, might change their minds after meeting these rising stars.
Stronger Miami’s initiative offers an equal place at the table for those who are close to the neighbors they serve. If those already at the table resist making room for others, one should ask “why?”