So, North Miami Beach residents: Thought you were safe from elections, eh?

Not quite yet. There’s a runoff for City Commission this Tuesday, November 17, between top November 3 at-large Group 3 vote-getters Daniela Jean and Margaret “Margie” Love, who are vying to replace outgoing Commissioner Phyllis Smith on the seven-member commission. To learn more about them, click on the links to their names and scroll up. Final treasurer reports, due 5 pm November 13, are not posted as of this writing, but you can find them and municipal voting information here.

This vote counts and presents a clear choice at a turbulent time, which we’ll present below in the candidates’ own words.

In the November 3 election, political newcomer Jean, 34, a published motivational-book author and City of North Miami risk management specialist, was breakaway leader, with 34 percent of the vote, and Love, 68, a retired schoolteacher, longtime community activist, and perennial candidate, got 19 percent.

Jean, raised in North Miami Beach, advocates more help to homeowners and struggling businesses through the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, holding the line on water rates and offering payment plans, and more extensive community policing.

If elected, she would be the fourth Haitian-American on the seven-member commission in this highly diverse majority-minority city, joining Group 5 Commissioner McKenzie Fleurimond, Group 7 Commissioner Michael Joseph, and Group 2 Commissioner Paule Villard. Fleurimond and Joseph easily fended off challenges November 3, winning 70 percent and 65 percent of the vote respectively. Villard is up for re-election in 2022. Jean ran in an unofficial alliance with Joseph, even on occasion using the same slogan of “People Over Politics.”

Love is running for her sixth time in a self-funded campaign. Police-civilian relations has long been her signature issue. She is also pressing for stability in city management to protect the city manager and clerk. She also casts a skeptical eye on developers, particularly on Dezer Development, which on November 10 won the zoning it was seeking to transform the 29-acre Intracoastal Mall into the $1.5-billion Uptown Harbour Development with 2,000 condos in four 40-story towers, townhouses, a boutique hotel, 375,000 square feet of retail and 200,000 square feet of office, and a canal dredged from Biscayne Bay.  Fleurimond, Joseph, and Villard have consistently voted with the development.

Jean is taking no position on development issues, but, with Love, stresses the need for civility on a long-contentious dais that seems to grow tenser by the meeting.

Of the two candidates, Jean has superior organization and strong backing from the broader, tightly-knit Haitian-American political community, and claims endorsements from AFSCME, the municipal employees’ union, and veteran politicians. Jean and Love outvoted Ruth Abeckjerr (10 percent), Henry Dube (12 percent), Ketley Joachim (14 percent), and Dianne Weiss Raulson (11 percent).

While runoffs like this on one-item ballots are usually low-turnout affairs, this is not your ordinary runoff.

The winner will join a riven, feuding commission filled with animosity that cuts in several directions, as demonstrated in the November 3 election dominated by the Dezer Development just west of the 163rd Street drawbridge to Sunny Isles Beach, itself dominated by Dubai-like Dezer-built towers. Then there were dark-money attack mailers, bitter Facebook feuds, and screaming matches on the dais, all undergirded by delicate issues of neighborhood, race, and ethnicity.

In a bitter commission meeting November 10, the commission voted 4-3 on second reading to approve rezoning for the development. In addition, the council and management will manage the tricky business of the city’s reassuming control of the county’s second largest water utility from Jacobs Engineering. The city voted to end its 2017 contract in August.

The rezoning vote is good news for Dezer Development and for Ron Book, the Aventura and Tallahassee lobbyist who is in the curious and influential position of lobbying both for the Trump-tied Dezers in the City of North Miami Beach and on the city’s behalf on other matters in Tallahassee, which also happens to be the city of origin for some attack mailers for unsuccessful candidates who were less keen on the Dezers.

For Mayor Anthony DeFillipo, the 4-3 vote is a mixed blessing at best. DeFillipo, like his predecessor and close ally George Vallejo, has been broadly popular and in line to run unopposed. That changed in August, when it was apparent that the Dezers had the likely votes to hustle the project through the council before the November election. The project was approved 4-3 on first reading after 3 am September 25 and 3-2 around 2 am October 22 after one commissioner fell asleep on the Zoom meeting and the other lost the internet connection and was then rescheduled for November 10. That meeting is posted here. Eastern Shores residents told The Miami Herald that DeFillipo betrayed them by going back on his word, given to them at an October 29 meeting, that he would not approve the project without a traffic study with multiple access points.

Bruce Kusens, an Eastern Shores resident, entrepreneur, and inventor, ran a campaign to ensure the Dezers honor an agreement to put multiple traffic points to their development leading to NE 35th Avenue– the only route into the Eastern Shores neighborhood, with swank single family homes to the west and a dense warren of condos and townhouses to the east.

For a candidate who said he was not interested in becoming mayor, his quixotic-seeming run posted a surprisingly strong showing of 32 percent to Filippo’s 68 percent. In some striking wording, the Miami-Dade Democratic party also announced its “overwhelming” support of Kusens. DeFillipo, while a registered Democrat, was a strong supporter of Sen. Marco Rubio and has long had friendly relations with the Gil Dezer and his father Michael Dezer. DeFillipo also harbors a mutual animus with Joseph, who has strong ties to Democratic Party leadership, although Joseph has voted consistently with DeFilippo on development issues, as have fellow commissioners Fleurimond of Group 5 and Paule Villard of Group 2.

Vallejo, who oversaw massive development in the city after 2015, resigned in disgrace after agreeing a plea deal for campaign finance violations for diverting at least $5,000 in campaign finance money to shell corporations to pay personal expenses. Vallejo also disclosed to attorneys that his wife was taking undisclosed payments from the Dezers while he was voting on Dezer-related matters.

Both Vallejo and DeFillipo are commercial real estate brokers and occasional partners on deals.

The city commission has changed over the last five years, particularly since 2018, and this election will only shift it further. No matter who wins, five of the seven commissioners will live west of Biscayne Boulevard. Not so long ago, Eastern Shores residents dominated on the commission.

Says Jean: “I am running because I am a change maker. I’ve lived in North Miami Beach for the majority of my life, attended elementary, middle and a high school within the city. My first job in high school was at the North Miami Beach Library.  I am a product of this community and I want to be an advocate for the residents that call this place home.”

Her priorities: ensuring that the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency spins more money into helping small/minority businesses and paying for home improvements; properly staffing the water plant, which the city is taking back in-house, and community policing and increased patrolling. She says she wants to bring more communication, honesty and empathy.

“I want to move us back to a place of respect on the dais. We can agree to disagree. We have to put people over politics.”

This is Margie Love’s sixth race. She has paid for her campaign with more than $45,000 of her own money. She got caught flat-footed around November 3 election time when her campaign account closed amid a family emergency and caught her up short of money before paying a maintenance fee to restore it. She is a strong advocate for community policing and has been active in police-civilian relations for many years. Her priorities and perspective are quite different.

Says Love: “My priorities are to protect our city manager and his staff, protect the city clerk and her staff, and protect our entire police department. I take issue with allowing shady developers to come up with this outrageous proposal for development within Eastern Shores. Most residents are against it, with traffic problems that will ensue. Residents’ opinions are not being respected. If you have a shady past and you’ve given us a black eye in the past that caused our seated mayor to face charges, this election becomes a matter of trust.”

Love is broadly skeptical about the pace of development in North Miami Beach, with high density developments recently approved on the north side of 163rd Street and NE 19th and 21st Avenues, West Dixie Highway just south of 172nd Street, and more on the way.

Says Love: “It is my hope that my presence up there in seat no. 3 will be a constant reminder of proper decorum and civility and restoring the integrity of our dais.”

In this cycle, Jean benefited from get-out-the-vote efforts and has consolidated support in the Haitian-American community. She has since received endorsements from politicians, organizations, and unions. She estimates that she has raised roughly $16,000, and her treasurers’ report, due 5 pm November 13, should come online Monday.

Jean got a big organizational boost after November 3 with an endorsement and $1,000 donation from the new Haitian-American Political Action Committee – NHAEON Progressive PAC, a newly-formed PAC offshoot of the National Haitian American Elected Officials Network. Its mission: “Building a Strong Black Political Movement To Ensure Our Vote Counts,”  as described late last month in an article on this group for The Miami Times. While it is a national group, this year’s president is North Miami Councilman Alix Desulme, and its secretary is North Miami elected City Clerk Vanessa Joseph.

Polls are open from 7 am-7 pm at eight polling sites linked here. Wear your mask and bring your drivers’ license or voter registration card. If you didn’t get a ballot yet, watch for it. If not, match your precinct with your voter registration card. Can’t find the card or don’t know the precinct?  Then go online to miamidade.gov and go to Voter Information section, or use the Florida Division of Election’s Voter Information Lookup page and enter your name and birth date. Still stuck? Call the city clerk’s office at 305-787-6001.

Mark Sell