In District 5 commission race, a Miami power fight between Higgins, Diaz de la Portilla

The contest for the county commission seat representing Little Havana and South Beach has divided the political leadership on both sides of Biscayne Bay.

Incumbent Eileen Higgins won the open Miami-Dade seat during a 2018 special election against two candidates with well-known names: Zoraida Barreiro, wife of the commissioner who gave up the seat to run for Congress that year; and Alex Diaz de la Portilla, a former state senator.

Two years later, Diaz de la Portilla sits on the Miami City Commission and his brother, former school board member Renier Diaz de la Portilla, is challenging Higgins in her bid for a full four-year term.

On one side of the bay, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber backs Higgins. “She is one of the hardest-working public servants I have ever seen,” Gelber said. In Miami, Mayor Francis Suarez backs Diaz de la Portilla and refers to both brothers in explaining why.

“I’ve had a longstanding relationship with them. I wish I had a better relationship with her,” Suarez said. “Literally, in the time she’s been an elected official, she has never scheduled a time to meet with me on an issue about the city.”

Higgins has her own rejoinder to the Suarez dig, suggesting the mayor with a national profile doesn’t generally make time for working meetings. “I have met with him,” she said. “But I will say: Mostly, when you’re with the mayor, you’re at events... They’re public things.”

The District 5 contest is the only commission race with an incumbent running for reelection.

The impact of term limits

The two-term limit voters approved in 2012 forced the first wave of retirements in 2020, creating open seats in five districts. That could grant Higgins an instant seniority bump if she wins — especially after the next wave of term limits kick in during the 2022 commission elections and only Joe Martinez will have been on the board longer.

A loss for Higgins would place Diaz de la Portilla in a historic freshman class on a commission where some incumbents have been serving since the early 1990s. The new commission set to take power in November will mark the most churn on the commission since single-member, geographical districts were created by court order in 1992.

Diaz de la Portilla, 49, a lawyer who served on the Miami-Dade School Board and in the Florida Legislature as a Republican, hopes to ride his longtime political and voter ties into a win. “They know me,” he said while standing outside the early-voting site at the Shenandoah library and adjoining park on a recent afternoon. “I used to play a lot of basketball here.”

Later that day, Higgins attended a revolving campaign event with supporters in downtown Miami, who gathered outside cafes and bars on either side of Northeast Third Avenue.

The shoulders of the roadway are painted, and part of the parking spaces transformed into space for sidewalk tables to allow for more outdoor dining during the COVID-19 pandemic. Higgins recalled Zoom calls with transportation officials locally and in Tallahassee to get the project done. “This was city,” she said, before pointing to the far end of the street. “That was the state.”

A former State Department official in the Obama administration and one-time marketing executive, Higgins, 56, ran her first race for the District 5 open seat.

She says her record on the commission has earned a full term. Higgins points to hundreds of new affordable-housing units in the district, with thousands more in the pipeline.

On the transportation front, Higgins touts the commission’s recent endorsement of the Better Bus Project framework for shortening waits at popular bus stops, her advocacy for a $300 million rapid-transit bus system in South Miami-Dade that started development this fall and the recent approval of a $12 million engineering agreement with the developer of a planned monorail over the MacArthur Causeway.

“I said I was going to work on transportation. You know that’s complicated,” she said. “But we’ve made a lot of progress in two years.”

Higgins got 47% of the vote in the August primary, and Diaz de la Portilla 39%. The third candidate, Miguel Soliman, won 13%. Because no candidate won more than 50% of the vote, the top two finishers moved on to a November runoff election.

The contest has been a bitter one. Diaz de la Portilla’s campaign aired a Spanish-language ad with a doctored image of Higgins wearing a Che Guevara beret.

He accuses her of “ethnic dog whistles” for a mailer portraying him as the “Fredo” mob brother in “The Godfather” movies for raising money from Miami developers for the District 5 race.

Diaz de la Portilla opposed the monorail project, calling it a “boondoggle.” He likens the county’s managing of $474 million in federal CARES Act relief of creating a “slush fund” for Higgins, who sponsored legislation to spend the money on rental assistance, business loans and $10 million in grants for non-profit arts groups.

He’s also pitching his candidacy as a way to retire tensions between the county and Miami, where Suarez has a long-running feud with outgoing county Mayor Carlos Gimenez.

“I think it’s a great opportunity to not just work with my brother,” he said. “But with the mayor, too.”