In Miami-Dade’s District 11 election, Roberto Gonzalez faces first test with voters

As the District 11 commissioner representing Miami-Dade’s western suburbs for nearly two years, Roberto Gonzalez enjoys all the advantages of incumbency — except having won an election.

Voters will have their first chance to elect Gonzalez, 37, to a four-year term on Aug. 20, when they can decide between the incumbent and two challengers. The District 11 seat was vacant in November 2022 when Gonzalez, a lawyer and recent Republican candidate for the Florida House, was appointed to the position by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

There are no municipalities in District 11, a rectangle-shaped area of about 215,000 people that overlaps with the Everglades and touches Country Walk, the Hammocks, Kendale Lakes, West Kendall and other suburban neighborhoods in western Miami-Dade.

With three people in the District 11 election, the contest could move to a November runoff if no candidate wins more than half of the August vote.

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The nearly $900,000 Gonzalez has raised for the race dwarfs that of Bryan Paz-Hernandez, his best-funded challenger. Paz-Hernandez, 29, is the former president of the Kendall Democratic Club who is now an independent and hoping to paint Gonzalez as too partisan for voters as he seeks his first political office.

At a recent candidate forum that Gonzalez skipped, Paz-Hernandez faulted the Republican commissioner for posting an image of an upside-down American flag on his Instagram feed as a show of support after former President Donald Trump’s criminal conviction in New York.

“I love this country, and I see that as a real sign of disrespect,” Paz-Hernandez said at the June 20 forum hosted by the Kendall Federation of Homeowners Associations. “Instead of appealing to people on a partisan basis, how about a commissioner who actually works on issues that matter?”

Gonzalez is pitching himself as an energetic problem solver who has revived the county bureaucracy’s activities in District 11 as his office pushes to get potholes filled, roads repaved and repair crews to county parks needing attention.

“You have to be annoying,” Gonzalez said in an interview. “And I’m relentless.”

Gonzalez’s other challenger, Claudia Rainville, is also running her first campaign for elected office as she seeks the District 11 seat. Born in Nicaragua, Rainville, 43, became a U.S. citizen in 2010, according to her campaign website, and now is a married educator at a private school with two daughters at home.

“I am doing this because I am able to do it,” she said at the forum held by the West Kendall Homeowners Association. “And I have a passion to do this.”

She said she’s running to get some basic county improvements, including better road painting and more frequent bus arrivals. Her campaign website also promotes more police funding and economic development. She also said tax relief for elderly homeowners will be a priority. At the start of July, she reported raising just $3,800 for her campaign — and all of that in the form of loans from herself. “I’m running to help the community,” she said. “I’m going to be with them.”

Paz-Hernandez, also an educator, contributed about $300 of the $10,000 in campaign donations he reported through June. At the Kendall forum, he was the only District 11 candidate with a table set up for distributing flyers and campaign volunteers there to help distribute them. On July 3, Florida Politics reported that Paz-Hernandez celebrated his team for knocking on 4,000 doors.

A charter school teacher born in Miami, Paz-Hernandez pledged on his campaign website to fight over-development in the Kendall area and push for campaign-finance rules to limit the influence of commercial interests in county government. He also opposes extending the 836 expressway southeast into Kendall, earning him the Sierra Club endorsement over Gonzalez, who supports the highway expansion.

At the Kendall forum, Paz-Hernandez told the audience he wants a 15-mile extension of Metrorail to West Kendall, a transit undertaking sure to cost billions. He said he’d rely on highly competitive federal funding for the bulk of the costs.

“This is a fundamental quality-of-life issue,” he said.

Gonzalez, a married father of two daughters with a third on the way, moved with his family as a child to the United States from Guatemala. In 2021, he helped found a political advocacy group in the Miami area, the American Patriot Community. Gonzalez said the group was formed to encourage more people to get involved with politics.

State records list him as a corporate officer for a few months before the initial organization dissolved. In the months that followed his departure, the group’s Telegram feed promoted anti-vaccine campaigns and false claims that Trump won the 2020 election.

The Instagram account Gonzalez uses for posts about his District 11 activities also frequently includes quotes from Scripture.

But on the County Commission, Gonzalez hasn’t used his District 11 seat to trumpet his conservative politics.

Seven months after he took the District 11 seat, Gonzalez made the motion needed to advance multiple pieces of legislation on the June 21, 2023, agenda, including an ordinance that changed the name of the county’s LGBTQ advisory board to be LGBTQIA, a more expansive title covering people who identify as intersex and asexual.

In a recent interview, Gonzalez said he didn’t remember that procedural moment but described himself as holding the kind of local post where residents don’t want theatrics. “I feel this is a bipartisan seat,” he said. “It’s about fixing potholes and getting services to residents.”

In 2023, he sponsored legislation changing Miami-Dade rules to require more transparency on how homeowner associations plan to spend money raised by special assessments on property owners and which companies will be hired to do the work. “Lots of times, these homeowner associations aren’t committing fraud,” he said. “But they’re not doing a good job in showing how the money is going to be spent.”

Gonzalez said he is the only commissioner with a standing monthly meeting with the county’s Democratic mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, though he declined to say who he’s voting for in the mayoral election, where multiple Republicans are challenging her.

Gonzalez succeeded Joe Martinez, the term-limited District 11 commissioner who was arrested on charges alleging he introduced legislation in exchange for a cash payment. Martinez, a retired county police lieutenant, denied the allegations and is now a Republican candidate for Miami-Dade sheriff.

It’s hard to match the free exposure that a sitting commissioner can garner when county funds are spent to promote their name and likeness with residents. In 2023, Gonzalez’s commission office spent $19,851 on a mailer that went to District 11 residents introducing himself as their new commissioner. In June, a jumbo photo of the incumbent greeted visitors at a county park in his district. “Roberto J. Gonzalez welcomes you to Westwind Lakes Park,” the sign reads. “I’m here for you.”

Not all of the exposure has been welcome. Last August, the Miami Herald reported Gonzalez’s paychecks had been wrong almost from the start of his tenure as a commissioner, prompting him to pay back the county $34,000 in overpayments that he and Human Resources managers said they hadn’t noticed for eight months until a reporter asked about it. (The inquiry revealed paycheck errors for five other commissioners, too.)

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In December, Gonzalez fell two votes short on the 13-seat commission in the uphill task of blocking funding for an $11 million homeless facility for single men that the board voted to create in District 11 when his seat was vacant. The chosen site, a vacant building near a federal immigration detention center off Krome Avenue, is isolated enough from parks and schools that registered sex offenders can live there under Florida law, providing the county a facility for a segment of the homeless population that’s chronically difficult to house.

The plan now faces a suit by the Miccosukee Tribe, which owns land around the facility and claims the county took advantage of the District 11 vacancy to improperly rush through approval of the homeless center.

Gonzalez’s campaign website’s platform includes a push for attracting more entertainment options to District 11 to create more of a “live-work-play” lifestyle in the suburbs and a pledge to “protect individual liberty and small businesses” against excessive government regulations and mandates.

For his first full term, Gonzalez said he wants to secure approval for using land at Miami Executive Airport in District 11 to allow for the relocation and expansion of the county school system’s George T. Baker aviation vocational school, which operates on a built-out site near Miami International Airport. Gonzalez, who grew up with a World War II pilot as a mentor, is a graduate of the Baker program himself, even though he ended up pursuing law instead of aviation.

“I learned so much,” he said. “It taught me a lot of discipline. It’s a great career.”

Citing high-paying positions for trained aviation mechanics and related fields, Gonzalez said he sees a pipeline for jobs centered around MIA a better bet for Miami-Dade than investing in recruiting high-tech firms to the area.

“There are many vocational trades where you can make great money. This is one of them,” Gonzalez said. “We should be the leader in aeronautics for the United States.”