He’s spent over $1M to run for Miami Beach mayor. Can he overcome residency questions?

Bill Roedy has seen the attack ads — text messages and flyers sent from a political committee to voters around Miami Beach, depicting him in a British redcoat uniform and a tall bearskin cap.

“British Bill Roedy lived in London for the last three decades,” the ads read. “Now he’s back in the USA, and wants to be YOUR mayor.”

Roedy has tried to laugh it off. “My kids loved it and are going to frame it,” he said in an interview last week from his oceanfront condo in South Beach.

But the former CEO of MTV Networks International is serious about becoming the next mayor of Miami Beach. In four months since entering the race, he says he’s spent more than $1 million of his own money. He ran a TV ad during the NBA finals. His billboards appear over the entrances to the Julia Tuttle Causeway connecting Miami Beach and Miami. He has held meet-and-greet events throughout the city.

“We’re all in,” Roedy said. “We had to get our name out there.”

READ MORE: A former MTV executive is running for Miami Beach mayor. Can he beat political insiders?

Increasingly, Roedy is also responding to political attacks as the November election approaches.

At 75, he is the oldest of four candidates to replace term-limited Mayor Dan Gelber. But as the only one who has never held political office — Steven Meiner, Michael Gongora and Mike Grieco are each active or former city commissioners, and Grieco was a state representative — Roedy is getting a crash course in nasty local politics.

He said he’s tried to take the Michelle Obama route — “when they go low, we go high” — but now feels his campaign “has to be more aggressive” to counter attacks by his opponents.

That includes claims about his residency.

“No matter where I went around the world, I always considered this my roots,” Roedy said from his home at the north end of Ocean Drive. “I never considered anywhere in the world home except Miami.”

‘Long-time residents’

Roedy’s campaign website says he and his wife, Alexandra, are “long-time residents of Miami Beach since 1999.” That’s when the couple bought a condo at Il Villagio, the year it was built.

“They were married on the beach in 2000, held a memorial service for Bill’s mother on the beach that same year, and had one of their children in Miami Beach in 2001,” the campaign site notes.

But opponents have dug up statements Roedy made in recent years that call his characterization into question.

In a March 2021 podcast interview with British music industry executive Chris Wright, Roedy said he went to London on a three-year contract with MTV in 1989, “thinking it would be three years and then come back” to the United States.

“And here I am, 31 years later,” Roedy said of London. “I have British citizenship. I feel very close to the British culture. I still keep a foot, obviously, in America ... Here I am. I’m not going anywhere.”

Asked about those statements last week, Roedy said he was playing to the show’s British audience.

“Of course I’m going to say I love Britain,” he said.

Roedy said he generally spent “at least four months of the year” in Miami Beach after he moved to London, as he oversaw the MTV Networks Latin America headquarters on Lincoln Road.

“I was here all the time,” he said.

No one has challenged Roedy’s residency in court. Roedy said he hired a lawyer to ensure he complied with the city’s rules, which require candidates to live in the city for at least a year before qualifying.

Last month, the Miami Beach city clerk deemed Roedy a qualified candidate after he submitted a copy of a Florida driver’s license issued in 2019 and property tax receipts for each of the past three years. Records show he has not filed for a homestead exemption on his South Beach property.

‘Going vertical’

Roedy likes to talk about “going vertical” — a reference to diving deeply into whatever place or task he’s focused on at a given time. He used the phrase in the 2021 podcast interview about moving to London, and he uses it now to talk about his run for Miami Beach mayor.

He’s been doing his homework. Two books about Miami’s history of crime and corruption sat on his kitchen table last week, marked in green pen from Roedy’s annotations: “Sins of South Beach,” by former Miami Beach Mayor Alex Daoud, and “Organized Crime in Miami,” by Avi Bash.

“Going vertical, going deep — that’s my personality,” Roedy said.

At candidate forums and in interviews, Roedy has seemed comfortable engaging on a range of hot-button Miami Beach issues, such as spring break, homelessness, development and flooding. He has pitched himself as an independent voice, saying he won’t take contributions from developers and would be a “24/7” mayor, unlike other candidates who have full-time jobs as attorneys.

There have also been mistakes from Roedy and his campaign team, which consists largely of former employees at the MTV office on Lincoln Road. One flyer in which Roedy pledged to take action “for a resilient future” featured an image of Hollywood, Fla., instead of Miami Beach.

At forums, Roedy has told voters he grew up “here,” but hasn’t always specified that he first lived in Miami Shores and went to grade school in North Miami, not Miami Beach.

And he has taken heat for never having voted in a Miami Beach municipal election, according to county records, despite being registered to vote in the city with the Independent Party for more than two decades.

Roedy has voted by mail in general elections in 2000, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016 and 2020, records show. Late last year, he changed his address on file with the Miami-Dade elections department from London to Miami Beach.

“The fact is I didn’t vote when I should have voted,” Roedy said. “You will never see me miss a vote going forward.”

Former mayor is impressed

Roedy has gained admirers along the campaign trail, including some who have bristled at sparring between longtime politicians Gongora and Grieco.

Philip Levine, another former political outsider who funded his own campaign to become Miami Beach mayor in 2013, hasn’t formally endorsed anyone but said he’s been impressed by Roedy’s campaign.

“He is clearly a guy that, similar to me, is putting his money where his mouth is,” Levine told the Herald. “My instinct is he’s running for all the right reasons.”

Roedy has touted his West Point education and service in Vietnam, his time spent commanding nuclear missile bases in Italy for NATO during the Cold War, his executive experience directing MTV’s expansion, and his work on global health issues, including a multimedia campaign to fight the AIDS epidemic.

Responding to criticism from left-leaning Miami Beach politicos for serving as an adviser on the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board during the Trump administration, Roedy said he never supported Trump, but wanted to continue working on global diplomacy efforts.

“I try and bring people together,” he said.

Roedy has just over a month left to convince voters. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote on Nov. 7, there will be a runoff Nov. 21.

Even if he doesn’t win, he said, there’s no question where he’ll live.

“Here,” he said. “Where else would I live? This is it.”