Moments before North Miami Police Officer Jonathan Aledda shot unarmed behavioral technician Charles Kinsey last July 18, another cop on the scene warned there was no gun, only a toy. After the shooting, an assistant chief repeatedly lied to the police chief, and City Manager Larry Spring ignored vital evidence.
Thanks to Donald Trump, the nation is already expected to lose $1.6 billion in tourism from Mexican travelers, who are overwhelmingly skipping the States and flying to Canada. On a local level, economic analysts worry that the so-called Trump effect from his xenophobic rhetoric and attempted Muslim bans is also discouraging Latin American tourists from venturing onto U.S. soil.
At the beginning of North Miami Beach’s meeting last night about a plan to privatize its water system, City Manager Ana Garcia asked residents to trust the city based on the commission’s track record. That was an odd appeal, considering that Mayor George Vallejo is the subject of an…
Floatopia-style parties — where attendees bring inflatable rafts and get hellaciously drunk on the ocean — would be totally fine if people just cleaned up after themselves. But instead, partygoers have treated the ocean like an open garbage can and left beer cans, food wrappers, loose garbage, and all sorts of marine-life-killing flotsam drifting in the current.
Florida lawmakers have, over the past ten years, quietly siphoned $1.3 billion away from a $1.8 billion, statewide fund for affordable housing, the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times Tallahassee Bureau reported Friday. Asked whether this is a problem, Miami Republican state Rep. Carlos Trujillo basically flipped his hometown — which is trapped in an unprecedented affordability crisis — the bird.
Public utilities never quite work great. They function without (typically) poisoning people, but they’re almost always wrapped in red tape and slathered in layers of needless bureaucracy. But lately, right-leaning politicians have loved to harp that selling off publicly owned water, sewer, or power grids to private companies will somehow cut costs and public waste.
The folks who support fracking or nuclear energy need to distract people, so they call their dirty, carbon-emitting industries “job-creators,” and accuse green-energy advocates of being “job-killers.” But that’s all bunk. Study after study has shown recently that solar energy is getting cheap. Scores of workers have been hired to make…
Ignore the fact that the FBI has probed the City of North Miami Beach’s proposal to hand the operation of its entire water system over to a private company, and brush aside that the third-ranked company bidding for the project, the French firm Veolia, has ties to lead crises in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Flint, Michigan.
Federal and state authorities probed North Miami Beach’s pending deal to potentially privatize its water system, North Miami Beach City Attorney Jose Smith said Thursday. “They found no wrongdoing,” he added.
In 2014, Miami-Dade County Police abandoned a technology called ShotSpotter, which detects gunshots using microphones, after the department claimed the technology didn’t work. Then, last September, MDPD decided to spend up to $5 million on ShotSpotter a second time, without mentioning that the technology failed the first time.
South Beach appears to be coming apart at the seams this month. Sure, spring break is nuts every year in Miami Beach, but 2017 was supposed to be different: Police have instituted liquor bans on the beach and even rolled out license-plate readers to try to track down alleged criminals who have entered the city.
Having a hand in catastrophic lead crises in multiple American cities should probably disqualify a company from ever controlling a public water utility. But that has not stopped North Miami Beach from negotiating to potentially hand its water services over to Veolia, a private company tied to the two largest drinking-water crises in America: the catastrophes in Flint, Michigan; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In June 2016, the City of Miami Beach voted to eventually raise its minimum wage to $13.31 per hour. The move sounds innocuous enough, but it was a shot across the bow of state legislators: Florida law actually bans local municipalities from setting their own wages higher than the state’s…
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Miami’s top prosecutor, hasn’t been the subject of much public outrage during her 24 years in office. Despite wielding a huge power over Miami’s criminal justice system, she’s largely flown below the radar since she took over for Janet Reno in 1993, despite having…
According to a June 2012 police report, Civilian Investigative Panel member Danny Suarez ran into Miami Police Union President Javier Ortiz outside the Sugar Nightclub, threatened to get Ortiz fired, obstructed a traffic stop, and — when Ortiz attempted to arrest him — ran away from the scene of the…
In 2010, Miami-Dade County Police became the first law enforcement department in the nation to buy a drone. The $50,000, military-grade flying robot was paid for with a U.S. Department of Justice grant. But although buying an expensive drone is easy enough, figuring out how to legally fly what is basically a garbage can full of privacy-invading cameras is hard to do. So MDPD’s drone has sat virtually unused since 2011.
City of Miami Police Lt. Javier Ortiz was temporarily suspended this week. He was stripped of his gun and will be forced to fill out paperwork for the foreseeable future, thanks to a restraining order a county judge granted against him by a woman he’d harassed on Facebook. Ortiz runs…
Miami Police Lt. Javier Ortiz, the outspoken head of the city’s cop union, has been temporarily reassigned to desk duty and stripped of his gun, New Times has confirmed. The move came after a judge granted a restraining order to a woman Ortiz allegedly harassed and doxxed online.
Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart definitely, totally, absolutely hasn’t been trying to trade his vote for “Trumpcare” for control over the Trump administration’s Cuba policy, the congressman’s spokesperson tells New Times. Just minutes before the scheduled high-stakes vote, such is the surreal world of political intrigue in which Diaz-Balart now finds himself.
Miami real-estate analyst Andrew Stearns releases a report about the health of the city’s condominium market four times per year. Read between the lines of Stearns’ last three consecutive releases, and it’s easy to picture him pulling out clumps of his hair and nervously loosening his tie as he writes the reports.
According to Longwood state Rep. Scott Plakon, Florida’s firefighters, cops, and corrections officers are a “special” type of public servants, the sort that are integral to a functioning democracy. The state’s teachers and nurses? Not so much. Earlier this month, Plakon filed a bill that, if enacted, would strip a union of its collective bargaining power…
On February 24, Florida Power & Light — Miami’s electricity monopoly and the single biggest donor to politicians in Florida — lost a court battle with the Miami, South Miami, Pinecrest, and Miami-Dade governments over whether the company could string power lines from massive, 80-to-150-foot towers through South Miami-Dade County.
