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…
If we’re going to legalize, we ought to expunge the criminal record of every person ever convicted of a marijuana crime. For years, white people bought their weed from the brothers. Even the white guy who sold the stuff got it from an African-American. Yet a disproportionate number of blacks have spent years in jail for trafficking and possession.
Alone in his car on the side of the highway, Corey Jones made his tenth call for help. Tinny music echoed through the speaker of the 31-year-old drummer’s iPhone. A streetlight shrouded the gray Hyundai Santa Fe in orange and highlighted bunches of trees along the I-95 ramp where the…
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.
Here is what you need to know about a team that has the ceiling of average and the floor of, well, Marlins.
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…
The history of Florida is the adjustment to intrusion. In the state’s short 172-year history, armed U.S. troops have chased native Seminoles out of the Everglades, pristine beaches once considered worthless land have become vacation hot spots, and cattle pastures have given way to Disney World food courts.
South Florida has the largest number of doctors approved to recommend medical marijuana to patients.
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.
Miami Beach has collected only about 2 percent of the short-term-rental fines it has handed out.
If you’re a sentient human in Miami, you know by now that trying to walk or ride your bike around town can be downright scary. Last year, 1,508 pedestrians lost their lives on South Florida roads — the third highest death toll in the nation, trailing only the New York and Los Angeles metro areas.
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.
It’s been almost three years since LeBron James last bounced a basketball for the Heat, but constant reminders remain of his four-season tour in Miami. No, we’re not talking about your dad and his Tourette’s-like stream of profanity that flares up every time he sees LeBron on TV. We’re talking about the No. 6 Heat jerseys that still litter the South Florida landscape.
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…
Miami-Dade commissioners — particularly Barbara Jordan and Audrey Edmonson — last week let down their constituents. How? They punted for a third straight year on coming up with a system to give $14 million in funding to nonprofit groups.
The three kids heard something in the night but figured mom was just arguing with her boyfriend Carlos. So they went back to sleep. Friday morning, 8-year-old Noah got up for school and awoke his siblings, 4-year-old Martha and 3-year-old Michael. Mom and Carlos still hadn’t stirred, so he walked…
