In Miami Beach, it’s no secret that the hotel industry is the city’s biggest economic engine. City Hall certainly knows who pays the bills. Back in March, the city voted to start fining AirBnB-type short term renters a whopping $20,000 a pop. Hoteliers say the new fines protect the tourism industry…
Miami Hurricanes football is just ten days away. We can almost see the smoke and hear Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight” already. But this Canes season is different: the stakes are exponentially higher thanks to another coaching staff reboot. The fan base is as restless and thirsty as ever to get back…
On an August morning two years ago, Eric Cheeley arrived to work at the City of Miami’s capital improvements department at his usual time, around 6 a.m. A devout Pentecostal, he liked to get there early to read his Bible. On this day, however, he took his religious practices a…
Earlier this month, a Miami-Dade County mosquito control plane buzzed over New Times’ Wynwood office building at around 11:15 a.m., wafting the organic, larva-killing bacterial pesticide Bti over the neighborhood. A nearby worker noticed a reporter taking photos and chimed in. “If you’re under the cloud, it gets on your skin,”…
When installing a bat house, which is just like a bird house except with a slit-shaped hole for the tiny flying mammals, it’s important to keep the box out of direct sunlight. Bats are notoriously temperamental, and if the lighting isn’t quite right, the home could get too hot or…
Come October, it will be exactly 11 years since Hurricane Wilma tore across South Florida. Astoundingly, no hurricane has made landfall in the state since. That’s a statistical quirk that has to end soon. In fact, it might just end early next week. A tropical wave just east of the…
Not every child who walks into Maria Sanabria’s first-grade classroom at Orange Brook Elementary in Hollywood can read well. The kids are mostly from poor families, and roughly half of Orange Brook’s students don’t pass state standardized tests. Even at age 6, many have fallen behind. So Sanabria was excited…
Mosquito repellent isn’t trendy, plus it’s sticky and smells like floor cleaner. So for Miami adults who aren’t worried about pregnancy, it’s been pretty easy to rationalize leaving the house unprotected amidst the Zika outbreak since the virus allegedly is only harmful to growing fetuses. Bad news: A study released…
Dear Stoner: I hate dry pot. My roommate says he puts his on the bathroom counter, turns the shower on hot and lets the steam bring it back to life. Thoughts? Monte Dear Monte: Few things are worse than pinching a bud and seeing it crumble to dust — as…
For the past seven years, Stephanie Coats and her four children have lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Hibiscus Street in West Grove, just four blocks east of bustling CocoWalk. But their building, built in 1948, stands in stark contrast to the Starbucks and Gap stores inside the upscale shopping…
When New Times sat down with medical-marijuana advocate and political consultant Ben Pollara earlier this month, Pollara said he wasn’t concerned that Carol Jenkins Barnett, daughter of Publix founder George Jenkins, had donated $800,000 to a group trying to keep medicinal weed illegal. “I still think ‘shopping is a pleasure,'” Pollara…
The Miami-Dade County Commission will hold a special meeting on Monday to start counting 127,000 petitions demanding that the county reform its campaign-finance laws. It only took a week’s worth of protests (including a sit-in at county hall), a national Twitter campaign, and a full-on lawsuit for that meeting to…
Just 14 hours after Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine stood in front of reporters and said there was “no Zika outbreak in Miami Beach,” Gov. Rick Scott announced in a press conference today that five locally transmitted Zika cases had been identified in the city’s highest-traffic tourist area. The Centers…
We now live in a day and age where a former congressman running for his old job can’t peruse the sex toy aisle at Spencer Gifts in peace. Just ask Joe Garcia, who is leading polls in the Democratic primary for the 26th congressional district currently occupied by Carlos Curbelo,…
Coral Gables recently paid around $1 million for a pair of flower-like sculptures to celebrate its roots as a garden city. But some residents say the artwork, which was installed in traffic circles on Segovia Street in June, looks more like “Little Shop of Horrors.” They claim the brightly colored…
So yeah, Florida is a state where people routinely murder others and then chew off parts of their victims’ faces. When it comes to weirdness, the state sets a high bar for itself. But, every Friday, we’re here to catalog the strangest things that happen in Florida — here are…
In Florida, Sean P. Jackson is about as rare as an August afternoon without a thunderous downpour: He’s a black Republican official who is proudly backing Donald Trump’s bid for the White House. But the head of the Black Republican Caucus of South Florida says Trump’s state campaign doesn’t seem…
The Zika virus has been transmitted locally to two people in Miami Beach, Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez told New Times via phone today. The Florida Department of Health had previously assumed active transmissions were just confined to a small area surrounding Wynwood. Reading from a memo sent by City Manager Jimmy…
A few years ago, Tomas Kennedy, an immigration and civil-rights activist, spent some time working as an aide at County Hall. In all that time, Kennedy says, he’d never seen a security officer brandishing a semi-automatic gun for any reason. So Kennedy says his jaw dropped when he showed up…
When Martin County police arrived Monday to find 19-year-old Austin Harrouff standing over the bodies of two bleeding victims, violently biting at man’s face, police first fired stun-guns. When those didn’t work, cops then unleashed a dog. When that didn’t work, three officers pulled Harrouff off the man and brought him…
Politicians have always found creative ways to deal with bubbling rumors that they’re up to no good. There’s the classic “I am not a crook!” finger wag on television, or the passive aggressive sprint through the hotel kitchen to avoid reporters with tough questions. Last night, North Miami Beach…
Back in 2011, Jesse Campodonico, a 27-year-old fitness trainer from New York, was thrown to the ground and Tasered by police at Ultra Music Fest. Campodonico later filed a lawsuit for police brutality against the city and the festival and ultimately Ultra paid $400,000 to settle the case. Naturally, festival organizers weren’t…
