Herald article today: my answer to Uncle Luke
It’s District 5 day for me today. My Herald column focuses on the very little the district has seen go right over the last few decades, and answers this column by Luther Campbell in the Miami New Times: Read more
New Miami Herald column: Dunn deal
I’ve got an extra column in the Herald this week, focusing on the deal the Miami commissioners extracted from their newly appointed colleague, Rev. Richard Dunn. Read it here.
No surprises in Miami: Spence-Jones wins
The unofficial official tallies, with all precincts reporting, show walk-away wins for both Michelle Spence-Jones in District 5 and Wilie Gort in District 1. Both fields were crowded, with nine candidates apiece. And after $300,000 expended by the citizens of Miami, the only change from last November’s result is that even fewer people voted (11.9% county-wide, or about 4,268 people in District 1, and 3,820 people in District 5 today vs. 4,854 in D5 last November 3rd), and this time Spence-Jones only got 53 percent, not 83 percent, of the vote. Rev. Richard Dunn, who gave Spence-Jones a run for her money in the “bad vs. worse” election of 2005, got just 601 votes, or just under 16%. David Chiverton did even worse this time than he did last November, getting just 3.6 percent of the vote, and attorney Erica Wright, who won the Herald endorsement, received just 284 votes, or 7.4 percent of the vote.) Read more
False promises, fallen leaders
The wonderful Audra Burch does it again, with the help of Charles Rabin. The two supply a lengthy, well-written essay on the un-ending plight of Miami’s District 5, especially good for those seeking a background on this ongoing tragedy. Enjoy it before the Herald archives it and pulls it off the site.
The villains of District 5
From left: Michelle Spence Jones, Katherine Fernandez Rundle and Barbara Carey Shyler.
My column on the Miami District 5 madness is up on the South Florida Times website. A clip:
To review: The Miami election is barely two weeks old, and the winner and incumbent in District 5, Michelle Spence-Jones, has been driven from office. Gov. Charlie Crist suspended her after she was charged with stealing tens of thousands of dollars in grant money intended for her community. It’s an all-too familiar story in Miami, which has a long history of political scandal. But it’s especially ugly given the outsized challenges faced by the neighborhoods that Spence-Jones used to represent. They include Overtown, Liberty City and Little Haiti, which face higher-than-average unemployment and crime rates, and lower-than-average economic development.
There are so many villains in this runaway catastrophe, so it’s hard to narrow it down to just five. But here goes.
Read the rest here. You might be surprised by who makes number one.
Also in the SFLTimes today: Crist still AWOL on Broward Commission District 9
Meanwhile, more names are popping up on the special election radar, with the buzz list including Patrick Range Jr., Rev. Richard Dunn (a sometimes friend, sometimes opponent of Spence-Jones’), Pierre Rutledge, who Spence Jones had appointed to the Orange Bowl Advisory Committee through 2008 and who is associated with the Miami-Dade School Board, and the two runners up on November 3rd, David Chiverton and Jeff Torain. Personally, I think that since it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Ms. Spence Jones will win re-election (again), and given the potential to have her re-removed, and yet another special election, the city should just scrap the whole damned thing, save the $200,000, and allow the woman to return to her seat. If the people of District 5 are fine with having a commissioner facing trial while she’s supposed to be serving them? So be it. Let them have what they want (but no complaining, D5! No one’s going to want to hear it!)
Also, I’ve uncovered new details about this case, not seen anywhere else, which I’ll be rolling out soon. Stay tuned!
Polls have closed in Miami
Follow the bouncing returns here.
On a national level, Virginia’s polls have also closed, while New Jersey closes at 8, and New York at 9. And by the way, sorry wingers, but exit polls out of Virginia show clearly that the race is NOT a referendum on Barack Obama (55% said as much.) And Bob McDonnell never even mentioned the president during his campaign (nor did Christie in New Jersey.) But nice try. The electorate in VA is going to be older, whiter and more Republican tonight, since Creigh Deeds foolishly failed to run with the president. But that’s another post.
Oh, and you’ll want to be here for the New York 23 results.
Local buzz: a dismal day at the polls
![Voter turnout was extremely light on Election Day in Miami, November 3rd, 2009. [Photo by Joy Reid]](http://blog.reidreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IMG_0717.JPG "IMG_0717")
Voter turnout was extremely light on Election Day in Miami, November 3rd, 2009. [Photo by Joy Reid
I spent the better part of today riding through District 5, checking out the “action” at more than a dozen polls. It was, in a word, depressing. Not only were most of the polling places empty — with far more poll workers than voters, but on this first anniversary of Barack Obama’s election, when those same polls had lines wrapped around the block, there was little enthusiasm on display, even among those who did participate. It’s important not to read too much into these things, and to be sure, off-off-year, municipal elections rarely draw much interest, even in the suburbs (and according to the Miami Herald, things weren’t much better anywhere else, even with the Mayor’s race on the ballot.) But something about seeing those empty polling places today was just damned depressing.
Perhaps what was the most disturbing was just driving through the neighborhoods that make up District 5 — Liberty City, Overtown and parts of Little Haiti. Particularly in the first two, I saw what had to be dozens of men, sitting in front of various beaten down convenience stores, some drinking beer, not a soul waiting at a bus stop to go to work, wearing a suit, or a uniform, or just a name tag. I’m told the unemployment rate in Liberty City is somewhere around 40 percent — four times what it is in the rest of Miami. And Liberty City is the number one HIV/AIDS zone, not just in Miami-Dade, but in all of Florida. Clearly, something is going wrong in neighborhoods like these, and they’re not just here: they’re all around the country. So many decades removed from what was supposed to be revolutionary progress for the generations who emerged from slavery, many of these neighborhoods look like a postcard from the 1930s. Imagine being an adult who lives not 20 miles from the beach, but has never seen the ocean (meanwhile, they’ve got “free public WiFi on Miami Beach!…”) Or someone who, as a pastor I rode with on part of my trek recounted for me, is like the young man he spoke with near a mostly empty polling station, who told him that the reason most people around there don’t bother looking for a job is because even if you get one, “you’re just gonna fail anyway.”
And we wonder why, barring a Barack Obama on the ballot, people don’t bother to vote. Read more
Local politics: Down and dirty in District 5
Miami Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones is running for a second term, buffeted by headwinds that include an ethical cloud that has hung over her office, resistance from a growing number of quarters in Miami’s Black community, and grumblings from supporters of her former pastor, Gaston Smith, that Spence Jones milked him for $8,000 in “consulting fees” and then threw him under the legal bus (Smith goes to trial this month on charges he mis-used MMAP funds.) But so far, Spence-Jones has also had a lot going for her: namely, about $180,000 in fundraising (though money can’t buy you love, in Miami, it can usually buy you an election.) However, with just days to go before Election Day, things are starting to get weird.
I was apparently one of several journo types and political people who were emailed a pretty scathing 3-page document cataloging a string of alleged bad deeds, not just by Ms. Spence-Jones, but also by her husband, Nathanial. The document is written with enough legalistic language to sound like it came from an attorney, or someone who works with one (or maybe with a bunch of taxpayer-paid ones, if you know what I mean…) and it contains case files that link to actual cases against Nathanial Jones (I looked them up via the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s case file hotline.) However, an attorney friend of mine who specializes in criminal cases tells me the information in the document could easily have been found by anyone, using the County Clerk’s website (which the county clerk’s office also said.) Still, someone went to an awful lot of trouble to do three pages worth of research. Among the dirt: male prostitution, petty larceny, theft and drug possession charges (both verified by the case files, and all resulting in pretrial “diversion” or no adjudication…) on the part of Nathanial Jones dating back to 2000, 2004 and 2006, plus a litany of allegations that Spence-Jones and her political mentor, Barbara Carey-Shuler, played fast and loose with tazpayer money. A peek at the dirt inside. Read more
South Florida Buzz: Shake-up in District 5?
While the Miami media establishment is focused on the upcoming Miami mayor’s race, something interesting is happening in District 5 — the district covering some of Miami’s poorest neighborhoods (Overtown, Liberty City, Little Haiti…) Just a few weeks ago, most people you talked to would tell you that no one would be able to beat the incumbent, Manny Diaz protege Michelle Spence Jones. The commissioner has raised nearly $180,000 — mostly from an assortment of developers and other business interests (no obvious Marlins money, but you’ve got to figure…) while her opponents, David Chiverton of the MLK Economic Development Center, and Jeff Torain, the former deputy police chief in Opa-Locka, have barely raised $20,000 between them.
But that was a few weeks ago. Read more
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