Waterfront, Coconut Grove, Miami

Photo © Michael Deibert

Ofrendas

 

 Photo © Michael Deibert

Yemayá y Ochún

The great Cuban poet and anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, also a longtime Miami resident, who was one of the world's foremost authorities on Afro-Cuban religion and the Abakuá secret society, as a young woman.

Making sense of Miami:

Thursday 2 July 2015

Making sense of Miami: what America's strangest city says about the US's future

The dizzying blend of accents entices some visitors and alarms others. But as the US gets ever-closer to Cuba, Miami resident Michael Deibert asks: what can the rest of America learn from its own multicultural metropolis? 

The Guardian
  
(Please read original article here)

Just off Miami’s busy Calle Ocho, the thoroughfare that is the beating cultural heart of the city’s Cuban community, there rises a splendid ceiba tree whose roots erupt from the ground like waves from the sea, and whose vast branches throw shade far to either side.

All around the gnarled roots and tucked into the tree’s hidden crevices, one finds the offerings of the faithful: candles, bags of food, feathers, bones. In this modern metropolis, whose vaulting skyscrapers a mile away reflect the near-blinding sun, the saturnalia surrounding the ceiba attests to the lifeblood of the Afro-Cuban religion of santería, and Miami’s eternal place in the imagination of el exilio, as the Cuban community is often referred to.

I’ve lived in Miami off and on since the mid-1990s. As much as anywhere in the United States – my native country with which I have an often conflicted relationship – it counts as home. Landing back in Florida from Haiti, Paris or elsewhere, Miami always seems to offer the singular trick of providing some of the efficiency and convenience of living in the US while never seeming entirely a part of it.
Miami has long been a kind of quasi city-state that evokes strong reactions from visitors, especially those from more anglicised parts of the country who cannot make themselves understood in English to a large part of the local population – an experience that annoys and alarms them.

The strangest city in what is perhaps America’s strangest state, Miami is now home not just to Cubans but to thousands of Argentines, Brazilians, Colombians, Haitians, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and practically every other Latin American nationality, with sizeable populations of Russians, Indians, Persians and Orthodox Jews as well.

The city has become so micronised that what is commonly thought of as “Miami” in the popular imagination is, in fact, a series of semi-independent small cities – some only a few blocks long – within the urban sprawl of Miami-Dade County (population 2.6 million). It fronts a long sweep of the blue-green Atlantic to the east and finally peters out in the miasma of the Everglades swamp to the west and the necklace of the Florida Keys to the south.

A young city (it was only incorporated in 1896 in what was then mostly wilderness), Miami is often said to have been founded on bootleg liquor and built its skyline on an infusion of cocaine money in the 70s and 80s (at the height of its cocaine wars in 1980 to 1981, the city had the world’s highest murder rate). Nearly 30 years ago, the crime writer Edna Buchanan wrote that Miami had been “a sleepy resort” that had transformed to attract “year-round ... concentrations of everything corrupt, bizarre or dangerous from everywhere in the world”.

Above all, Miami is a place of exile where newcomers try to construct a new life. Upon arriving from Cuba in 1980, the author Reinaldo Arenas – who as a teenaged barbudo had fought with Castro’s forces but was then imprisoned and tortured both for being an independent intellectual and gay – declared Miami “a barren and pestiferous peninsula ... trying to become for a million exiles, the dream of a tropical island”.

No fan of the city, Arenas quickly decamped to New York, where he committed suicide in 1990. Miami, however, continued to percolate like a spoonful of Café Bustelo coffee from the cafe colada that residents traditionally drink every afternoon at 3:05 (the city’s area code). And it has become something more interesting than many had thought possible.

In his office in West Miami near the city’s airport – a few blocks away from a branch of the city’s El Palacio de los Jugos Cuban eateries where the pan con lechón hints at the divine – Armando Valladares sits surrounded by photos of himself with political leaders: Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Florida senator (and Miami native and presidential candidate) Marco Rubio. Now white-haired, bespectacled and elegant, Valladares spent 22 years in Cuban prisons for – among other perceived offences – refusing to put an “I’m with Fidel” sign on his desk at the Ministry of Communications in 1960. Upon his release in 1982, he became a United States Ambassador to the United Nations. After residing in Washington for many years, he moved to Miami about 15 years ago.

“The Cubans have demonstrated their ability and their quality of work here,” Valladares says. “It’s a unique case in the history of the United States where the identity of a city was born, in a sense, in another country.”

The Cuban aspects of Miami’s identity appear to be far less monolithic than they once were, though. Many younger Cuban-Americans support the easing of relations with Cuba that US president Barack Obama has been pursuing with the island’s rulers. Events such as the O’ Miami poetry festival bring Cuban cultural groups such as Omni Zona Franca (from eastern Havana’s housing estates) to Miami on a regular basis, demonstrating that the city’s Latin vibe is more than Hoy Como Ayer (Today Like Yesterday), as one long-standing club wistfully calls itself.

If Miami represents a refuge for Cubans, it serves as no less of one for Haitians who, fleeing a downward economic spiral and the tyranny of some of the country’s leaders, have made a profound impact on Miami’s cultural life over the last several decades.

Along a once-neglected stretch of Northeast 2nd Avenue in the heart of the Haitian immigrant community, a cultural flowering has taken place that has seen the opening of the Little Haiti Cultural Center and its Caribbean Marketplace – a replica of the famed Marché en fer (Iron Market) in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Exuberantly coloured murals by local artists adorn walls, and every Friday night the Rara Lakay band marches through the neighbourhood, beating on drums and blowing on plangent bamboo vaksin trumpets, whose bleat more evokes the deep Haitian countryside than an American city.

“I have seen this city grow culturally,” says the Haitian painter Edouard Duval Carrié, who arrived in Miami from Paris in 1992. “When I moved here it was really a [cultural] desert. That has changed.”
Carrié maintains his studio in Little Haiti. Famous for his painting of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in a wedding dress (an image that did not endear him to the regime), his space now seems a precursor of the area’s renaissance. What was once a district many outsiders approached with trepidation now attracts hundreds of people to the outdoor concerts of its monthly Big Night in Little Haiti.

“This is the doorway to the United States,” Carrié says. “The particularity of Miami is that it has this very ebullient immigration that makes it quite fascinating.”

But Miami’s growth into the multicultural metropolis it is today has had a sinister side, too. In the 1960s, the city built the southern extension of Interstate 95 directly through the heart of the Overtown district, an area that had been a cultural mecca for black culture in the south. “Overtown was a very pleasant place,” says Enid Pinkney, the 83-year-old daughter of an immigrant from the Bahamas (one of the first non-indigenous communities to settle in Miami).

Dispersed to other areas of the city, black residents often found themselves met with hostility. After the 1980 acquittal of four white and Latino police officers for the murder of black businessman Arthur McDuffie, at least 18 people died in rioting and property destruction topped $100m. Fatal police shootings touched off riots in the city at three other points during that decade.

Police departments throughout the county gained a reputation for violence and corruption that intervening years have done little to diminish, with Miami Beach police famously fatally tasering teenage Colombian-American graffiti artist Israel Hernandez in 2013. That same year, a report by the US Justice Department found that City of Miami police had “engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive use of force through officer-involved shootings in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution” and that the department was tainted by “deficient tactics, improper actions by specialised units, as well as egregious delays and substantive deficiencies in deadly force investigations”.

Outside observers often remain mystified by Miami. Three years ago, the author Tom Wolfe attempted to capture it as he had 1980s New York in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and instead spewed forth a right-wing caricature titled Back to Blood that showed no grasp of the place the city has become. Such misconceptions are helped along by gaffe- and scandal-prone local politicians, whose peccadillos include everything from floating the idea to shut down all the city’s libraries to close a budget gap, to the by-now standard (for Miami) cash-for-favours schemes.

In some areas, things have gone over the top. In South Beach – once a slum for retirees and poor immigrants, now a gay mecca and nightlife hotspot – crass commercialisation has resulted in a kind of Vegas-by-the-sea ambiance, with even the famed Lincoln Road, once a redoubt of local restaurants and retailers, now housing little more than chain stores and the bewildered tourists they prey upon. The preponderance of “juniors” (a derisive term for the rich scions of Latin America’s economic elite) in the city can be somewhat off-putting, as it seems not only the language and music of that elite is being imported, but their class system, as well.

But the city has blossomed from the place that Reinaldo Arenas despised. The great Cuban poet and anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, who was during her lifetime one of the world’s foremost authorities on Afro-Cuban religion, spent the latter part of her life based in Miami, and donated her abundant collection of papers to the university here. It was home, too, for one of Haiti’s greatest poets, Félix Morisseau-Leroy, for the last 17 years of his life. And, as testament to the city’s new cultural heritage, a new major institution, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, opened next to the waters of Biscayne Bay in 2013; the Art Basel festival attracts thousands to the city every year; and the Miami Book Fair is an autumn staple of the literary calendar.

Perhaps more representative of the city than South Beach today are the northern reaches of Miami Beach, an area that is still home to many working-class residents despite spiralling property prices, where the lilting, almost Italianate sound of Argentine Spanish mixes with the caressing sounds of Brazilian Portuguese in the bodegas and on the beach. The Buenos Aires Bakery & Cafe – an establishment on Collins Avenue, only steps away from the sea – sells a variety of pastries that would make any porteño misty-eyed with nostalgia as well as several different kinds of the leafy, highly caffeinated mate beloved in South America, and does a brisk business.

When one drives south towards the Florida Keys – where the last island, Key West, is a mere 90 miles from Cuba – the county begins to descend into farmland. It was here that, in the early part of the 20th century, a Latvian-born eccentric named Edward Leedskalnin created an extraordinary structure known as the Coral Castle, out of coral-formed limestone. As he worked alone and without advanced equipment, just how Leedskalnin created his “castle” remains something of a mystery – with explanations ranging from some secret mastery of the Earth’s magnetic field to telekinesis.

Today, other dreams are played out in Miami-Dade’s fields, and exist in the imaginings of the many migrant workers who toil here, scant miles from the glittering high-rises of downtown Miami. 
Surrounded by fields of squash, okra, beans and tomatoes, the community of Homestead, despite its tropical locale, evokes the somnolent Midwestern communities of a Ray Bradbury story. Low-rise buildings, train tracks and empty playground swings greet the visitor, and in the street one hears the melange of accents and dialects from the agricultural workers here: Mexican, Guatemalan, Haitian, Jamaican.

In the offices of the immigrant support group WeCount! just off of North Krome Avenue (which shares its name with one of the US’s most infamous immigration detention centres located nearby), the connection between Homestead’s rural lushness and the city rising only a few miles away seems obvious.

“The Mexicans are the ones that put the food on Miami’s table,” says Catalina Santiago, an 18-year-old high school student who came to the US with her agricultural-worker parents from the Mexican state of Oaxaca a decade ago. “But they are always spoken of in a condescending manner.”

On the street below, where Santiago sits with her brother and a number of other immigrants, dusk falls and Homestead sees Mexican families gathering for Sunday-night dinner at restaurants such as Casita Tejas. When they rise for work early the following morning, some will be met by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police, who will be waiting to check their immigration status and arrest them for probable deportation if they are undocumented (as many are, a state of affairs on which Florida’s agriculture depends).

Perhaps it is impending apocalypse, natural and man-made, that makes Miami’s frivolity all the more poignant. If climate change predictions are to be believed, large parts of Miami – Miami Beach, Key Biscayne, Virginia Key – will be under water in coming years, a phenomenon helped along by the fact that many Florida politicians, including Governor Rick Scott and the aforementioned Senator Rubio, deny that climate change can be linked to human activity.

Driving home north along US1, the skyline of Miami rises above the flat land, its concrete and steel wrapped in the warmth of the tropical sunset. A city of outsiders, refugees and immigrants that – in its reflection of present-day America’s diversity – feels in many ways more “American” than the 1950s small-town Americana that some politicians and commentators are perpetually nostalgic for.

Jackie Gleason, Miami Beach, 1968.

Little Haiti, Miami

 

Photo  © Michael Deibert

Love Conquers

Photo © Michael Deibert

Miami Demonstration in Support of Palestine and Against Israel's Massacres in Gaza

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All photos © Michael Deibert

Thanks to all those who came out to support the people of Gaza and greater Palestine in Miami yesterday. Even the pro-Israel fanatic who showed up with a gun and had to be disarmed by the police didn't deter a huge crowd. I have often said that Miami has the social conscience of a flea but yesterday, at least, I was happy to be proved wrong.

So Very Miami

Photo © Michael Deibert

Literatura sin fronteras

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity this past weekend to discuss writing and literature with the Cuban poet Amaury Pacheco, who came to Miami as part of the O Miami Poetry Festival. Talking with Amaury and his fellow artists reminded me once again that art truly transcends borders, and that there is so much more to the histories of countries than just politics.

Photo © Michael Deibert 

Three Graces

Photo © Michael Deibert

Obama mural, Little Haiti, Miami

Obama mural Little Haiti, Miami. Inside, where a car struck it, someone has scrawled the words "Empty Promises."

Photo © Michael Deibert

2013: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

Busy as I was working on two books this year, my output in terms of articles was minimal. Nevertheless, I did manage to address some issue confronting Miami, the city that I live in, as well as Mexico, Haiti and a few other locales. I was also fortunate enough to have my book on the Democratic Republic of Congo reviewed by Kris Berwouts, an always-perceptive veteran analyst of that country.

In hopes for a more gentle 2014, and with much love,

MD


Letter From Miami for the Huffington Post (9 August 2013)

Why Arrest of Zetas Leader Does Not Mean End to Mexico's Drug War for the Huffington Post (16 July 2013)

CAR rebel victory throws resource deals into doubt for FDI Magazine (12 June 2013)

What Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez left behind: A Review of Rory Carroll's Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela for the Miami Herald (24 March 2013)

Michael Deibert's Haiti Bookshelf for the Huffington Post (18 March 2013)


A journalist ventures back to a troubled, seductive Haiti: A Review of Amy Wilentz's Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti for the Huffington Post (18 January 2013)

Reporter depicts events surrounding Haiti earthquake: A Review of Jonathan M. Katz's The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster for the Miami Herald (14 January 2013)

Reviews of my work

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair reviewed by Kris Berwouts for African Arguments (10 December 2013)
 

Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum Miami

Ai Weiwei's commentary on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 people, a death toll blamed largely on government corruption and shoddy contruction. On the ground, rebar recovered from the rubble of collapsed schoolhouses and then painstakingly straightened again. On the wall to the left, a list of names of Chinese students who died in the earthquake. On the far wall, photos of the construction of the Beijing National Stadium, constructed for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Miami Art Basel 2013

Photo © Michael Deibert

Doesn't get old

Justice for Israel

Photo © Michael Deibert

Letter From Miami

 Letter From Miami

By Michael Deibert

The Huffington Post

Posted: 08/09/2013 11:44 am

 

(This article originally appeared here) 

At about the time Miami Beach Police Department officers were fatally tasing 18-year-old artist and skateboarder Israel Hernandez-Llach, I was rising for the day in my apartment a few blocks away. Morning is generally the most sedate and appealing of time in the tropics, and as one side of my building faces east towards the sea, watching the sunlight cut blazing and orange through the gossamer clouds at dawn while drinking a coffee is one of the great pleasures of living here. In the midst of writing a particularly dark book about Mexican drug cartels, the moment also serves as a kind of respite, as well.

As I was sipping my coffee, Hernandez-Llach, a lithe fellow who had moved to Miami with his family from Colombia a few years ago, was confronted by police as he began tagging his graffiti name -- Reefa -- on a building at the corner of Collins Avenue and 71st Street. He only had time to write the "R" before police started chasing him. The building -- an abandoned shell that used to be a McDonald's whose windows are now covered in newspaper -- was hardly an architectural gem, and a number of other residents and I had actually commented how the look of the place had been improved by the graffiti that had started appearing there.

The police -- by most accounts almost half a dozen -- chased Hernandez-Llach throughout the neighborhood before cornering him, tasering him and reportedly high-fiving one another as he lay on the ground. Hernández was taken to the hospital where was pronounced dead. The official cause of death is still pending.

The news that authorities in Miami place a higher value on real estate -- however derelict -- than human life will come as little surprise to anyone who has been living here for the last several years, nor will the fact that the various police forces operating in Miami-Dade County (as the wider conglomeration of which Miami Beach is a part of is known) are largely out of control.

Just last month, a U.S. Department Of Justice report on the City of Miami Police Department, just across the glittering waters of Biscayne Bay from Miami Beach, found that the department "has engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive use of force through officer-involved shootings in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution" and that the Department was also tainted by "deficient tactics, improper actions by specialized units, as well as egregious delays and substantive deficiencies in deadly force investigations."

Back here on the beach, one often gets the impression that many police feel they they're on Spring Break, rather than policing those who are, such as when a uniformed cop took a woman on a drunken pre-dawn joy ride on his department-issued ATV and ran over -- and then left -- two tourists waiting to see the sunrise. In another incident, the city had to pay out a $75,000 settlement after two officers were accused of beating a handcuffed gay man, attacking a witness and spewing anti-gay epithets. One officer was fired, then reinstated. The circumstances of the 2011 fatal shooting of Raymond Herisse during the largely African-American Urban Beach Weekend have yet to be fully explained. Meanwhile, in tony Bal Harbour, the police force there treated itself to $3,200 golf outings, trips to Puerto Rico and shopping sprees at the exclusive Bal Harbour Shoppes mall with millions of dollars the department had seized from drug dealers.

The death of Hernandez caps a summer during which a kind of malaise has settled over the city that even a second consecutive Miami Heat NBA championship can't quite dissipate.

Miami-Dade County is governed by a convoluted system whereby the mayor and the Board of County Commissioners run the county as a whole, but within the county there are innumerable little quasi-independent "cities" (some only stretching a few blocks) that have their own police forces, zoning ordinances and so on. One county commissioner, Javier D. Souto, said at a recent special session of the commission that I attended that the system was so complex that even some of the commissioners themselves didn't fully understand it.

Carlos A. Giménez, a retired Cuban-American firefighter, was elected Miami-Dade County mayor in June 2011 following the recall of Mayor Carlos Alvarez (largely bankrolled by former Philadelphia Eagles owner Norman Braman). Promising reform and clean governance, Giménez has thus far seemed to have forgotten that governing a city is about more than lining the pockets of its already fabulously wealthy real estate developers.

Miami's skyline is dotted with construction cranes servicing a luxury apartment boom (a 2011 UBS study ranked Miami as the richest city in the country by pure domestic purchasing power), but the city also has the second-highest income inequality rate in the United States.

Miami-Dade County borrowed about $400 million to pay for a new stadium for the Miami Marlins baseball team by selling bonds on Wall Street, and one set of stadium bonds - worth about $90 million - will now cost the county more than $1 billion to pay back.

After proposing a small property tax rate hike to enable to county to maintain basic services such as fire rescue, libraries and no-kill animal shelters, Giménez reversed course and supported the country commission's 8-4 vote to cut services, later declaring "the age of the library is probably ending" when people questioned the wisdom of the county closing nearly half its branches. This no doubt came as music to the ears of Commissioner Juan C. Zapata, who voted to defund the libraries and whose "non-profit" Read2Succeed! "actively promotes the importance of literacy and unites our community through the power of reading." Or, in other words, does what libraries do but less efficiently and on a far smaller scale.

One must also wonder, given the role of libraries as internet centers, where Miami-Dade's 10 percent unemployed will now apply for unemployment online, as Florida Governor Rick Scott recently required they do (such measures are taken when Scott is not busy trying to purge voters from state rolls) or where they will find free internet to find a new job online.

It seems as if not a single week passes without some elected official being lead away in handcuffs. This week it was Sweetwater Mayor Manuel Maroño and Miami Lakes Mayor Michael Pizzi hauled in by FBI agents for conspiring to commit extortion. A few weeks before that it was Former Hialeah Mayor Julio Robaina (who finished second in the 2011 Miami-Dade County mayoral race behind Gimenez) for tax evasion. Who it will be next week is anybody's guess.

The charms of the city remain considerable. The lavender twilights, the musical lilt of Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole one hears on the streets, the festiveness with which the city explodes into a street party at the drop of a hat. And what other municipality in the United States would declare 3:05 p.m. an official coffee break time, when all should pause and reflect on the magnificence of the cafecito?

Nevertheless, in the needless death of Israel Hernandez-Llach, who was just starting his life, one can briefly glimpse a city whose values seem increasingly awry, putting the almighty dollar reflected in that famous skyline above the citizens who live beneath it and, now, above human life itself.

This evening, just as the rain clouds were getting ready to roll onto the beach from the ocean, I went and looked at the makeshift memorial that had sprung up outside the derelict building that Israel Hernandez-Llach had been spray painting when Miami Beach police set upon him. "I'll see you around" read one note. "Rest in Paradise" read another. And "I'll miss you so much, brother." As I stood there, a young man with a ponytail and a goatee, probably also about 18, pulled up on his bike and gently placed two spray paint cans above the doorway where someone had place a bouquet of flowers.

"I didn't know him personally," the youth said to me. "But you've got to give mad respect to him. As a street artist."

And then he got on his bike and peddled away just as it began to rain.

RIP Israel Hernandez

Photo © Michael Deibert

Letter to Miami-Dade County Commission on plans to close nearly all public libraries

13 July 2013

Greetings, Commissioner Sally A. Heyman. My name is Michael Deibert, and I am a journalist and author who currently resides in your district - Distirct 4 - in Miami Beach. I am the author of three books, In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Rise and Fall of the Gulf Cartel (Lyons Press, 2014), The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books, 2013) and Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005), and my writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Miami Herald, Le Monde diplomatique, Folha de Sao Paulo and the World Policy Journal, among other venues.

I have just become aware via an article in the Miami Herald of the county's plans to close nearly all of its public libraries, potentially shuttering 42 locations and laying off 260 employees. It is hard for me to envision, after the millions of dollars that the county was willing to advance towards the new Marlins Stadium, a more short-sighted or destructive move than for the Commission to deprive the citizens of Miami-Dade of one of the few free sources of information and education left in the city today.

The library remains among our most precious democratic institutions. When I first moved to Miami in 1997 I was quite poor indeed, and access to the books at the Miami-Dade Public Library branch on Washington Avenue in South Beach was an essential part of my being able to make through those difficult months, with the free access to books providing me with important spiritual and intellectual sustenance. I honestly don't know what I would have done without it. As the American author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote "the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

I couldn't agree with that sentiment more. I know that many of my fellow Miamians involved in the arts and simply ordinary citizens are just as outraged as I am at the thought of depriving our city of this essential facet of our democracy. I am urging them to contact you, as well, and I urge you to reconsider a move that would be so disempowering and wantonly harmful to the city that we all call home.

I have cc'd Miami-Dade County Commission Chairwoman Rebeca Sosa and Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos A. Giménez on this email, as well.

Best regards from Miami Beach,

MD

**********************************************

Note: Commissioner Sally Heyman was the only person to respond to this email. Her response was as follows.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: District4
Date: Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:37 AM
Subject: RE: Hello Commissioner Heyman regarding potential library closures in Miami-Dade County

Sent on behalf of Commissioner Sally Heyman:

Thank you for your email RE: shutting fire stations and libraries. 

I voted NO to keeping mileage "flat," as it meant limiting negotiations regarding the budget, AND cuts in services as we started the budget discussions.  UNACCEPTABLE!

OUR FIRE STATIONS are essential to public safety, both person and property.  Restoring FIRE SERVICES to the current level in the budget does NOT mean raising taxes; it means we need to reduce costs, frills, duplicity and waste in our budget.   

I am also committed to keeping more of our libraries open, for the value it has to our communities.   Closing 22 of our 49 libraries is way too many, especially for our children and seniors.

Please continue to reach out to our MAYOR and County Commissioners; especially those that voted to accept this terrible proposal: Commissioners Barreiro, Bell, Bovo, Diaz, Suarez, Sosa, Soto, Zapata.  They all need to hear we need to keep valued services in place.... That does not mean raising taxes.

Thank you,

Commissioner Sally Heyman