What Miami-Dade’s District 8 candidates say about traffic, housing, county spending

To win a second four-year term, Miami-Dade Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins is running as a fighter against bad development and against ducking tough decisions. Her opponents say they’re the best choice for real reform, knocking Cohen Higgins for a bloated county budget and worsening traffic in a district that includes Cutler Bay, Palmetto Bay and parts of Homestead.

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Two challengers are running against Cohen Higgins: John DuBois, 64, a former vice mayor of Palmetto Bay, and Martha “Vega” Hero, 61, a first-time candidate who owns a consulting firm and runs a nonprofit in Homestead that helps immigrant communities.

As the District 8 commissioner, Cohen Higgins, 44, represents a suburban area with some of Miami-Dade’s most affluent bedroom communities.

Split by U.S. 1, traffic is a friction point as neighborhoods complain about congestion from commuters using local streets to bypass the county’s main north-south highway. District 8 is also home to some of the top growth frontiers as the suburbs give way to farmland that’s a source of new land for developers.

Though she faced criticism for backing some development within District 8, Cohen Higgins led the fight on the County Commission against a project just outside the area that was one of the County Commission’s biggest development battles.

That was in 2022, when developers wanted to expand the county’s suburban construction zone – known as the Urban Development Boundary — to build a commercial project outside of Homestead. Commissioners approved the plan, with Cohen Higgins casting one of the four no votes. But an adverse ruling by the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis voided the approval, setting up a redo vote on the board.

“I’ve taken on big fights,” Cohen Higgins told the Miami Herald Editorial Board on June 30, “and really mobilized the community and brought stakeholders locally — and frankly, at the state level — on a very controversial application to move hundreds of acres inside the urban development boundary.”

Both DuBois and Hero cite traffic and housing affordability as problems that the District 8 commissioner needs to be tackling over the next four years.

“Residents are fed up with what used to be 20- or 25-minute commutes to downtown now taking an hour to an hour-and-a-half each way. That’s been the number one issue,” DuBois said during a July 9 appearance on the Community Newspapers podcast. “I have taken on development. … I wrote the legislation [in Palmetto Bay] to preemptively zone 69 acres [to] one house per acre, against the wishes of the developer, who obviously wanted very high density.”

For Hero, she wants the District 8 commissioner to find a way to make housing more affordable for older residents. “I’ve been working for several years with elderly residents” who rely on modest Social Security checks for income, she told the Editorial Board, “and right now they can’t even pay the monthly rent.”

Cohen Higgins also is running on affordability message, telling audiences that Miami-Dade can’t just be affordable for the “billionaire class.”

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Though she’s a first-term commissioner, Cohen Higgins has been on the 13-member commission for six years. A political novice at the time, she was appointed to the District 8 post in 2020 when commissioners named her to the seat left vacant when then-Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava won the mayor’s election that year.

Cohen Higgins, a lawyer, won her first election in 2022, and on Aug. 18 she’s on the ballot for what would be her final four years on the commission before Miami-Dade’s term limits would require her to leave office in 2030.

Cohen Higgins is one of the top fundraisers on the 13-member commission, with $1.6 million in the bank from two political committees, Fight for Our Future and We are Miami-Dade, and her campaign account. With financial support from lobbyists, developers and county vendors, she’s raised nearly $2 million since her last election.

DuBois, who owns a global video-surveillance company and reports a net worth of $25 million, said he’s planning to self-fund his campaign. The latest filings show his campaign with $53,000 to spend, and he has not registered to raise money for a political committee. Hero’s campaign reported less than $25,000 to spend.

County spending is an issue DuBois hopes will work against Cohen Higgins as a commissioner who last fall voted in favor of Miami-Dade’s $13.2 billion budget. In candidate forums, he’s knocked the county for subpar services even as a real estate boom allowed property-tax revenue to grow .

“Services from Dade County have not improved,” DuBois said at a Miami Foundation candidate forum on July 28. “There’s been some very poor fiscal management on the part of the commission.”

Cohen Higgins says she’s not afraid to take unpopular stances, including pushing through a neighborhood auto bridge connecting Cutler Bay and Palmetto Bay that Levine Cava didn’t support when she represented District 8. She also said she’s ready to vote for building a modern garbage incinerator in Miami-Dade to replace the one in Doral that’s been shut down since a fire in early 2023.

“The incinerator is not a very popular decision, but I think it’s a critical piece of infrastructure for the future growth of Miami-Dade County,” she told the Miami Foundation forum, which Hero did not attend. “I know there is a lot of opposition to this, but I do think a very environmentally conscious incinerator is the path forward for Miami-Dade County.”

Cohen Higgins and DuBois both said at the Miami Foundation forum that while they support tax reductions, they also oppose the proposed constitutional amendment to sharply cut property taxes on primary homes across Florida — a proposal that voters are being asked to approve in November.

Hero, whose campaign literature includes a call to eliminate property taxes for homeowners 65 and older, told the Editorial Board she supports the amendment. If the amendment passes, Hero said, it will be up to government leaders like the District 8 commissioner to make sure the drop in property-tax revenue “does not compromise essential public services.”

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