What Miami-Dade’s District 5 candidates say about taxes, Baylink and housing

Miami-Dade County admin August 3, 2026 0 Comments

What Miami-Dade’s District 5 candidates say about taxes, Baylink and housing

To win her first election for Miami-Dade County Commission, incumbent Vicki Lopez calls herself a champion for affordable housing and for older residents in a district that includes South Beach, Little Havana and Miami’s Brickell Avenue. Her two challengers say they’re residents’ best choice for a commissioner to tackle District 5’s problems.

Nine months ago, Lopez, then a sitting Republican member of the Florida House, was appointed to the vacant District 5 seat on the County Commission. Now she’s running for a full four-year term against two challengers: Rob Piper, a retired U.S. Marine and former candidate for the Miami City Commission, and Joe Sanchez, a retired Florida state trooper and former chair of the Miami City Commission.

Each candidate says District 5 residents need help with affordability, particularly when it comes to housing.

“I don’t care who you talk to — whether a retired person, a college graduate or a young family — it’s housing, housing, housing,” Lopez, 68, told the Miami Herald Editorial Board on June 29.

Sanchez, 61, sees statewide housing legislation that Lopez championed — Florida’s Live Local Act — as a reason for District 5 voters to elect someone else to represent them. The legislation, passed in 2023, allows developers to bypass local zoning boards and match existing height allowances if they cap rents in a portion of their units at state-set price rates.

“Live Local is a horrible, horrible law,” Sanchez told the Herald board. “It was done by developers because they were tired of dealing with the public and tired of dealing with local governments.”

Piper, 54, also described Live Local as Tallahassee favoring the development industry over local governments trying to manage growth. “I see it as a gift to developers,” he told the Herald board. “The city of Miami worked hard to get a comprehensive [zoning] plan done, and it was just totally wiped away by this preemptive law.”

Lopez, meanwhile, called Live Local a “very good bill to address the housing crisis across the state.”

The District 5 seat was once held by Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins, whose resignation in late 2025 created the vacancy that led to Lopez’s appointment by the remaining commissioners.

Lopez, a nonprofit consultant, was elected to the Florida House in 2022 and was in her second term when she sought the District 5 appointment. Piper ran for the Miami City Commission last year and led an unsuccessful effort to recall then-City Commissioner Joe Carollo in 2020. Sanchez served on the Miami City Commission between 1998 and 2009 and ran in the Republican primary for Miami-Dade sheriff in 2024. Piper is the only Democrat in the officially nonpartisan District 5 race.

Even before her appointment in Miami-Dade, Lopez had served as a county commissioner before. In the 1990s, she was a member of the Lee County Commission in the Fort Myers area. Prosecutors secured a prison sentence for Lopez for alleged fraud, but in the appeals process, a judge ruled that she had been wrongly convicted.

As the incumbent who had been a sitting House member last year, Lopez enjoys a substantial advantage in fundraising. Through her campaign account and Common Sense Government PAC, Lopez has about $800,000 to spend, according to the last reports. Sanchez has roughly $100,000 and Piper, about $1,000.

Transit is a key issue for District 5, home to the county’s Metromover system, multiple Metrorail stations and some of the busiest bus routes in Miami-Dade. When Higgins was a commissioner, she pushed Miami-Dade to spend more than $1 billion to extend rail across the MacArthur Causeway and finally build the elusive Baylink transit route connecting Miami with South Beach.

In this election, the District 5 candidates expressed little enthusiasm for reviving that fight and said Miami-Dade needs to focus on improving the bus system at a time when Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is calling for targeted service cuts.

“It’s a great idea if we can afford it,” Sanchez said of the Baylink project during a July 29 forum hosted by the Miami Foundation. “But why don’t we fix what we have now?… Our bus system is a very good system. Why are we cutting it in this year’s budget?”

Lopez noted the Baylink proposal has been particularly contentious in parts of Miami Beach and that she’s working with residents to come up with simpler fixes to improve transit. That includes restoring cut routes that were popular with older residents. “We’ve got to get back to realizing that elderly people don’t drive, and they greatly depend on the bus routes that really need to be reestablished,” she said.

“As long as it’s affordable and financially feasible, yes I would support it,” Piper said of Baylink. “But I think there are other options that would be a little bit more cost effective, like just increasing the [number of] buses that go out there.”

At the Miami Foundation forum, the candidates agreed on not wanting to increase the county’s transportation sales tax from a half-percent to one percent in order to expand transit — a funding move that Levine Cava recently said in a memo is one of the few options available to realize Miami-Dade’s goal of extending rail countywide.

They disagreed on the wisdom of the major tax cut on the Florida ballot this fall, where voters will be asked to reduce the amount of property taxes paid by primary residents.

Lopez has been a top critic of the proposal on the County Commission, and she told the Miami Foundation forum that residents would feel the pain in lost government services if the measure passes.

“The cost to our county for the first two years of this property-tax reform will be almost a billion dollars,” she said. “To make up that billion dollars will absolutely impact the level of services and the quality of life we all enjoy here.”

Lopez also criticized Tallahassee lawmakers for a rushed special session to pass the proposal. “I think this kind of amendment should have had a whole lot more thought put into it.”

Piper sided with Lopez in criticizing the plan. “I say this as a homeowner,” he said. “We just spent the last 30 minutes talking about how much we need to fund public transit, how much we need to fund affordable housing, but yet they want to do this?”

Sanchez said he supported the tax-cut proposal. “As I campaign, and I walk and talk to people in our community, there are a lot of people out there that are maybe two or three or five months away from losing their homes because they’re on fixed incomes and everything is going up,” he said. “They deserve a break.”