MIA plane crash put a spotlight on friction between Miami-Dade’s sheriff and mayor

It took a live microphone near a plane crash to amplify what’s been apparent for months now: Miami-Dade’s sheriff and mayor do not get along.

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Moments before Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz addressed reporters Sunday night with Mayor Daniella Levine Cava by her side, a top aide to the mayor told the sheriff that he thought the mayor should speak first. It was a county rescue squad that responded within 30 seconds to the scene of a crashed cargo jet at the county-owned Miami International Airport — two agencies that report up to Levine Cava, not the sheriff.

“Sir, with all due respect, I’m going to speak first,” Cordero-Stutz told Chris Hudtwalcker, the mayor’s chief of staff, in an exchange caught in a live feed leading up to the press conference.

The tense moment captured only the latest source of friction between two of the county’s most powerful elected officials.

“I don’t think anybody wants to see a display similar to the one we saw happen,” Miami-Dade Commissioner Daniella Cohen Higgins, a Democrat and chair of the commission’s Aviation and Seaport Committee, said at a hearing Tuesday. “Especially when lives have been lost. It is a complete distraction on what we should be focused on.”

Until a recent change in Florida’s constitution, Miami-Dade didn’t have an elected sheriff, and the mayor held authority over the countywide police department. That changed in 2024 with the county’s first sheriff election in decades — a contest where Levine Cava, a Democrat, backed the candidate who lost to Cordero-Stutz, a Republican and a former senior administrator at the Miami-Dade Police Department.

Now the strains between the two are hard to miss. Cordero-Stutz and Levine Cava couldn’t work out a budget compromise behind closed doors in the midst of a spending standoff, with the mayor recommending a 2027 funding increase for the Sheriff’s Office, but only about half as much as what the sheriff requested from the County Commission, which retains control of the $1 billion budget for the Sheriff’s Office.

There’s a $52 million gap between Levine Cava’s proposed 6% increase in tax funding for the Sheriff’s Office and Cordero-Stutz’s request for a 12% boost — making the MDSO budget one of the top flare-ups ahead of the commission’s second and final budget vote on Sept. 17.

Hours before the first budget hearing began on Sept. 3, Cordero-Stutz and County Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez, a Republican, issued a joint statement criticizing the mayor on an unrelated topic.

A week earlier, news leaked that Levine Cava’s administration was pursuing a marketing deal with the maker of Grand Theft Auto, a video game that features criminals prospering in a fictional Miami-Dade. “Its fictional world includes murder, robbery, drug trafficking, carjacking, violence against law enforcement, and other conduct that the men and women of the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office work every single day to prevent,” Cordero-Stutz said in the statement.

While the Grand Theft Auto flap highlighted the political tension between the mayor and sheriff, Sunday’s crash of an Amazon cargo plane was the first practical test of how the high-profile relationship would work during a crisis.

“The mayor is responsible for the airport,” Hudtwalcker said to Cordero-Stutz at the start of the exchange as it became clear that the sheriff was getting ready to start the press conference and not Levine Cava. “So I believe she should go first.”

Cordero-Stutz responded: “I know what you believe. This is public safety. And I’m going first.”

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A source familiar with the county’s prep for the press conference said Levine Cava and her top deputies joined federal officials in a conference room before the event for a briefing and to map out what information should be shared with the media. Cordero-Stutz was invited and expected to attend but never showed up, the source said.

The tense exchange as Levine Cava looked on ricocheted through social media Sunday after being posted by the Mercy’s Corner podcast. “It’s an indication of the growing pains for both the Mayor’s Office and Sheriff’s Office as they try to establish themselves as separate offices,” Juan Perez, a former Miami-Dade police director who backed Cordero-Stutz in the 2024 campaign, told the Miami Herald. “This is one of those things that needs to be worked out ahead of time so we don’t see that happening in front of cameras.”

Asked about MDSO’s relationship with the county government during a Tuesday morning press conference where the sheriff released the names of five people killed by the crash, Cordero-Stutz said she handled the fast-moving situation appropriately.

“In a situation or scene as complex as the one we were looking at, these kinds of things are going to come up,” she said. “We addressed it, and we continued to move forward.”

In a statement released Monday about the crash, Levine Cava said in part: “It is my foremost responsibility as Mayor to ensure the safety and well-being of those who travel through MIA and the residents of Miami-Dade County.”

On Tuesday, her office said the mayor and sheriff have not spoken since the Sunday press conference but said the public “should have full confidence” in the county’s ability to respond to an emergency. “We saw that on Sunday,” the statement read, “when Miami-Dade Fire Rescue was on the scene in seconds and the County’s public safety and Aviation teams worked seamlessly with the Sheriff’s Office.”

Commissioners on the Aviation committee weighed in on the dispute Tuesday during the first meeting of members of the officially nonpartisan commission after the crash. “There were a lot of moving parts that day,” said Commissioner Natalie Milian Orbis, a Republican who attended Sunday’s briefing and press conference. “Emotions were running a little high. … I don’t think we should say anybody was wrong or right.”

Commissioner Oliver Gilbert, a Democrat running for Congress, sided with Levine Cava. “We should be communicating with everyone and cooperating with everyone,” he said. “But the face and voice of the county that the people chose to speak during that situation is Mayor Cava.”

In 2021, Levine Cava was the public face of Miami-Dade’s response to the Surfside condo collapse — which happened while both the police director and fire chief reported to her. The mayor received generally positive reviews for how she conducted daily press briefings, and that exposure helped propel her to both national prominence and an easy reelection in 2024.

Now term-limited and eyeing an exit in 2028, Levine Cava is managing a strained relationship as Cordero-Stutz establishes herself as the new face of law enforcement in Miami-Dade ahead of an expected reelection run two years from now. Along with the budget dispute, the two administrations are in talks about a formal cooperation agreement between the Sheriff’s Office and the county government.

At the Aviation meeting, Levine Cava’s deputy mayor, Roy Coley, said that agreement will address protocols on who takes the lead in an emergency — a responsibility he pointed out belongs to the mayor under Miami-Dade’s charter.

“It’s explicit, and that’s how we’ve always functioned,” Coley said. “And I’m sure we’ll continue that way.”

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