The Food Issue

Editor’s Note

Fight the Overreach

Few people noticed this past September when employees of the Florida Department of Transportation quietly came in and painted over the brightly colored sidewalk in front of City Hall. It was a piece of public art the city paid $180,000 for in 2017, by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. Unfortunately, it fell victim to a recent state edict by Gov. Ron DeSantis which requires the removal of non-standard crosswalk markings on all state roads, even those which run inside city limits. It is part of his anti-LGBTQ campaign that also saw the removal of gay-advocacy rainbow art in Orlando and Miami Beach. The sidewalk in Coral Gables had nothing to do with promoting gay values, except in the old sense of that word, since it was a gay and festive work of creativity.

The removal was, however, consistent with an over-reaching state government that now controls our county school board (as if we need Tallahassee to appoint our local school board members) and prohibits cities from protecting historic structures on their own coastlines. That pro-development regulation, another DeSantis initiative, has already led to the bulldozing of the famous Sea Aerie building by Alfred Browning Parker, Florida’s equivalent to Frank Lloyd Wright. (The same law has seen the destruction of the Al Capone mansion on Palm Island, and is threatening the Deco hotels on Ocean Drive.)

Likewise, the city cannot control its own gun laws (a commissioner who votes to stop the sale of automatic weapons on Miracle Mile could be removed from office and fined $5,000, while the city would get a $100,000 fine); and during COVID, the Gables was also stripped of its power to regulate the use of protective masks in the city. And then we have the state’s Live Local Act, which lets developers break local height restrictions if they include “affordable” housing in 40 percent of their units.

One very big reason why Coral Gables is such a special place is that the city tightly controls its own destiny – how it looks, how it is regulated, and how it is protected. Overreach by the State of Florida into how Coral Gables – or any city in Florida – runs itself is an affront to the will of residents.

We therefore applaud how the City of Coral Gables has joined many other Florida municipalities in a legal effort to sue the state over Senate Bill 180, which prohibits the exercise of home rule authority over land use and zoning regulations.