Who is challenging Daniella Levine Cava for Miami-Dade Mayor?

The first day of early voting in Miami-Dade County saw a flurry of activity at sites across the county.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and a few other candidates made the Coral Gables Branch Library their first stop.

Levine Cava is running for a second four-year term, insisting she can continue to build on what she calls tremendous progress over the last four years.

“People moved here because they discovered paradise and they drove up the housing prices and we’ve had to deal with the affordability crisis,” she said. “Our bay, which is always in peril, we have to protect it for our economy, it is a $64 billion impact.”

Surfside’s former town mayor, the current mayor of Miami Lakes and a Spanish-speaking influencer, who would govern through an interpreter, are all looking to unseat Levine Cava. 

The influencer, Alex Otaola, is one of the more colorful candidates, with a sizable footprint on YouTube and other social media platforms.

He prefers to speak only in Spanish, and would conduct county business in English, but through an interpreter.

“That should not be a problem, I speak English but not as my first language, I want to use an interpreter so that the message does not get lost,” Otaola said.

Miami Lakes Mayor Manny Cid is also in the running, pointing to taxes and transportation as his top priorities.

“Number one, property taxes, that is a must, a 10% decrease in property taxes will happen during that first budget cycle,” Cid promised.

“Second on transportation, we have to reform the way we do transportation. One of the things that I will do is that the monies that get derived from all of the new developments in Miami-Dade County, which is hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions of dollars, stay in our local communities to mitigate the transportation impact that exists.”

Former Surfside Town Mayor Shlomo Danzinger recently lost his reelection bid for a second term and is now eying the much larger role of county mayor.

“There was a lot that I saw as the mayor of Surfside, a lot of deficiencies within the county within the way its governance is being handled right now,” Danzinger said during a recent interview on Impact with Jackie Nespral. “A lack of communication between the county and a lot of the municipalities there that is leading to a lot bad initiatives and that is something that I would like to address.”

Three additional candidates are running for county mayor: Carlos Garin, Miguel Quintero and Eddy Rojas.

One candidate has to take a majority of votes, 50% plus one, in order to win the mayor’s seat in the August elections.

 If not, the top two vote-getters go into a runoff in November’s election.