District 5: The Never Ending Story

Jeffrey Allen doesn’t hesitate when asked what District 5, the political boundary of Miami’s African American community, needs for its future. “Well, more economic development for one,” responds Allen, a trial attorney, on the phone from his Flagler Street office. Then he politely declines further comment and hangs up.

Allen has a unique perspective. He’s the only former District 5 commissioner not to have been indicted since its 1997 creation, and he’s one of only three former commissioners representing that part of Miami not to have been charged with a crime while in office in the last three decades.

It may be unfair to ask Allen to comment knowledgeably on District 5—he was never elected and he only served a year. In fact, he and the other three with clean records were just benchwarmers appointed to sit in for commissioners who had been arrested. Their combined tenure is barely over a year, meaning that for more than a decade the office has been held by a succession of accused and convicted thieves—four commissioners whose legacy is bribe-taking, fraud, even blood.

The latest to fall, of course, is Michelle Spence-Jones. The 42-year-old former aide to Mayor Manny Diaz was indicted in November for allegedly using forged documents to divert $50,000 in public grant money intended for two other businesses to a corporation formed by her family. Prosecutors allege that Spence-Jones and her brother then spent much of the money, including $10,279 in credit card charges for “air travel, hotels, restaurants, pet care [and] footwear.” The day after her November 12 arrest on grand theft charges, Gov. Charlie Crist promptly removed her from office.

But Spence-Jones, who has denied any wrongdoing, defiantly chose to get her seat back via a special election created by her vacancy, even though her court case is pending. On January 12, she won, taking 53 percent of the vote in an election against eight contenders. Only 3,820 people voted—meaning less than 10 percent of the district’s 39,961 registered voters turned out. All this for a cost of $150,000 to the taxpayers. Although Spence-Jones did win handily, her election victory isn’t exactly a mandate. The odds don’t appear on her side, either: none of the other accused commissioners from District 5 ever escaped a guilty verdict, save one, who committed suicide before charges could be resolved.

Two days after her re-election, Gov. Charlie Crist once again suspended Spence-Jones from office, asserting in his order that it was “in the best interests of the residents of the City of Miami, and the residents of Florida” that she be removed until the charges against her are resolved. Spence-Jones—who had already filed an injunction challenging the governor’s right to remove her prior to a guilty verdict—claims the governor is subverting the will of the people. Which, of course, means the commissioner for the city’s poorest district is both fighting to stay out of jail and fighting to stay in office—surefire distractions from the act of governing. Spence-Jones, her staff and lawyers did not return numerous calls and emails seeking comment for this article.

Unfortunately, there is no part of the city in more dire need of effective representation than District 5, which sits tantalizingly on the edge of Miami’s up-and-coming Design District. Its 75,000 residents, encompassing the neighborhoods of Model City, Overtown and Little Haiti, are the city’s poorest, with a median household income of about $17,000 a year, well below the other four districts. Fifty percent of the residents live below the poverty line in the district’s core. In many parts of Allapattah, Little Haiti, and Wynwood—all District 5 neighborhoods—40 percent or more of the residents have less than a ninth grade education.

Efforts to change those statistics are not helped by political corruption. Tales of politicians demanding bribes to win contracts or of stealing grant money only add to a reputation of street crime and lawlessness that scares off developers and businesses. But corruption is not exclusive to District 5 or the city’s black politicians. White and Hispanic commissioners have been arrested with embarrassing regularity countywide. The day prosecutors announced the indictment against Spence-Jones they also unveiled charges against Angel Gonzalez, the District 1 commissioner, for negotiating a no-show job for his daughter at a politically connected construction company. Ironically, Gonzalez donated $500 to Spence-Jones’ campaign in the special election effort to reclaim her seat.

Spence-Jones’ fall has been as rapid as her rise. Her work advocating gang-prevention for the Isaac Hayes Foundation in the early part of the decade brought her to the attention of former County Commissioner Barbara Carey Shuler, who hired her. (It was in Shuler’s office that Spence-Jones allegedly forged documents in 2004 indicating she would be in charge of the grant money that was never distributed). From Shuler’s office she went to work, briefly, for Miami Mayor Manny Diaz as a senior advisor on urban affairs. When the District 5 seat opened up in 2005, Spence-Jones ran for the seat with Diaz’s support and won. Her opponent, Rev. Richard Dunn sued, claiming she bought votes, but lost the case.

Once in power, she became a fiscal advocate for her district, securing redevelopment money to fix storefronts, renovate iconic businesses and rehabilitate buildings. She became a crucial vote in the city’s approval of the new Marlin’s baseball stadium, but only after extracting promises for $500 million from the city and county for Overtown’s redevelopment agency. Still, two years into her term fellow Commissioner Marc Sarnoff accused her of political corruption, prompting a criminal investigation that was eventually dropped. Within her first term, she had become a glorious but bruised political veteran.

[HOW WE GOT HERE]

Marvin Dunn, a historian of black Miami who teaches psychology at Florida International University, says District 5 needs strong leaders who serve extended periods. “But we’ve seemed to move into a period of revolving political scandals, and it has hurt the district,” Dunn says.

Dunn notes things were much more stable in previous decades. Past black commissioners like Athalie Range and Theodore Gibson survived lengthy terms in office without scandal. He suspects one possible factor is the single-member district system put in place in the 1990s, which reduced the pool of available money to candidates at a time when campaigns became increasingly more expensive.

In fact, the single-district system the city now uses owes its existence to a political scandal originating in what would become District 5. Until the 1990s commissioners ran on a citywide basis, although they were unofficially associated with certain constituents. For 15 years the commissioner for Miami’s African Americans was Miller Dawkins. Then in 1996, federal authorities arrested Dawkins after a sting caught him taking $100,000 from a company seeking a $20 million computer contract with the city. Dawkins eventually pleaded guilty. It was a stunning take-down for a veteran public servant and it ended an unprecedented era of stability. Pastors, community activists, even a congresswoman asked the judge for leniency at his sentencing.

The Rev. Richard P. Dunn (no relation to Professor Dunn) was appointed to serve the remaining two months of Dawkins’ term. The standing arrangement within the political class at the time was that no viable Hispanic candidate (Hispanics were the majority population) would run for the city’s only “black seat,” even though there were no official barriers to doing so. But a young ambitious lawyer named Humberto Hernandez, who had twice run for commissioner and lost, saw an opportunity in challenging the status quo. Hernandez beat Dunn in November 1996, leaving Miami without a black commissioner for the first time in more than 30 years.