Raquel Regalado’s message: ‘I can be a better mayor’

Dressed in a crisp white skirt suit that shimmered just a little, with a big green flower pin that matched her high heels, Miami-Dade School Board Member Raquel Regalado — the 305’s favorite political daughter — became on Monday morning the first Hispanic woman to run for Miami-Dade mayor.

While the media throng made a big deal of that on the International Day of the Woman, that’s not the reason she wants you to vote for her.

Regalado, 40, accompanied to the elections department by her big brother Tomasito Regalado, said her priorities are going to be public safety, transportation and infrastructure, public housing and county services. “We have to look at residents not as taxpayers but as consumers of services we provide,” she said, adding that she would work toward free WiFi throughout the county.

She talked about the vacancies of up to 300 police officers and the coming retirement of many more next year. “For some people, it takes two and half hours for a police officer to get to their home, and that’s unacceptable.”

Regalado said she expects the support of labor leaders because “I’ve kept my promises. The big problem he has is he has not kept his promises,” she said, referring to incumbent mayor Carlos “Cry Wolf” Gimenez and his abysmal relationship with the unions.

But there is more. As the first champion of a tech hub and creating opportunities for coding education and jobs, way before Gimenez glommed onto the issue, Regalado told Ladra that one of the things that prompted her to run was the kind of low-wage jobs that Gimenez seems go after ’cause it’s easy, ’cause it’s low-hanging fruit and he’s lazy.

“We need to have an accord, county schools working with government so what the students are learning is what they need to learn for this economy,” Regalado said. And, she told me earlier, her kids “are not going to work in the tourism industry.”

Some veteran political observers might suggest she is too “all over the place” and without a central message. But Ladra sees a central message: “I am not that other guy whose priorities are all wrong. And I can do better by you.”

We still have a long ways to go — 16 months before the first round in August, which only goes to a runoff if neither gets 50% plus one. But Regalado has started to campaign already as the anti-Gimenez, going against him tooth and manicured nail and pointing a big spotlight on every little thing he does wrong, which can become blinding. She’s sued to block his gift of $9 million in taxpayer dollars to a private developer who wants to build the improbable SkyRise Miami and has already posted two videos critiquing the mayor’s State of the County address and his secret plan, negotiated behind closed doors for a year, for a mega retail mall in the Northwest corner of the county.

That’s one reason, she said, she felt a need to file paperwork so soon. She didn’t want to be seen as criticizing the mayor por gusto. “People asked me if I was just criticizing him to criticize him. And of course it’s not,” she told Ladra. “It’s to show that there is an alternative. We can go in a different direction.”

Those people are likely dense, but it says something that she wants to be transparent about her ambition as she sets about visiting cities and communities to let them get to know her.

Because the truth is, not a lot of people know her outside Miami, where she is political royalty: Princess Raquelita of Shenandoah. Or is it Silver Bluff? Because even though she has had a lot of public coverage of her challenges with Gimenez, she wants to be the candidate that people talked to, not the lady who played a candidate on TV.

A content Raquel Regalado looks up at her brother, who has his hand on her shoulder, as she files for Miami-Dade mayor.

Ladra is not going to pretend that she doesn’t really like Regalado already. We kinda converged on the courthouse tax issue and became friendly because of our common interests. She is eloquent and articulate in both English and Spanish, is centered on the issues, makes common sense judgements and has stuck her neck out in this void of leadership we have. She has good ideas and, Ladra thinks, is focused on the greater good, not just the good for the inner circle.

I fear that, like all politicians, she will let us down one day or another. But, because she is the great Dade hope — that is, she is a very viable candidate to take down King Carlos II — I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt for the next 16 months.

And because it’s easy to believe her message: “I can be a better mayor.”

Carlos Gimenez, Raquel Regalado

Raquel Regalado’s message: ‘I can be a better mayor’ added by Ladra on March 10, 2015
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