Miami-Dade Commissioner Vicki Lopez launched a new campaign video ad Wednesday, and if you watch it, you’ll learn that she’s fighting affordability, improving infrastructure, protecting waterways, supporting small businesses, and expanding opportunity.
In other words, she’s running as the solution to all the problems facing the county.
What you won’t learn is that she also helped create one of them.
The bilingual television and digital 30-second spots were released this week as Lopez gears up for her first countywide election in District 5 — facing two challengers in August — after being appointed to replace Eileen Higgins after Higgins was elected Miami’s first female mayor last year.
“In Tallahassee, I fought hard to take on affordability challenges,” Lopez says in the ad.
That’s one way to tell the story.
Another way would be to mention the Live Local Act.
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Lopez was one of the chief architects and most enthusiastic champions of the legislation, which was sold as a way to address Florida’s housing crisis 
by encouraging developers to build affordable housing.
The reality has been a bit more complicated.
Across South Florida, local governments and neighborhood groups have spent the last two years scrambling to deal with projects seeking dramatic increases in height and density under the law’s provisions. Critics argue that developers have been handed a golden ticket: build a relatively small percentage of units at below-market rates and receive enormous zoning benefits that significantly increase the value of their projects.
Developers call it housing policy. Neighborhood activists often call it a giveaway.
And many residents are still trying to figure out how apartments advertised as “affordable” can require incomes that seem anything but.
Yet none of that made it into the commercial. Imagine that.
Read related: Miami Realtors crown Vicki ‘Live Local’ Lopez ‘Housing Advocate of the Year’
The press release that accompanied it also includes an impressive list of elected officials, labor unions, firefighters, police organizations, and community leaders that support her. They include Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, Miami Commission Chairwoman Christine King, Miami Commissioner Miguel Gabela, Miami Beach City Commissioners Joseph Magazine, David Suarez, Laura Dominguez, Monica Matteo-Salinas, Alex Fernandez, and Tanya Bhatt, former Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz, the Florida Professional Firefighters, Metro-Dade Firefighters IAFF Local 1403, Firefighters of Miami Beach Local 1510, Florida State Fraternal Order of Police, South Florida Police Benevolent Association (PBA), SEIU 32BJ, SEIU Local 1991, AFSCME, UNITE HERE Local 
355, and the South Florida AFL-CIO.
It’s a formidable coalition.
It’s also a reminder of how Miami-Dade is the capital of second chances. Because there’s another chapter missing from the biography.
Long before Tallahassee and county government, Lopez was indicted by a grand jury in 1997 for honest services fraud (read: bribery) during her time as a Lee County Commissioner (read: political corruption) and served 15 months in federal prison until President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence. Later, a court vacated her conviction.
To be fair, Lopez has never hidden that part of her story. In fact, she has often spoken publicly about it as a lesson in accountability, redemption, and second chances and to advocate for improved conditions for women and youth in the justice system. But it remains one of the most unusual political comeback stories in Florida politics.
From inmate to state legislator to county commissioner is not a trajectory they teach in civics class.
More recently, she’s been accused of benefiting from the school bus camera legislation she championed last year after family members got lucrative jobs in the industry.
Of course, campaign ads aren’t designed to provide a complete biography. They’re designed to tell voters what a candidate wants them to 
remember.
And in Lopez’s case, what she wants voters to remember is affordability, infrastructure, clean water, and results.
What she would probably prefer they forget are the ongoing fights over Live Local, the complaints from local governments struggling to control development, and the complicated history that doesn’t fit neatly between shots of smiling residents and scenic waterfront views.
Read related: Five Miami-Dade Commissioners were elected Tuesday — without a single vote
As campaign season heats up, Lopez will face former Miami Commissioner Joe Sanchez, a Florida Highway Patrol spokesman who ran for county sheriff and lost in the Republican primary — those police union endorsements for Lopez must have hurt — and activist Rob Piper, a Miami activist who spearheaded the recall effort against former Commissioner Joe Carollo in 2020 and ran for commissioner in District 3 last year.
Her video ads tell voters she’s been working for them already. “I’m not waiting to get started. I’m already on the job,” Lopez says.
The results Aug. 18 will determine whether voters like the whole résumé — or just the parts that made the commercial.
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