JOE SANCHEZ IS RUNNING FOR MIAMI-DADE COUNTY COMMISSION DISTRICT 5

I STAND WITH THE LONGTIME SERVANT – WHO GAVE ME THE OPPORTUNITY TO WORK AS A SENIOR POLICY ADVISOR WHEN WAS A MIAMI CITY COMMISSIONER

I stand with Joe Sanchez — the People’s Commissioner — for Miami Dade County District 5.

I have been a proud resident of this district for a quarter century.

I also had the rare privilege of working the better part of a decade as Joe’s policy advisor with the City Of Miami.

I was proud when Joe Sanchez listed a few of the people-centered initiatives that we completed when he was a Miami Commissioner.

He could have listed dozens.

All embraced our diverse population and were done for people—not partisan politics.

Far more than 100 people stood shoulder-to-shoulder to support Joe Sanchez for Miami-Dade County Commissioner.

The lifelong public servant spoke from the heart about fighting corruption, reducing taxes, increasing, homeownership affordability

A packed house of diverse community members attended Joe Sanchez for Miami-Dade County Commissioner District 5 campaign kickoff this month.

The county commissioners robbed us of the democratic process when they appointed a person to the position.

We get to vote on who represent us in August 2026.

https://votejoesanchez.com/

IF YOUR COUNTY DOESN’T WORK FOR EVERYONE, IT WORKS FOR NO ONE

SHAMEFUL THAT BROKEN ELEVATORS DESTORY RAIL TRANSIT ACCESS 

FOR WHEELCHAIR USERS FOR MONTHS TO YEARS

It is incredibly embarrassing when your county is hosting a nationwide conference of transportation officials -- but your rail lines have had elevators out for years and some will not be repaired till 2025.

While co-leading a tour and meeting with friends, dozens of top tier planners complained about the broken elevators and the devastating impact on people with disabilities.

They were attending the nationwide National Association of City Transportation Officials hosted by Miami-Dade County.

Lack of planning ahead for maintenance and glacial pace of repairs - -is a black eye for a city that could have shined while hosting NACTO.

Please, County mayor and commissioners, stop treating people with disabilities like second class.

GRATIFIED TO HAVE MY PHOTOGRAPHY AND HISTORIC PRESERVATION ACTIVISM RECOGNIZED WITH A PROCLAMATION

BY THE HONORABLE MIAMI-DADE COUNTY COMMISSIONER EILEEN HIGGINS

Thrilled to give a special tour of my Little Havana photography exhibit to the Honorable Miami-Dade County Commissioner Eileen Higgins.

I was honored to received an official Miami-Dade County Commendation recognizing my art and activism.

Commissioner Higgins has proudly represented Little Havana by ensuring there is funding to preserve great buildings with affordable housing.

I’m am thankful, proud and gratified to receive recognition of my tireless work to make Miami a better place.

There are so many stories to tell about Little Havana.

It is a rich tapestry of historic buildings, trailblazing immigrants, world class artists, renowned musicians, mom and pop restaurants and growing nightlife scene.

I have happily called Little Havana home for more than two decades.

I bought an old house in very bad shape and lovingly restored what is now a lovely Spanish Mission Style century old abode that fronts historic William Jennings Bryan Park.

I told Little Havana’s stories when I worked from Miami City Commissioner Joe Sanchez.

Thanks to our efforts, more than three million people visit the famous Calle Ocho corridor each year.

But as Little Havana becomes popular, it also is under threat.

The high rise Brickell district has somewhat jumped west of I-95.

The buildings are not skyscrapers, but dozens of bland, faceless buildings – with expensive rents – have replaced quaint, small, beautiful 3-story Mediterranean and Art Deco buildings that have supplied affordable housing in Little Havana for decades.

When I went on a journey that resulted in losing far more than 100 pounds, I started walking my neighborhood.

I photographed the backstreets.

I documented the lovely apartments, houses, churches and commercial buildings.

WHAT KIND OF GOVERNMENT BLOCKS PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

FROM ACCESSING A SAVE, PAVED GREENWAY PATH?

Here’s an idea. An exclusionary one. 

Let’s pave miles of safe pedestrian trails ideal for wheelchair users. 

But let’s end the sidewalk before it connects to them. 

This is in Coral Gables just west of Segovia traffic circle at Granada Golf Course.

City official claims Miami-Dade County is approving a traffic circle that will fix all of this.

Looks to use like a simple few feet of concrete or asphalt would fill the gap and provide access.

Check out the image below.

Super-inviting, safe pathway.

Two blocks from Coral Gables downtown.

But this entire intersection, zero ways to access the path from city sidewalks -- if you use a wheelchair for mobility.

NARROW BUS STOP

WITH NO WHEELCHAIR ACCESS TO ADJACENT PAVED PATH

Cruel and unusual bus stop in Coral Gables.

This problem festers on Coral Way at South Greenway.

There are miles of smooth paved pathways along Granada Golf Course are a few feet away.

But the bus stop pad ends in a cliff that prevents wheelchair users from accessing the paths.

A city official tells my Miami-Dade County is fixing the issue.

But I think that might be a crosswalk, not an accessible link to the safe, paved paths.

PUBLIC SERVICE IS A NOBLE CALLING

MY WIFE HEIDI JOHNSON-WRIGHT

HAS HEEDED IT FOR NEARLY FOUR DECADES

My wife Heidi, celebrates her birthday today.

I am proud of her lifelong career as a public servant.

When she was in law school at Ohio State University, she interned at a state agency in our native Ohio.

Even in undergrad, she volunteered on a campus programing board that served the state of Ohio at Kent State University.

She practiced law her first decade out of law school, for a pair of state agencies in Ohio.

After we moved to Miami in 2000, Heidi became the first full-time Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Coordinator for the City of Miami Beach.

She was in her first decade as a proud public servant there when Miami-Dade County – one of the largest (in population and land mass) government bodies in the U.S. – did a nationwide, high-level candidate search for the next person to guide its ADA department.

Heidi has now proudly served Miami-Dade for a decade and a half. She has endured the late 2009-2010 financial crisis that saw virtually all of her staff laid off or forced into early retirement.

ADA was abolished as a department under some of the worst mayoral “leadership” this county has ever known. A mayor who filled the county with cronies cared not a moment about people with disabilities.

Now, under Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, the ADA office has at least regained about one third the level of staffing that it traditionally had for decades.

Heidi and her hand-picked group of expert pros are now empowered to ensure that Miami-Dade’s vast facilities and programs are accessible to all.

There are still great hurdles. Miami-Dade could use tens of thousands of affordable, accessible housing units.

People with disabilities are by far the most under and unemployed of all minority groups.

The face an impossible reality of less than 1 percent of all U.S. housing being move-in ready for wheelchair users.

Some housing bureaucrats still push back mightily on the idea that even a few units (required by federal law) should be move-in ready for people with disabilities.

They insanely plot to pass adaptation costs on to impoverished people with disabilities.

Those clueless policies cause homelessness and worse.

Hopefully, Mayor Levine Cava will get another term and continue to empower Heidi to influence other departments – from airport to seaport to parks, transit and housing – to follow federal law by making 100 percent of buildings and programs accessible to all.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, HEIDI

YOU HAVE HAD MY BACK FOR MORE THAN A THIRD OF A CENTURY

Sometimes love is expressed with the good times – an amazing meal, a stroll through a beautiful European capital city, a shopping trip to splurge on rare luxury.

Other times, it is expressed through love, support, having your partner’s back in the most anguished and challenging of times.

I love my bride of 34 years, Heidi Johnson-Wright, for thousands of reasons.

During a recent solo lecture tour in Europe, she proved why she’s been my soulmate of more than a third of a century.

Unfortunately, it was for the latter expression of love and support.

I was hustling to change from the RER train for Charles de Gaulle Airport to the Metro M6 to reach my hotel on Place Italie.

A trio of men, all less than half my age, crash into me just as the subway doors are closing.

I bash my head on one the polls for standing riders to grasp and fall forward.

Even though I was blindsided and injured, my only thoughts were on the wallet I neglected to hide in my book bag. It was gone along with a lot of cash, all my credit cards and other key documents.

Waiting a few hours to get an English-speaking detective at a Paris Police station, I called my indefatigable wife back in Miami and she assisted with canceling credit cards and closing a now exposed bank account.

Heidi is the point person for all things under the Americans with Disabilities Act in Miami-Dade County and oversees several employees and assists dozens of ADA coordinators in myriad departments.

She is a very busy person, but took the day off to help me.

She wired Euros to a Western Union near my hotel.

She added me as a cardholder on one of her credit cards.

She reminded me to put her card on my phone’s wallet app, so I could pay without the confusion of lacking a physical credit card in hand.

She closed a compromised joint checking account and started a new one.

When I returned from working in Paris, Lyon and beyond – Heidi had one neat envelope full of fraud squad correspondence, new credit cards and other important documents such as a temporary medical ID card to replace the stolen one.

We celebrated our 34^th wedding anniversary yesterday.

Knowing after all these years, that Heidi has my back in a time of crises – makes me love her even more.

  

APP-BASED DRIVER SERVICES MUST SERVE ALL COMMUNITIES

MIAMI-DADE COUNTY MUST ENSURE THAT UBER, LYFT AND OTHERS SERVE WHEELCHAIR USERS, DISABLED CLIENTS AND ALL NEIGHBORHOODS

We applaud Miami-Dade County elected and appointed officials for tackling the issue of regulation for Uber, Lyft and any other similar systems that use smart phone apps to link drivers with clients.

We read in the Miami Herald that the County administration is looking at waiving millions of dollars in fines.

We have a suggestion to help ensure that our County government creates rules that require Uber, Lyft, etc. to serve disabled passengers and those in communities that are often ignored.

We understand that Uber, Lyft and likely other app-based services are not going away.

But if we are going to endorse privatizing a large portion of our transportation utility, we must establish rules that ensure equity of all.

Sadly, the business model for private industry very rarely is to serve all communities equally.

Just like there are no fancy department stores in our most needy communities, the drivers for Uber and Lyft notoriously decline rides requested from areas that they perceive as poor, unsafe or worse.

There is a built in classism/racism in this system.

In our world, the #1 job of elected officials is to strive for a system that treats all equally and restores the unbalance of economic, housing, transportation and other opportunity that exists in far too many of our communities.

People with physical disabilities represent the most underemployed, most transit option-deprived community on earth.

Our taxis are required to supply a certain number of wheelchair-equipped vans and vehicles.  Uber and Lyft have fought the truism that they are obligated to do the same.

It is inhumane to have a 50 billion company to pretend it is an appservice, not the fast growing transportation utility on earth.

It is discriminatory for these firms to ignore their obligations to wheelchair users and folks with other mobility issues. But they have a history of dodging the issue of providing accessible transportation -- or providing woefully inadequate lift-equipped options when forced to do so.

We suggest that the accrued fines -- be they the full amount or a reduced portion -- be set aside to create a fund for buying wheelchair lift-equipped vehicles to be a required part of the Uber, Lyft, etc fleets. 

To get licensed by the County, these firms should match the fine amount with their own millions to provide a dispatching system and to fund maintenance and operations of a fleet that serves disabled County residents. 

Some of the money should be put into a fund for a third party service that tests these driver summoned by app transport firms to make sure they are providing the County-required service to the disability community.   

This would work much like housing testers that expose bigoted, horrible landlords that claim a unit is no longer for rent when a person from a minority group inquires about the advertised vacancy.

Stiff fines should be imposed for Uber, Lyft, etc. if they ignore minority communities and/or people with disabilities. Certainly, technology could easily monitor zip codes or sub neighborhoods "redlined" by drivers.  

The random monitoring could take care of any violations against disabled people.

This is an incredibly just, fair and equitable system.  

If Uber, Lyft and others cannot play by those rules of equity, then they have no business making billions off the backs of our diverse community.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article46121120.html

https://gigaom.com/2014/06/03/wheelchair-users-sue-car-services-uber-and-lyft-over-lack-of-access/