New Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins quizzed at chamber event

The Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce named the winner of next year’s Sand in My Shoes Award, hosted a fireside chat with a Miami mayoral candidate and honored Miami Today’s publishers with the Alvah Chapman Award at their last trustee meeting of the year last week.

The Sand in My Shoes Award will go to Cesar L. Alvarez, senior chairman of global law firm Greenberg Traurig. Eileen Higgins was interviewed in the mayor’s race as opponent Emilio Gonzalez cancelled. And Michael Lewis and Carmen Betancourt-Lewis were honored for both journalistic excellence and community advancement via the special Chapman award.

Ms. Higgins, who left the county commission last month to seek the city mayor’s office, told interviewer Tom Hudson of WLRN at the Jungle Island meeting that she aimed to look at city-owned lands for sites for added affordable and workforce housing, she said that the city has terrible problems in issuing building permits, and she called for zoning changes for small lots. She said that in permitting, the city’s technology has been terrible.

She ducked questions on who she was looking at for the city manager’s chair and was also silent on who might become police chief, though she said that present Chief Manuel A. Morales has done a good job.

She also said she was surprised that Mayor Francis Suarez had had no office in the city administration building and said she would have one there and be in the building every day, calling the mayor’s job a full-time role. She said that as mayor she would have no outside job and had had none while serving for eight years in the $6,000-a-year county commission job.

Ms. Higgins called for swift action to extend the county’s Metromover system to Miami Beach and pledged to be fully cooperative on the Miami side of the bay in accomplishing that.

Although the mayor has no city commission vote, Ms. Higgins said she would be in the city commission chambers for every meeting, unlike Mr. Suarez, and said that she would appoint a commission chair – with the threat of filling the job herself if needed to accomplish her agenda.

In accepting the special Alvah Chapman Award from Alfred Sanchez, the chamber’s president and CEO, Mr. Lewis noted that he was honored to receive an award named for a man who was synonymous both with building good journalism and community leadership as CEO of the Knight Newspapers, which at the time owned the Miami Herald and other major newspapers across the nation. Ms. Betancourt-Lewis recalled that Mr. Chapman told her that Miami Today had become a Miami institution. Now, Miami Today has the largest print circulation in the community.

Mr. Alvarez will receive the Sand in My Shoes Award in an Oct. 15, 2026, dinner on Jungle Island. The award, established in 1981, recognizes individuals who have made lasting contributions to Greater Miami, “reflecting a commitment to make our community the best possible place to live, work, and play,” according to a chamber announcement of the award.

“Cesar has been a pillar of this community for decades,” Mr. Sanchez said. “As a Cuban immigrant who came here as a teen, his story is a perfect example of the American dream. We have all benefited from his leadership, and his devotion to giving back to our community is unmatched.”

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