A Tale of Two Cities

Recently, Commissioner Melissa Castro put a question to Instagram. Would you vote yes or no, she asked, on a proposal that helped Coral Gables businesses using existing city resources and no new taxpayer funding? The Town of Bal Harbour had reached out to partner with us, she wrote, to promote our restaurants, shops, and cultural destinations during one of the slowest times of the year. She brought it forward. The commission voted no. Follow the votes, she told her followers, not the talking points.

I did follow the votes, and then I followed them back to the proposal itself, and here is what it actually is.

The idea began, according to the exchange that produced it, as a casual suggestion between the commissioner and a Bal Harbour councilman, Alejandro Levy: a “Town Visit” program, floated as “just a thought,” in which Bal Harbour residents would spend a day in Coral Gables and Gables residents a day in Bal Harbour, to see one another’s parks, cultural initiatives, and public spaces. It grew into what Bal Harbour’s own public agenda calls a “Proposed Friendship Initiative with Coral Gables,” a matching resolution in each town. The commissioner described it as a creative, low-cost way to encourage a few cross-town visits in the slow season.

Here is the problem, and it begins before the framing does. A Coral Gables commissioner has one job, first and always, and it is Coral Gables. Councilman Levy was doing his, advocating for Bal Harbour, and I appreciate the effort, because that is exactly what he is there for. But the person on our side of the table is there for us, and what she chose to champion was a plan to point our residents, our promotion, and our attention at another town. In three and a half years on the commission, I am hard pressed to name much she has delivered for the very businesses she now says she wants to help. That the initiative worth her energy was one for someone else’s city tells you where the priorities have been sitting.

Then look at how a small thing got sold. A reciprocal day-trip to admire each other’s parks became, on Instagram, “a proposal that helped Coral Gables businesses” that “the majority voted no” on. A modest, symbolic gesture became a referendum on whether your commissioners care about local business. The substance never grew. Only the framing did. It’s also worth noting that four commissioners voted no, with Castro as the sole yes vote.

And on that substance, Bal Harbour is not our partner in the way that matters here. It is our competitor. The town sits about 19 miles and, in season, the better part of an hour up the coast, and the Shops at Merrick Park were built, from the beginning, to compete with Bal Harbour as South Florida’s luxury destination. The two are anchored by the same department store, chase the same shoppers, and carry many of the same names. Encouraging our residents to spend a day in Bal Harbour, during the very weeks our own businesses are hungriest for foot traffic, is not a lifeline to Coral Gables merchants. If anything, it points our own customers toward a rival’s shops.

I put it this way in the comments, and I will put it here. Imagine Jacksonville asking St. Augustine to send the millions of visitors who pour in for the Nights of Lights festival 40 miles north instead, during the same peak weeks. St. Augustine would never do it, because Nights of Lights is their program and their success. You do not lend your best season to the town competing with you for it.

None of which means the goal is wrong. Helping our restaurants and shops through the quiet months is exactly what the city should be working on, and I would vote yes on the right version in a heartbeat. But if the aim is to fill our tables with visitors, we are already sitting on the answer. Coral Gables is home to the Loews, the Biltmore, the Hyatt, the Colonnade, the Thesis, and more, thousands of hotel rooms full of people who chose to sleep here. Turning those guests into diners and shoppers a few blocks from their lobby is the most direct tourism program the city could run, and it needs no other municipality at all. Work with our own hotels first. Maximize the destination we already are before organizing field trips to the one up the coast.

I want to say something, too, about how that conversation went when I raised these points, because the commissioner asked people to weigh in and I did, calmly and on the merits. What came back was not a counterargument. It was that I was “muddying the waters,” that I was a “troll,” that my view could be dismissed rather than answered. I asked, in the thread, whether we could disagree without the insults, and I will ask it again, because the pattern is its own tell. When a proposal is strong, its defenders meet the substance with substance. When it is thin, they reach for a name to call the person pointing that out.

As for “no new taxpayer funding,” I take the point, and it is true this may cost little in dollars. But staff time is a resource, attention is a resource, and the city’s promotional reach is a finite one. Spending it is a choice with a cost even when no line item moves, and the only question that matters is whether the spending helps Coral Gables. A day trip to a competitor during our leanest weeks does not.

So follow the votes, by all means, and read the memo and the resolution while you are at it. But follow them all the way to the reasons, because a no vote here was not a vote against local business. It was a vote to put Coral Gables first. That is the only job any of us sent her to do, and it is the one this proposal forgot.