After a new mayor takes over, Miami-Dade getting a new transit director, too

Douglas Hanks

A month into her tenure, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Friday she’ll be conducting a national search for a transit director after revealing Alice Bravo will leave the post after five years on the job.

The departure gives Levine Cava the chance to pick her own appointee for one of the more high-profile jobs in county government. The department head oversees one of the country’s largest transit systems and presides over an expansion effort known as the SMART Plan.

In a resignation letter dated Friday, Bravo said she was leaving her $248,000-a-year job at Transportation and Public Works for a “leadership opportunity in the private sector” that reflects “my strong commitment to advancing public transportation, innovation and mobility solutions.”

More of your Miami-Dade property taxes go to jails than libraries, parks or hospitals

Public Works and Transportation were merged after Bravo left her deputy city manager job in Miami to join the Gimenez administration. In her memo to commissioners announcing Bravo’s pending departure, Levine Cava said Bravo had been “instrumental in expanding mobility options” in Miami-Dade and in securing $200 million for South Miami-Dade’s new rapid-transit bus line.

As transportation director, she also helped Gimenez shepherd through a monorail proposal that drew criticism from the inspector general and ethics investigators for insider communication between the mayor, Bravo, and other county leaders and bidder Genting around a trip to Hong Kong coordinated by the mayor’s office.

Bravo pushed through contentious contracting decisions on buses that allowed Miami-Dade to upgrade its fleet, and oversaw the long-delayed replacement of an obsolete Metrorail fleet suffering chronic breakdowns and delays. A 2017 state report cited staffing shortages as a problem at Transit, too.

She clashed frequently with the county’s transportation union, as the Gimenez administration outsourced some bus routes to private operators and pursued a privatized system in the monorail proposal. The tensions hit a peak at the start of the coronavirus emergency when bus operators were rationed to a single Clorox wipe per shift when the county was caught short on protective and sanitizing supplies.

On Friday evening, the Transportation Workers Union posted a celebratory message on Twitter about Bravo’s resignation: “Great! We hope the next transit director will be willing to put our workers’ safety first.”

In her resignation letter, Bravo highlighted her work advancing the 2016 SMART Plan, which launched transit studies for six commuting corridors, including in South Miami-Dade and between Miami and Miami Beach. Project contracts are signed for both of those, and three others are advancing past the study stage.

“The significant increase in investments in our community’s transportation future is a testament to our unwavering vision and sheer determination to improve mobility in Miami-Dade County,” she wrote.

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