A resident asked me this spring what the Council was voting on that week. I told her to pull the agenda packet off the Town website. She tried. What she found was eight pages of legal captions, ordinance numbers, and staff memoranda written for people who already knew what they were reading. She gave up. So she asked me instead — and most people don’t have a councilmember’s number.
That’s the problem I want to fix, and it’s bigger than one agenda. Cutler Bay government asks a great deal of its residents to come to it: to Town Hall, at six in the evening, on a Wednesday, to read documents written in a language nobody speaks. I want to reverse that. Three things I’d propose as Mayor, all versions of the same idea:
Publish a Plain-Language Preview of Every Agenda
One page, a week ahead, in English and Spanish. What we’re voting on, what it costs, what changes if it passes. Not a replacement for the legal packet — a translation of it. This requires no charter change and very little money. It requires deciding that residents are the audience.
Bring Town Government to the Neighborhood
Our Council meets the third Wednesday of the month at 6:00 p.m. If your shift ends at six, you aren’t there. If you have a child who needs dinner and a bath and a book, you aren’t there. That means that consequential decisions get made in front of only a handful of residents. As Mayor, I’d hold a public forum every month somewhere other than Town Hall, rotating across Town so that over a year it reaches your neighborhood. Not a presentation. A conversation, with answers you can hold me to.
Make Cutler Bay the Easiest Place in South Dade to Open a Small Business
Ask your neighbors where they ate last weekend and count how many say Pinecrest, Kendall, or Homestead. Every one of those meals is a job that happened somewhere else and a dollar that was spent in another city. The fix isn’t one big national tenant. It’s a hundred smaller decisions by people who already live here.
Most first-time business owners aren’t developers. They’re a caterer ready for a storefront, a barber opening a second chair, a family that has saved for years and found a space on US-1. They walk into a process built for people who do this professionally, and some of them give up. I’d put one named person at Town Hall in charge of walking a first-time owner from idea to open door — not a webpage, a person who answers the phone and can provide guidance tailored to small businesses.
Beyond first-time small businesses, the most likely new restaurant or shop in Cutler Bay isn’t a national chain. It’s an independent operator in Pinecrest or Kendall who already counts our residents among their regulars and has wondered about a second location. That outreach call should come from the mayor. I’d also prove the demand instead of describing it; a recurring evening market to encourage small businesses to start, grow, and thrive; working with local commercial property owners to create a simple pop-up program for vacant storefronts that let an operator test Cutler Bay over a weekend rather than a ten-year lease. The ones who do well become tenants. That is how a corridor fills.
Those three proposals have something in common beyond good intentions. Every one of them is within this Town’s power. I’ve spent eight years learning where the Town’s authority ends and the County’s and the State’s begin, and I’ve watched candidates promise things a mayor cannot deliver. I’d rather promise less and be held to it.
None of this replaces the work of protecting what we already have. Density belongs on US-1 — not on Old Cutler Road, not on 87th Avenue, not on any residential street in this Town — and I’ve fought proposals east of the highway for years. Growth in the right place funds the parks, drainage, and services in every other place. That’s the trade, and we should be honest that it is one.
I was the youngest person ever elected to this Council in 2018. I just turned forty, almost exactly the median age in Cutler Bay. Three generations of my family live here — my parents, my wife and me, and our two sons. I’m not going to be somewhere else when these decisions come due, and neither are my kids. That isn’t a credential. It’s the reason I’d rather make them in front of the people who must live with them.
Robert “B.J.” Duncan has served on the Cutler Bay Town Council since 2018 and is a candidate for Mayor.
Contact: bj@bjd.vote
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