Miami Republican Rep. Vicki Lopez is vacating her office in the House to fill an open seat on the Miami-Dade Commission.
Lopez will join the panel, whose 12 current members voted 7-5 for a resolution appointing her to fill the District 5 seat vacated earlier this month by Eileen Higgins, a Democrat.
Lopez is to hold the post until at least the 2026 Midterm Election, when the seat will again be up for grabs in accordance with county charter rules.
District 5 covers parts of Miami and Miami Beach, including the neighborhoods of Brickell, Downtown Miami, Little Havana, Miami River, Mid Beach, The Roads, Silver Bluff, Shenandoah, South Beach and West Flagler.
Lopez comes to the job after an effective tenure as a state lawmaker. She won House District 113 by 2 points in 2022, flipping the long-blue seat red. In her freshman term, she passed well over half her bills, including 75% of those she carried in the 2024 Legislative Session.
Some were ambitious proposals. She was the House sponsor for the Live Local Act, a seismic measure meant to address Florida’s affordable housing shortage that critics argued preempted local growth controls while giving too much to developers.
She also tackled the thankless task of fixing the state’s post-Surfside condo safety law, which underwent major revisions in subsequent Sessions, and created a pilot program that extended home-hardening grants to condo owners.
Her legislative victories, including nearly $26 million in appropriations, came despite her votes against her party’s draconian six-week abortion ban and a proposal to roll back age restrictions on long rifle purchases the Legislature passed after the 2018 Parkland massacre.
Vicki Lopez will hold the District 5 seat on the Miami-Dade County Commission until at least next November, following her appointment Tuesday by the Board. Image via Florida House.
Ahead of the 2026 Session, Lopez co-chaired a House panel on eliminating or reducing property taxes, the revenue from which finances many of the operations she’ll now have direct say in at County Hall.
“I am grateful to the people and leaders of Miami-Dade County for their faith in me, and I’m ready to get to work for the people of our community,” Lopez told Florida Politics by text.
“In the Florida Legislature, I’ve worked closely with our local elected officials and their staff to create opportunities and solve many of the challenges we face. While I have truly enjoyed my service in the Legislature, my job there is to address policy that affects not just my constituents but all the people of the state of Florida. This opportunity to serve on the Commission permits me the pleasure of focusing on our local communities, specifically in our shared desire to keep them truly special.”
This will be Lopez’s second stint as a County Commissioner. She served as a Lee County Commissioner in the 1990s, during which she was convicted for honest services fraud and served 15 months in prison until President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence. An appeals court later overturned her conviction.
In the decades since, Lopez has dedicated much of her policy efforts to criminal justice reform and helping wrongly convicted people, including work as an advocate under former Gov. Jeb Bush.
Commissioners Marleine Bastien, Oliver Gilbert, Keon Hardemon, Danielle Cohen Higgins, Rob Gonzalez and Natalie Milian Orbis, who took her District 6 seat by appointment in May, voted with Chair Anthony Rodriguez to pick Lopez from a group of five applicants.
Vice Chair Kionne McGhee, whose motion to set a Special Election in January to fill the seat was shot down by Rodriguez, voted “no” alongside Juan-Carlos “J.C.” Bermudez, René García, Raquel Regalado and Micky Steinberg.
Had the panel opted to hold a Special Election, the winner would have earned the right to serve District 5 at County Hall through 2028.
Miami-Dade Commission Vice Chair Kionne McGhee, a former House Democratic Leader, led an unsuccessful charge to call a Special Election to fill the District 5 seat Eileen Higgins vacated this month to run for Miami Mayor. Image via Miami-Dade County.
Before the vote, which took place after roughly 40 minutes of deliberation on the dais, one of the other applicants implored Commissioners to support a Special Election even though most agreed it would cost the county extra money and draw fewer voters than would participate in the General Election next year.
“Our district deserves a voice,” said Joe Sanchez, a former Miami City Commissioner who last year ran unsuccessfully for Miami-Dade Sheriff. “We cannot and should not put a price tag on the right of the people to decide who represents them.”
That argument arose in similar forms as Commissioners discussed what observers believed to be a foregone conclusion, as Rodriguez appeared to have the votes needed to choose his preferred candidate ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
McGhee made clear his issue wasn’t with Lopez, who was selected over Sanchez, former Rep. David Richardson, former Miami-Dade Commissioner Bruno Barreiro and businessman Tony Diaz.
McGhee described Lopez as “one of the brightest” people he knows and a “hard-charging” policymaker with whom he’d collaborated on criminal justice reform ex-inmate reintegration through an initiative called Transition Inc.
“Vicki will always be my friend,” he said. “What brings us here today is not about who gets to fill a seat. The real question is about who gets to choose.”
García, a former Senator, reminded his peers of a referendum that voters weighed in on in 2020, when he won his seat at County Hall. A whopping 78.4% of voters said “yes” to a ballot question asking if they supported amending the Miami-Dade Charter to require a vote during the next Primary or General Election if the county Mayor or a Commissioner resigned to run for another office, as Higgins did on Nov. 5, one after advancing to a runoff for Miami Mayor.
“The voters have spoken, and they’ve said, ‘We want elections,’” he said. “Yet, now we’re using the fact that we pick and choose when democracy applies.”
Much of the blame for the Commission’s conundrum sits at Higgins’ feet, Regalado noted, adding that Higgins could have resigned much earlier this year, or even before she coasted back into office unopposed last year. Regalado said she did that when she left the Miami-Dade School Board to run for county Mayor, and her father, Miami-Dade Property Appraiser Tomás Regalado, did the same when he ran for Miami Mayor.
“This board is being put in a very difficult position,” she said.
Miami-Dade Commission Chair Anthony Rodriguez, who left the House in 2022 for a seat on the County Commission, delivered the District 5 seat to his preferred appointee, Vicki Lopez, after rejecting a motion from Vice Chair Kionne McGhee to call a Special Election. Image via Miami-Dade County.
Bermudez said that while he believes Lopez is “an extraordinary person,” appointing her would give her significant advantages over her challengers by Election Day next year.
Hardemon disagreed, citing the example of Miami Commission Chair Christine King, who was passed over in 2020 for an appointment in favor of Jeffrey Watson, whom she unseated by a landslide in the city’s General Election the following year.
“Any time you’ve been appointed to a position, you are not the favorite, meaning the (people) have an opportunity to say, ‘We don’t want you,’” he said. “I’ve seen it happen with people who are appointed from time to time.”
Notably, all of the last five people appointed to the Miami-Dade Commission — Milian Orbis, Gonzalez, Cohen Higgins, Rebeca Sosa and Audrey Edmonson — kept their appointed seats in the subsequent election. The last time a Special Election was held to fill a vacant seat, Higgins defeated Barreiro in an upset.
Gilbert, the immediate past Chair of the Commission, argued that people who want a voter-chosen Commissioner should support an appointment now, since turnout in Special Elections tend to be far lower than in General Elections. For instance, the 2018 Special Election saw about 15% of District 5’s registered voters cast ballots. In the 2022 General Election, 47% of county voters participated.
“If you really want people to participate,” he said, “you want them to participate when elections happen.”
Gonzalez agreed.
“Everybody on this dais is for elections, and everybody on this dais wants to make sure that the people’s voices are heard, especially if we’re going to have the most amount of people vote,” he said. “I’m giving, with my vote, the constituents of District 5 a voice in their representative for the next three years — just come (out and vote) in eight months.”
With Lopez departing the Legislature, her seat representing House District 113 will be up for grabs. Democratic consultant Christian Ulvert said Miami-Dade Young Democrats President Justin Mendoza Routt will file paperwork to run.
Florida Politics contacted Mendoza Routt for comment but received none by press time.