By Jose Navarro, MBA
Every election cycle, Miami-Dade County’s thirteen commissioners and its mayor raise money from a remarkably consistent donor base: developers, government contractors, lobbyists, and the firms competing for the very contracts those officials vote to award. The pattern isn’t hidden — it shows up in publicly filed campaign finance reports every quarter — but its persistence, year after year, deserves more scrutiny than a single donor list gets when it flashes through the news cycle.
The developers at the top of the list
In the first quarter of 2026, Bluenest Development, a homebuilder based just outside Miami, gave more than $190,000 to county commissioners — the largest single-donor total tracked in that period. The Related Group, one of Miami’s leading builders of public and affordable housing, gave $115,000. The Swerdlow Group, another developer that depends on county land and approvals for its affordable- and workforce-housing projects, gave $105,000. These aren’t incidental contributions from firms with no business before the county. Related and Swerdlow both have projects that require the same commission votes their donations are funding campaigns to win.
The pattern repeated the following quarter. CDR Maguire, an emergency-management firm that ran county COVID testing centers, gave $90,000 across incumbents — and separately, CDR gave $70,000 to a political committee tied to Commissioner Oliver Gilbert while he was running for a congressional seat, with the remaining $35,000 split among three other sitting commissioners. Notably, CDR Maguire also holds a state contract to operate the “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention facility — a company simultaneously navigating state contracting relationships and county-level political giving.
When the donor and the contractor are the same company
Some of the clearest examples involve firms whose county business and campaign giving trace to the same relationship. Horsepower Electric and AUM Construction, two contractors run by members of the same family, together gave $135,500 to commissioners. In 2024, commissioners awarded Horsepower a contested contract to update the county’s traffic-light system; the company has since secured an additional contract to fix county streetlights. The timing — a contested award followed by continued donations followed by a second contract — is the kind of sequence campaign-finance reformers have flagged in Miami-Dade for years without securing a policy fix.
David Martin, a developer with multiple county deals in progress, gave $162,500 through corporate entities linked to his Terra development firm. Triple Five, the developer behind a long-stalled mega-mall proposal that needs a change in county subsidy law to proceed, gave roughly $125,000 to commissioners, mostly in support of the sitting board that would ultimately vote on that change. MasTec, a major infrastructure contractor, gave about $260,000 to incumbents in a single year — mostly funneled to commissioner-specific committees rather than general county party accounts.
The defense, and why it doesn’t fully answer the question
Commissioners and the donors themselves generally offer the same explanation when reporters ask: the money supports candidates who back the county’s long-term growth, not specific votes. One frequent donor’s statement put it in almost identical language to what’s been offered for years — that the firm supports “candidates and public leaders from both political parties who we believe are committed to the county’s long-term strength, economic growth and quality of life.” That may well be sincerely meant. It’s also functionally impossible to distinguish, from the outside, between a donor genuinely committed to regional growth and a donor whose growth happens to run through contracts and zoning approvals the same commissioners control.
Miami-Dade has been here before. A 2016 push for tighter campaign-finance rules — including a proposed ban on political donations from firms receiving large government payments — was voted down by the commission itself, with one commissioner arguing publicly that she didn’t believe donations influence how officials vote. A decade later, the same donor categories — developers, contractors, lobbyists — still dominate the county’s political giving, and the same absence of a contribution-source restriction persists.
What would a real fix require?
None of this requires proving that any individual commissioner traded a vote for a check — that’s a much higher bar and is rarely provable from campaign-finance filings alone. But the county doesn’t need a bribery case to justify closing the structural gap that makes the pattern possible in the first place: a rule barring or capping donations from firms with active or pending contracts before the donating commissioner’s office, disclosure requirements that make the contractor-to-commissioner-to-contract sequence visible in real time rather than reconstructed later by reporters, and an independent review of any contract awarded within a defined window of a qualifying donation. Miami-Dade voters rejected the version of this reform proposed in 2016. The donor list hasn’t materially changed since. At some point, the county’s residents deserve a commission willing to revisit that decision, rather than one that keeps citing the same defense whenever the same donor names resurface.
The cost of leaving it alone
The argument against reform has stayed consistent for a decade: campaign contributions are protected political speech, and donors give to candidates whose general priorities they support, not to buy specific outcomes. That argument becomes harder to sustain the more precisely a donation timeline lines up with a contract award, and Miami-Dade’s own donor rolls keep producing that alignment year after year. Residents don’t need proof of an explicit quid pro quo to reasonably ask why the same handful of firms — developers awaiting zoning votes, contractors awaiting renewal decisions, emergency-management companies holding state contracts — keep showing up at the top of every quarterly donor list the county’s commissioners are required to file.
Jose Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and public affairs analyst based in San Diego with more than two decades of experience in public finance, nonprofit management, and government contract compliance.