In the race for the District 3 seat on the Miami-Dade County Commission, voters this month will have the rare choice of two candidates they’ve already elected for that post.
The Miami-area contest pits the incumbent, Commissioner Keon Hardemon, against his predecessor, Audrey Edmonson, who gave up her commission seat in 2020 due to the county’s newly enacted term-limit rules.
While commissioners are now limited to a pair of consecutive four-year terms, the rules don’t bar them from running again once they’ve been out of office. Edmonson, 71, is the first term-limited former commissioner to take that path, adding an extra dimension of political intrigue to a race between two longtime rivals.
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Both are trying to claim the better legacy from serving as the commissioner for District 3, which stretches from downtown Miami north into Miami Shores, and includes the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Brownsville, Liberty City and Overtown.
“You’re either voting for the past, and going back to conditions that were unbearable,” Hardemon, 40, said at a July 23 forum put on by the Miami Foundation. “Or you’re voting for the future and for a community you can have pride in.”
Edmonson is counting on voters’ remorse after four years with Hardemon representing District 3 on the 13-seat commission.
“I’m back by popular demand,” Edmonson said at the forum. “The current commissioner is not accessible. He’s not there for the community.”
Hardemon faces a second challenger in Marion Brown, the 59-year-old owner of a construction business that specializes in work at landfills.
Brown said he’s not a fan of Hardemon and wanted to dampen development in District 3 before more long-time residents leave.
“Keon is not doing a great job. He’s let the community down,” Brown said in an interview. “My main thing is slowing down gentrification.”
With three candidates in the race, the contest could stretch into November. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote on Aug. 20, the top two finishers will compete in a run-off on Election Day.
As an incumbent and chair of the commission committee that oversees Miami International Airport, Hardemon holds a steep fund-raising advantage over his challengers. Campaign finance records show he has raised more than $1.3 million over the last four years.
Edmonson’s war chest is a mystery, as she hasn’t disclosed the political committees she’s using to bankroll her election effort. A press release from April announced more than $100,000 raised for her “campaign account and political committees supporting her re-election bid,” but Edmonson declined to identify the committees. Unlike Hardemon, she has not filled out a disclosure form Miami-Dade requires candidates to file if they are raising money for political committees.
Her campaign account shows $45,000 raised since she entered the race in February. Brown reported raising about $2,500.
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Edmonson, a grandmother, and Hardemon, who is raising two school-age children with his wife, both point to gun violence as a priority, and each said they would expand on prior efforts.
In 2021, Hardemon sponsored legislation that funded Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s plan for countywide summer jobs program and other neighborhood anti-violence and prosperity programs with $8 million in upfront money from crypto giant FTX’s sponsorship deal for the county-owned arena where the Miami Heat play.
“Instead of preaching at these kids and telling them not to do drugs and not to commit crimes, we actually put money in their pockets,” Hardemon said at the forum.
When FTX collapsed after federal fraud charges hit top executives, the commission shifted funding for the “Peace and Prosperity Plan” to dollars from the replacement naming-rights sponsor, Kaseya. The ongoing plan has county dollars for grants across Miami-Dade, but steers more dollars to District 3 and other commission districts with higher incidents of gun violence.
Edmonson countered with a promise to use the District 3 seat as a way to mediate directly with sources of violence in the neighborhoods — a strategy she said was promising while she was in office.
“We were meeting with the gang leaders,” she said. “As well as waiting outside their doors.”
Brown said he would use the District 3 seat to get more club owners to hire off-duty police and get the community more invested in curbing violence by young people. “Neighbors to neighbors,” Brown said.
Brown said he has the insight for a practical effort on neighborhood safety. His court history includes some arrests in the 1990s, a record the married grandfather chalks up to a long-ago phase in which he was with “the wrong people at the wrong time.”
He said he’s eager to use a commission seat for a broad approach to reducing violence among young men. “I want the community to be a part of this,” he said. “The community will help.”
Edmonson is a former El Portal mayor who became a Miami-Dade commissioner in 2005. In 2012 she beat back a challenge by Hardemon, then a public defender in his late 20s.
Hardemon went on to win a seat on the Miami City Commission the next year, a post he held until winning his County Commission race four years ago.
After leaving the commission in 2020, Edmonson briefly ran for Congress against incumbent Democrat Frederica Wilson, but dropped out before the 2022 primary.
Both Edmonson and Hardemon see their commission action on housing development as a reason for voters to trust them in 2024.
“I was born in public housing. I care greatly, and deeply, about the status of public housing in our community,” Hardemon said. He said the ongoing push to attach both subsidized and market-rate housing to public housing complexes when they’re redeveloped will help keep the middle class in District 3. Without that, younger residents who secure professional jobs find themselves without options.
“What’s important is we build housing for everyone,” he said. “Housing that doesn’t give you a stigma for living in a certain development.”
On the issue of neighborhood improvement, he also pointed to legislation he sponsored to improve neighborhoods, including turning over county land to stabilize and preserve the Lincoln Memorial Park park cemetery in Brownsville. “It really turned the cemetery from an eyesore to something that is a beauty to see,” he said. “All it took was better leadership.”
Edmonson said voters continue to see the results from county-backed housing developments approved while she was on the commission.
“I did a lot of affordable housing in the community so people could have a decent place to live,” she said. “I was known as the housing guru.… I built a lot for our community, and I left a lot in the queue.”
