5 candidates for Palmetto Bay council want to end divisiveness in Village Hall

Palmetto Bay, a village of about 24,000 people situated on the shores of Biscayne Bay, is on the brink of change.

The village is facing a major budget deficit, a controversial rezoned downtown development district and traffic issues some residents call a “living hell.”

In November, residents will have the chance to vote in a new council member and vice mayor to address some of these issues, and the race has surfaced five colorful characters. The candidates include a seasoned — and vocal — politician, a lobbyist and consultant with a long history of political scuffles and even one candidate who has proudly never attended a village council meeting.

While the personalities vary greatly among the candidates, all five interviewed told the Miami Herald that they hope to be a calming force to a divided council that has been known in recent years to heatedly clash on issues and spend time arguing.

Three candidates for vice mayor

The three candidates running to replace John Dubois as vice mayor are air-conditioning salesman and artist Alan “AlJohn” Farquharson, former village manager Ed Silva and active resident and lawyer Leanne Tellam.

Tellam, who has the backing of Palmetto Bay Mayor Karyn Cunningham, outgoing Vice Mayor DuBois and former Pinecrest mayor and county commission candidate Cindy Lerner, has raised about $31,000 in her race for the $12,000-a-year position. She’s hired top Democratic consultant Christian Ulvert to run her campaign.

A lawyer primarily, Tellam has worked in an array of service-oriented roles, including on various education-related committees and as the president of the Junior League of Miami. She had recently taken a step back after her husband, 57-year-old Doug Tellam, went missing off Key Biscayne while paddleboarding. He was found dead last month.

Tellam first got involved in politics when she began hosting training for Ruth’s List Florida, an organization that prepares women to run for office. She said she finally decided to run so that she can bring some fresh perspective to the council, which she believes makes it hard to govern in a “non-egotistical way.”

“It is extremely frustrating to watch one person drag things on and pick things apart,” she said. “I look forward to getting in there.” She said one of her key goals is to address the budget issues Palmetto Bay faces due to a “a village manager who wasn’t budgeting effectively.”

The manager is Ed Silva, and he’s running for vice mayor, too.

Silva, an architect by trade, became Palmetto Bay’s permanent manager in July 2015 after serving briefly in an interim capacity. Before that, he’d been the village’s director of building and capital projects for eight years.

The position caused a bit of controversy when the county Commission on Ethics and Public Trust in April 2015 received anonymous correspondence alleging that Silva “‘stands to gain either directly or indirectly through clients, business partners or proxies thanks to [his] position.”

The investigator at the time concluded that the role didn’t raise any issues under county law. The commission looked into him again in December 2015 out of concern that he hired an employee to work both at Village Hall and at his private firm.

Soon after leaving his post in January 2020 with a $60,000 severance package, he became the main architect on a slew of development projects the village had approved during his time as a village employee.

Silva told the Miami Herald that he’s in the process of getting his clients to assign the work to other architects in preparation for a potential win. A large chunk of the $32,000 he has raised so far came from developers or development-related companies.

He noted that his experience in development helps, not hurts, his candidacy. He’s the only one capable of delivering the kind of development residents want, he said, like low-scale restaurant and shopping projects.

Silva, who has spent 24 years in Palmetto Bay, said he also hopes to restore trust in the village by using the relationships he built as village manager to quell tension among fellow council members.

“We should be able to sit on that dais without acrimony and speak,” he said. “The biggest issue we have is that we have an extremely divided council that takes shots at each other, and that has to stop ... I am hopeful that I can just cut through a lot of this backroom mentality.”

Farquharson, who runs his family’s air-conditioning business, is the third candidate for vice mayor. He grew up near Kendall, lived in Miami Beach and moved to Palmetto Bay to raise his young children. He says he is the candidate who can best relate to residents, especially those like himself who are frustrated with development.

Farquharson took up the business from his father, who was deported to Jamaica in 2001 as a result of an 1980 incident in which he flew a plane loaded with marijuana from Jamaica to Florida. The disruption in his family led him to “trouble,” racking up a record of assault, battery, property damage and public intoxication charges related to drunken fights and arguments with family members.

“Things fell apart when my dad got deported. From there, I had to leave school and my world started a downward spiral for a few years,” he said. “After that, I started to change my life back to the way I always was. A happy person who wanted to do something positive. I won’t condone them and I don’t regret them … I own them.”

He said now, he wants peaceful neighborhoods that are safe to raise his children. Older generations want to keep things quiet as well,” he said.

“We all want peaceful stuff,” he said. “I don’t feel like it’s heading in that direction of peaceful.”

The only money he’s raised are loans he gave himself, which he used to pay a qualifying fee and buy signs and T-shirts. He’s campaigned locally by using his client list and standing on street corners with signs boasting his name.

Farquharson has never attended a village council meeting himself but says he doesn’t need to have attended to understand what the people outside Village Hall need.

Incumbent Seat 2 councilman hopes to defend his seat

David Singer, the incumbent councilman, is running against Steve Cody for council Seat 2. He originally filed to run for vice mayor, but switched to Seat 2 in March.

Singer, whose background is in regional development and auditing, ran for the first time four years ago and says the problems he faced then have “only gotten worse.” He has raised about $20,500 for his reelection campaign, with big donations coming from development groups and real estate companies.

He is especially concerned about the rezoning of Palmetto Bay’s downtown, traffic-related issues and the budget. Singer is known on the village council for delving deep into agenda items and often spending lots of time going through issues, no matter the size.

He’s been a frequent and strident critic of his colleagues, especially Cunningham, about whom he’s filed an ethics complaint (which was dismissed).

“The mayor would rather be a social director on the Titanic than what she was elected to do,” he recently told Michael Miller of Miami’s Community Newspapers.

The reason he is running for another term?

“My job’s not done,” he said.

His opponent Steve Cody, a suspended lawyer, children’s book author and political consultant, has another impetus.

“I am running because the incumbent, David Singer, has been such a divisive force in the community,” he told the Miami Herald.

Cody worked on many campaigns in the 1970s and ‘80s, but never ran for office himself. His political energy hasn’t waned.

Cody has actively gone after Singer in his Facebook page, posting videos playing profanity-laced voicemails and a news report of an incident in Key Largo where Singer allegedly grabbed a man and was punched in the face.

In recent years, Cody may be best known for a scandalous robocall paid for by his political committee, A Better Miami Dade, which shared a recording of former South Miami Commissioner Valerie Newman accusing then-South Miami Mayor Phillip Stoddard of forcibly kissing her after a Thanksgiving dinner at Newman’s home. The call went out four days before the mayoral election last February.

Cody said he has resigned from the PAC and is not involved in any political committees at the moment. His wife died last year, his eyesight has deteriorated and he recently had a foot amputated due to a diabetes-related infection, so he spends more time working on legal briefs and with his children and grandchildren, some of whom live with him in Palmetto Bay.

He no longer practices law. Cody was suspended in 2013 by the Florida Bar Association for bouncing a check in one case and failing to keep a client informed in another. He was ordered to pay a former client $13,049, and was publicly reprimanded in 2016 for failing to pay the fee, according to court documents.

“One of the advantages in this race is that a lot of people know me,” he said. “One of the disadvantages is that a lot of people know me.”