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...with the disturbing bridge colony putting Miami under increased national scrutiny - it has managed the improbable feat of arousing sympathy for pedophiles - Miami-Dade County hopes to return some sanity to the issue. A new law takes effect on Monday that supersedes the county's 24 municipal ordinances, many of which make it all but impossible for offenders to find housing. It keeps the 2,500-feet restriction, but applies it only to schools. It also sets a 300-foot restriction to keep offenders from loitering near anyplace where children gather, which many experts call a more practical solution than...
Ironically, it was one of residency restrictions' fiercest proponents who helped push the softer Miami-Dade law through the county commission. Ron Book, a powerful Florida lobbyist, began his crusade for tougher residency laws after discovering that his daughter was molested by a nanny for years. Now, realizing that homelessness makes offenders potentially more dangerous, Book has shifted his campaign to the kind of child-safety, no-loitering zones that are built into the Miami-Dade measure. "Child-safety zones [should] have been a critical component of what we did [before]," says Book. "We just didn't think of them...
Florida Department of Corrections spokesperson Greti Plessinger agrees, saying, "We are glad that [Miami-Dade County] has taken the lead on this." But Miami-Dade is just one of Florida's 67 counties. Eventually the state, and maybe even Washington, will have to assume that lead. Keeping sex offenders under the bridge may be good short-term politics, but it may well threaten the long-term safety of kids...
What's still alarming in states like Florida is the frequency of hit-and-run deaths. Most U.S. counties see only a handful of them each year; but Miami-Dade County in the past decade has seen as many as 46, a good number of them taking the lives of children like Ashley. It's partly due to a mind-set that views pedestrians as nuisances. To crack down on that way of thinking, Risete, Ashley's mother, has pushed for a number of measures in Florida - including the Ashley Nicole Valdes Alert System in Miami-Dade, which notifies...
...Most of the federal stimulus money is disbursed via states and counties, and the outlook for minorities does seem better once the dollars reach more local levels. Miami-Dade County's Public Works Department has kept its so far $25 million worth of stimulus projects relatively small, and therefore more accessible to minority contractors, to ensure its own 10% DBE participation goal. On some projects Miami-Dade has even 100% DBE involvement. For now, the county is using what stimulus money it can earmark for transit purposes to purchase a fleet of BRT (bus rapid transit) buses that will...