El Portal is home.El Portal is life.El Portal needs us.
El Portal is not just a place; it’s a people. I’m Danny Rojas, and I’m here for us: for the community that knows we can do better, for our families, our homes, and the environment.
Why I’m running
Fourteen years in El Portal, mostly on foot.
Fourteen years ago my wife, our dog Dahlia, and I went looking for a home in Miami — somewhere with nature, culture, and room to be ourselves. We fell in love with the house, and with El Portal, before we even finished the walk-through. It was a fixer-upper and we worked extra jobs to afford it, but the reward came every morning and evening: long walks through a neighborhood where time moved slower. The odd, beautiful houses. The canopy overhead. And the neighbors — you cannot walk this village for an hour without stopping to talk to someone. A sanctuary in every sense of the word.
When our daughter was born, everything changed except the long walks. When COVID shut everything down, those walks kept all four of us sane, and we weren't alone out there. More people were walking El Portal than I'd ever seen, and we met neighbors we'd lived near for a decade without ever meeting. For a while the whole village was out on its own streets.
But COVID also brought change, and it came faster than before. Old houses came down, new ones went up, and specimen trees disappeared from lots that had sat empty for years — with no assessment of what we were losing. Dahlia was older by then and our walks were shorter, but the contrast was hard to miss: the landscape kept changing while nothing underneath it did.
We'd been comfortable. We trusted the Village was being led responsibly.
That ended when the Council moved to raise its own compensation, in a village with potholes older than my daughter.
So I stopped walking past, and I started showing up — to meetings, to the Tree Board, to the Little River Conservancy — because if I was going to have opinions about my village, I should understand how it actually works.
We spoke up. They backed down.
Then the Rader Memorial United Methodist Church was demolished, four days before a town hall on the project. Village Hall was packed. Neighbors ended up on opposite sides of a room they’d shared for years. What I remember isn’t the anger — it’s how much trust we lost, with the Village and with each other. The application was never approved or denied. It’s still pending.
I'm running because trust can be rebuilt — not by arguing louder, but by doing the work in the open.
Dahlia isn't with us anymore. We still take the walks. El Portal is still the place we fell in love with, and it's worth protecting.
What’s at stake
El Portal is facing more at once than it has in a long time.
Amendment 3 is on this same ballot. It raises the homestead exemption for non-school taxes to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028, and limits what property taxes can be spent on. Property taxes are well over half of what runs this village.
Live Local and SB 180 limit what a small municipality can require of what gets built in it.
The water is higher than it was, and the drainage work moves one phase at a time, because that’s all we can afford.
And the Village’s own auditor has flagged a deficit fund balance five years running.
One of those is your call. The rest is already here, or already ours. All of it lands on whoever is sitting at the table next.
I have a vested interest in El Portal surviving as an independent municipality, because I’m not leaving.
We’re small enough to take on big problems.
4 US means all of us
Us means everyone. Not just the loudest voice at the podium, not just whoever knows a councilmember, not just whoever arrives with a lawyer — but also the neighbors who can’t make a Tuesday night meeting.
I’ll listen before I decide, and tell you what I heard — including the parts I disagreed with. Disagreement is how a village finds answers, not how it comes apart. And I’ll weigh every vote the same way: does this serve the village, or only part of it?
What I’ll do
Nature is one of our most valuable assets
Our trees protect us. The river sustains us. Nature defines us.
El Portal sits along the Little River, which drains into Biscayne Bay. What goes in here ends up there. The charrette saw both the river and the canopy as assets; we have used neither. Protecting them is the resilience we can build fastest. Lose the canopy and the heat comes, the runoff comes, and the wildlife goes. What I’d add is that protecting the canopy is one of the few things that slows a bad project down.
- Grow the canopy — it’s infrastructure, not landscaping
- Tree rules developers can’t route around
- Rehabilitate the Little River — its shores, its mangroves, and the partnerships to pay for it
- Fix the drainage — funded every year, not when money turns up
Trust, earned in the open
Everyone should know who decides what. Every proposal in front of you before it’s voted on. Every dollar should earn its place.
Trust isn’t something a council can ask for; it’s something it earns, in public, one decision at a time. And when residents can’t tell who’s responsible for a decision, they can’t hold anyone to it — and neither can the Council.
In February I asked this Council to disclose conflicts of interest on development matters, and to step back from votes where one applies. I’d bring it as a motion.
The pay increase didn’t get stopped because someone on the dais changed their mind. It got stopped because residents showed up — and it was deferred, not decided. Open government isn’t a courtesy the Council extends — it’s what makes a village able to move it.
- Hold the Manager to the charter — and the staff to the Manager
- Say it out loud when you know the applicant
- Read written comment into the record — and keep it in the minutes
- Monthly reports on spending and contracts — on the website, not on request
- Bid the renewals, not just the new contracts
- Rebuild the reserves before the next storm
The village we keep
Hold the line on scale. Preserve our village. Enjoy it together.
The question isn’t whether El Portal grows. It’s whether growth follows a standard, or whether each exception becomes the argument for the next one.
I’d start from something this village already decided. The charrette it paid for put eight stories on Biscayne Boulevard and stepped down to two and three inside the village. That’s the standard I’d hold new construction to — the one we already agreed on.
Growth should never come at the cost of what makes this place worth living in — our community and small-village feel are what make it home.
- Keep density on the corridor, not in the heart of the village
- Every recommendation cites the code it rests on
- Movie nights and wellness, on a real calendar
“I want to walk this village in ten years under a closed canopy, past yards that feed wildlife and streets that soak up the rain. Along a shoreline that holds, and a river clean enough to swim in again — in a village that paid its own way there.”Danny Rojas
Meet Danny
I’ve worked in Miami’s health district since 2009 — first at the University of Miami, then at Jackson Health System, where I’ve led the telehealth and AV team since 2014. That work has taught me how to show up, do the homework, and take responsibility for the people counting on me.
A large part of it is contracts: writing the specifications, reviewing the bids, holding vendors to what they promised. It’s public money, for an institution that can’t afford waste. A village signs contracts too, and the questions are the same ones.
It’s also taught me that hospitals don’t run on individuals. Nothing I’ve built there worked because one person had the right answer — it worked because a team found it together, usually after disagreeing about it first. And teams only work when everyone knows their role and everyone else’s. That’s not bureaucracy; it’s what keeps good people from tripping over each other.
That’s how I’d approach a council of five, the staff who make it work, and the residents we both answer to.
My wife and I have called El Portal home for fourteen years, and our small part started in our own yard. We planted native plants when we moved in, and a decade later we have a pollinator garden that draws birds, butterflies, and even glowing click beetles. We compost. We grow, not always successfully, our own vegetables. We keep our lights off at night for the animals who share the yard after dark.
That same care led me to the board of the Little River Conservancy and the El Portal Tree Board. I wanted to actually understand these issues before claiming to represent them.
None of that makes me an expert. It makes me a neighbor who did the reading. What I can promise is that I’ll keep doing it — and that when something comes before the Council that I don’t understand yet, I’ll say so and go find out.
- El Portal resident since 2012
- Little River Conservancy, board member
- El Portal Tree Board, member
- Jackson Health System, telehealth and AV, since 2014
Sunday morning basketball with the kids on our block.
What I’m hearing at the doors
I said I’d tell you what I heard, including the parts I disagreed with. Here’s what keeps coming up, and what I’d do about it. Updated as I go.
Told me something I should add? Send it over.
Events
Campaign events, community meetings, and election dates.
No events scheduled right now — check back, or email me.
Get involved
This campaign runs on neighbors. Whatever you can give — an hour, a yard, a few dollars — helps us reach more of El Portal before November 3.