By the Coral Gables Gazette editorial board

Last week, Miami commissioners voted unanimously to direct the city attorney to explore legal options for challenging the Live Local Act and, if warranted, take legal action. Hollywood has won a trial-court ruling in a narrower Live Local dispute, though the developer planned to appeal. Hillsborough County has sued the state over the law’s validity. Across Florida, local governments are testing what room remains to push back against a law that has reshaped zoning power from Tallahassee.

Coral Gables, by contrast, has been outspoken about the law while remaining less clear about its own public strategy.

For more than a year, city officials have repeatedly criticized the Live Local Act. They have called it a threat to the city’s zoning standards. They have warned that it preempts decisions residents expect their own commission to make. And now the issue is no longer theoretical: Shoma Group’s planned Ponce 8 project on Southwest Eighth Street marks the first known planned development under the law in Coral Gables.

What is less clear, at least in public, is whether the City Commission has directed a Live Local-specific legal and policy evaluation, and whether residents will be given a public accounting of the city’s options.

That distinction matters, because it is easy to conflate Live Local with other state preemption fights. Coral Gables has, at times, taken formal positions on related state measures, including Senate Bill 180, the broader post-hurricane development-restriction law that several Florida municipalities have challenged in court. But SB 180 and the Live Local Act are not the same statute. Action on one does not constitute an evaluation of the other.

Whatever the city’s posture on SB 180, the public record available so far does not show a Live Local-specific legal assessment commissioned by the City Commission and reported back to residents in an open meeting.

That gap is what deserves attention here.

Reasonable officials can disagree about whether litigation is the right tool. Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson has cautioned that fighting the state aggressively could backfire, comparing the city’s position to a lower court bound by a higher one. Commissioner Ariel Fernandez has argued that correcting a state law is the job of state legislators. Commissioner Melissa Castro, who has built a record advocating for local control in Tallahassee, has been careful not to conflate Hollywood’s narrow procedural win with the broader home-rule fight Miami is now considering.

These are legitimate, defensible positions. None of them, on their own, is the problem.

The problem is that these positions appear to have formed without a public record showing what, specifically, Coral Gables’ own options on Live Local actually are. Residents have heard plenty about what commissioners fear the law might do to the city. They have heard far less about what the city’s own attorney believes Coral Gables could do about it, what coordination with other municipalities might look like, or what tradeoffs a challenge would carry for the workforce housing the law was written to encourage.

This is an unfinished public commitment.

Coral Gables prides itself on careful, deliberate governance, the kind that produced a century of architectural standards strict enough to define the city’s name. That same instinct for deliberation should apply here. A commission willing to warn residents about a law’s dangers owes them a public accounting of what, if anything, it intends to do about it.

The City Commission should direct the city attorney to evaluate Coral Gables’ legal and policy options specifically on the Live Local Act. That review should include whether joining or supporting a regional challenge would meaningfully protect the city’s planning authority, whether litigation would be prudent or premature, and whether the city has other tools available to preserve local standards while still recognizing the law’s legitimate goal of expanding workforce housing.

Not every part of that analysis can or should be conducted in public. Legal strategy has limits, and attorney-client privilege exists for a reason. But the commission should receive enough of that analysis in public for residents to understand the city’s options, the risks of action, the risks of inaction and the basis for whatever course commissioners choose.

Residents need to know whether their commission has actually examined this particular fight before deciding, in effect, to sit it out.

Live Local is likely to surface again as municipal elections approach and candidates are pressed on where they stand. That makes a public strategy more useful now than later, when the issue risks becoming campaign shorthand rather than a governing decision.

Good government is not measured by how forcefully officials identify a problem. It is measured by whether they complete the work required to address it.

On Live Local specifically, Coral Gables has done the first. It has not yet shown residents the second.