EDITORIAL: Why can’t Coral Gables’ transportation board meet regularly?

By the Coral Gables Gazette editorial board

On July 21, the Transportation Advisory Board gathered to discuss a potentially significant development in the city’s transit planning: an interagency effort involving Miami-Dade County, South Miami and the University of Miami to explore a trolley connection across U.S. 1. Board member Henry Pinera, who attended the interagency meeting, described it as an effort to set the rules for how such a service might operate.

The board could not vote on any of it. It could not approve its own minutes. It could not send a single formal recommendation to the City Commission. It lacked a quorum.

An advisory board exists to produce a public record. Its value to residents is that its members’ views are stated in an open meeting, recorded and transmitted to the elected officials who will decide. On July 21, the Transportation Advisory Board produced no such formal record. The discussion happened. Formal deliberation and action did not.

That would be unremarkable as an isolated bad night. It is harder to set aside alongside a second fact: with more than half of 2026 complete, the board has held two official meetings. Chair Roland Rodriguez has separately told colleagues that last year’s annual report to the City Commission was largely generic, and that he intends to circulate a draft of this year’s report, due Oct. 1, for the board to review in advance.

Those two facts raise a legitimate question about whether the board is meeting often enough, and producing work substantial enough, to fulfill the advisory role the city created it to perform.

The question matters because the city’s transportation agenda has not slowed to match the board’s pace. The Southern Loop route launched in 2025 and has been gaining riders, approaching 2,000 a month as of the most recent verified count, though still far behind the roughly 83,000 monthly riders on the Ponce route. The city has approved a new interlocal agreement with Miami-Dade County governing its circulator service, extending a framework first established in 2010. A scramble crossing at Ponce de Leon Boulevard and Miracle Mile is before the commission, which postponed action pending further review. The city has been awarded $60,000 toward a Pedestrian Master Plan. And the trolley discussions with South Miami and the county continue outside the board’s formal proceedings.

None of that is evidence of bad faith, and none of it should stop. A city that wants residents out of their cars should be building ridership, negotiating with neighbors and pursuing grant money for pedestrian planning. The concern is narrower. Coral Gables built a citizen board to examine these questions in public before they reach a commission vote. When that board cannot conduct business, the examination does not move elsewhere. It simply does not occur, and residents lose the one forum designed to give them a documented voice in transportation policy while it is still being formed.

What remains unknown is why. The city should publish the board’s 2026 meeting and attendance record, identify any vacancies or scheduling obstacles, clarify what its own rules require of members, and explain how it intends to restore the board to regular working order. If the difficulty is attendance among sitting members, the city has rules and can apply them. If the difficulty is scheduling, that should be among the most readily solvable problems on the list. What the city should not do is allow the board’s formal role to become decorative through accumulated silence, without anyone deciding that it should.

This is a question of democratic process, and of the modest but real promise a city makes when it creates a citizen board. The promise is that residents will have a place at the table before decisions are made. Coral Gables has made that promise. It is worth keeping deliberately rather than losing by attrition.

Residents deserve a transportation board that can examine proposals in public and tell the City Commission what it thinks while those proposals are still taking shape. That is a modest expectation. On the record available today, it is not being met.