The last place Myron Rosner saw himself was on the city council. But when he realized he wanted to make a difference in his community, including for people with disabilities like himself, that’s exactly where he wound up.
By Andrea Jehn Kennedy
In 2001, Myron Rosner was injured during a fall from a three-story home during a construction job with his company, SIZ Construction based in North Miami Beach, Florida. When the doctors told him he’d never walk again, little did Rosner know that would be the first of a never-ending series of battles that would test his willpower.
Rosner spent several months at a specialist rehabilitation center in Israel, and continued to maintain his business from a laptop in his hospital bed until returning home. His inspiration came from many people, but he focused on his wife Sarah, who had helped run his business while he was gone, maintained their home with three children and a fourth on the way, and continued to run her own legal practice.
Early the following year, Sarah chose to run for circuit court judge, a nine-month, county- wide campaign that was Rosner’s second challenge. They closed both businesses and focused on a 2.2 million-voter race, with Sarah finally succeeding in November of 2002. After being thwarted by Miami city planning boards and a tight knit political community, Rosner took on his next challenge: to run for city council himself. Little did he know at the time that he chose the toughest match to overturn a 22-year incumbent who had his roots dug deep into many departments of the community. But right away Rosner saw that he was desperately needed, and began to prepare thoroughly for the fight of his life.
His opponent played hardball. He spread rumors, made threats, and played political tricks that left a foul taste in Rosner’s mouth.
“Be careful what you wish for,” he warns. “Politics is dirty.” But the more they tried to push Rosner down, the harder he fought back.
Doing the best thing he could have done, Rosner focused on the people instead of his opponent. He gathered numbers and statistics on his voters, used the same consultants he used for his wife’s campaign, and went out knocking on doors in his manual wheelchair.
Rosner blanketed his four-mile district with 750 signs, handed out brochures with his simple message, and spoke to everyone he possibly could to find out what his community wanted, what they felt had been missing over the past 22 years.
Rosner didn’t have a specific platform to run on, he says, but his message was plain. “I didn’t offer any false promises. I just told them I would do the best I could and asked them to give me the opportunity to represent them.”
Rosner also did something no one else running for that office had ever done: he went hard after nonvoters. In addition to leaving information and brochures in the homes he visited, Rosner left absentee ballots, and in the end, it was saving grace. Rosner’s aggressive door-to-door campaign yielded nearly four times the absentee ballot votes of previous years. He beat his opponent by 300 votes, thanks to 490 votes from 676 absentee ballots. The previous election year, only 170 absentee ballots trickled in.
When Rosner took offi ce in 2003, he took over several existing committees, one of which was the 11 year old Advisory Committee for Disabled Individuals. With a $15,000 annual budget, made up partially from handicapped parking fees, Rosner began spearheading Miami’s access improvements immediately. Including renovated pool lifts, a Center for Independent Living, and the Disability Sports Program (DSP) that continues to grow beyond sports to include a successful free gym for people with disabilities, the Advisory Committee’s yearly projects began to outgrow the annual budget, leading Rosner to Washington, DC, to lobby for additional funding.
After five years, Rosner’s accomplishments in DC brought in a $330,000 grant this year for the DSP. Having progressed from a small two-sport operation, DSP now operates a gym facility with state-of-the-art exercise equipment including the disability-focused VitaGlide machine, group workout schedules, and additional sports such as tennis and tandem cycling.
But Rosner insists that access and disability rights aren’t the main focus for his seat on the city council. He has also turned the local Commission on Aging and Senior Citizen’s Advisory board into a community support system with monthly meetings, networking luncheons, and evening speeches. He has spearheaded the Caribbean Affairs Committee, bringing notice to a 5,000-strong community that had previously gone unrecognized, and offering Creole language classes, events, and more. Rosner speaks three languages (going on four with Creole), and continues to make it his mission to know his community well, fight for their needs, and “To do the best I can for my city.”
He is currently the highest-rated city council member among community polls, has no hidden agenda, and hopes to continue to offer leadership and support to the community he so loves. He has been reelected three times without contest, and sees no end in sight.
When the opposition tried to peg Rosner with an ethic complaint, saying he was “looking for the pity vote” due to his wheelchair, he appeared on the radio to defend his position. When he knocked on 6,000 doors over several months, constituents told him they hadn’t seen anyone knock on doors in 20 years. He’d beaten an incumbent who had his fingers wrapped so tightly around the politics of the community that no one had even contested him in years. For Myron Rosner, it wasn’t about the wheelchair. It was about doing what was right.
His advice to anyone wanting to run for public office: “Get people’s support. The best advice I had was to not be a radical. Radicals push votes away. Know what people want, prepare for your race, and don’t make any promises.”
By keeping himself mainstream and finding a cause to believe in, Rosner kept himself above the odds, and it has led him to places he’d never dreamed of.
Andrea J. Kennedy is Action’s Travel columnist.
