Mayor Manny Cid presented former Vice Mayor Carlos O. Alvarez with a proclamation and the key to the town during the Jan. 16 council meeting.
“We’re going to miss you,” Mayor Manny Cid said.
Alvarez sponsored or pushed for such changes as a $100,000 reallocation of funds to the Education Advisory Board; a street designation, improving crosswalks at Fairway Drive and Montrose Road, improvements to Veterans Park, Cid said.
Alvarez resigned from the council in the middle of its Nov. 14 meeting. He was first elected in 2018.
Alvarez is principal of the City of Hialeah Educational Academy and president of the CIVICA charter schools network. He cited personal and professional reasons for leaving a year into his second term.
The town will have a special election on April 9 to fill Seat 6.
During the celebration the council thanked Alvarez and recounted stories about his time on the council.
“Governance was a foreign thing to me,” Alvarez said. “It was something that I was not familiar [with]. … Anyone that is serving or has served, the amount of work that it takes to be an elected official, the tenacity, the exhaustion, the early voting, the knocking on doors.
“It’s something really that you want to do,” he said. “It’s something that I challenged myself, something that I wanted to learn. It is rigorous. It will pull you in every single direction, physically and mentally exhausting, leading up to voting.
“I loved it at the time. … It was a wonderful experience. The mayor is a great mentor. … It’s been a great learning experience…that I’ll take with me for the last five years that I served,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez described a “tug of war” between the demands of council work and other parts of his life.
“If I cannot do something at the highest level then someone deserves to come in and do it at the level that the residents of the Town of Miami Lakes deserve,” he said.