Town officials were shocked when a hydraulic backhoe dug a ditch and a front-end loader filled the trench with gravel along Northwest 170th Street.The street leads to a closed bridge that the city of Hialeah and Miami-Dade County apparently want to open soon.“They’re doing the work without permits,” Mayor Manny Cid said Oct. 2 as he observed the road work at Northwest 89th Avenue. Cid said the construction partially trespassed on town...

Tired of being squashed by nationally ranked high school football teams, Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High and Barbara Goleman Senior High formed an independent league for 12 schools to give their programs a fair chance to compete.And what a difference the Greater Miami Athletic Conference’s (GMAC) independent league has made.The Goleman Gators are off to their best start in school history at 6-0, and the Trojans are 3-1, including 3-0 in...

Royal Palm Estates was developed in the late 1980s and there are 108 single-family homes in the community.The neighborhood is at the northwest corner of Northwest 154th Street and Northwest 82nd Avenue, and extends north to Northwest 157th Terrace.Its western border, at Northwest 83rd Place, abuts a waterway and land where cattle graze.The neighborhood is almost fully developed: a home is rising on the last remaining lot.The Park Centre Shops...

The dreaded Palmetto Expressway may have a new nickname: the not so bad Palmetto, perhaps?On Sept. 23, drivers using new express lanes on the Palmetto Expressway began paying tolls with their Sunpass transponders.Some Miami Lakes drivers like the express lanes; others, not so much.Whatever one’s feelings about the tolls, those who watch traffic on Northwest 154th Street said the town’s main east-west artery is less congested.And that’s not...

After a federal jury found in 2014 that former Miami Lakes Mayor Michael Pizzi was not guilty of conspiracy to commit extortion and bribery, he sought to have the town pay more than $2.5 million in legal fees. Pizzi was mayor in 2013 when the FBI arrested him in a sting, and then Gov. Rick Scott suspended him from office. After Pizzi was acquitted and reinstated as mayor, he sued the town to recover the costs of his defense. The town has...