Category: Other

Should the view at your neighborhood park include a sponsor’s logo? Miami-Dade voters will settle that question in November, after the county commission voted to place a charter amendment on the ballot that would lift the county’s prohibition on advertising in county-owned parks.

The measure squeaked through. Getting a charter amendment on the ballot requires a two-thirds supermajority, and the proposal, sponsored by commission Chairman Anthony Rodriguez, passed 8-4, with commissioners Regalado, McGhee, García and Steinberg opposed and Commissioner Hardemon absent.

A Hedge Against a Tax Hit

The timing is no accident. The same November ballot carries a statewide vote on expanding homestead exemptions, and county officials fear that if it passes, it will drain local property tax revenue, leaving departments like parks scrambling for money. Advertising, the argument goes, could backfill some of the loss without raising taxes.

What the ads would actually look like is where things get fuzzy, and where the debate turned lively. The ballot language will not specify permitted formats, and commissioners disagreed openly about where the line should fall, with options floated ranging from banners to billboards. Rodriguez described a modest vision: small digital kiosks where parkgoers could charge phones, check maps and find nearby restaurants, emphatically not towering billboards looming over the tot lot.

Skeptics on the dais worried that once the charter door opens, the distinction between a helpful kiosk and a revenue-maximizing digital sign could prove hard to police, and that green space is one of the few refuges left in a county already saturated with commercial messaging.

Miami-Dade’s park system is one of the nation’s largest, spanning hundreds of parks from urban playgrounds to beachfront preserves, which is exactly why the proposal cuts both ways: a vast canvas for advertisers is also a vast landscape of public space that has never carried ads. Voters get the final word Nov. 3. Until then, expect the quintessentially Miami debate, palm trees versus pixels, to keep simmering.

Zoo Miami has pulled off a marsupial milestone. The zoo announced that a southern hairy-nosed wombat joey, the first successful birth of the species in the zoo’s history, and the only successful southern hairy-nosed wombat birth in the United States this year, has begun emerging from her mother’s pouch.

Because wombat newborns are roughly the size of a jellybean and develop hidden inside the pouch, the birth itself went unseen. Zoo staff estimate the female joey was born around Jan. 19, following a pregnancy of only about 30 days. She then spent months growing in her mother’s rear-facing pouch, an arrangement that keeps dirt out while mom digs, before offering keepers their first glimpses this summer.

The proud parents are Gordon, an 8-and-a-half-year-old male who arrived from the Los Angeles Zoo, and Adelaid, a 9-and-a-half-year-old female from Illinois’ Brookfield Zoo. The pairing was part of a coordinated effort to breed a species that is rarely reproduced successfully in American zoos.

Built Like a Tank, Poops Like a Dice Factory

Southern hairy-nosed wombats are the smallest of Australia’s three wombat species, typically weighing 45 to 65 pounds, with oversized ears and broad, fuzzy snouts. They are engineering marvels: powerful claws let them excavate sprawling burrow networks called warrens, and their rumps are reinforced with tough cartilage, a built-in shield they use to block burrow entrances against predators.

They are also the animal kingdom’s reigning oddballs in one memorable respect: wombats produce cube-shaped droppings, a quirk scientists believe helps the pellets stay put when marking territory.

Zoo officials say the joey is healthy and increasingly bold about poking her head into the world, giving visitors to the zoo’s Australia-themed area a shot at spotting one of the rarest baby animals on display anywhere in the country. In a summer when South Florida’s animal headlines usually involve pythons and iguanas, a homegrown wombat, born in Miami, no less, makes for a welcome change of species.