Miami Restaurant Owners Slam Gimenez’s "Devastating" Anti-Protestor Curfew

“First, Gimenez punished working families by shutting down public transit to sabotage peaceful protestors. Now, his latest whim is an arbitrary curfew that has small businesses across Miami-Dade furious and losing customers,” said FDP spokesperson Luisana Perez. “Yet again, Gimenez is putting his partisan and corrupt agenda ahead of what’s best for the people he was elected to represent.”

 

 

“The police showed up at 11 p.m. Friday, just as the last batch of guests were finishing their dinners at Ariete restaurant in Coconut Grove, and told Chef Michael Beltran he was breaking the law.”

“Three cop cars showed up and they told me we were breaking curfew,” Beltran said. “I didn’t know about [Miami-Dade Mayor] Carlos Gimenez’s latest whim to push the curfew back to 10 p.m. that night. A lot of our guests didn’t know what was happening either.”

“Beltran said that after the first weekend of protests, all the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations have been peaceful, and that it seems “unconstitutional” to tell people they have to be home by 9 p.m.”

“Other jurisdictions that have exponentially larger populations than we do don’t have curfew. We can work with a midnight curfew, even though I’m not happy with it. But moving it to 9 p.m. is devastating. If you open at 5:30, you’re lucky to get half a dining room by 7 o’clock.”

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