By MICHEL BERTRAN

City of South Miami officials have passed a resolution supporting the idea to split the state of Florida in half — drawing an east-west line near Orlando — making South Florida the 51st state of the United States.

On Oct. 7, the resolution was proposed by Vice Mayor Walter Harris at a city commission meeting and it passed with a 3-2 vote. The City of South Miami’s reasoning for this is because Tallahassee is not providing South Florida with with adequate representation of its concerns for sea-levels rising in the future.

South Florida has to deal with this environmental concern and Harris believes that nothing will get done in Tallahassee since it doesn’t really apply to them.

On SunSentinel.com he stated, “We have to be able to deal directly with this environmental concern and we can’t really get it done in Tallahassee,” Harris said. “I don’t care what people think — it’s not a matter of electing the right people.”

Mayor Philip Stoddard has actually been advocating for this for the past 15 years, but never went through with a resolution. Stoddard agreed with Harris’ statement.

“It’s very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean,” Stoddard said. “They’ve made that abundantly clear every possible opportunity and I would love to give them the opportunity to do that.”

In order for this to be approved, it would have to have an electorate approval from the entire state and a Congressional approval.