Raised behind a deli counter.
Dana was born and raised in South Florida and grew up working in her family’s restaurant, Pumpernik’s Deli. It is where she learned the thing that still shapes how she works: you stand behind the counter, people tell you what is wrong, and you fix it or you lose them.
She moved to the south end of Sunny Isles Beach in 2001 with her husband, Michael Gates. They raised their daughter here, on Poinciana Island. Before she ever ran for anything, she volunteered on the city’s Citizen Advisory Committee.
In 2019 she started something nobody asked her to start: a free workshop for condo owners who could not get a straight answer about their own buildings. She has run them ever since, in Sunny Isles Beach, Aventura, North Miami Beach and Hallandale. A month after Surfside, she held one on how to read your building’s structural reports and its finances. She still moderates them herself.