Report finds violations by Pembroke Park mayor
The longtime mayor of Pembroke Park has repeatedly blurred the lines between official town business and her personal endeavors, using town employees to do work for her law firm and a campaign staffer to post from the town’s Facebook page, the Broward Office of the Inspector General said in a report released Thursday.
Ashira Mohammed, the mayor of the small South Broward town since 2011, committed both ethical and electoral misconduct that “went to the very heart of state prohibitions that regulate a public officer’s conduct while in office and during a campaign,” the inspector general’s office said in a 157-page final report.
According to the inspector general’s office, Mohammed committed multiple violations that could have criminal implications. Investigators found that, by having a campaign employee post as the mayor from a town social media account, Mohammed violated the state’s “Little Hatch Act,” which regulates the political activity of public officials, a first-degree misdemeanor.
The report also says Mohammed failed to properly resign her position as mayor under Florida’s “resign to run” law before she ran as a Democrat for Florida House District 101 in the August primary. By submitting campaign qualifying papers to the state swearing she had properly resigned, Mohammed “willfully swore a false oath” related to an election, a third-degree felony, the report says.
Broward Inspector General John W. Scott lacks the authority to bring criminal charges, but his office can refer its findings to other agencies. The report says the investigation, which found “probable cause” that Mohammed violated election and ethics laws, will be referred to the Broward State Attorney, the Florida Elections Commission and the state’s Commission
on Ethics “for whatever action those agencies deem appropriate.”
Mohammed, through an attorney, challenged the investigation’s findings in a response included in the final report. The response says the inspector general’s office used witness testimony that was “unreliable,” and that the report makes conclusions “based on assumptions as to certain facts, which are unwarranted based on the actual evidence adduced, and are contrary to objective reality.”
“The report has inaccuracies large and small,” Mohammed’s attorney, Joe Geller, told the Miami Herald after the final report was released Thursday morning. “It’s based on suppositions people made that don’t have actual knowledge or direct knowledge of what they’re talking about.”
The report says the inspector general’s office made multiple attempts to interview Mohammed, but she didn’t respond until after the deadline they provided and then failed to respond to a follow-up inquiry.
In her response, Mohammed’s attorney called on the inspector general’s office to recall a preliminary version of the report that was sent to town officials Aug. 19 and arrange an interview with Mohammed.
“I don’t understand why that offer would not have been accepted,” Geller said Thursday.
Mohammed did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The town responded to the findings by implementing a policy that limits the number of employees with access to the town’s social media pages. In addition, the town “committed to review its employee code of conduct and expressed its intent to update its Personnel Policies and Procedures Manual,” the inspector general’s office said.
This isn’t the first time Pembroke Park has been a target of a harsh inspector general report. In 2018, the agency found that the former town manager and two other town officials “engaged in gross mismanagement, misconduct, or both” in the procurement of an engineering contract over the course of 16 years.