Records show city’s commissioner blasting rival; the city wants other texts secret
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IT JUST COMES DOWN TO WHY [THE COMMUNICATIONS] WERE [SENT] OR RECEIVED AND THE MESSAGE OF THEM. Virginia Hamrick, staff attorney for the nonprofit First Amendment Foundation
Facing a lawsuit from a former commissioner, the city of Sunny Isles Beach has agreed to release some messages Commissioner Dana Goldman sent about a rival during a November commission meeting — messages in which she called Vice Mayor Larisa Svechin “devious” and “very jealous of me,” and suggested residents who made public comments were “all Larisa Svechin plants.”
But the contents of other messages Goldman exchanged during the meeting — specifically, texts with her husband — remain a mystery. Despite a ruling last month by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Carlos Lopez that Goldman’s texts should be public, the city is planning to fight their release before the Third District Court of Appeal.
After former City Commissioner Jeanette Gatto sued the city for messages Goldman sent during a Nov. 19 meeting, and even after Lopez ruled that the messages should be released, Sunny Isles
Beach’s lawyers initially fought to keep all of the messages secret. They argued in a court filing that the messages were “highly sensitive personal communications” that could cause “significant reputational damage” to Goldman.
The city partially changed course last week, asking Lopez to allow the release of Goldman’s exchange with a resident while keeping the messages with her spouse under wraps pending the appeal.
THE RELEASED MESSAGES
The messages that are now public show Gold- man’s apparent disdain and mistrust for Svechin, a former advertising executive who was first elected in 2016. And they hint at a possible showdown between the two for mayor in November 2022, when Mayor George “Bud” Scholl will be termed out.
In an exchange via Facebook Messenger during the Nov. 19 meeting — which featured multiple comments from residents concerned about air quality and other construction impacts at the Marina del Mar apartment towers in Goldman’s district — a resident asked Goldman about the public comment process before asking if other commenters had been “paid off.” Goldman replied: “Yes actually. It’s a power struggle for the mayor succession.”
“She is trying to bring me down and has her surrogates,” Goldman said of Svechin in another message to the resident. “She is attacking me through others. Power struggle. Devious.”
Goldman added: “She won’t succeed. Very jealous of me.”
Goldman and Svechin both declined to say Thursday whether they plan to seek the mayor’s seat.
‘PEDESTRIAN’ OR DISPARAGING?
The Facebook messages were shared with the Miami Herald on Thursday by
Michael Pizzi, an attorney representing Gatto, the former commissioner who requested Goldman’s text messages the day after the November meeting and then filed a public records lawsuit in late March.
Goldman, a real estate lawyer and a city commissioner since 2014, declined to comment on whether she stood by her remarks. The messages, she said in an email, were “rather pedestrian.”
Svechin, meanwhile, took the high road.
“I can’t be spending time on some pettiness,” she told the Herald. As for the suggestion that she planted speakers at the November meeting, she said she has “no idea what [Goldman] is talking about.”
“I’m laser-focused on fixing our problems with distracted driving and speeding,” she said. “I come into the office every day and focus on solving for that.”
Goldman and Svechin were both re-elected in November.
CITY FIGHTS TO KEEP TEXTS PRIVATE
The Facebook messages that became public last week were the eventual result of the Nov. 20 public records request by Gatto, who said she could see Goldman “consistently texting” during the meeting the night before.
In her request, Gatto asked for all “cell phone texts” to and from Goldman while the meeting was ongoing, noting that a prior request she made for text messages from Goldman had been ignored.
Initially, the city seemed poised to cooperate. City Clerk Mauricio Betancur gave an initial response Nov. 23, then followed up Dec. 1 to say he had forwarded the request to Goldman. Gatto checked in again on Jan. 11, records show, but Betancur didn’t respond until Feb. 26, saying he was working with Goldman to fulfill the request and expected to have the records ready “early next week.”
Then the city went quiet. On March 30, Gatto filed a lawsuit demanding the release of any of Goldman’s text messages during the meeting “pertaining to city business.”
After the judge ruled that some of the messages should be public — including the Facebook messages with a resident and multiple texts between Goldman and her husband — the city filed a notice of appeal. The judge quickly ordered that the messages be locked down while the city pursued its challenge.
The week before last, Goldman told the Herald the texts with her husband were “unresponsive to [Gatto’s] original request because it’s personal in nature.”
But Pizzi, the lawyer for Gatto, said the messages — which he has seen but isn’t authorized to release — “are relating to public business and are absolutely a public record.”
“There are no exemptions for public officials who say embarrassing things,” he said.
Florida’s public records law says any record created “in connection with the transaction of official business by any agency” should be considered public.
Virginia Hamrick, staff attorney for the nonprofit First Amendment Foundation in Tallahassee, said communications between a city official and her spouse could certainly be public records if they relate to the substance of a public meeting. On the other hand, they could be exempt if they were unrelated to city business.
“It just comes down to why they were [sent] or received and the message of them,” Hamrick said.
Goldman suggested the effort to obtain her communications could be related to her role as an agitator against some development efforts in Sunny Isles Beach, home to numerous beachfront skyscrapers.
“I am an inviting target,” Goldman said in an email in late April. “I have a lot of enemies among the entrenched interests who don’t care about our city’s quality of life.”
She added: “I push back hard. I ask questions that no one else asks about proposed developments and taming traffic on Collins Avenue and Sunny Isles Boulevard. And I am often the sole NO vote on these vitally important issues. This infuriates the entrenched interests and their surrogates inside and outside City Hall.”