Anti-corruption Miami officials should oust city attorney
Voters in Miami just delivered seismic change by ousting two incumbents from office. Activist and financial adviser Damian Pardo defeated sitting Commissioner Sabina Covo, and Miguel Gabela defeated perennial politician Alex Diaz de la Portilla, who technically was not an incumbent after being recently removed from office by Gov. Ron DeSantis due to Diaz de la Portilla’s arrest for charges that included money laundering, criminal conspiracy and bribery.
Pardo and Gabela rode a wave of strong anti-corruption sentiment to victory, sent into office by residents sick of chronic flooding, lack of public transportation, skyrocketing housing costs and rampant corruption that sees the city government consumed by nonstop and embarrassing scandals.
But this election doesn’t mean the embarrassment is over.
City Commissioner Joe Carollo lost a lawsuit brought by the owners of a venue in Little Havana called Ball & Chain for weaponizing city agencies against them and their tenants due to their support of one of Carollo’s political opponents; Carollo was ordered to pay $63.5 million on top of legal fees.
City Attorney Victoria Mendez (who was deposed and is a witness in a second lawsuit against the city by the owners of Ball & Chain) has been implicated in a corruption scandal involving a Miami-Dade County program that is supposed to sell properties of “incapacitated” people but was being abused by her husband to reap big profits.
The redrawing of the commission district maps was initially thrown out after a lawsuit due to transparent racial gerrymandering and self-dealing by the commissioners. Although an appeals court allowed those maps to be used in the most recent election, a trial on the fate of the maps is set for January.
Mayor Francis Suarez is now under FBI investigation after secretly taking up to $170,000 payments from a developer who later thanked Suarez in an email for intervening with the city zoning director to cut red tape for one of the developer’s luxury projects.
Victoria Mendez has long operated as a fixer for politicians who have misused public office to their personal benefit. In one of the most shocking testimonies that took place in Carollo’s trial, former Miami Commissioner Ken Russell said that Mendez actually told him businesses in his district were being targeted by code enforcement to make the politically motivated harassment of businesses within Carollo’s district less suspicious. Not only were the initial businesses inappropriately and unfairly targeted by Carollo, but businesses that had nothing to do with this mess at all were affected merely as collateral damage as city agencies taxpayers paid for were weaponized with the help of the city attorney! It’s the stuff one would expect of a cliché banana republic.
An investigation by WLRN found that Express Homes, a real estate company owned by Mendez’s husband, used his connection to Miami City Hall to get code violations resolved, according to a lawsuit filed by a former homeowner. The homes, which had been sold to Express Homes as part of city program to help homeowners that courts had determined had become incapacitated, were then flipped for hundreds of thousands of dollars more than were paid for the properties.
It is clear to anyone paying attention that Mendez is too close to the corruption that has gripped Miami’s government and can no longer be trusted to carry forward her responsibilities as city attorney with integrity and transparency. If newly elected commissioners Pardo and Gabela want to live up to their campaign promises, they should start their tenures by immediately calling for her resignation and move to oust her if she refuses to go. The voters have given Pardo and Gabela a clear mandate to clean up Miami. It’s time to act.