New anti-corruption Miami commissioners should start by ousting city attorney
Voters in the City of Miami just delivered seismic change by ousting two incumbents from office. Activist and financial advisor Damian Pardo defeated sitting Commissioner Sabina Covo and Migel Gabela defeated perennial politician Alex Diaz de la Portilla, who technically was not an incumbent after being recently removed from office by Governor Ron Desantis due to his recent arrests for charges that included money laundering, criminal conspiracy, bribery and more.
Pardo and Gabela rode a wave of strong anti-corruption sentiment to victory, 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.
One of the most corrupt characters in Miami government, current Commissioner Joe Carollo, lost a lawsuit against the owners of a venue in Little Havana called Ball & Chain and was ordered to pay a total of $63.5 million dollars, on top of legal fees, for weaponizing city agencies against them and their tenants due to their support for one of Carollo’s political opponents. 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. Last but not least, 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 cliche banana republic in the City of Miami.
It’s not just the crooked politicians at the City of Miami who abuse their positions of power at the expense of taxpayers and residents. Under the Guardianship Program of Dade County, a private, nonprofit agency was supposed to care for those deemed by a court to be incapacitated and who don’t have the money to afford a private guardian, and who have no friends or family willing to take care of them. Staff would take control of their assets — including vehicles and real estate — and sell them to help pay for future care and living expenses. Turns out the program was caught selling incapacitated people's homes to a real company called Express Homes which was owned by Victoria Mendez's husband, who would then resell them for profit.
An investigation by WLRN found that Express Homes used his connection to Miami City Hall to get code violations resolved, according to a lawsuit filed by a former homeowner. The homes were then flipped for hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they paid for the properties, to the financial benefit of Mendez and her husband. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez was also involved in several transactions with Express Homes as a real estate attorney.
It is clear to anyone paying attention that Victoria Mendez is complicit in the corruption that has gripped the City of Miami government and can no longer be trusted to carry forward her responsibilities as city attorney with integrity and transparency. If newly elected commissioners Damian Pardo and Miguel 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 the City of Miami from corruption. It’s time to act on it.