The last candidate forum hosted by the Kendall Federation of Homeowners Associations sounds like it might be a little one-sided: While three candidates have confirmed their attendance, their opponents will likely be MIA.

All of them are — surprise, surprise — incumbents.

By now, we are used to Miami-Dade Carlos Gimenez skipping the neighborhood debates and forums with School Board member and mayoral challenger Raquel Regalado. He agreed to three debates only after he was forced into a runoff — two on TV and one on radio (at 10 a.m. on WMBM Thursday morning) but none in front of a live audience. You don’t have to wonder why.

But the invite from the KFHA also says that Republican incumbent State Rep. Michael Bileca had not confirmed his attendance, though his challenger, Jeffrey Solomon, will be there. 

Also not coming: U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, the Republican incumbent who is apparently sending a “representative from his office” to face former Congressman Joe Garcia, who Curbelo beat in 2014 amid damaging headlines about voter fraud. He shouldn’t be allowed to send a stand-in. We are not voting for a stand-in.

Also, Ladra hopes that when he says “office,” he means someone from the campaign office, not from his government office.

It’s a shame that Gimenez, Bileca and Curbelo have so little respect for the Kendall voters that they would skip this last opportunity to reach them at a debate where they would engage with their opponent. 

Tsk, tsk.

If you want to hear the one-sided arguments from the challengers, the event begins at 7:30 p.m. at the ‘civic pavilion’ at the Kendall Village Center, 8625 SW 124 Ave. (it’s that little room in front of the movie theater).

Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine is having a fundraiser for Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez Tuesday. Also hosting: Beach Commissioner Ricky Arriola and lobbyist Alex Heckler, who is partners with former State Rep. and original G-man Marcelo Llorente.

The event is at Levine’s company offices, Royal Media Partners at 960 Alton Rd.

Gimenez and Levine have been buddy-buddy almost since the latter was elected in 2014. They did an ice bucket challenge together (photo left). And even though the two disagreed on funding for the BayLink leg of new rail, they joined forces on battling Zika and flew to Washington together (even though Gimenez repeatedly says we have to solve our problems here) to lobby Congress for more funding.

The Beach mayor even has a cameo in a Gimenez campaign ad (so does Hialeah Mayor Carlos Hernandez, the admitted loanshark).

Levine’s support means a lot to Gimenez, who needs Anglos (read: non Hispanic white) voters and Democrats to gain the edge over Miami-Dade School Board member Raquel Regalado, who forced him (surprise!) into a runoff in the August primary.

But what does Levine want from Gimenez? The torch, maybe?

It is no secret that Levine originally planned to run for Miami-Dade mayor. Consultants convinced him that that would be impossible because his last name doesn’t end with a vowel or a Z. But Ladra hears he is a stubborn man. While we also believe that he has eyed the governor’s mansion, maybe he holds out hope that he can compete in a crowded Miami-Dade field come 2020 when Gimenez is termed out. He may think he’d have a helluva leg up with the predecessor’s blessing.

Or maybe he just wants Gimenez and his monied pals — Heckler et al — to help him raise funds for the governor’s race?

Nah. Levine is a proud millionaire who likes to self-fund his campaigns and buy little old Cuban ladies with chachkies and salsa parties.

In fact, why is he hosting a fundraiser at all? Can’t he just write a check for whatever it is he’d raise?

Ladra can’t wait to see how many Beach city vendors are on Gimenez’s next campaign report.

Ralph Garcia-Toledo, the man who went from being Mayor Carlos Gimenez‘s driver to being a grossly-overpaid $200 consultant subcontractor on a $140 million water and sewer contract secured by his BFF, the mayor, sure is living the mogul’s life.

Here he is at Joe’s Stone Crabs, enjoying a leisurely lunch, we presume, with two lovely ladies — who work at County Hall.

It’s good to have palanca!

The picture was posted just around noon Thursday by Mary Juncadella Ferreiro, the deputy chief of staff for Miami-Dade Commissioner Sally Heyman. She is the one on the left. With the duck lips (channeling Barby Gimenez, are we?).

Ladra is told the other woman — the one on the right without the pouty ducky face — is also a Heyman staffer: Chief of Staff Bonnie Michaels, who looks like she really wanted to be in the picture.

Please notice the likes. I don’t follow Juncadella (mamadukes24), who has a private Instagram account (obviously someone I know does). But you can tell from the screen save that Brian Goldmeier, the mayor’s fundraiser, likes the photo. If lobster and blondes keep the Gimenez campaign finance chair happy, what are we gonna do, right?

Read related story: Why Carlos Gimenez should not have four more years

And he can afford it, okay? His contract guarantees him up to $18 million in the next 12 years. What’s a few hundred bucks for a nice dinner with wine and a couple of friends?

Just look at how happy he is! It almost looks like a date and RGT is now divorced from his lobbyist wife, Vicky Garcia Toledo, so we guess it could be. Who’s the third wheel?

Or maybe it was a belated birthday celebration: Garcia-Toledo turned 54 earlier this month.

Bet I know what he wished for: Four more years of the gravy train under Gimenez, which guarantees him lots of lobster in the future.

On a recent Friday night, there were nine police officers patrolling the Hammocks district. Nine police officers in their marked cars, covering the area between Southwest 8th and 200th streets and the Turnpike and Krome Avenue.

Nine.

The addition of 140 new police officers to our Miami-Dade County Police force is certainly a good thing to begin to alleviate the shortage we have of cops on the street. Mayor Carlos Gimenez may be right when he says that it’s the largest graduating class in MDPD history.

But that only makes it worse when you realize it is only a band aid.

Not just because most of those officers will need to ride with a field training supervisor for at least four months — so it’s not really more police cars on the street right away as Mayor Carlos Gimenez implies when he says that 132 of those officers will be added to patrol. They’ll be doubled up with existing patrols for four months.

Read related story: Miami-Dade Police cuts by Carlos Gimenez cause concern

No, it’s because by the time these rookies finish their first year of probation, we’ll have lost another 120 officers or so. Which is the number of “separations” that the police department has every year. Fifty-eight officers are scheduled to retire through the Deferred Retirement Option Plan, according to the Dade County PBA. That means their retirement in 2017 is mandatory. And the county typically loses another 50 or 60 officers every year  through attrition (to other agencies or careers).

So it’s a net gain of only 20. At best.

Gimenez will say yeah, but we hired 100 officers in January. To which Ladra says, yeah, but we lost 100 officers so far this year (66 in the DROP), according to numbers provided by the police department. So that means it’s a net gain of zero.

It’s basic math, which the mayor has shown to be, eh, not so good at. So, let’s do the addition and subtraction for him, shall we? At least 100 officers have left so far this fiscal year, plus the 119 we lost in 2015 is 219. Plus, oh, let’s split the baby and put next year’s separations at 110. That makes for a total of 329 officers gone in the past three years.  Add the 140 rookies who graduated Wednesday to another class of about 100 that graduated in January and that’s 240 new officers. Subtract 240 from 329 and we still have a net loss of 89 cops in three years.

I sure feel safer already. Don’t you?

This is how we have gotten to a shortfall of close to 200 officers between the budgeted positions and the filled positions. But if you go by the budgeted positions in 2011, before Gimenez was elected, we are short about 390 officers. And that is with the graduating class that Carlos Gimenez used Wednesday as a photo op six weeks before the election. He also used the opportunity to issue a campaign email saying that crime was down statistically.

“As your Mayor, I know the fight against crime is one that every community struggles with everyday,” said the man Ladra christened Cry Wolf Gimenez when he threatened to fire 400 officers in 2014, just two years ago. Then it was 228. No, 110. No, 70. And when it went to zero, he blamed the police director for inflaming the community needlessly.

Read related story: Carlos Gimenez scolds police director: ‘Layoffs may not come’

We also know that crime statistics can be manipulated by the way incident reports are written and filed. How much you wanna bet we have a whole bunch more “information reports” this year than we did last year or in 2010 even. And, anyway, numbers don’t comfort the parents of Jada Page or King Carter or the family of Miami firefighter Chadrick Davis, shot dead last week. Not when the plain truth is that their deaths might have been avoided – if only we had the proper police coverage in the community.

But we don’t even try to have the proper coverage.

Based on the county budget and the police department goals prepared by Gimenez this year,  three out of five killers are practically guaranteed to get away with murder. That’s because the goal for solving homicide cases for the Miami-Dade Police Department is only 40%. That’s hardly a deterrent. In fact, it’s almost encouragement to pick up a gun because, well, why not? The goal for clearance of sex crime cases is just a little better at 41%.  But for robberies? Well, we’re aiming to solve the crime and nab the bad guy only 28% of the time.

These are our goals? Really? That’s the best we can do?

And Gimenez’s solution, instead of hiring more officers and restoring the specialized units he dismantled in 2013, is to create a squad of living room cops. He wants to take two dozen of the officers we do have on the street and put them in the homes of at risk kids we then further reward with extra empowerment and access to more services and programs. Really?

Can’t help but wonder how many police officers are patrolling the district tonight. And I sure hope it’s more than nine.

The head of the Beacon Council resigned last month. But it’s likely he would have been fired anyway when his contract expired in October.

That’s because it looks like Larry Williams has exaggerated his accomplishments.

Williams, president and CEO of the Beacon for the past three years, announced in late August that he was taking a job with Technology Association of Georgia. But maybe someone ought to send them a copy of the memo by Miami-Dade Commissioner “Mayor Sir” Xavier Suarez that shows Williams may have greatly inflated his or the Beacon Council’s achievements.

When the Beacon Council claimed in its third quarter “Key Performance Indicators” report to have brought or helped 10 companies in Miami-Dade with research and marketing, networking and the like, Suarez decided to check on it. He sent eight members of his staff to the companies with the addresses listed in the Beacon Council report. They all came back with reports of their own. And guess what? Not one single company volunteered any information about the Beacon Council helping them or recruiting them.

Not one.

In fact, most gave perfectly organic reasons. Like being close to family, in one case. The attractive diversity of the Miami market, in another.

Alpha Trade doesn’t even exist. Another company occupies its space in Doral and the company is not even listed in the lobby directory. The Suarez staffer who visited the office was told that they could arrange a meeting with someone from Alpha Trade. Like it’s some cloak and dagger illegal thing. Which it might be since the company has been inactive in the Division of Corporations since 2012.

The New York Code and Design Company was a locked office inside Strayer University. Suarez’s office has not been able to contact anyone there.

On a visit to Florida Minerals, an import export predicted to create seven jobs over the next three years according to the Beacon report, the commissioner’s staffer found a residence and someone with no knowledge of the company. George Tsotkas, the CEO of Florida Minerals — which is located in Boca Raton — had moved to Boca Raton.

Suarez was flabbergasted. “I told them I was going to bring it up in committee. I wanted answers,” Suarez told Ladra Friday. “And then the guy resigns. And I guess that’s the answer.”

Yep. Williams, whose contract was coming up next month anyway, figured he’d been caught. He’s not going to get his contract renewed if Suarez starts bringing up the lies he’s been telling. In his memo, Suarez questions whether or not the $3.5 million or so the county gives the Beacon Council every year is money well spent.

There’s more. Please press this “continue reading” button to “turn the page.”

So, now that people — both investigators and reporters — are looking into her job with Miami-Dade Water and Sewer and making public records requests, Barby Rodriguez Gimenez showed up to work Tuesday.

Mayor ‘s daughter-in-law was paraded up and down the Coral Gables offices of Aecom, 135 San Lorenzo Ave., by Esther Monzon, president and owner of EV Services, one of 15 subcontractors on Aecom’s $91 million 2014 contract for water and sewer improvements mandated by the federal and state governments.

Barby is one of four public information officers at the company and was hired about a year after the contract was awarded in May, 2014. Before that, she worked as director of client relations (though that title could be a bit inflated) at Genovese, Joblove & Batista, which, by the way, lobbied on behalf of Aecom for the contract.

Read related story: Carlos Gimenez daughter-in-law could need a new job

Rodriguez’s role at EV Services is described in the company’s website.

“Better known as ‘Barby’ throughout the South Florida community, she’s a member of the Miami-Dade International Trade Consortium, Board Member at Voices for Children and member of Florida International University’s Presidents Council,” it says under her photo.

Barby Gimenez, face circled to the right, after her father-in-law is forced into a run-off. Looks like she’s saying, “Sh**! I may have to find a real job!”

What it doesn’t say is that she was appointed in 2013 to the ITC — which meets quarterly and makes recommendations about trade missions and sister city issues to the commission — which is already after her father-in-law was elected mayor. And she was appointed by Miami-Dade Commissioner Juan Zapata, who she worked for when he was a State Rep in Tally. It was a consolation prize because Barby really wanted a job in his county office when he was elected in 2011 — which Zap couldn’t give her, well, because she is the mayor’s daughter-in-law.

It wouldn’t look right.

She is also not listed, by the way, as a board member on the websites for either the Voices for Children Foundation or the FIU President’s Council. A search for her among the members yields zero results. Barbara Galvez, a communications coordinator at the President’s Council, said Rodriguez is not a current member. Galvez has only been there for three years, so she checked with Director Dania Rivero, who said Barby had not been a PC member in the eight years that she had been there.

Lots of people pad their resumes, but this one uses her mayoral father-in-law’s palanca to live off the county dime.

Read related story: Carlos Gimenez rewards family (again) in $1.6 billion deal

“Barby is our firm’s social butterfly connecting our clients with decision makers for desired results,” reads the last line of her thumbnail bio on the EV Services website. Social butterfly? Is that what we are calling it these days? And “connecting our clients with decision makers for desired results” has never meant more than when your suegro is mayor of largest county in Florida and the seventh largest county in the United States. She doesn’t have to do anything but support el viejo. She just has to be.

Records obtained by Political Cortadito show that Rodriguez is paid $21.75 an hour out of a possible $45. There are a total of nine EV Services employees on the county payroll, making a combined $255 an hour. Three of those positions are “public information officer,” but Ladra cannot imagine needing three PIOs on this project. What is their work product? How much public information could there possibly be? There’s apparently also an opening for a social media person, making $25.50 to $31.50 an hour, so if you’re looking and you know Mayor Gimenez…

The other two PIOs make a little more ($28.84 and $25.72 an hour) than Rodriguez, who makes much less than her father-in-law’s BFF, Ralph Garcia Toledo, who gets paid $200 an hour for what he admits is mostly clerical work on a separate $131 million contract awarded to CH2M Hill.

Still, $21.75 an hour is a $45,000-a-year job — nice work if on top of that you don’t really have to show up.

Doesn’t it look in this photo like Barby is flashing taxpayers the bird? The man on the right is her husband, the mayor’s less illustrious son, Julio Gimenez, who works for a company that got a $4 million no-bid contract to repair the performing arts center. Yes, it’s nice to be in the mayor’s friends and family plan.

Classy, huh?

Some people say que la familia de Carlos Gimenez es tan elegante. And then there are those of us who know the truth.

What they are is descarados.