Want to meet with Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez? Got $15,000?
Apparently that’s the price for a half-hour meeting with the county’s strong mayor, the one in charge of all the purse strings and who would be instrumental in getting your retail/residential development all the green lights.
According to his calendar, Gimenez met from noon to 12:30 p.m. Thursday with Andy Hellinger, principal of Urban-X, the Coral Gables-based development firm that wants to build the $425-million River Landing Shops and Residences on 8.14 acres at 1500 NW North River Drive.
Read related: Carlos Gimenez nets $70K vs city strong mayor — for what in return?
Currently under construction, the latest version of River Landing Shops — and there have been a few — has 529 residential units and approximately 345,000 square feet of retail space along the Miami River. There will also be 2,200 parking spaces and a riverfront park and promenade.
“The ground floor of the project will have a variety of restaurants—from casual and fine dining to chef-driven concepts—with indoor and outdoor seating, opening to a landscaped linear park inspired by Manhattan’s High Line,” Hellinger told Multi-Housing News last month.
“We seek to offer retail options that our shoppers care about, including retailers that cater to Millennials that are health-conscious, tech-savvy, foodies and more.”
Read related: Carlos Gimenez has new role as rainmaker — soliciting for 10 PACs
But if they already started construction, then what would Hellinger need from the mayor? Funding? Now that Gimenez is raising funds for so many political action committees, maybe he has a future as a rainmaker. And as of last month, Hellinger said, roughly $117.4 million had been invested in the project, out of the total estimated cost of $424.8 million.
Or maybe Hellinger wants to make sure that other riverfront developments are not too competitive? Who knows?
What can’t be denied is that Urban-X made a $15,000 contribution to Miami Dade Residents First on Oct. 8 — the single largest donation made to finance the opposition to the Miami strong mayor initiative — and the company’s principal got an audience with Gimenez exactly one month later.
Now that’s a quick return on an investment.

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Now, this is a victory.
Sen. Annette Taddeo showed on Tuesday that she is truly a viable candidate who can win more than just special elections against racist apologists when she solidly defeated a challenge by Republican superwoman Marili Cancio, who was handpicked by the GOP for this specific race and moved from Key Biscayne to a condo in the Dadeland area.
Taddeo won 53 to 47 percent, a six point lead that Ladra is certain would have been double digits if voters had known her campaign was run by the racist himself, former Sen. Frank Artiles, who called some fellow legislators niggers in a loud rant at a bar.  Still, it is double what she won her seat with last year and that will resonate going into 2020. Yeah, okay, Ladra will concede while the campaign definitely benefited from Cancio’s Trump ties during a blue wave year, Taddeo’s final numbers were also boosted by the Andrew Gillum excitement in his native Richmond Heights and the NPA trend to go blue this year because of Trump and Parkland.
But, let me remind you, it’s a midterm election after all!
On Monday, Taddeo was the unelectable perennial candidate who finally got lucky one time running against former State Rep. Jose Felix “Pepi” Diaz, who did not do enough to distance himself from Artiles and lost despite outspending Taddeo 3 to 1. On Wednesday, Taddeo was an entrenched incumbent until she is termed out.
Because who are they going to throw at her now?
Read related: Jose Felix Diaz outspends Annette Taddeo 3 to 1 plus — but loses anyway
It can’t be Cancio, who should have stayed in Key Biscayne and run for Congress with better chance against Donna Shalala. After all, she did get 47% showing in the Senate district she just moved to in a campaign she started less than six months ago. Nothing to sneeze at.
But if she runs again, Cancio should run in her district — she has to move out of her Dadeland condo anyway; no room for the dogs — where nobody can call her a carpetbagger GOP invader. And she should not scrub her Twitter of her Trump love and extreme right conservative views. That is who she is. She needs to own it.
She also needs to stay away from the lies. The commercials and mailers calling Taddeo an NRA flunkie did not pass muster. Democrats in District 40 are not stupid, Marili. They are not going to buy the argument that she sided with the NRA by voting against the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Student Safety Bill. And that backfired because we felt like you thought we were stupid.
“You can say a lot of things about me but to say I’m with the NRA is really a stretch,” the senator said Wednesday.
Read related: GOP’s Marili Cancio vs Sen. Annette Taddeo in ‘year of the woman’
Taddeo joined most Democrats when she voted against the legislation only because of the poison pill — put in there by Republican State Rep. Jose Oliva — that puts guns on school campuses. Only 10 joined the Republicans who wrote and ushered the legislation in.
Does Taddeo feel like she still has a target on her back? Like Artiles is gonna run someone else against her two years from now. Bring it on, she said.
“I’ve never been one to start worrying very early,” Taddeo said. “I’m just going to continue doing my job. I think I’ve shown people that I’m a true public servant. I’ve gained fans.”
Cancio would not say no Wednesday to another race. But she also won’t say yes right now. Her life is full enough with her law firm, her volunteer work, her house on the West coast she hasn’t visited in a while, her son’s wedding in January and her grandchild, who is due in three to four weeks. “I feel so blessed,” she said.
Maybe she’ll also get back on the guest panel in Channel 10’s This Week In South Florida, where she used to be the regular GOP mouthpiece before she announced her run. We know she misses that.
Cancio thanked everyone who helped her in a class act statement posted on Facebook Wednesday but which, she said, was written three weeks earlier.
“It really doesn’t matter what the end result is tonight because as some say it is the journey and not the destination. I am a better person after meeting and talking to so many people in our community. I love our community and this race has been the honor of a lifetime.”
Ladra hopes it was also a lesson: Don’t lie. Be yourself. And try again.

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In a resounding defeat to Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, voters solidly rejected the strong mayor initiative by 65% of the vote Tuesday — a signal that the new mayor doesn’t exactly have the mandate he thought he had.
Is Francis the Future suddenly the Prince of the Past?
Maybe it wasn’t a complete loss. Voters did approved the Miami Freedom Park retail complex with a soccer stadium that he lobbied so hard for. But they approved that and the lease and development of the Miami Riverfront Center property by 60 percent — and then shut Suarez down.
It was like, yeah this, sure that, and then nananina to the Suarez power grab, which he has spent several years and millions of dollars on.
It’s not just a huge blow to Baby X — whose allies on the dais just got targets on their backs — it hurts his papa, Miami-Dade Commissioner Xavier Suarez, who has had thoughts of running for county mayor in 2020.
It’s bittersweet for Ladra. Because while we did not support the strong arm mayor move, we certainly don’t enjoy how smug Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo and Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and his cohorts are feeling right about now. Both raised money for campaigns against the measure. We won’t know how much they spent for weeks.
And Ladra is pretty sure this sets the stage for a Gimenez run for Miami mayor in 2021. Then he will try to push forward a different strong mayor referendum that he will call strong mayor lite.
Suarez is likely going to lie low for a few days, but he already told the Miami Herald that he wanted to try again with a different, probably also “lite” version.
Ladra thinks he should try to score a few victories first and concentrate on making the voters who elected him — and who have been shaking their heads for the last few months — remember why he was once Francis the Future.

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It started good at the top of the ticket. Then, ouch.
Was former Sen. Bill Nelson and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum actually winning with absentee ballots? Because early results had them just over 50.
Even Jeffrey “Doc” Solomon had 525 votes over newly-elected State Rep. Vance Aloupis, right, who ended up winning by 591 votes.
But that feeling of rising hope quickly turned to disbelief and dread when the blue wave turned into a wipeout after Gov. Elect Ron DeSantis and former Gov. and Senator elect Rick Scott turned it around.
We had a few bright spots where the wave did crash nicely.
Democrats gained two seats in Congress, with the election of Donna Shalala over Republican Maria Elvira Salazar (though not as solid as she should have) and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell‘s stunning victory over Carlos Curbelo. That’s a bright silver lining for Ladra that we will come back to.
And Ladra’s favorite new elected, mom gone mad Cindy Polo beat back former Miami Lakes Councilman Frank Mingo in District 103. That was a tremendous upset as Polo, right, was underfunded and losing in Miami-Dade, 56 to 44 percent. The voters in Broward — because the district also includes Miramar — saved us flipping those numbers so she won 53 to 47 percent.
But locally, Polo was it. Democrats failed everywhere else.
While Miami-Dade was overwhelmingly pro Gillum and pro Nelson — they won the 305 each with about 60% of the vote — and Democrats were able to defend Sen. Annette Taddeo from a challenge by Republican superwoman Marili Cancio (next time, Marili, don’t attack with lies about Taddeo and the NRA and talk about your own achievements), they let another Senate bid die and lost several opportunities to gain Florida House seats — even letting one flip red in District 118.
Former State Rep. Robert Asencio became a one-term legislator probably because he was too busy trying to help everybody else and didn’t campaign enough to keep his own seat. Granted, it was definitely an upset surprise for Anthony Rodriguez, who lost the primary two years ago to King David “Nine Lives” Rivera, to beat him ever so slightly, 51% to 49%.
The same narrow win gave Doral Councilwoman Ana Maria Rodriguez a seat in the House, replacing Ambassador Carlos Trujillo in District 105, beating Javier Estevez by a scant 560 votes. Democrats are used to voting for Ana Maria, right, that gap was expected to be even wider, but only because the party invested zero time and money in this flippable district.
The real pain comes with what happened up north, where special interest favorite State Rep. Manny Diaz Jr. beat firefighter hero David Perez for the Senate seat in 36 vacated by Rene Garcia (who will run for county commissioner in two years).
Now we heal and rest until next year when it’s time to gear up for 2020. Maybe Democrats will figure something out between now and then.

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It looks like Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo loves a good spanking.
After getting smacked down by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge who said his lawsuit to block the strong mayor referendum on the city ballot had absolutely no merit whatsoever, Carollo filed an appeal late Thursday — an 11th hour hail Mary to deny voters the chance to weigh in on this controversial charter change.
Carollo, who asked for an expedited hearing because the election is Tuesday, must think the strong mayor measure is passing. Why else appeal the decision this far in?
But, more importantly, who is paying for these frivolous lawsuits? What is this costing taxpayers? It’s costing them something. More than half of the eight (!) attorneys involved — including two former federal prosecutors — represent city or county employees or entities.
Read related: Judge calls Joe Carollo sore loser, rips apart strong mayor lawsuit
City Attorney Victoria Mendez represents the city, Mayor Francis Suarez and City Clerk Todd Hannon in the matter. Every hour that Mendez works on the case is paid by city taxpayers. Deputy Miami-Dade Attorney Oren Rosenthal, who makes $298,000 a year, represents Supervisor of Elections Christina White. Every hour Rosenthal works on the case is paid by county taxpayers (including city taxpayers).
But there is also outside counsel: Raquel Rodriguez, of McDonalds Hopkins, for the city and the city clerk, and Robert Martinez, of Colson, Hicks Eidson, for the mayor. Every billable hour of theirs for this case is on taxpayer’s back and on Carollo. That’s already a hefty bill for the city. Ladra made a public records request Friday for the payments or invoices so far but had not received a response as of the evening.
And we still don’t know whether the city will end up paying Carollo’s attorney, too. Mendez told Ladra on Friday that the city had made no payments to either Jesus Suarez, who filed the lawsuit, or Genovese Joblove Batista, his law firm.
But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be payments made later. Both the original motion and the appeal repeat that the plaintiff is Carollo, “individually and as commissioner of the city of Miami.”
Read related: Miami taxpayers could be on hook for Joe Carollo’s frivolous lawsuit
It’s those last six words that could leave the city on the hook.
Carollo won’t talk about it. He did not return multiple calls and text messages. But the attorneys aren’t doing this for free.
There are no legal expenditures reflected in either Carollo’s PAC or the Miami Dade Residents First, the PAC belonging to Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who is using it to push a no vote.
Also, while she is not on the list of attorneys who got a copy of the notice, Gimenez daughter-in-law Tania Cruz is involved in some way. She got a text message from Jesus Suarez two minutes and three seconds after the lawsuit was first filed. “FILED,” it said, all in caps. Like he was reporting to a supervisor?
Then there are also Jennifer Blohm, Ben Keuhne and Marcos Daniel Jimenez representing the Miamians for an Independent and Accountable Mayors Initiative PAC, which gathered the petitions to put the question on the ballot. Strangely enough, Keuhne was on Carollo’s team just recently when the commissioner won a challenge to his residency.
Read related: Mayor Carlos Gimenez clan involved in Joe Carollo lawsuit vs strong mayor
One of the arguments made in the lawsuit is that the petition did not meet requirements — which Circuit Court Judge Miguel de la O ruled did not matter since it was the city commission that voted to put the measure on the ballot.
The main argument is exactly the same, which the judge categorized as tears over spilled milk: Carollo didn’t get his way on the dais and the question moved forward to the ballot. So he took his gripe to court.
Does this mean that he’s going to legally challenge other decisions that go against him on the dais?
Because that can get expensive.

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Something scary happened at the home of South Miami Mayor Phillip Stoddard on Halloween four years ago: a 16-year-old boy got sick from alcohol or drugs and ended up in the hospital, where he stopped breathing three times.
Stoddard has been sued by the young man, who said the mayor let him drink alcohol and endangered his life at a Halloween party thrown at Stoddard’s house by his then teenage daughter in 2014.
“When we got there, the dad introduced himself and he showed us a table that had a bowl of fruit punch and chips and there was a bottle of alcohol sitting at the end of the table,” Loro told Ladra. “And he told us there was more fruit punch in the fridge, then went to his room.”
Hours later, Loro said, he was vomiting and had to be carried out of the house. He ended up unconscious and woke up in the intensive care unit at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital.
The lawsuit says that Stoddard was responsible as the adult with control of the premises under the Florida Open House Party law. It seeks an undetermined amount of damages in excess of $15,000.
“At all times material, Phillip Stoddard was aware that the plaintiff, age 16, and other underage minors were attending the party where he provided alcohol,” the lawsuit states. As the adult owner of the house, and under Florida’s open house party laws, Stoddard had “a duty to prohibit its use and availability to minors.”
Stoddard says the allegations are nonsense, “a political hatchet job” orchestrated by attorney activist Steve Cody.
And the mayor’s recollection of that evening is a bit different.
“That kid snuck onto our property and drank a lot of vodka and got sick,” Stoddard said. “He was perfectly fine when he got out of the hospital. I haven’t seen or heard from this kid since.”
He doesn’t deny that there was alcohol at the party. He denies supplying it.
“I found alcohol and I threw it away. I stood up on a chair and read them the riot act,” the mayor said. “I’ve taken booze away from these kids. My wife took booze away from them. They took it to the park across the street. I saw them holding Solo cups.”
According to an investigation report, the boy’s mother said she dropped Carlo off at about 8:30 p.m. At 11:45, she got a call from one of his friends telling her to pick Carlo up because he was sick.
“Upon her arrival she noticed that Carlos was slumped over and not responding to her commands when she spoke to him,” the report states. Mayte Loro rushed her son to the emergency room. “Upon arrival at the hospital, Carlos was falling into a deep sleep causing him to stop breathing,” wrote police officer M. Lopez.
Mayte Loro said her son stopped breathing three times. “The doctors couldn’t figure out what he had ingested in order to help him. One of the doctors told me that he must have taken some synthetic type of drug because it wasn’t coming up on the blood work or the urine test.”
Stoddard also made a statement about his daughter having a Halloween party for friends in the Coral Gables High IB program.
“About 90 minutes in, I found a mostly empty large bottle of Bacardi white rum in the kitchen — it wasn’t ours. I stopped the party, gathered all the kids, and told them that no alcohol, pot or other illegal sustances would be consumed in our house, in our yard or in the park in front of our house,” Stoddard wrote at City Hall three days later.
“All night, my wife and I patrolled the house, yard and park. My wife found kids in the park with vodka and made them leave. Apparently young Carlo Loro had obtained vodka in the park,” Stoddard continued. “I did not see that he was impaired because he had been sitting quietly on the living room sofa.”
Loro’s parents were so embarrassed, he said, they didn’t even ask for him to pay the deductible on their insurance for his hospital visit.
Stoddard says the lawsuit amounts to harassment and wouldn’t even have been filed if Cody — who has also filed ethics complaints against Stoddard for using city funds to pay his attorney — and private investigator Joe Carillo hadn’t dug up the old police information report and convinced Loro to sue.
Loro admitted that he hadn’t thought about calling an attorney until Carillo found him.
“Joe Carillo approached me and informed me that I have rights,” said the young father of a 3 month old daughter (photographed left) who works at a smoke shop. “He said what happened to me was wrong. And I told a friend who put me in touch with an attorney.”
Carillo says Cody hired him to look into Stoddard’s past behavior with minors.
“In doing so, I came across this incident and decided to investigate,” Carillo said, adding that he spoke to Loro eight times to “make sure what he was telling me was true.”
Stoddard said Carillo interrogated his 85-year-old mother and even visited his daughter at the congressional office of U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, where Stoddard’s daughter works as an intern.
“It amounts to legal harassment,” Stoddard said.
Cody is well known for creating videos that attack politicians he doesn’t like, such as former Miami Beach Mayor Phil Levine and Commissioner Jonah Wolfson for having opened that quid pro quo PAC and he also created some web videos for Kristen Rosen Gonzalez in her congressional bid. He’s been long involved in politics, waging the lawsuits that created single member districts in the county.
Recently, he formed a non-profit 501(c)(4), A Better Miami-Dade Inc., so he could raise money for these fights the without having to say where he’s getting the funds. The PAC also made a contribution to Gwen Graham.
It boils down to a grudge. Stoddard should not have shut Cody down at a South Miami Commission meeting. The Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust found probable cause that Stoddard did violate Cody’s “right to be heard” under the Citizens Bill of Rights. That’s only one of the ethics complaints Cody filed. The other is for voting (he should have recused himself) on getting the city to pay his legal fees defending against the Martinez de Castro lawsuit.
“Five minutes on the microphone and this wouldn’t have happened,” Cody said.
But the bigger problem might not be in Stoddard’s actions — or lack of action — at the party that Halloween night. It might be in actions taken after to try to cover up any wrongdoing or even the perception of wrongdoing.
A police report taken at Loro’s hospital bed looks unfamiliar to the young man, now 20, and also seems scripted.
“That’s not my handwriting and it also doesn’t sound like me, like what I would say,” Loro told Ladra. And he’s right. It doesn’t sound like anything a teenager would say and, instead, sounds like it was scripted to get Stoddard off the hook.
The statement is allegedly written by Loro at 1:40 a.m. Nov. 1 — so was in between the times the boy stopped breathing? His mother said she went home to take a shower and that when she returned she was told detectives had talked to her son.
“I went to a party at the South Miami Mayor’s house and there was alcohol outside of his house in the park and I had some vodka to drink,” Loro allegedly wrote in his statement. “And there were people inside the house also drinking.
“The mayor, at one point, found a bottle in his kitchen, stopped the party, addressed the bottle and told everyone inside the house that he cannot have minors drinking alcohol on his property. He then put the bottle he found in a safe place and then left to his room. After the mayor left to his room the party continued on for the night.”
Really? Loro wrote all that by himself with no coaching? Ladra finds that hard to believe.
Another statement from Loro taken on July 27 this year disputes the statement police said he gave in 2014.
“The date and time of the statement is incorrect as well as all of the words highlighted an with my initials,” Carlo wrote, referring to practically the entire second half. “I did not write these highlighted words and what is depicted on this statement is not what occurred at the party that night.”
Using the police department to cover up any possible malfeasance or negligence is worse than the original allegation that he let teens drink at his house.
Ladra has been told that the state attorney’s office is investigating.

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