UPDATED: So this is why she didn’t run for re-election.
Former Miami Beach Commissioner Joy Malakoff, who said she wouldn’t run again because of a back injury, was hired by the city at Wednesday’s commission meeting to do three months of community outreach for the city’s general obligation bond effort for $50,000. Guess her back is feeling much better.
This juicy job was not advertised. There was no competitive process for it. And believe me, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people who could do it better than Malakoff, and in two languages.
By the end of Friday, after Ladra had made a series of inquiries, Malakoff “withdrew” her name from consideration. But the kicker is that there may have been a Sunshine Law violation because at least one commissioner got a late night call Tuesday about this item. From who? She wouldn’t say. But that means it’s interesting.
Normally, a former commissioner would have to wait two years after leaving office to work for or lobby the city, but commissioners on Wednesday — after the city attorney reminded them that they could — waived that rule in order to give Malakoff the palanca position. Both the vote to waive the rule and the vote to award the contract to Malakoff was 5-2, with only Commissioners Michael Góngora and Kristen Rosen Gonzalez voting against both times.
But it’s a moot point. Earlier Ladra said it was illegal and I certainly think it was invalid. That’s because Miami Beach — which has more rules about campaign contributions than any other city probably on Earth, prohibits anyone who gave to a candidate’s political campaign from becoming a city vendor, which is what Malkoff did on Wednesday, for at least a year. She left office three months ago, after contributing to both Mayor Dan Gelber’s and Commissioner Micky Steinberg’s campaigns. Ladra had first written that they shouldn’t have voted on this, but rather recuse themselves. I thought commissioners were the ones that were prohibited from voting on items for vendors who contributed.
Mayor Dan Gelber
Gelber, who only called me back after he read the story to correct me, fell all over himself to correct me and explain that it wasn’t exactly illegal. He pointed me to the ordinance and indeed, it says that “a person or entity other than a vendor who directly or indirectly makes to a candidate elected to the office of mayor or commissioner shall be disqualified for a period of 12 months following the swearing in of the subject elected official from serving as a vendor with the city.” This, too, can be waived by a 5/7th vote.
So, wait a minute. If the commission waives that part of the Beach ethics ordinance, then she can have the job. So the same mayor and/or commissioners who get the campaign contribution can then turn around and waive the rule that prohibits their benefactors from getting a juicy city contract?
“I actually looked at it the other day,” Gelber told me about Ordinance 2-487, giving me the number.
So he thought he was going to have to waive both sections of the ethics ordinance: The one that prohibits a former employee or elected from being a vendor and the one that prohibits a person or entity who gave to his campaign. Like that is so much better.
Ladra is glad the mayor corrected me because, actually, this is worse. He was going to waive both ethical requirements. For a guy who ran on ethics, this is rich.
But it gets better (or worse).
Gelber first told me that Malakoff didn’t get the job outright, that the commission simply authorized the city manager to negotiate a contract with her up to $50,000. We all know that’s how it works in every city and at the county. Electeds authorize or instruct the city manager or mayor and the negotiation is done. It doesn’t come back. And Gelber knows this, too, because he contradicted himself moments later.
“I don’t quibble with the fact that there are people more qualified. He may hire them, too,” Gelber said, referring to the city manager. “He may not have to go through us. There’s going to be lots of people doing outreach.”
First, whoa! “Lots of people?” How much is the city going to spend to convince residents to increase taxes? How many of those people are gonna be campaign contributors and friends? And, secondly, aha! “He may not have to go through us,” he said. And I asked him to confirm. “The only reason it was before us is because we couldnt hire her,” without the waiver, Gelber told Ladra, “because she was a commissioner. He needed that.”
But, then, he certainly wouldn’t have to come back to the commission.
Commissioner Michael Góngora
Góngora told Ladra he voted against Malakoff getting the plum post because there was no prior announcement or open, competitive process. The job came up during a discussion item, an update from the city manager on the efforts to get a GOB passed. Then suddenly, out of nowhere City Manager Jimmy Morales explains how they’ve been thinking about hiring Joy Malakoff, who was sitting in the audience, as a consultant to do outreach.
Only Góngora and Rosen Gonzalez seemed shocked, really. Every other commissioner talked about her unique knowledge and experience, laying it on pretty thick. Like, almost too much, you know? Over compensation. Commissioner Ricky Arriola practically drew a sword to defend his colleague. Really, anyone who cares about this has to watch the video on Facebook posted by former Commissioner Michael Grieco (more on that later).
Though she had previously voted to move forward with the GOB exploration process, citing parks and a swimming pool as some of the projects she would like to see funded, Rosen Gonzalez told Ladra Friday that she hasn’t decided whether to move forward with what is essentially a tax increase until she has details on how much it would be and how it would impact homeowners. She certainly wasn’t ready to hire someone to do outreach. Once, and if, the city gets to that point, she wants to advertise the position and hire a professional.
“This is obviously a political favor,” Rosen Gonzalez said on the dais, raising questions about Malakoff’s skills set for this particular position. But more importantly, telling her colleagues that she had gotten a late night call on Tuesday from someone telling her about the item. Who made that call? On behalf of whom? Nobody even asked her! Some might think that one of the commissioners would have been curious.
Góngora said he would have voted yes had it been presented as what it was, instead of snuck into a discussion item like a Trojan horse. He urged his colleagues to defer the item to the first meeting in March, three weeks from now, so that it would be properly noticed for what it was. His colleagues seemed adamant to make this happen now.
“Discussion items are typically not an action item,” Góngora told me later. “It was mislabeled and misleading. It hadn’t been advertised and properly noticed. The item didn’t say vote three times to hire someone. It said update.
“It seemed like a set up.”
Ya think?
Morales knew he was going to bring this up. It appears it was something that city staffers have been talking about. And at least Gelber was brought into the fold (though it appears Arriola was in on it, too), because the mayor said that “when I first heard about this idea, I thought it was a fair and good idea.”
So that begs the question: When did he first “hear” about the idea? From who?
Malakoff said that she was “asked to sell the GO bonds to the community and I’d be happy to do so.” Who asked her? When?
The city manager did not return several calls from Ladra. He returned a text message at 5:36 p.m., four hours after I texted him, with “She withdrew from the process.”
What freaking process?
When I texted Morales three minutes later asking for the letter or email in which Malakoff withdrew, Morales — who also used to be a poster child of ethics — didn’t respond.
But at this point, it doesn’t matter that Malakoff didn’t take the job that was offered, if not illegally then certainly unethically — though I would bet on the first. Because Ladra believes there was a Sunshine Law violation here. And that this was a deal done on the campaign trail — a job created for Joy, who endorsed several candidates last year. There is just no way that this wasn’t worked out behind the scenes.
This is something for Joe Centorino and the Miami Dade Ethics and Public Trust Commission to look into. Consider this post my complaint if you have to, Joe.

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And the lucky residents of Kendall may be the winners

Zika may be out of the daily headlines and daily heads — for now. Because experts have already said that the virus could, and very likely will come back as mosquito season returns to South Florida this summer.

And, of course, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez — who had cut mosquito control funding in previous years and was caught unprepared for the 2016 crisis — has a plan this time: He wants to drop thousands, perhaps millions of genetically modified mosquitos to mate with the female Aedes aegypti species that spreads Zika — as well as Dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya — and eventually kill them off, producing offspring that die before they reproduce.

That’s right. Gimenez, the former firefighters, wants to fight fire with fire. He met with Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado and Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine about it earlier this month and pitched the proposal. Also there: Miami-Dade Deputy Mayor Alina Hudak, Miami Beach City Manager Jimmy Morales, Dr. Lilian Rivera, the head of the Miami-Dade Department of Health, and a few other municipal staffers. The topic: What everyone is doing to prepare for mosquito season.

Miami-Dade was scarred by the Zika bite last year that seemingly ate into our tourist dollars after Wynwood became ground zero, the home to the first locally-transmitted case and, eventually, dozens bite victims, although the disease is generally undetected and is feared to cause encephelitis in the unborn children of pregnant women.  Wynwood was declared a Zika zone by Gov. Rick Scott and put on a travel advisory by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Later, Miami Beach became a secondary zone with 19 cases. 

This is where Gimenez asked Miami and Miami Beach to host the mutant mosquitoes.

It isn’t so far-fetched. The technology of GMO mosquitoes, as they are called, has been used in Panama, the Cayman Islands and Brazil, where they have reportedly reduced the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitos by 90 percent. The World Health Organization has concluded that GE mosquitoes, as they are also called, “warrant time-limited pilot deployment, accompanied by rigorous monitoring and evaluation.”

Key words: rigours monitoring and evaluation.

Because these are still mosquitos, after all. They may not bite, because only females bite, but they still buzz. They still fly around your face and bug you. We don’t know what other diseases they may carry and pass on to the females, who do bite. Or to dogs and cats. We don’t know how strong they can get. We don’t know how resistant they are and how they may further mutate or how they may affect other populations, like birds or reptiles or other bugs. Could we be creating a super-resistant mosquito species? There’s been relatively little research or study.

And Gimenez wants to do the trials here.

While he says they will all be male mutant mosquitos, it’s kinda difficult to differentiate between males and females when you are sorting millions of them, and trials in Costa Rica and elsewhere have shown that about .03 % of the mutant mosquitos that are released are female.

Read related story: Zika politics — State House candidate has repellant wristbands

That might sound like a small number. But if 3 million mutant mosquitos are released, that means 900 of them could be female. And what happens when a female mosquito with altered DNA bites a human? 

Do you know how they genetically alter these mosquitos to carry a “genetic kill switch,” so the offspring (hopefully?) inherits the lethal gene and cannot survive? Why, they insert “protein fragments” from the herpes virus, E. coli bacteria, coral and cabbage into the insects. Did we mention E. coli?

So what happens if one of the 900 females bites one of us? Can they pass their mutant DNA into our bloodstream?

It’s a controversial solution because there are still so many unknowns. Residents in the Florida Keys collected 160,000 signatures against releasing the mosquitoes in Monroe County, even though voters approved the deployment — as a Zika fighting tactic — in a referendum vote last November. Curiously enough, the Keys hasn’t had a single case of Zika reported. And they haven’t had a Dengue fever report since 2010. Ladra doesn’t know what voters were thinking. 

But at least they were given the choice in Monroe County. Gimenez won’t do that here. Because this pilot program likely comes with some federal or state grant and its his way of funding mosquito control this year, instead of adding inspectors and staff to code enforcement to cite people who keep dirty, infested pools as breeding grounds. In fact, Oxitec has provided the mutant mosquitoes to some cities for free so they get to do their trials. So maybe he’ll use the grant money someplace else. This science may be unproven and there could be unknown risks, but Gimenez doesn’t want to increase funding for code enforcement or add mosquito control inspectors when, you know, that doesn’t help his contributors or the people on his friends and family plan. And this will make it sound like he is doing something substantial, rather than just taking a stab in the dark.

Or a bite.

The mutant mosquitoes also still swarm in dark, ominous clouds — and that is not an attractive postcard picture for tourists. That’s the main reason Miami Mayor Regalado said nananina when Gimenez offered to try a pilot program in the Wynwood area that was first hit with last year’s outbreak.

“After what happened in Wynwood last year, if we start soltando mosquitos ahi, those people will suffer again. They’ve had enough,” Regalado told Ladra. The clouds of mosquitos and the mere perception that an infestation — even of mutant mosquitos — could have on tourism is not worth it, the Miami mayor said.

“We had the experience that Wynwood was crucified publicly,” Regalado said, referring to the effect the multiple cases reported in that Miami neighborhood had. “If they suddenly release all of these mosquitos that are genetically altered, it will cause a doubt for people who want to go to the Wynwood area.

“It will have a chilling effect to see a cloud of millions of mosquitos buzzing around.”

Regalado doesn’t think it’s a good idea anywhere. “It will create more anxiety in the county. The perception will be that we have more mosquitos,” he said. “They should be looking at ways to spray without using toxins like Naled. We need to focus on code enforcement and eliminate the receptacles and dirty pools that breed mosquitos.”

In Miami, the city has placed 200 electric traps in Wynwood, Little Haiti, Little Havana, Liberty City and the Design District, Regaldo said. They were donated from a company in Texas and “they have been working to reduce the population of mosquitos.”

After Regalado said no thanks to the mutant mosquito army, Gimenez apparently turned to the Beach, wanting to dump the little buggers there. 

Read related story: Joe Garcia and Carlos Curbelo agree on Zika

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said City Manager Jimmy Morales, correcting Ladra, but also likely repeating what he said at the meeting with Gimenez. “What he said was that the EPA is willing to authorize a test and that the place that makes the most sense is in Miami Beach.” 

Morales, who is very diplomatic, said he didn’t think it would be welcomed in Miami Beach, however, where residents complained loudly about the Naled that was sprayed to contain the small Zika outbreak there. “The same group that didn’t like the Naled, don’t like the [genetically modified] mosquitos.

“If there was any decision to do anything, we would have to bring it before the commission at a public hearing,” Morales told Ladra. And, he said between the lines, that’s not gonna happen.

“I don’t see that as a likely decision at all. Neither does the mayor.”

Gimenez spokesman and, now, senior advisor Michael Hernandez did not return several phone calls and text messages from Ladra asking for clarification. But both Regalado and Morales, a former county commissioner who once ran for mayor, confirmed the meeting took place and that both cities were offered the “pilot program.”

After Gimenez was rejected a second time, Regalado said, the Miami-Dade mayor announced that the county would dump the mutant mosquitos somewhere far away from the two cities — probably from any cities, so he doesn’t get the same kind of resistance.

“The only option is South,” Regalado said.

Are you listening Commissioner Joe Martinez? Because Ladra thinks this means your people. Far away and with no cities? That sounds like West Kendall to me.