Miami Beach Police and city officials are trying to clamp down on violent crime that has spiked in the city in recent weeks.

“We have too many people not doing the right thing,” said Commissioner Mark Samuelian, who had a virtual town hall meeting last week with Police Chief Richard Clements, city staff and residents.

Read Full Story

There is a secret meeting in Miami Beach this afternoon at which the city manager’s contract will be discussed, as well as several other measures that include limiting residential input into government policy.
City Manager Jimmy Morales could come out of it with a raise and a five-year contract. Not right away, maybe. But once they know how the votes are going to go, a commission meeting is just a rubber stamp.
The Committee as a Whole meeting — coming three weeks after Morales asked for a five year extension and for the city commission to authorize the finance committee to negotiate a raise — is not a regular commission meeting. It is a more like a secret gathering. It is not in commission chambers. It is in the manager’s office conference room. It is not aired on television or streamed live online or even recorded. There is no public input.
If Commissioner Michael Góngora had not put it on Facebook, nobody would have known it was happening.
City commissioners got an emailed agenda from the mayor’s chief of staff Friday. “Below are the items to be discussed at Tuesday’s Committee of the Whole. Do you want to add anything,” Michelle Burger wrote, before adding the items:

City Manager Performance Evaluation
Ballot Questions / Resolutions
Best Practices for the Office of the Mayor & Commission
Eliminating the Commission Committee system and moving towards two (2) Commission meetings a month
Quarterly meetings for all boards and committees (except land use boards
Policies related to presentation and awards agenda

The last one seems pretty boring, but the rest certainly seem like they should be discussed at an open and public city commission meeting.
Particularly the manager’s evaluation, which was taken off the table by Mayor Dan Gelber last summer, when the commission evaluated the city attorney, Góngora said.
“I had inquired whether or not we were going to be evaluating the city manager and I was advised it would happen at a future date,” Góngora told Ladra, who said he was put off by fact that it came so much later on the heels of the request for a five year extension.
“Regardless of how you feel about the city manager’s performance, I’m unaware of us ever doing such a lengthy contract extension in the past,” Góngora said.
Gelber did not return a call for comment. Commissioners John Aleman, Micky Steinberg and Ricky Arriola did not return emails seeking comment Tuesday morning, although Arriola did have his aide call back and stress that the 2 p.m. meeting nobody knew about — with the seven commissioners, their staff, the city manager and his staff and the attorney and clerk and their staff in the manager’s conference room — is open to the public.
Commissioner Mark Samuelian said he was not concerned because nothing would be determined Tuesday without further discussion. “I’m under the impression there will be more than one discussion,” Samuelian said, adding that a salary increase would  go before the finance committee.
But when? Because also on the agenda for the secret meeting is a discussion about having all boards and committees meet quarterly instead of monthly or more regularly. This item would clearly get a lot of comment at a regular commission meeting.
“They are suggesting that the frequency of the meetings could be burdensome to city staff,” Samuelian said, adding that he wants to hear from staff about just how stressful it is and from his appointees to see what they think.
Góngora said he opposed the idea. “Those committees do a great job. Limiting them to once a quarter would stifle them and the hard work they do. It would severely impact citizen involvement,” he said.
There’s another questionable item about scrapping the committee structure within the commission and having all issues go before the full commission twice a month. These meetings are already 12 hours long sometimes, and this would likely make them longer. But it would also give the mayor more control.
No wonder he’s bringing these things up in secret.

Read Full Story

There were no surprises in the Miami Beach elections, which ended Tuesday with Mayor Dan Gelber getting 82% of the vote against three nobodies who each got single digits and former Commissioner Michael Gongora coming back to the dais, as largely expected, with 65% over restauranteur Adrian Gonzalez, who got 35%.
In the other race, Mark Samuelian, who lost his first bid two years ago, came in with 68% over Rafael “Wild Willy” Velasquez, who still got 32% despite having whipped out his penis last month in an ill-fated effort to woo Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez.
It’s still gonna be awkward for Rosen Gonzalez because she had openly helped Velasquez, but at least she doesn’t have to worry about his willy on the dais.
She also doesn’t have to worry about Mayor Philip Levine messing her up anymore. Levine decided not to run for re-election because, as he announced last week, he is running for governor instead. God help us all.
Read related story: Michael Gongora, Mark Samuelian lead Miami Beach Commission money race
Ladra hopes that this means there is a change in the climate at City Hall, where Levine led with fear and intimidation. Gelber may be his own man or he might be, as some suggest, Levine’s hand-picked successor (after Ricky Arriola tanked in the polls). But he was a senator once and is the son of the great former mayor Seymore Gelber so Ladra expects a lot from him.
Samuelian, too, has a lot to live up to after being endorsed by nearly every former elected in the city. But he lucked out when former Commissioner Michael Grieco — who eventually resigned as part of a deal with the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office for his PAC’s illegal campaign contribution — dropped out of the race (more on that later).
Can Miami Beach leave all this nastiness in the past and start new with three new electeds on the dais? We still have Arriola and a couple of other Levine puppets doing his bidding up there, but will Gelber make them moot?
The election ended Tuesday as expected but the real political machinations have just begun.

Read Full Story

While it is not the only reason they are the frontrunners in the November election, it helps that former Miami Beach Commissioner Michael Gongora and comeback candidate Mark Samuelian have each raised more than $170,000, leading the pack in their respective commission races, according to the latest campaign reports filed last week.

And leading by quite a distance.

Gongora, who enjoys the most name recognition as a former commissioner and one-time mayoral candidate, has the most of any of this year’s commission hopefuls, with $188,785 raised since March. Or actually $168,785 since $20K is reported as a loan to himself. Also, a quarter of last month’s $40K, or $10,000, comes from Adam Walker of Boardwalk Properties, a real estate investor who owns several small apartment buildings in South Beach and who bundled $40,000 in contributions to Commissioner Michael Grieco, who is running for mayor. Maybe Gongora saw the Political Cortadito story about it in May and hit Mr. Walker up the next month.

Read related story: Michael Grieco its $500K, with help from real estate investor

Nobody else in the Group 3 race even comes close to Gongora’s bank. Adrian Gonzalez, the owner of David’s Cafe and Gongora’s most serious challenge, has raised just over $55,000 and Zachary Eisner has raised $17,250.

In the Group 2 race, Samuelian has raised $170,747, an impressive amount in two months. Until you read the fine print and realize that more than half of that — or $91,000 — is in loans from the candidate to himself. He loaned himself $56,000 in the first report for May, to make it a total of $105,472, and then made another $35,000 loan to the campaign in June, so he could report a total of $62,275. Without the loans, he would be reporting only $79,472 in the same two months — which is not really “more cash on hand than all our opponents combined,” as he claims in one of his email blasts.

Attorney Joshua Levy has reported raising $76,070, but $24,700 is on loan from himself. Rafael Velazquez has managed to resist loaning himself anything to artificially pump up his numbers, even though he has only raised $31,476 so far.

Is Samuelian trying to scare more challengers away? Already, Eisner switched to the Group 3 race against Gongora and Robert Lansburgh (who had loaned himself $50K) withdrew completely, giving Samuelian his endorsement. One of many.

Samuelian boasts basically everybody’s endorsement. Former Miami Beach Mayor Matti Herrera Bower, former Beach Commissioners Jorge Esposito, Saul Gross, Nancy Liebman, Ed Tobin and Deede Weithorn and former Miami-Dade County Commissioner Katy Sorenson have all given him their nod. So have a number of community activists like Daniel Ciraldo, Frank and Marian Del Vecchio, Brad Bonessi, Carla Probus and Michael DeFilippi, to name a few.

And as the former president of Miami Beach United (he resigned last month), Samuelian not only built a track record opposing the “train to nowhere” and fighting Watson Island development, but he also doubled the group’s membership and increased its influence, which means he made a lot of friends and gained a lot of supporters along the way. Add that to the name recognition he built in 2015 with the 4,999 people who voted for him against John Elizabeth Aleman and you have all the makings of a winner winner, chicken dinner.

Read related story: Mark Samuelian runs for Miami Beach commission, part II

Name I.D. and wall of endorsements are those other reasons that Samuelian is the one to beat, because money alone doe not always do it. After all, Samuelian spent $416,560 in is first bid against Aleman and he came real close — there was a 77 vote difference — but he spent way more than Aleman, who only spent $274,045. In fact, Samuelian also significantly bankrolled that race, too, loaning himself a whopping $216,247,  or more than half his total bank, in installments of $25,000 loans every month, $50K the last month and a little more than $16,000 that he apparently needed at the very end to make ends meet.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Mayor Philip Levine is not running for re-election and will no longer be there to pull the strings, so he’s not going to back any puppet candidate against anyone — at least so far.

Oh, that and there are still four full months to raise funds for the November election.

Mark Samuelian, a Miami Beach activist who ran for commission in 2015 and lost by 77 votes, filed Monday to run again, joining the clusterbunch of candidates in the Group 2 open seat. Apparently, nobody wants to run against former Commissioner Michael Góngora in the Group 3 race.

There are four first timers running already in that Group 2 race, for a seat vacated by Commissioner Michael Greico‘s bid for mayor. They are: Zachary Eisner, Robert Lansburgh, Joshua Levy and Rafael Velasquez. Samuelian, who is president of Miami Beach United and quite active on city issues, has more name recognition and, with the first round experience, is arguably the instant front runner, especially if he keeps his preservationists base.

Read related story: Miami Beach’s Mark Samuelian scores key endorsements

“Miami Beach has transformed into a truly world-class city, but we still face important challenges,” Samuelian said in a statement. “I look forward to utilizing my decades of real-world engineering and strategic business experience to help our city tackle major issues, including transportation, flooding and sea level rise, and quality of life for our residents.

In 2015, Samuelian — who also serves on the board of the Belle Isles Residents Association and the Pets Trust Advisory Board — had the Miami Herald endorsement as well as key endorsements from activists like  Frank and Marian DelVecchio and former Miami Beach Commissioner Nancy Liebman when he ran and lost to John Elizabeth Aleman, who was the mayor’s slate mate. In the end, he got 4,999 votes to her 5,076. By a nose. He had 49.62% of the vote. Which certainly would encourage anyone to try again.

Samuelian got onto the ballot in 2015 by collecting a record number of petition signatures and told Ladra that he expect to break that record this year. He and his team will repeat the gassroots walking campaign of two years ago. “We will be listening closely to Miami Beach residents and engaging in serious conversations about our future,” Samuelian said.

But seriously, the future probably holds more candidates for this open seat. Qualifying isn’t until September even. Let’s see how long Samuelian can stay top dog.