And a slew of electeds supporting him

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A Miami Beach community activist and PTA mom has filed to run against Miami Beach Commissioner Ricky Arriola in this year’s November election.
Monica Matteo-Salinas, chair of the board of the Miami Beach Community Development Corporation, filed paperwork on Friday to run for the Group V seat, which is currently occupied by Arriola, who is only in his first term. So let’s not mince words: This is a challenge.
Bold move for a political newcomer.
“Am I excited? Yes. Am I scared? Gulp, yes,” Matteo-Salinas wrote on her Facebook wall. “But it has always been my DREAM to run for office. Win or lose, this is who I am. From PTA mom to community activist, I have a big mouth – and an even bigger brain. And I’m not afraid to use them!

“My journey starts today. Stay tuned!”

But Matteo-Salinas is not entirely new to the political scene. She has served as Florida Director of the Campus Election Engagement Project, a non partisan effort to increase the student vote in federal, state and local elections, for the last two years. Simultaneously, she was campus coordinator at Miami-Dade College for the Institute for Civic Engagement and Democracy and Vice President of Advocacy for the PTA at her sons’ school.
She also spent three years as a development manager at Catalyst Miami, a non profit that helps other non profits on the ground with community building initiatives and that was founded by Miami-Dade Commissioner Daniella Levine-Cava. She is an advocate for human rights, quality education & affordable housing.
Expect her to get a lot of Democratic Party support.
Also expect years of mismanagement at the Miami Beach Community Development Corp. — which received millions in city grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Develoment to become a campaign issue. There have been maintenance issues at public housing units, a six-figure deficit in the budget and friction with Miami-Dade County, which has taken over at least two properties. An audit of finances in 2013 found evidence that funds were misspent on ineligible expenses. The executive director resigned, two city officials quit and a third was fired.
But Matteo-Salinas, who inherited many of those problems when she joined the board in 2015, has taken steps to rectify the issues. But she may come under fire for efforts to turn the Capri Apartments into market-rate housing, which happened after she came on board.
Read related: Miami Beach mayor invites Castros to open Cuban consulate
She has to be better, though, than the hand-picked lackey that former Mayor Philip Levine put up there to vote for his items. Arriola — who went to Cuba as a tourist and wanted to bring a Cuban consulate back to Miami Beach — has since aligned himself with Mayor Dan Gelber.
Just a couple of weeks ago, he voted to make another lackey, former Commissioner Joy Malakoff, a commissioner again, to serve out the remainder of the term vacated by Kristen Rosen-Gonzalez.
Ladra would not be surprised if he simply backs down and doesn’t run for re-election.

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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.