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Former State Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla, who just lost special election for county commission in June on the heels of a loss in a special Senate race, has moved from his room in his parent’s house in Little Havana to a riverfront condo next to Sewell Park so he can run for city commission next year.
Dean DLP’s new digs on the 18th floor of the Terrazas Riverpark Village Condo, at 1861 NW S River Dr., is a 967-square-foot, 2-bedroom, 2-bath unit purchased in 2016 for $345,000 by Josefa Ortas, whose mailing address is in Madrid.
It also happens to be in Senate District 37 and Florida House District 111, but it is doubtful that anyone in the Diaz de la Portilla family wants to go up again against Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, who has beaten both Alex and big bro Miguel. And it’s hard to believe ADLP would make este sacrificio more than two years before the next state race.
Besides, las malas lenguas say he is definitely eyeing the city seat so he can conspire with BFF Commissioner Joe Carollo, who he campaigned for and supports. Carollo also campaigned with ADLP in city of Miami senior housing complexes and is reportedly under investigation because of allegations he used city resources trying to elect his friend.
Read related: Gimenez family hit in Senate campaign… ADLP’s wag the dog
But the burning question is: Does Alex really live at Terrazas, where the typical rent for a 2/2 on a high floor — like the one with this view in this picture — is $2,100 a month, or is he pulling a Carollo?
To remind readers, Carollo wants us all to believe that he lives in a small Brickell apartment and not in his mansion in Coconut Grove. His residency was challenged in court by the second place finisher who sought to prove that Carollo did not live in the district for a year before qualifying, as required.
The judge ruled in favor of Carollo, who signed the lease for the Brickell Station Lofts unit on Sept. 22, 2016. The deadline to qualify for the ballot in that election was Sept. 23, 2017.
ADLP changed his voter’s registration address on Sept. 15. The qualifying period for the Nov. 5, 2019 Miami city election is from Sept. 6 to Sept. 21.

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When Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and Commissioner Audrey Edmonson made themselves members of the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority early last year — convincing colleagues to appoint them rather than citizens, as they had traditionally done — there was talk about making MDX toll funds available to build rail for the SMART plan.
That was the whole idea, wasn’t it? That’s what Gimenez campaigned on in 2016.
Instead, all he’s done is get his daughter-in-law work and promote the construction of 14 new miles of highway.
That’s not what we were expecting.
Read related: MDX spent $400K on PR, including $60K for mayor’s daughter-in-law
“Miami-Dade mayor takes a seat on MDX toll board and eyes money for rail projects,” read the Feb. 7, 2017 headline in the Miami Herald.
“County preparing to spend $3.6B on rapid transit,” reads another headline, Feb. 16, 2017, in The Next Miami. “Mayor Carlos Gimenez and another county commissioner recently appointed themselves to the MDX board with the intention of taking MDX funds for rail,” the story said.
The mayor himself, at his first MDX meeting, said they agency had to be about more than highways.
“What the commission did in putting myself in and the vice chair is a clear indication that we consider MDX to be part of the solution and that we need to work together because its about mobility, its about getting around” Gimenez told the board at his introduction meeting.
“MDX is about maybe expressways. Maybe it should be more than that,” he said. “How we get around in the very near future is going to be quite different than how we get around today.”
What happened to all the promises?
Read related: Kendall Parkway to nowhere is an intentional slippery slope for UDB
By July of last year, after he was made chairman of the board at MDX, Gimenez was already saying rail wasn’t going to happen. He called it old fashioned. “So 19th century,” he told the Miami Herald’s editorial board. And, instead, he proposes the modern, 21st century solution: More buses.
Now his role on MDX is to promote the Kendall Parkway, a highway to nowhere over endangered wetlands and across the Urban Boundary Development line that everybody in the world knows will just become gridlocked as soon as it opens and that most Miami-Dade residents — and all environmentalists — don’t want.
Gimenez has become the lead advocate for the proposed $1 billion extension of the 836 expressway. Last month, before the county commission voted to approve the highway to nowhere, he actually said that 5,000 postcards received from residents in favor of the Parkway — which is perfectly named because it will become a parking lot — proved support for the project.
What he didn’t say was that there were really 150,000 cards sent out by MDX before the first vote in June — at a cost of $125,000 (which seems inflated) — and that they did not have an option to mark if you were against the new 14 miles of highway. Ladra can’t help but wonder if Gimenez, who was made chairman of the MDX board this past summer, approved that.
Read related: No-brainer Miami-Dade Commission approves Kendall Parkway despite so much
He also forgot to mention that MDX spent at least $400,000 on PR for the Kendall Parkway vote, including $60,000 that went to the company the mayor’s daughter-in-law works for.
On Monday, the Herald’s Doug Hanks wrote that two environmental groups filed separate lawsuits to block the construction of the Kendall Parkway, saying that the public was misled about the details and that what the commission approved was different than what was advertised.
Today, Tuesday, Gimenez will hold court at MDX, 3790 NW 21st St., where the board meets at 4 p.m. On the agenda: an update on the Kendall Parkway and a $2.6 million contract for “Construction Engineering and Inspection (CE&I) Services” on a number of projects, including the addition of a continuous westbound lane and interchange improvements at 57th and 17th avenues, the addition of a continuous eastbound lane from west of the LeJeune exit to 27th Avenue with interchange improvements, and replacing some tolling location points.
Not on the agenda: Rail.
 

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