Before Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago hand-picked attorney Richard Lara to run for city commission, in an effort to try to get his majority back with a third guaranteed vote, Lara was not at all involved in city politics. He hasn’t served on any boards. He never spoke before the commission, until he announced his run for office last year in a tacky move.
He hasn’t even voted in a single Coral Gables election since 1999.
Lara is asking for Gables residents to vote for him in this April 8 election, paints himself as a lifelong resident who cares deeply about the city. Yet he hasn’t cast a ballot in the City Beautiful in more than two decades. That’s because he lived in Westchester for a 17-year stint between calling Coral Gables home.
According to public records obtained from the Miami-Dade Elections Department, Lara has voted almost exclusively in national and state elections. He voted absentee in November, but did not vote in the primary last year. Ladra can’t help but wonder if Lago knows that Lara didn’t vote in the 2023 election, where the mayor’s two other handpicked candidates lost to commissioners Melissa Castro and Ariel Fernandez. Lara voted in the general election in 2022, but not in the city elections in 2021.
Read related: Coral Gables candidate Richard Lara campaigns in public comments — again
That’s because he was not eligible, or not registered to vote in the Gables election until June of 2021. Lara, who has repeatedly said he has lived in Coral Gables all his life, lived in Westchester for a spell. Miami-Dade property records show he purchased a home on Cadagua in 1998 and sold it in 2003. That could explain why he voted in the city in 1999.
But Lara hasn’t voted once since then. Not even 2001. Or after he moved back in 2021, when, county records show, he and his wife Bertha — who were married in 1997, according to the county clerk’s records — purchased their home on Coral Way for $1.5 million. Before that, Lara was registered from 2003 to 2021 to vote at a house near 97th Avenue and 30th Street owned by Bertha Canales, which is his wife’s maiden name. So, her house or her mom’s.

 
Lara, taking a page from his master’s book, did not return calls, texts and emails from Political Cortadito.
Attorney Thomas “Tom” Wells, who is running in the open seat against Lara (and transit lobbyist and onetime commission candidate Claudia Miro, too), is making this an issue. It’s smart. It is yet more evidence that Lara is just a Johnny Come Lately, and at the behest of the mayor for no other reason than to be a pocket vote on the commission dais.
At a recent forum hosted by the Gables Good Government group, Lara — whose entire campaign mirrors the issues that are hammered by Mayor Lago — tried to backtrack on the lies about living in the Gables his whole life saying that he has “always considered” Coral Gables home even though he technically lived out of the city. “His response prompted laughter from the audience,” says a story in the Coral Gables Gazette that provides a snapshot of the event.
Read related: School-based PTA forum for Coral Gables candidates has no big surprises
Strangely enough, Wells — who is endorsed by the active resident group Coral Gables Neighbors Association — also pulled the data for Lara’s wife, who did vote in the Gables elections of 2001 and 2005, which seems to indicate that she and Richard Lara were not living in the same house. Or that she committed voter fraud. Either, or. Ladra would ask the newly elected Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Alina Garcia to look into it, but she was at Lago’s town hall Thursday, so she may be biased.

Maybe Wells did it because he wanted to tout his wife’s own voting record, which is perfect. Dianne Wells has voted in every city election back to 1999. That’s 15 times, while Tom Wells, the candidate, has voted 10 times. He could not tell Ladra why he did not vote those years he was a no-show. “Maybe I was traveling,” he told Ladra.
But the local vote is important, he says.
“It shows commitment and passion to the city. It just shows you care,” Wells told Political Cortadito.
Records indicate that Miro, a former planning and zoning board member who ran for commission in 2021 and lost in a crowded race (Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson won in a runoff), is close behind with only one less vote in the city recorded. She was endorsed by The Miami Herald this week and is basically seen as an independent candidate. Lara is on an intentional slate with Lago and Anderson. Wells is on a defacto slate with Commissioner Kirk Menendez, who is running for mayor, and architect Felix Pardo, who is running against Anderson.
The next day, Community Newspapers — which endorsed Lara’s master, Mayor Lago, earlier — endorsed Lara, without even questioning the other candidates. Tsk, tsk. Ladra expects an endorsement for Anderson next.
Most longtime political observers believe this race (more on it later) is heading into a runoff because none of the three candidates will pull 50% plus one of the April 8 vote. That would be proof that every vote counts.
Someone better tell Lara.
The post Coral Gables candidate Richard Lara has not voted in the city since 1999 appeared first on Political Cortadito.

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The first forum for Coral Gables candidates, presented by the PTAs of eight city schools, was centered on education and the issues at the schools in the City Beautiful, like safety, teachers’ wages, affordable housing for teachers, student anxiety, book banning, increasing the number of families who send their kids to public schools and food waste in cafeterias. I kid you not.
Questions were asked by students at local schools and then the PTA members chose some submitted by participants in the Q&A section of the Zoom forum. Voters who missed it can view a recording here. The password is ?E^XpP^9, which is unnecessarily impossible to remember.
Not that it’s really worth the two hours. There were no real zingers or surprises. And it wasn’t terribly enlightening.
Candidates were questioned in three groups for the three different races, with the first session focused on the mayoral hopefuls — incumbent Mayor Vince Lago, Commissioner Kirk Menendez and Michael Abbott, an accountant with a beef against Coral Gables Police, who stands no chance of winning but could force a runoff.

All of the candidates think Coral Gables has some of the best schools. Abbott sounded like a robot reading from a boring script, and kept talking about his “technology hub” and establishing “Silicon South,” which is apparently a part of his platform. Lago and Menendez each touted their respective scholarship fundraising and different programs they’ve created.
Lago said he was the first elected in Miami-Dade to put police officers at schools after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. Menendez spearheaded spending $50,000 in the city budget for a conceptual design of a public park working with the Miami-Dade County School Board and mentioned the compact between the city of Miami Beach and the school board as something the Gables could explore.
Read related: Candidates are set for Coral Gables election April 8 as voters request ABs
The best part was when the candidates were basically asked to defend their decision to send their kids to private schools, not in so many words, but that was the point. Like, gotcha. Abbott said he has no kids but Lago and Menendez, who were obviously the targets of this question, said they made the decision to send their kids to faith-based schools because they are Catholic.
Lago — who suddenly has a lisp (maybe he had come from the dentist’s office?) — wanted to be someplace else.
There were no big surprises in the two commission forums, either. But some interesting takeaways:
Both Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson and Felix Pardo, a longtime city activist and architect, are products of the public school system. Pardo’s wife is a teacher and his son is a public school teacher in Chicago’s South Side. Both his grandchildren attend Chicago public schools. Oh, and Pardo has was recently celebrated for perfect attendance at The Rotary Club.

Anderson, as usual, sounded like she was mansplaining everything to people who just aren’t as smart as her. She also said she started bike lanes in Coral Gables 18 years ago.
Attorney Laureano Cancio, who announced his run before Pardo jumped in, is a Pedro Pan kid, having come from Cuba on the Catholic Church’s Peter Pan flights as an unaccompanied minor. He said his number one issue is education and he has said in the past that the city could establish its own education system or compact with the Miami-Dade County Public School Board to keep Gables students, who now go to schools outside the city, at hometown schools. That makes a community, he said.
At 74, he also runs about three miles almost every day.
The best question was from the participants on the Zoom call and it was about density. Pardo, who is on the planning and zoning board and was also one it 20 years ago as the chair, is absolutely making overdevelopment an issue in his race, and rightly so. Anderson was elected in part because she was supposed to be a firewall against the developers’ interest and, many say, it hasn’t turned out that way.
“I have been the sole voice for responsible development in the city,” Pardo said on the Zoom call. “What has gone on is absolutely atrocious. This city 100 years ago was never designed for the incredibly large projects that are just destroying the fabric of our city.”
Read related: Fundraising for Coral Gables election slows, incumbents count on max gifts
It’s not just traffic that’s affected every time a zoning or land use variance gets approved, he said. Water and sewer, parks schools, freighters, police are all “overburdened,” Pardo explained. “We are pinning ourselves into a corner.”
In the third race, voters have to choose between attorney Richard Lara, Lago’s handpicked pocket-vote candidate, micro transit lobbyist Claudia Miro, who talked about lobbying in Tallahassee for more school guards, and attorney and activist Thomas “Tom” Wells, all of whom are public school products.
Lara seemed to pander and use a bunch of buzzwords. Miro and Wells both seemed more prepared, knowledgable and specific.

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Attorney Richard Lara, who announced his candidacy for Coral Gables commissioner in February during public comments at a commission meeting, used another commission meeting Tuesday to attack Commissioner Kirk Menendez, who he is presumably challenging next year at the behest of the mayor’s cadre of establishment supporters.

Is this going to be a habit? This free advertising?

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And Vince Lago hasn’t raised any PAC money in a year

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Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres.

That’s an old Cuban saying my mom used to tell Ladra to get me to stay away from my more, um, troublemaker friends. “Tell me who you run with and I’ll tell you who you are.” It’s still true today. And nowhere is it more true than in politics.

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Sources say the mayor’s allies recruited the candidate

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