Predatory scheme to buy and sell homes may have targeted the elderly
And now the commission may reward the driver with a new job
The city of Miami has sued a mayoral candidate for $3,400 in court costs after she was disqualified from the race on the grounds that she didn’t meet the residency requirements.
In case anyone was wondering, Mayra Joli — a one-time Coral Gables commission candidate who campaigned in the Miami mayoral race last month, even though she was disqualified by a judge — would have come in third.
Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo is gone, but his shadow is still hanging out in City Hall.
Acevedo was fired Thursday after a 5-hour hearing in front of the city commission who tried real hard, with the help of the city manager, to make it look like it was because of eight specific job issues, which include failure to report damage to his car, gaffes with members of the public, taking time off without reporting it and accusing three commissioners of misconduct.
Miami City Commissioner Ken Russell was not able to get even a second on his motion to fire City 
Attorney Victoria Mendez Thursday.
Russell had made the move to terminate Mendez because he said she intentionally withheld emails that he had asked her for. He said the 26 emails not provided to him painted a different picture than the ones he got when he made the same request of IT — which was that Mendez was helping a developer get approval for a lot split in Coconut Grove to build five houses on one property. He said he lost trust in the city attorney.
But as if that wasn’t enough, he also mentioned another instance in which Mendez made him uncomfortable — when she advised him to get a cell phone services that would help him avoid having to make his text messages public.
“My very first week in office, in my very first meeting with Ms. Mendez, her first advice to me was which phone company I should use because it erases your text messages sooner,” Russell said at the meeting.
“It’s Sprint by the way.
“And my heart sank because this is not what I wanted to hear from the city attorney,” said Russell, who added that he stuck with AT&T.
Which made Ladra wonder who uses Sprint. So I asked. 
And the answer is nobody. Unless Commissioner Frank Carollo uses the service provider, because he was the only one that couldn’t be reached over the weekend.
Commissioners Willy Gort, Keon Hardemon and Francis Suarez each said they, too, use AT&T.
Certainly not what Ladra expected.
It seems odd that everybody would ignore the city attorney’s advice, but Suarez — who has been critical of Mendez on other professional issues — also said that the city attorney had never advised him to use a particular cell phone company.
“She’s never said anything remotely similar to me like that,” he said.
He wouldn’t go as far as calling Russell a liar.
“I don’t think he’s a dishonest person. I also don’t think she’s a dishonest person. We get told a lot of things,” Suarez said.
And since he uses AT&T, whatever he gets told in text, stays put for longer.
Miami City Commissioner Ken Russell lost his first political battle Thursday when he failed to get any support whatsoever on his move to terminate City Attorney Victoria Mendez after she failed to provide all the emails he asked her for about a certain Coconut Grove lot split and development.
He didn’t even get a second to his motion.
Russell has said that Mendez, who makes $215,000 a year, intentionally withheld some of the emails he requested on the development application for a lot split on Battersea Road. She gave him 13 emails dating back to November 2015. When he requested the same email search from IT, he got 39, and the conversation started in October. The attorneys even provided the city attorney with draft language for the resolution.
“The whole 39 told a different story,” Russell said.
A drawing composite of one of the five homes to be built on Battersea
The freshman commissioner says the emails show that Mendez went above and beyond to help the developer get a positive ruling on the application to divide the property into five lots so he could build five homes. The original ruling from planning and zoning was that the application needed a document called a warrant. The emails suggest Mendez shopped it out to different attorneys on her staff until she got the decision she was looking for.
She also assured Javier Vazquez, an attorney/lobbyist for the developer with whom she is rather friendly, that she was doing all she could to resolve the issue. And one email indicates it might not have been an easy sell.
Read related story: Miami commissioner wants attorney fired for missing emails
“Javier, we’re having a hard time on this. Let’s talk next week,” she wrote on Oct. 30 last year. This was after she had told an assistant city attorney to talk to him and “see how we can figure out.”
That email was among the ones that were withheld from Russell. So was the one that had been sent by Assistant City Attorney Amanda Quirke the day before, on Oct. 29. “I spoke to Javier today. I reviewed this issue at length with planning and zoning to see if we could get to the same interpretation, but we could not,” Quirke wrote. “This is an unplatted lot that has had a house on it for more than 50 years. It is a building site, and no building site shall be diminished in the NCD 
without a warrant.”
Quirke was no longer needed for meetings after that, as Vazquez indicated in an email Oct. 30 to Mendez’s assistant Marta Gomez about a meeting she was trying to reschedule for when Quirke would be back.
“My client cannot afford to keep waiting. Respectfully, we know Amanda’s opinion on the matter. We are simply wanting face to face time with Vicky to give her our interpretation,” he wrote.
Mendez chimed in: “Have Goldberg come up to speed with alternatives and we can still meet without Amanda.”
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