After two cancellations, a town hall meeting to discuss potential changes to the Coral Gables city charter has been scheduled for Thursday evening.

Created last September with legislation sponsored by Commissioner Ariel Fernandez, the charter review committee’s first meeting in December was cancelled due to a scheduling conflict with one of the board members, said City Clerk Billy Urquia. He said a second cancellation in January was at the request of Commissioner Fernandez.

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Warning that he was going to “drop a bomb,” David Centner did just that Thursday when the owner of The Centner Academy with wife Leila told Miami commissioners that, in light of the massive opposition, he was no longer interested in building a sports dome for his private school’s students on the public, taxpayer-owned Biscayne Park.

First, he had to hear speaker after speaker blast the way the shady deal was hatched — two people were later arrested for public corruption in connection with the 2022 licensing agreement — and the Centners campaign of misinformation and outright lies about their intentions and a previous plan that included Miami-Dade public schools and affordable housing.

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Maria Cruz has had it.

Coral Gables’ most active and famous gadfly is done with Mayor Vince Lago, who used to be her dear friend and ally. One would have thought she was crushing on him. Now, Cruz has formed a political action committee to push an effort to recall Lago.

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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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A new political action committee in Coral Gables has formed with the intention of getting three charter amendments on the ballot.

According to it’s website, Accountable Coral Gables is promoting a change in the election date to November on even years — which there is already a petition being circulated for — the requirement of voter approval to increase electeds’ salaries in the future and the requirement of a four fifths vote on the commission to dip into the city’s reserve funds.

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3 commissioners say public corruption is the reason

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