Coral Gables City Manager Peter Iglesias can count. Only because he knows he has three votes, can the manager lash out at Commissioner Ariel Fernandez like he did at Tuesday’s city commission meeting.
Se puso feo.
After several hours of discussion and passionate public comment, the city of Miami Commission deferred making a decision on the repeal of the ordinances that allow LED billboards on city parks and a moratorium on approving any such signage for 30 days while new rules are adopted.
Basically, they passed the buck to the state, which still has to approve the large sign being erected at the Perez Art Museum Miami in Maurice Ferre Park. Why it is being erected without clearing this hurdle is interesting. Perhaps the sign companies that contributed funds to certain city commissioners’ campaigns also touched state legislators and they’re not worried.
Miami-Dade County has never been better positioned. That was the message sent by Mayor Daniella Levine Cava at her fourth (and, perhaps, final) State of the County address Wednesday.
“The state of the county is strong,” Levine Cava said to a packed house at Zoo Miami after the district Commissioner Kionne McGhee and Commission Chair Oliver Gilbert warmed up the crowd. She came out to the tune of Roar, by Katy Perry.
A steam cleaner, a lint roller, pots and pans, three sets of silverware, Celsius fitness drinks. These are just some of the possibly questionable expenses that Coral Gables taxpayers are on the hook for when the city pays the bills on the purchase cards for a number of employees.
And nobody would be the wiser if former Miami-Dade School Board Member Lubby Navarro hadn’t been arrested earlier this month for grand theft for purchases with her own school board P-card.
The city of Coral Gables could join other municipalities in a lawsuit against the state to overturn legislation passed last year that requires municipal electeds to submit a more detailed financial disclosure document known as Form 6.
It’s a war against transparency.
Seems that former Miami Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla doesn’t have enough to worry about with the felony charges against him for money laundering, bribery, unlawful compensation and criminal conspiracy. He’s also trying to get his childhood house back from the bank.
The five-bedroom Little Havana house where Diaz de la Portilla and his two brothers and his sister grew up was sold for $300,100 at a Miami-Dade County foreclosure auction Nov. 15 last year. Owned by the former commissioner and his former wife, Claudia Davant, the home was purchased by Wells Fargo, which won a $628,545 final foreclosure judgment in 2019.
