Video ties Regalado to recently tainted politicos
For months there have been rumors that former Pinecrest Mayor and State Rep. Cindy Lerner would run for Miami-Dade commission in District 7 again. But Thursday, the rematch with Commissioner Raquel Regalado became official when Lerner filed bank account paperwork for the 2024 county election.
Lerner and/or her campaign team also released a video on YouTube that puts Regalado in the company of all the scummy politicos who have been in the news lately for their lack of ethics and other shenanigans: Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo, who was slapped with a $63 million judgement in his First Amendment violation case, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who was paid $170,000 by a developer who was pulling permits from the city, suspended Miami Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla, arrested in a pay-for-play scheme to give away a public park and charged with bribery and money laundering, and Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago, who has a bunch of shady side gigs and conflicts of interests.
Que tenga cuidado, ’cause they’re gonna call her a racist.
“Corruption, influence peddling, self-dealing, selling out the Everglades to big developers, breaking promises and betraying our communities,” Lerner says in the 2-minute video, and the last three items must be how she ropes in Regalado. “I am angry and I’m fed up. We all should be. That’s why I’m running for Miami Dade County Commission. We can stand up to Raquel Regalado and the whole corrupt Miami system and tell them ‘you’re out of order’.”
Read related: Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago has business with accused money launderer
That’s the phrase used against her in 2020 from the same meeting that she now opens her own video with. Except she wasn’t talking to the whole corrupt Miami system in that clip where she says “You’re out of order.” She was talking to residents. To constituents.
“Yep, that’s me, Cindy Lerner,” she says. “I was mayor of Pinecrest for eight years. As mayor, I organized and led dozens of Miami cities to address sea level rise and climate change. I took on FP&L — and won. And I made sure residents had an outsized voice in their local government creating citizen boards to guide Pinecrest’s future instead of leaving all the decisions to politicians.
“And in eight years, over hundreds of hours of public meetings, there were heated debates,” Lerner says into the camera. “And at times, I did lose my cool. But these days, I don’t know about you, but I can’t read the news without getting angry.”
It’s quite a stretch to lump Regalado in with these very obvious crooks. But this is also a preview of what could happen to every single local incumbent next year: They will be painted as part of the broken, corrupt system that needs a total overhaul. They will be guilty by association. It’s cheap and an easy out of needing to have a real campaign or platform.
Read related: Cindy Lerner had a pattern of verbal abuse, not just one single incident
Regalado is vulnerable, no doubt. She only beat Lerner by 1,300 votes in 2020. A 50.62% win is not a landslide mandate. And she has disappointed a bunch of people since.
People who voted for her who say they won’t again. Calusa people upset at her vote to allow massive development on the abandoned golf course that has become a rookery for endangered birds. Coconut Grove Playhouse people upset that she changed her position on full restoration after she was elected. Everglades people upset about her swing vote to approve the construction of a warehouse complex across the Urban Development Line.
But she is also a workaholic — her constituents have gotten their money’s worth on that one.– and has no hair on her tongue about keeping the mayor and other commissioners accountable in public.
Regalado is practically beloved in Key Biscayne and Coral Gables, areas she also served as a Miami-Dade School Board member. She is an incumbent now, which means it will be harder for Lerner to get full and public support from the mayor and other commissioners. Or the unions.
Read related: On fourth try, Miami-Dade Commission approves huge project beyond the UDB
And for all of Lerner’s protests and powwows about climate change, Regalado has probably done more in one term to move the county forward on the septic to sewer transition than everybody else combined has done in two decades.
Plus, she is really nothing like Carollo or ADLP.
Currently, she is the main opponent — okay, second to Zoo Miami’s Ron Magill — to the Miami Wilds theme park planned for a strip of disappearing pine rocklands that is home to some unique and imperiled species of wildlife and she’s fighting Commissioner Kionne McGhee on his intense drive to turn the Redland into a Wynwood West.
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Reached late on Monday, Regalado — who had curated and hosted an event Thursday called MIAbility to create a dialogue on the inclusion of the disabled in the workplace — didn’t want to talk about a race so far away.
“I’m running for re-election. Whoever wants to sign up, can. I’m running on my record.”
Which, as far as we can tell, has nothing to do with the politicos in the headlines.
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