Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago had another bad day at City Hall Tuesday.
Not only did he lack the votes to reject the proposed salary increase for himself and vice mayor — a grandstanding move that would have locked in future mayors and vice mayors — and is apparently losing the effort to annex High Pines/Ponce Davis (more on that later), but he was also censured by a majority of the commission for the false and disparaging remarks he has made about them and other critics on a two-week media tour.
It’s his own fault. Lago’s own words did him in.
In what looked like a warped version of “This Is Your Life,” Commissioner Ariel Fernandez presented a series of clips at the commission meeting, clips from Spanish-language television and radio interviews in which Lying Lago called the three commissioners — Fernandez, Melissa Castro and Kirk Menendez — uneducated and unprepared dummies who were not up for the complicated job of city commissioner.
He’s talking about a guy who worked 13 years in Congress, a woman with a PhD who runs her own business and Mr. Coral Gables, who has a law degree and worked as an assistant city attorney in Miami. Unprepared, indeed.
No, really. This is what Lago — a partner in a construction company and a new realtor with shady side gigs — calls collegial.
Read related: Coral Gables commission pay raise is red herring for Lying Vince Lago
There was no hole to crawl into as the audience and folks watching at home were treated to a series of colorful clips they likely had not heard before. So, instead, the mayor took to his phone. Was he playing Candy Crush or texting? A public records request is on its way.
“We have people here — Ariel Fernandez, Kirk Menendez and Melissa Castro — who are unprepared for the job,” Lago told Marilys Llanos of Telemundo in the first clip shown. “They have never had their own companies. They have never had employees. They don’t know what payroll is.”
Anyone could see that Castro was confused. “Is he talking about me?” She has employees and does payroll.
“You inherited your company,” Lago told her in a continued effort to belittle her. He probably knows that she and her late mother opened the permit expediting business together.
“Ariel Fernandez has never had a job in his life,” Lago said in another interview clip. But Fernandez has been a consultant for marketing, advertising, PR, international business and politics for more than 10 years and worked for the U.S. House of Representatives for 13 years before that.
“And now they are inventing that they are going to give checks to residents, especially seniors, for $100,” Lago said, belittling a relief grant idea that Fernandez floated during a budget hearing.
Read related: Vince Lago has conflict of interest with High Pines, Little Gables annexations
Interestingly enough, the tax cut the mayor wanted but failed to pass would have saved the average homeowner less than $100. Only the very rich with the multimillion mansions would save more.
“I did this in five months,” Fernandez said. “In 10 years, you never gave them a penny of relief.”
Fernandez said that the most egregious thing Lago said on the radio was how Bill Kerdyk, Jr., and the late Jeannett Slesnick also worked in real estate and “there was no problem, no one said anything.” He didn’t explain that they did not use their position to sell real estate to a developer who paid Lago’s BFF Miami Mayor Francis Suarez $10K a month while he was pulling permits and who is now being investigated by the FBI.
He aid the mayor violated six or seven of the criteria in his very own code of civility that he sponsored and passed at the city.
Fernandez said that the mayor could give his raise to a city department or a charity, pre-tax, like others, including Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy, have done in the past. But that Lago just wanted to talk about it again so he could continue to put out lies about the commissioners that he has been fighting since they were elected over his choices in April. In fact, Fernandez said that both the mayor and vice mayor wanted to keep their salaries low to “limit the people that can run against them” in two years.
Fernandez also said that Lago had made some misogynistic comments on a recent trolley tour. “You said, and I quote, ‘Real men do not let their wives work.’ You said they should be like you and tell her, and I quote, ‘to stay home with the children.’
“Mr. Mayor it’s the 21st century. Look around you,” Fernandez said. “We are in a room of fully capable, qualified and dedicated women who have Bren forced to work twice as hard to advance their careers because of men like you who believe they need your permission.
“You owe …all the women in our city an apology.”
Read related: In Coral Gables, Melissa Castro calls out Vince Lago for his rudeness, disrespect
So accusations were slung from both sides. Only Fernandez didn’t go on a traveling media tour “m order to portray a false crisis and deflect from the real issues,” Fernandez said, adding that the mayor’s “henchmen” (read: former Commissioner Chip Withers) were harassing and bullying his critics.
After the mayor’s motion to keep his and the vice mayor’s salaries the same, with only a CPI increase, failed, Menendez — who seemed shellshocked by some of the clips — moved to censure Lago “for the disparaging and personal comments made about his colleagues in the media.”
It passed 3-2. Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson, who repeated that her issue with the raised salaries was the lack of public input and transparency, voted against it.
“This is your legacy,” Fernandez said.
Nothing written here can do this meeting justice. So people should watch the hostility for themselves at the meeting video, available on YouTube. Make popcorn first.
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