The first Coral Gables commission meeting Tuesday after the required recall petitions for Mayor Vince Lago were submitted last week was long and a bit awkward for everybody. Ladra cringed a few times.
Lago said the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was investigating the recall effort and accused the new three amigos — Commissioners Melissa Castro, Ariel Fernandez and Kirk Menendez — of plotting against him to help the recall, which is being led by his old friend and the trio’s ally, activist Maria Cruz. He crowed about the internal purchace-card audit that, he said, showed no real inappropriate purchases, as Fernandez had asserted. And he said he wanted a forensic audit to finally lay rest to the claims of widespread corruption.
“And they can start with my office,” Lago said, grandstanding just a little.
Not to be outdone, Fernandez disagreed about the p-card audit, scolded the mayor for his recent smears on the three who currently have the majority bloc, and asked the city attorney to schedule a special commission meeting just to discuss Lago’s possible violation of the civility code that Lago himself sponsored and passed in 2021.
Read related: Round one petitions submitted for recall of Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago
And Cruz — who sported a KFC T-shirt to mock the disparaging nickname given to the three amigos by an anonymous blogger — made some colorful comments about Lago’s business dealings and his envy of BFF, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a one-time presidential candidate whose $10K a month “consulting” payments by a developer with investments in both cities have led to an FBI investigation.
“Now, that you made national news, you know what? Maybe you could run for president,” Cruz said coyly, before leaving the podium.
After she spoke, Lago and Fernandez got into it over the letter the mayor sent to residents earlier this month, blaming the recall on out-of-town developers and “attacking and disrespecting the members of this commission,” Fernandez said, calling on the city’s planning director to confirm that there were no plans to upzone Miracle Mile, as the mayor claimed the three commissioners were trying to do. She did.
So that means Lago lied again, just like when he said he always supported the city’s first responders.
“I personally took offense to the letter that you sent out, which is another violation of the city’s civility code,” Fernandez told the mayor, reminding him that he passed the civility code “that you brought forward four years ago and presented to the commission to ensure that there was respect in this community and that residents were not lied to.”
“And yet, over the last two weeks, you sent out a letter attacking and disparaging members of this commission,” Fernandez said, also bringing up a text messages sent to Gables voters over the weekend that blamed the three commissioners for mounting the recall.
Read related: Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago gets shut down, censured by 3 he disparaged
“You are making assertions, baseless assertions, about your colleagues,” Fernandez said. “You’ve been censured for this before,” Fernandez said, referring to a meeting last November, when Menendez led a vote to censure Lago last November after the mayor made multiple disparaging remarks about his colleagues.
The mayor apparently hasn’t learned anything.
“I don’t understand. What can we do as a commission to help you stop yourself, because obviously you no longer have control of yourself,” Fernandez said.
The two went back and forth for a while and Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson chimed in to say Fernandez was creating a circus.
“This will not take over the meeting,” Lago said. “I’m not going to allow it.” But it did. And he did.
Later, Lago blamed Fernandez for the low morale after the commissioner exposed a list of questionable Amazon purchases. An internal city audit did not find widespread corruption in the use of p-cards. But the mayor said that he wanted a forensic audit to help employee morale and clear the city of the stench caused when Menendez said, at a public meeting in February, that the city was “adrift in a cesspool of public corruption,” and the Gables establishment clutched their pearls.
In his public comments, which were interrupted by the long exchange, Jay Spieler said what many people watching were thinking — or have been thinking for weeks.
Read related: Letter from Gables Mayor Vince Lago means desperation about recall effort
“What a show,” Spieler said. He doesn’t support the corruption of the “gang of supposed reformers” who “rammed through” the new city manager selection and gave themselves “self-enriching pay hikes.”
The word “toxicity” would “accurately describe our commission today,” Spieler said.
But by the end of the meeting, there was a second item that the two foes agreed on (the first was the forensic audit). Lago, whose uncle was a Bay of Pigs veteran and former political prisoner in Cuba, wanted to honor the group on Wednesday, the 63rd anniversary of the exile invasion.
Fernandez suggested making it Bay of Pigs Day in Coral Gables.
“Let’s do it,” Lago said. And it was unanimous.
Would’t it be nice if we had more of that?
There was a lot more that happened at the meeting Tuesday. Political Cortadito will keep reporting in different posts about the actions taken by the commissioners on the Ponce Park Residences and other matters. Come back soon.
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