Incumbent Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago talks a lot about transparency, but the guy is anything but. He thinks that having open office hours for photo ops with foreign visitors and town halls attended mostly by city staff snd his lackeys means transparency. Or he thinks that Gables voters are stupid and will believe that’s being transparent.
From his personal life, to his business ties and official actions taken as an elected mayor, Lago has been secretive and deceitful.
Remember when he dramatically signed an affidavit at a public meeting swearing not to have any conflicts of interests through himself or any member of his immediate family with the annexation of Little Gables? Remember how the definition of immediate family, purportedly taken from the Miami-Dade Code of Ethics definition, did not mention siblings and step siblings and half siblings. That was not an innocent omission. The mayor’s brother, Carlos Lago, was at one time the registered lobbyist for the largest Little Gables property owner, which owns the trailer park and has plans for a major real estate project. A Moorish village.
Read related: Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago may have conflict of interest in Little Gables
That’s being the opposite of transparent. That is intentionally misleading or hiding the truth. He’s been misleading people ever since, saying that he was never investigated about owning property in Little Gables when nobody ever said he owned property there. He’s very crafty with words.
Let’s make that the first reason why not to vote to re-elect Vince Lago as the mayor in this election that ends Tuesday, April 8. As early voting is about to begin Saturday, here are some more:
He intentionally left the words “siblings” out of the affidavit he dramatically and publicly signed about conflicts of interest in Little Gables, trying to pull one over on voters.
Lago will not say that he won’t keep trying to annex Little Gables — despite the fact that 63% of Gables voters do not want to pay the $23 million cost just over the first five years — and, in fact, many suspect he still has that goal in his sights.
For years, Lago has often said that he only works for BDI Construction. But in a candidate forum recently, he said he was a “private business owner,” with “50 plus employees in my engineering and construction management firm.” Curious, Ladra searched the Florida Division of Corporation records for BDI Construction, where Lago says he is a partner with 33%. But he is not listed in the principals. It is owned by Carlos and Teobaldo Rossell III.
For years, Lago misled residents about police staffing. The police union, representing the officers, had to make public statements to correct his lies. The city is still more than 20 officers short. Recruitment and retention is a problem with lots of agencies. But Lago doesn’t have to lie about it. Thursday, the city manager sent his first email out to residents citywide providing them with his assurances that the police and fire departments couldn’t be stronger. It smells like a political campaign statement, which would be wholly inappropriate.
City Hall fell apart on his watch. He didn’t even want to hear about the safety issues when they did come up last year. Basically, Lago was forced out of the building. If it were up to Lago, the commission would still be meeting in chambers on the second floor of City Hall.
Lago nearly got into a fistfight with the former city manager, Amos Rojas. While a police investigation found that there was no real assault committed, because, allegedly, Rojas never really thought the mayor was capable of striking him, nobody says there wasn’t an argument that escalated and that Lago threw off his jacket, put up his dukes and called Rojas a coward. And nobody has said what the fight was about, but sources told Ladra it was because Lago wanted to go around the process to install a particular piece of art in a public place.
Steroids are bad for your health.
The mayor got part of a $640,000 commission in the 2023 sale of a Ponce De Leon Boulevard lot where real estate developer Rishi Kapoor — who was later investigated by the FBI after paying Lago pal and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez $170,000 in “consulting fees” while seeking development approvals there — planned to build a luxury high-rise, for which he likely needed zoning variances. The payment went to a brokerage firm owned by former Hialeah Councilman Oscar De La Rosa which listed only five real estate agents hanging their licenses there, including Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo, lobbyist Bill Riley (who was arrested with former Miami Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla on public corruption charges in 2023), Lago and his chief of staff at Coral Gables City Hall, Chelsea Granell.
Lago and his partners — including Baby X cousin Esteban Suarez — also rented a retail space, a former karate studio across the street from the Ponce development site, to Kapoor for about $12,500, according to sources cited by the Miami Herald. Kapoor rented the space shortly after Lago and his partners bought it in order to open a sales office for the luxury condo he wanted to build at 1505 Ponce de Leon and paid more than $152,000. But the space sat empty all the while.
Lago gave $5,000 from his political action committee to another PAC run by Alex Diaz de la Portilla in 2023, just six weeks before the latter was arrested on public corruption charges, bribery and money laundering, for a negotiated deal to give away a public park for more than $300,000 in cash and in-kind political campaign contributions. ADLP was at the mayor’s 2021 Victory Party, looking a bit disheveled.
While Lago complains about the salary increases that commissioners voted to give themselves, he also created a non-existing and completely unnecessary position of chief of staff for his aide, which elevates her multiple pay grades at once, for a current salary of more than $90,000, to oversee a staff of none, now that the part-timer has left after just a couple months.
Hypocrisy is relevant. It is further evidence that Lago is a political opportunist who sees every relationship as transactional and doesn’t understand anyone who might do anything just because it is the right thing.
The part timer only lasted a couple of months.
The mayor pushed for a “tax cut” that would have benefited developers and large property owners with huge savings while netting most homeowners less than $100 a year and would have almost certainly led to service cuts.
Lago condones (or directs) the trolls on social media that attack the three commissioners he disagrees with (and yours truly, and Billy Corben, and The Miami Herald), using body shaming and discriminatory comments and arguably sexually harassing Commissioner Melissa Castro. He knows about these trolls, one of whom was already proven to be his friend, Manny Chamizo, who is a waterfront committee board member and just got probation on a criminal stalking case (more on that later). These hate speech cyber threats have been reported to Coral Gables Police and brought to his attention on several occasions. Ladra herself has texted him and sent him screenshots of the cruelly insulting and defamatory remarks to be met by crickets. He’s either tolerant of these kind of baseless, dehumanizing attacks or complicit. It’s hard to believe that his friends would be doing this without his permission.
He has friends like Manny Chamizo and Alex Diaz de la Portilla. Dime con quien andas…
He lied, or at least stretched the truth, about the alleged FP Journe clock that he so dramatically installed on Miracle Mile — remember he wanted to do it on September 11 — which seems like a knock off. He said it was a $100,000 clock being donated to the city, and he would pay the installation himself (receipts?). But according to emails to the city from employees at Electric Time Company in Massachusetts, they built the clock, stuck an FP Journe sticker on it, and it would cost $23,000 to replace. Not $100,o00. FP Journe letter lago clock
He wanted to unveil the Miracle Mile clock on Sept. 11, saying it was “not a national holiday.”
Lago’s petition to put three charter amendments on the ballot failed so miserably, having thousands of signed petitions rejected as invalid (more on that later). Was it fraud or just carelessness?
The mayor, or rather his proxies, have weaponized the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust, making complaints against his political enemies. Two complaints were filed against activist Maria Cruz, who spearheaded the unsuccessful recall effort against Lago, were dismissed in recent months. The first was filed by Lago’s campaign fundraiser, Brian Goldmeier, who accused Cruz of targeting his home on a code enforcement violation, and the second by lobbyist Jorge Arrizurieta, Lago’s appointment to the city’s board of adjustments — until someone notified the administration that he had moved out of Coral Gables — who said that Cruz acted as a lobbyist without registering. The ethics commission found no probable cause for the first complaint and no legal sufficiency for the second, because it was an obvious lie. There was no legal sufficiency, either, for three complaints filed last November by Gonzalo Sanabria, one of his most loyal lackeys, against Commissioners Melissa Castro, Ariel Fernandez and Kirk Menendez “alleging unspecified” of the ethics code and city’s hiring practices in hiring of former City Manage Amos Rojas. Sanabria said it was a violation of the city’s hiring procedures and the item was not on the agenda for the Feb. 27 meeting. But it was on the agenda. Also, why did Sanabria wait more than eight months to make the complaint in November? There’s no way these complaints were not made with, at the very least, Lago’s permission, or, at the very most, his direct orders.
Lago has threatened to sue Ladra for defamation and libel for reporting the truth, while he knowingly falsely claims in both public commission meetings and on public podcasts and other media programs that she is pay-to-play. He also filed a meritless, frivolous lawsuit against Actualidad Radio. He just wants to silence his critics.
Instead of saying what every p0litician knows is the right thing to say — “I condemn these acts… blah blah blah…” — Lago accused Commissioner Fernandez of a “campaign stunt” when the latter blasted what he called recent security threats against his family and the other two commissioners. There are police reports about these incidents — which culminated Tuesday when police stopped a private investigator who had been hired to follow Fernandez. By who? We don’t know.
Ladra is sure she could come up with more reasons. This list started with 12 then went to 17 and there are things I’m leaving out because they don’t live up to the others or they are unconfirmed and I ran out of time.
But readers are invited to please feel free to add their own reasons in the comments below.
Maria Cruz, you will be cut off after three comments so think about it!
The post What transparency? 22 reasons NOT to vote for Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago appeared first on Political Cortadito.
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