Miami Madness: Guess who’s coming to the election?
Suspended commissioner Spence-Jones isn't backing down amid grand theft charges.
When Miami’s District 5 holds its $200,000 special election sometime in January, after Mayor Regalado and a coterie of supporters of Rev. Richard Dunn failed in their bid to get the governor to appoint a replacement, sources tell me the star candidate will be none other than Michelle Spence Jones, who was just dismissed from the commission by the governor, after being charged with grand theft, but who I’m told was meeting and election strategizing with supporters up to yesterday. Spence-Jones won re-election on November 3rd with an overwhelming 82 percent of the vote, and if the word on the street is accurate, she will probably get 90 percent the next time. Folk just don’t want to believe that their politicians are crooked. (It’s actually rather pathetic.) And if Spence-Jones does make good on the threat to run again, which legally, she can do, since she hasn’t been convicted (yet), she could then theoretically be re-removed by the governor (or not,) and we get to do this all over again. I can’t imagine what her exit strategy is at this point, other than simply sticking it to the City, the prosecutors, and fate itself. That said, if she does run, remarkably, it could clear the field, since everyone who knows that part of Miami will know it would be very, very tough to beat her in a climate where so many residents either don’t believe, don’t know (believe it or not), or don’t care about the allegations against her.
Meanwhile, over at Marlins headquarters, they can’t have missed the fact that all three of their supporters on the commission are gonzo (but surprise, surprise, only after the vote is a fait accompli…) The new mayor has said the Marlins shouldn’t expect a warm reception at City Hall, and now, they’ve got construction workers protesting outside the new stadium site. Apparently, all those “jobs, jobs jobs!” promised by the three now departed stadium proponents on the commission aren’t materializing, and much of the work so far has been awarded to out-of-state firms. Surprise! [Blind item after the jump]
Not to be left out, it appears that Miami-Dade County commissioners know how to bend a public dollar themselves (though apparently, no shoes, perfumes or pet care were purchased in the course of this particular scandal.) According to the Herald, even as they were busy laying off hundreds of county workers and slashing the pay of other staff, five of the 13 county electeds found the time to make personal sacrifices of their own: like traveling to the Bahamas and South Africa on the public dime. In political speak, we call it “trade missions.”
In late July, as Miami-Dade leaders confronted the county’s worst budget crisis in decades, Commissioner Natacha Seijas boarded American Airlines Flight 56 for a weeklong trip to Ireland.
In September, a day after commissioners voted to lay off more than 500 county workers and cut millions in funding to social service groups, Seijas hopped on a plane for seven days in Brazil. In October, as commissioners imposed steep salary cuts on three unions, Commissioner Audrey Edmonson and her chief of staff embarked on a 12-day journey through Senegal and South Africa.
Taxpayers picked up the tab for commissioners and their county entourages on each trip, which were arranged by the International Trade Consortium, a county agency designed to open global markets for Miami-Dade businesses.
Despite spending more than $217,000 on nine trips since 2007, ITC executive director J.A. “Tony” Ojeda Jr. could not identify a single contract signed as a result of the missions. In fact, the agency stopped keeping such records four years ago after a Miami Herald review found them grossly exaggerating the trips’ economic benefit.
To critics, the International Trade Consortium has become a punch line.
“It’s sort of a common joke that the ITC is International Travel for Commissioners,” said Mario Artecona, executive director of the Miami Business Forum, which represents the region’s top business leaders.
The ITC journeys include stops at luxury hotels from Mumbai to Istanbul, extended stays for personal vacations in South Africa and, in one case, the cost of flying a county staffer across the country to help public officials change planes.
Created in 2002 by the County Commission, the ITC’s primary aim is to spur trade between greater Miami companies and the world. To do so, the government agency brings Miami businesses on as many as four trade missions a year to destinations ranging from Poland to Japan. The businesses pay their own way, but travel under the county’s seal of approval.
Yet on more than half of the trade missions since 2007, commissioners and county staffers outnumbered the Miami-Dade businesses they were supposed to be promoting, The Miami Herald found.
But of course, all of this travel is doing wonders to spur trade business in the county … right? Um, no:
There’s no evidence the taxpayer-funded missions are actually spurring trade. That’s because, after a series of reports showing the ITC was vastly inflating the amount of new business it was generating, the agency simply stopped quantifying results.
A 2005 Herald review found that ITC claims of nearly $240 million in “anticipated” economic development from trade missions included at least $150 million of pure fiction — including more than $2 million attributed to a nonexistent business and more than $30 million for a company whose business owner said a Turks and Caicos trade mission was mostly about the cocktail parties.
Oh.
And now, for a blind item. I’m told by two sources that the federal corruption sweep that has already been cutting a swath through Broward County, nabbing former Miramar commissioner Fitzroy Salesman in Miramar, ex-county Mayor Joe Eggelletion, and school board member Beverly Gallaghe (and from what I hear, they’re not done there,) will soon hit Miami-Dade, with up to half a dozen current and former electeds on the radar screen. A couple of these potential targets may want to rethink seeking re-election based on what I’m hearing. I think in legal circles, the term is “conspiracy to defraud…” This one’s definitely “developing…”
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Lovin this blog lately. Big surprises everywhere! Never saw any of this coming!
Thanks! And yeah, it just gets crazier and crazier down here…