The villains of District 5
From left: Michelle Spence Jones, Katherine Fernandez Rundle and Barbara Carey Shyler.
My column on the Miami District 5 madness is up on the South Florida Times website. A clip:
To review: The Miami election is barely two weeks old, and the winner and incumbent in District 5, Michelle Spence-Jones, has been driven from office. Gov. Charlie Crist suspended her after she was charged with stealing tens of thousands of dollars in grant money intended for her community. It’s an all-too familiar story in Miami, which has a long history of political scandal. But it’s especially ugly given the outsized challenges faced by the neighborhoods that Spence-Jones used to represent. They include Overtown, Liberty City and Little Haiti, which face higher-than-average unemployment and crime rates, and lower-than-average economic development.
There are so many villains in this runaway catastrophe, so it’s hard to narrow it down to just five. But here goes.
Read the rest here. You might be surprised by who makes number one.
Also in the SFLTimes today: Crist still AWOL on Broward Commission District 9
Meanwhile, more names are popping up on the special election radar, with the buzz list including Patrick Range Jr., Rev. Richard Dunn (a sometimes friend, sometimes opponent of Spence-Jones’), Pierre Rutledge, who Spence Jones had appointed to the Orange Bowl Advisory Committee through 2008 and who is associated with the Miami-Dade School Board, and the two runners up on November 3rd, David Chiverton and Jeff Torain. Personally, I think that since it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Ms. Spence Jones will win re-election (again), and given the potential to have her re-removed, and yet another special election, the city should just scrap the whole damned thing, save the $200,000, and allow the woman to return to her seat. If the people of District 5 are fine with having a commissioner facing trial while she’s supposed to be serving them? So be it. Let them have what they want (but no complaining, D5! No one’s going to want to hear it!)
Also, I’ve uncovered new details about this case, not seen anywhere else, which I’ll be rolling out soon. Stay tuned!
Local Buzz: Spence-Jones, Charlie Crist and the walk of shame
Charlie Crist wants no part of the Miami mess, according to press reports. The Herald is reporting that the governor has no current plans to name replacements for two disgraced Miami commissioners, and instead, is hoping to defer to the rump commission, despite the fact that it currently has just two members, and let them choose replacements for Angel Gonzales, who stepped down to avoid facing the long arm of the law, and Michelle Spence Jones, whom Crist suspended yesterday after she turned herself in on theft charges. Crist has apparently been in touch with newly elected Mayor Tomas Regalado, and has said that he’d prefer to wait for the District 4 run-off, and then to allow a three-man panel to pick the two replacements. If that’s true, it would makes sense, since the governor would likely prefer to avoid a fresh fight with the crazies in his party who would no doubt demand that he find two purity-tested wingnuts to fill the posts in the majority Hispanic and majority black districts (in Marco Rubio’s back yard), where he could also risk alienating two key general election constituencies. And oh, what a headache that would be. Read more
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