Billy Corben joins journalists to discuss Miami City Hall dysfunction

MIAMI – Anyone who thinks local government meetings are boring hasn’t been to one at City Hall in Miami. The latest spectacle of the dysfunction at a commission meeting was the ousting of Miami City Attorney Victoria Méndez.

Commissioners Miguel Angel Gabela, Damian Pardo, Manolo Reyes, and Christine King voted to oust Méndez and placed her in an advisory role ending June 11.

“I was doing my job; that’s why you’re upset at me,” Méndez told Gabela during the meeting.

Gabela said he didn’t trust her. Commissioner Joe Carollo was the only dissenting vote. This had just followed Miami City Manager Art Noriega’s furniture scandal.

Filmmaker Billy Corben met with local journalists to discuss the madness during This Week In South Florida’s Roundtable on Sunday. He compared the city government to a mafia, a dictatorship, and a third-world banana republic.

“It runs on fear and intimidation, and I would say extortion,” Corben said.

The Miami Herald’s Sarah Blaskey, an investigative reporter, and Joe Flechas, an associate editor, joined the conversation on TWISF with Joshua Ceballos, the local government accountability reporter for WLRN.

Blaskey described Méndez’s role as someone who has a hand in “a lot of pots” and went beyond her role as a city attorney to comment on a case that resulted in a $63.5 million legal judgment against Carollo.

“She has been sort of proactive in that case,” Blaskey said adding she had defended Carollo.

Flechas said the attorney is tasked with interpreting the city’s code and charter. Instead, Méndez went on the record several times defending Carollo’s actions against the businessmen who won the judgment.

“She attacked these Little Havana businessmen and besmirched their reputations often as a means of justifying the taxpayers paying for the legal defense,” Flechas said referring to Bill Fuller and Martin Pinilla.

Ceballos said Méndez was allegedly “the go-between” Carollo and Emilio Gonzalez, the former city manager. Corben said Méndez was tasked with spending taxpayers’ money to defend corruption, as Carrollo “weaponized” government.

“She has had a blank check to enable this corrupt behavior,” Corben said.

The furniture choices and the city’s legal costs were not the only scandals mentioned. Blaskey said Méndez’s husband had a company that flipped homes.

“The allegation is that through her work at the city, she had information that helped, you know, guide her husband’s business towards homes that, you know, could be flipped for a profit,” Blaskey said. “Often these were homes through the guardianship program.”

Blaskey said the program’s homes mostly belong to the elderly and people with disabilities.

“There is a lawsuit that Victoria Méndez and her husband are facing right now about this house flipping business. There’s also a bar complaint into how she has engaged with that business as the city attorney,” Blaskey said.

Corben said the city attorney also failed to intervene on the redistricting maps that prompted a federal racial gerrymandering suit. U.S. District Court Judge K. Michael Moore found the city unconstitutionally drew district lines.

“This perversion of the redistricting is far more corrupt than even the judge decided,” Corben said.

Blaskey said that to notice the incumbent’s attempt to disqualify Gabela from running last November an observer has to “zoom in on this tiny, tiny little carveout around the part where” one home is.

There was speculation about the impact of the federal judge’s ruling, how this reflects on Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, and how it affects other local governments.

“I think whatever happens in the city of Miami government is something that will influence the way other government officials act in their governments as well,” Blaskey said. “And so I think, that’s how it becomes relevant to everyone else.”

Watch more on TWISF: Debra Hixon talks about Broward schools