Mayor Gimenez has game Plan B on Dolphins stadium

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Even before it came out in the Miami Herald today that the state legislators who represent us (at least this time) are not so hot on the Miami Dolphins stadium renovation penny tax request (Well, what do you know? Miami-Dade Commissioner Esteban Bovo was right) — and while there is a longshot bill in the stack for the session, it did not make the Miami-Dade delegation’s priority or pet projects list — we knew there had to be a Plan B.

But maybe that Plan B was really Plan A all along.

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez has “another tack” on the Dolphins desire to raise the tourist bed tax by one penny to fund half of a $400-million renovation for the 25-year-old Sun Life Stadium. He had “another tack” the same week the issue came to the commission dais last month. Probably earlier, Ladra says.

But I don’t know this from him. Gimenez never called me back when I left him several messages and spoke to his chief of staff, Chip Iglesias, after the commission’s Dolphins stadium vote “urging” the legislature to allow the county to levy an additional penny tax on hotel beds.

Instead, he had his daughter-in-law Barby Rodriguez-Gimenez call me four days after I called him to set up breakfast with Ralph Garcia-Toledo, the mayor’s bff and sports lobbyist-turned-political-driver and, now, apparently, political blogger blocker. And he’s a very busy driver and lobbyist, working on those PanAmerican Games for 2019 I guess (wink, wink) because it took another week for us to get together at Versailles, which was his choice but I always love to visit.

Oh, it was “not about anything,” really.  (Really?) He just wanted to get together and sort of mend fences (wink, wink) after our very public break-up last year during the county mayoral primary campaign. You remember? When his boss hooked up with the hoodlums in Hialeah and overly celebrated his evil endorsement from Mayor Carlos “Castro” Hernandez  and the Seguro Que Yes Council, accepting all the baggage (read: absentee ballot fraud) that comes with that. Even though Garcia-Toledo and I already saw each other and chatted and sort of mended any fences — as far as anybody in this business does — during early voting at the Hammocks Library in November.

“Things sort of headed south after that day,” Garcia-Toledo told me Tuesday, referring to the summertime press conference last year announcing the Hernandez et al endorsment of Gimenez at a La Carretta on West 16th Avenue. Ladra, as well as a few other Castro critics, were not allowed into the public event by Hialeah Police, which is normal for me in the City of Retrogress but a shock to my system that it would be condoned by my up-to-then Golden Boy Mayor.

Garcia-Toledo said it was a “misunderstanding” and that nobody in the campaign knew I was outside, fuming quietly and not-so-quietly. I reminded him that I was talking to a G-Man staffer in person who was on the phone at that very instant with campaign manager Jesse Manzano — now working the Dolphins deal with the rest of the G-Men unit — before the mayor arrived in the car and that he briefed him on everything in my presence. I also know, because other people told me, that Manzano — as well as people I had called from the parking lot — apprised the arriving mayoral entourage of the “situation with the blogger outside” and I do not think that Gimenez intended to bar me from the event, but I do think it was easier to let the hoodlums do it than to protest their repressive behavior and cast further doubt on their value even before he officially announced he had gone to the Dark Side. I reminded him that there was time to do the right thing even after a Miami Herald reporter asked Hernandez, during the press conference Q & A, why Ladra had been barred and Castro refused to answer.

I also reminded Garcia-Toledo that things sort of headed south a few days earlier, when the evil endorsement had been sealed in a series of secret meetings, that things headed south faster after Gimenez was implicated in the absentee ballot fraud scandal that Ladra hopes is still being investigated in Hialeah (this is an election year, after all) and that things landed squarely in hell — can’t head any more south — at the mayoral debate hosted by the Miami Times in Overtown, where he and the mayor looked like they would have spat on me, if people weren’t watching, as they gave me what they thought was a public scolding.

“You were barred! You were barred! You! You,” Garcia-Toledo shouted at me inside a church on that July evening, insinuating that it was my fault and it was deserved, legitimizing what happened.

Now, it’s a misunderstanding? Maybe breakfast was more about Ladra being freed from some kind of time-out.

But how much you wanna bet that reprieve is very shortlived?

Because it is no coincidence that this “mending fences” meeting comes in the midst of the Dolphins stadium dealmaking in which nearly all the mayor’s friends are involved, as the Miami Herald reported. Not just Garcia-Toledo, who was in the audience to support Sun Life Stadium CEO Mike Dee when he made his plea Jan. 24th and was identified simply as the man trying to bring the PanAmerican Games 2019 to Miami, not as the mayor’s bff and driver, which he hates being called but is really one of the most important inside jobs a campaigner can have, despite his self-professed lack of navigational skills.

The pro-Dolphins offense, er, I mean lobbying team looks like a “Gimenez brain trust,” wrote the Herald’s Patty Mazzei. Indeed. Manzano is also involved, as is Gimenez fundraiser Brian Goldmeier and former State Rep. Marcelo “No. 3” Llorente, who has become a Gimenez shadow. The same team also worked on the Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Albert Carvalho’s bond issue (read: tax) passed by voters in November. I wouldn’t be surprised if Barby Gimenez is doing a little consulting, also. You know, community outreach. Crisis management. She should. But she says she is just along for the ride.

There’s no sign, either, of Baby Carlos Gimenez, the Golden Boy Jr., despite jokes that he was the last ingredient needed in the stadium soup. CJ did leave the Becker Poliakoff firm following the departure of his former boss, Florida Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla to a national firm, but is joining Freddy Balsera as the counsel for Balsera Communications. But, obviously, that doesn’t mean he will be out of politics completely. He did say some of his work would be dealing with media campaigns. Hmmmm.

Then there is lobbying or consulting or gate-keeping or some money-grabbing tasks being performed by Rodney Barreto, Ron Book, Ric Katz — all people who contributed to the mayor’s campaign.

And who likely will be counted on to give again.

Mayor Gimenez told Mazzei that he didn’t know that his friends were going to be working on the Dolphins team. Ladra finds that unlikely. They are probably going to be his same team for his re-election bid in 2016 and if they are smart, they tell him those kinds of things. Or else he may be looking for staffers more trustworthy. Someone told me that Goldmeier was in the mayor’s office hours after the stadium tax vote came up before the commission. Sure, it could have been about something else entirely. But it doesn’t matter if they talk about it on the 18th floor or over a beer watching the Super Bowl or at a Grove kitchen on a Sunday night.

It is now in the best interest of the mayor, and his friends and key political supporters, for the Dolphins to get what they want.

Which brings us back to the tack.

That’s the word that Garcia-Toledo used at breakfast Tuesday. “Another tack,” he said Gimenez had. The mayor told him about it the weekend after the vote, having invited him over to his Coconut Grove house to look at some renovation in the kitchen or something (apparently he got more work done on the house). “But it wasn’t about that,” Garcia-Toledo said, laughing and showing off his buddy buddy relationship with Gimenez.

It was about the stadium and “another tack.”

Garcia-Toledo wouldn’t give me any details but, rather, smiled broadly like the cat that ate a very big canary. He said he’d ask the mayor and get back to me. I saw him at a fundraiser for Miami City Commission candidate Ralph Rosado — with Barby Gimenez, no joke — but he still didn’t have any details.

And they ran out of there so fast after I got there that it almost made my head spin.

Yes, of course I called the mayor’s office. I left a message for Chip Iglesias.

So, I guess I will get a call back from Barby or an invitation to meet for breakfast or coffee from Ralph in a few days.

He told me we’d go to Greenstreets in the Grove next time. Maybe swing by the mayor’s kitchen to talk about that tack?