If you want to know who’s giving to the campaign coffers for Miami Commissioner Francis Suarez‘s million-dollar mayoral bid, all you have to do is look online: The city posts candidates’ financial campaign reports on its website.
Ditto for the races in Homestead and Miami Beach.
But if you want to see who is funding Hialeah Mayor Carlos “Castro” Hernandez‘s re-election campaign — or that of his cronies on the Seguro Que Yes Council — you have to go to City Hall and hope the City Clerk is not out to a 90-minute lunch or something.
Hialeah is the only city in the big four Miami-Dade municipalities with elections this year that does not provide campaign finance reports online.
There are a growing number of cities that offer this convenience. Among them: Aventura, Coral Gables, North Miami and North Miami Beach.
“We’ve just never done it,” said Hialeah City Clerk Marbelis Fatjo, not realizing, I guess, that nobody used to do it until the technology became status quo and then they just did it. She also reminded me that it isn’t mandated by law.
“We’re not required to provide them online,” Fatjo told me.
Maybe there should be a state statute that requires municipalities to post their election campaign finance reports online. I mean, if our state senators’ and representatives’ reports are available, why not our local government electeds? Yay. Ladra has something to work toward for next year’s legislative session.
Because, of course, Hialeah is not the only city that has decided to stay stuck in the dark ages and make it just a teensy bit harder for people to get information by filing public records requests for it.
The Village of El Portal doesn’t, for example. Neither does the progressive town of Miami Lakes, which does have an iphone app.
The city of Hialeah Gardens, which just had elections this past spring doesn’t post reports online either. Hialeah Gardens City Clerk Maria Joffee told Ladra that city administrators have never even discussed it or considered it.
Miami Springs just had city elections, too, and City Clerk Magali Valls gave the same reason as Fatjo for the lack of campaign reports on its website. “It hasn’t been the custom. We just have never done it,” Valls said.
“We have just become paperless,” Valls said about her city of 13,600 people. “It’s really only in the last year or so that we came into the 21st Century.”
She said that the reports may very well be posted online by the next election two years from now.
“It would be a very good thing to do,” Valls told me. But, in reality, very few people in the city of 13,600 make public records requests for the reports.
“Just the other candidates,” Valls said.
Well, imagine the ease on them if they could just peek at their opponents war chests online rather than have to ask for one — que pena! — in person.
In Hialeah, campaign reports are almost secret added by Ladra on
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