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The problem is that it doesn’t look like that win-win scenario is on the radar. It’s a shame that the fine people at our county and FIU and the Youth Fair couldn’t have found a way to make this happen in four years. So why a ballot question now? How is that going to help figure all this out?
Ladra suspects it won’t. Ladra suspects this is more like pressure for a land grab dotted with sweet backroom deals disguised as good policy. Because while we really don’t know much about the deal, we know something about the deal makers, don’t we?
Friends of Higher Education PAC formed in June and quickly hired as some of its many more lobbyists: Robert Holland, former State Rep. Miguel de Grandy, former County Manager Sergio 
Pereira, campaign guru Steve Marin, Jorge Luis Lopez — one of the Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez‘s best buds — and spin doctor Freddy Balsera, who employs mayor’s son, CJ Gimenez.
Oh, so wait, is that the emergency! Is this why, after four years of discussions that go nowhere, we need to immediately approve obscure ballot language so that it can be railroaded into the November election. Because now the mayor’s friends and family are metido en la rosca. Because, you know, the referendum is just the first part. Ka-ching! There is money to be spent on phone banks and mailers and communications and media buys. And then, ka-ching! There could be at least a decade of deals in the making here. Someone will have to develop that academic building and someone will have to build the student housing and someone (read: Manny Diaz Farms) will have to plant palm trees around them and someone will get a concession’s contract or a security contract or a parking contract.
Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!
What the referendum intends to do, according to the political observers that Ladra believes, is pressure the Youth Fair folks to get the ball rolling. 
Because, from the looks of it, they don’t want to go anywhere. And that would effect everybody’s ka-ching. The Fair Expo has a sweet deal for another 70 years. They have a history at that location for more than four decades now, since the county leased it to them way back when it was nothing but a potato field in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Everglades. Too bad, so sad, Dade County? A deal is a deal. Why on Earth would they mess with it?
Perez would not tell Ladra what they would do if the Youth Fair people decided not to budge, but he did hint that they would not give up. The ballot measure, then, might be intended to provide FIU’s Friends with the needed mandate or social conscience to move forward more aggressively. My words, not his. His were: “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
“We hope that the Youth Fair comes, at the end of teh day, to an amicalble solution that is a win-win solution for the good of this community,” Perez said “But this is an issue that voters should be heard from. We honestly believe that the best place to start is to see if this is something the people want or not. If at the end of the day, people don’t support it, you’ve wasted all this time and effort for nothing.”
But, if at the end of the day you can’t find a suitable location to make your dream happen, no matter how many people vote in favor, you’ve wasted your time and effort on a referendum for nothing.
Well, not for nothing. And that’s what the PAC is for after all. Well, after they get a majority of the commission to put this on the November ballot (which Ladra hears is going to be a tight call), their job is to sell the “vote yes” campaign to the public. A poll done two months ago showed there was more opposition to FIU’s growth plans than there was support. But that’s nothing a little messaging and PR can’t fix, right Freddy? And that takes moolah.
Ka-ching!
Friends of Higher Education has already raised nearly $285,000 to promote this. Contributions came from healthcare interests, including $50,000 from Benjamin Leon, and the construction industry, including $25,000 from MCM Construction, owned by the Jorge Munilla family that is close 
to Gimenez, and $30,000 from Fort Lauderdale Contractor Bob Moss. The PAC got another $25,000 from Carlos Saladrigas and $20,000 from MCCI Group Holdings, a real estate company owned by Jose Armas.
That money can go fast in the right hands, however, and the Friends PAC has already spent $185,000 including about $130K on government consulting and media. Have you seen much media? Yeah, me neither. Freddy must be working it from the inside. He didn’t call Ladra back when she reached out to him on this Tuesday. The FIU communications office took my number and had Perez, the lobbyist, call me back.
The campaign to woo public votes has already begun, too. It won’t be on the ballot, but a memorandum of understanding — which also seems premature — has the generous university paying the county $20 million in upgrades to Tamiami Park athletic facilities (gotta appease those Little League parents) and leasing or giving the county a 320-acre piece of property known as the Bird Drive Basin just east of Krome Avenue in the UDB. So what if it is a useless piece of land they can’t do anything with anyway because any construction would have to pass a super majority of the board? So what if the county and FIU expect us to swallow that this land just east of Krome en casa del diablo is to compensate for the lost green space at Tamiami Park?
Still, both these things look like carrots or fodder that can be spun to lead the voting masses their way.
Hohenstein told Ladra that the Youth Fair organizers are not going to form a PAC, but that they will disseminate information in other ways and that there won’t be a vacuum of anti-proposal information. Voters will know what an empty shell this is by November.
“It makes no sense at all,” Hohenstein said. “They’re asking voters to vote for something where there is no meat. There’s no funding. There’s no site.”
All there is at this point is the promise of ka-ching.
Premature ballot item = pressure on Youth Fair/FIU land deal added by Ladra on
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