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He also ignores the will of the people when he refuses to fund the Pets’ Trust initiative that was approved by 65% of the voters the November prior. After first submitting a budget with a small increase to accommodate the massive spay and neuter program to bring the county to a real zero kill rate, Gimenez back pedals and shows his cowardice by taking the tiny increase off.
2014 — The Year of the Giveaways
Time for take two on the Dolphin stadium finance plan — we told you it was an obsession — which 
is a tax exemption for the billionaire owner, Stephen Ross. That’s right: Carlos Gimenez does not fight for our fair share of available federal funds to help constituents going through foreclosure but he does want to create a new tax exemption so a billionaire buddy and donor to his campaign can afford upgrades to his multi-billion property. This “better best deal ever” failed to get traction with county commissioners — probably because some of them had elections later that year.
Not one to give up when it comes to giving away millions of other people’s money, Gimenez came up with Plan C: Up to $5 million a year if the stadium attracts events that it was already motivated to go after. This “best possible best deal ever” won’t have the county start payments until 2025 — way after Gimenez is gone from the 29th floor — even though the stadium can earn credits toward that first payment already. The money will come from hotel bed tax funds, which were already strained from museum subsidies even before the Zika outbreak has its expected tourist fallout.
But one bad stadium deal is not enough for Gimenez. In 2014, he also brokered the renegotiated deal for the Miami Heat’s use of the American Airlines Arena — arguably a better deal for the Miami Heat than it is for the county (we could have gotten more).
Later that year, he dismantled the public corruption unit, the very same squad of specialized police officers who investigated absentee ballot fraud in his campaign. Oh, he will say he had nothing to do with it. But the whole reorganization was done for him, to accommodate his budget. Carlos Gimenez is the de facto sheriff of Miami-Dade, the only county in the state without an elected independent sheriff.
Not happy with just giveaways to the football and basketball teams, Gimenez later proposes to use a Port Miami parcel to build a soccer stadium for David Beckham’s Miami franchise. This, like many of his cockamaynie ideas, goes nowhere. He later backpedals and says it’s just a “viable” site.
That summer, as the legacy of his first year’s irresponsible tax cut continued, he began the budget process with a proposed pay cut of 10% across the board and laying off 700 employees — including, at first, 200 police officers – to bridge a $64 million deficit that was caused basically by his previous visionless and irresponsible tax cut in 2011, which we are still paying for. He ended up cutting far fewer positions and no police officers lost their jobs, further earning him the “Cry Wolf” name.
By December, he was giving money away again. 
This time, to developer Jeffrey Berkowitz, who had once been his top donor and campaign finance director. Gimenez got the commission to approve a $9 million grant to Berkowitz for his SkyRise Miami project on the waterfront. But because voters in Miami have to approve waterfront projects and they approved this one as a “privately funded project,” Berkowitz had to give the money back, thanks to a lawsuit filed by Miami-Dade School Board Member Raquel Regalado, who is running against Gimenez.
2015 — The Year of the Secret Deals
In February of 2015, it became public that the county had been working quietly with Donald Trump to turn over the Key Biscayne golf course. The mayor 
supported the idea, which was born when he and Trump played a round of golf one morning, but he recused himself from the negotiations because his son worked for the billionaire. Here is where his deputy mayors come in handy. The idea generated so much outrage that he not only pulled back, he was forced to return Trump’s $15,000 contribution to his campaign.
A month later, he had another secret plan to unveil. We learned in March 2015 that he had worked for months on a deal that would help developers build a mega mall in Northwest Miami-Dade as some sort of giant retail tourist attraction. He was instrumental in getting the state-owned land declared surplus so he could buy it at government rates and then sell it to the developer for a big savings over market property value. That’s not a perk that everyone gets.
In April, he proposed to privatize Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. We haven’t heard much more about that again but, trust Ladra, it is still in the works. There is a whole new non-profit entity in the Florida Division of Corporations and my sources say the management is paying for items like security and landscaping from that account rather than the public government account (more on that later). This will allow the mayor or whatever entity he has in place to give his sons, both the lobbyist and the construction project manager, millions of dollars worth of work without having to go through the public, transparent bid process.
In May, he flew to Paris for the air show again. This time, with a bunch of county officials and lobbyists, including Ralph Garcia Toledo, his BFF, one time driver and campaign finance chair, who had started his $200 county job on his multi-million contract six months prior.
When he came back in June, Carlos Gimenez admitted that, under his administration, the county had been mismanaging the special taxing districts that some taxpayers pay for lighting or security or landscaping services. Gimenez admitted that some taxpayers had been over billed to compensate for the under-billing of others. If that’s not mismanagement, we don’t know what is.
In November, after he passed a budget where we still don’t have all our library hours restored, Carlos Gimenez proposed forgiving $2-$3 million in fines to Uber for operating illegally for months.
2016 — The Year of Opportunity
Gimenez starts off 2014 with a bang. After, once again, secret negotiations are uncovered, Gimenez publicly proposes 
to use the vacant port parcel at Port Miami for a Miami-Havana ferry — an idea he quickly withdraws after the expected fallout. He later says he doesn’t care if Cuba opens its consulate office here.
In April, since he has money to burn, Gimenez proposes and gets a $50 million bailout of the Frost Science Museum. Again, he finances it on our future, promising to pay these funds back from future CRA funds that would have gone to the museum in annual operation subsidies that we have to believe are suddenly not needed.
His emergency knee-jerk response to the Zika crisis has been characteristically too little too late and it has exposed another example of his mismanagement. Having decreased mosquito spending every year, moving the division under roads and bridges in Public Works, the county spends less for mosquito control than West Palm Beach. Nobody knows what happened to a helicopter we bought a decade ago for spraying because we have to outsource and 
pay a Sarasota pilot to do it. The crisis also exposed the fact that the county has a complaint based system, placing traps when residents call the 311 complaint line, which has left urban low-income areas under-served.
And while he has again refused to raise taxes, we are paying more because of increased property values. And we are getting less. Bus maintenance has been cut and on-time service is only expected less than 80 percent of the time. Who can take the bus if they’re only going to get to work on time 80 percent of the time? The new budget also includes a 5 to 9 percent increase in water and sewer rates, the first hike in annual increases that will total more than 30 percent at the end of five years. This while his best friend makes $18 million from a $139 million contract for what basically amounts to clerical work like going to meetings and filing documents.
Carlos Gimenez is not the man I voted for in 2011.
But we had very little choice, then, didn’t we? It was either this embattled commissioner who had been on the right side of the Marlins stadium deal or a former Hialeah mayor who was under investigation for tax evasion (later acquitted) connected to multiple questionable land deals.
This time, we have a good choice.
I didn’t start seeing Carlos Gimenez for the fraud he is after I joined the Raquel Regalado campaign. It was the other way around. I joined #TeamRegalado way after I learned that Carlos Gimenez is not the man I voted for in 2011.
Because she can do better. And because she sure can’t do any worse.
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