One of the consistent complaints about the Joe Carollo recall effort from the Three Amigos on the Miami City Commission has been that it is being funded and organized by “outside interests.” People who don’t live in District 3. People who don’t live in Miami. People in Coral Gables.
But Commissioners Carollo, Manolo Reyes and Alex Diaz de la Portilla, who sponsored the ordinance to limit recalls, are happy to take outsider money — from outside their districts and outside the city, even from Coral Gables — when it is for their own campaigns. This is just another example of how the stated reasons and arguments for the anti-recall 
ordinance are bogus. And how the Three Stooges are also hypocrites.
Carollo, who was elected in 2017 to replace his brother Frank in a District he never lived in before — talk about being an outsider — raised almost a million dollars ($537,388 in his campaign account and $377,700 in his political action committee, Miami First). Of the $915,088 total, at least $367,000 in checks came from outside of the City of Miami, including more than $132,000 from residents and businesses in — where else? — Coral Gables. That’s $32,000 more than the $100K Gables resident and Jackson Memorial Public Health Trust Chairman Joe Arriola, the infamous outsider funding the recall, has committed to the effort.
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Reyes, who had no opposition last year but got contributions of $279,290 to his campaign account anyway (Ladra doesn’t know if he had a PAC), took at least $114,000 from sources outside the city of Miami. About $50,000 came from Coral Gables.
“A millionaire developer can come from outside the city and because you don’t vote with him, finance a recall against you,” Reyes told Ladra when he spoke to her about his support for the ordinance. He is terrified that Jorge Mas will fund a recall against him for voting against the Miami Freedom Park hoax. Reyes should be more worried about people closer to home.
But the biggest culprit of all is ADLP, who raised almost $1.7 million ($820,800 in his campaign account and $836,800 in his 
PAC, Proven Leadership for Miami-Dade) just for the District 1 election last year — and who knows how much more from other PACs and 501(c)4’s. About half of that came from sources outside the city, let alone the district.
Just in his campaign account, more than half of the checks are from outside city limits — 572 out of 959. That does not include many P.O. boxes and some address that say Miami but are really in the Greater Miami postal area. Like Kendall.
Diaz de la Portilla got money from more than two dozen other PACs and other Tallahassee interests and contributions from San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Fort Lauderdale and Hialeah, among the faraway places. Non Miami sources contributed approximately $450,000 into his PAC and almost $400,000 into his campaign account. That’s about of $850,000.00, at the very least, of campaign funds that he took from sources outside of the City of Miami.
Read related: Miami’s Alex Diaz de la Portilla got $740K between the general and runoff
At least $137,000 came from donors in Coral Gables — that’s $37,000 more than the recall effort got from Arriola.
Diaz de la Portilla, who also argues that the recall would cause an “unfunded mandate” special election, sure likes special elections — damn the costs! — when he can run in them. Before he became city commissioner, Diaz de la Portilla ran in two back-to-back special elections, one for county commissioner and the special 2017 Republican primary for Florida Senate in District 40, which is way outside the city, and was a very negative campaign. He was rejected by voters in both, before trying his smaller universe.
In fact, one could even say that Diaz de la Portilla himself is an outsider, since he really doesn’t live in District 1 with his brother. On the record, he moved in just in time to qualify for the race.
But his next door neighbor says he hasn’t seen him even once since the election.
Three Amigos cry about ‘outsiders’ in recall, but take lots of outside money added by Ladra on
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