Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo got his way Thursday when the commission voted to throw all the unused COVID19 relief money for grocery gift cards from the CARES federal funding into a new pot and divide it between four of them again.
Commissioner Jeffrey Watson and his $360,388 balance will stay in District 5 because, officially, it’s the neediest zone and because Watson was appointed in November and may have gotten a late start.
This really helps Carollo, who has the smallest balance of unused gift card money with just under $100K, and Commissioner Manolo Reyes, the only one to use his entire allotment and have sworn affidavits for every recipient.
It hurts Commission Chairman Ken Russell and Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla, who had the highest balances after Watson, with $279,313 and $190,800 respectively.
Read related: Miami commissioners hang on to hundreds of COVID19 relief gift cards
The funds for the gift cards — which ranged from $100 to $350 and came from various grocery stores as well as general vanilla Visa cards — were doled out to districts based on the percentage of people living at or below the poverty level. District 5 got the biggest piece of the pie.
The balances for the other commissioners that are to be divided among the other four, including Reyes, the same way, which is what Carollo demanded two weeks ago. Score one for Crazy Joe.
But it’s not everything he wanted. After getting the public records he asked for last week and finding a number of issues with the card giveaways, he got the commission to direct the Inspector General to audit the reports from each district office. He was particularly concerned that one unnamed commissioner — Ladra suspects it’s ADLP — had not followed the agreed upon distribution process. Rule breaker? Sounds like The Dean.
Each of the gift card recipients had to sign a sworn affidavit that they were impacted by COVID with their name, address, proof of residency, telephone numbers, the type of gift card and denomination they got. “We need to double check that everyone that signed that they got a card did get a card,” Carollo said, which is an insinuation that some cards were pilfered.
“This process, with the amount of dollars here, needs to be with full transparency so nobody can be questioned on it,” he said, referring to the $4.7 million gift card program.
Read related: Miami city could sue for their fair share of federal CARES COVID19 relief funds
“We begin with me,” he said, adding that the information provided by his staff indicated that his district office “assigned 78 more cards than were issued to us.” He said that further inspection showed those people never came to pick up cards. “And then we then reissued them.
“The current number of cards not assigned is actually 23.”
So Joe has missing cards, too. Either 78 or 23.
He said there were also 133 applications in District 3 that got more than one card, but that was when monies were shifted from the business loan program surplus and the card values were increased on the second batch.
Six of this. A half dozen of that. The accounting here has been terrible all around.
“That’s what I want the Inspector General to look at, and, in fact, it can begin with me,” Carollo said.
But he’s not looking at himself. He’s looking across the dais at his old BFF turned Best Foe Forever, ADLP. Carollo wouldn’t call Ladra back to confirm, but you just know that’s who he is gunning for.
“One of us decided that we were going to do our own form and that form only had the name of the person the signature of the person with the date, the number of the card, a signature of an employee from the city that had done the process, and that was it,” Carollo said. “No sworn statement, no address, no telephone number… when we all voted on the resolution and instructed the administration that this is what we wanted.
“None of us had the right to do whatever we wanted,” Carollo continued, with Reyes interjecting “mmm hmmm” here and there. “The only thing you have is the name of someone. You don’t have an address that matches to that person and you don’t have a phone number that matches to that person. How do we verify who the person is? Where they live at? How do we reach them?”
Read related: Miami bromance breaks up as Joe Carollo and ADLP bicker and brawl
He also lashed out at the administration.
“Who the heck was responsible for going through these and making sure that at the very least we were filing the format that the administration [gave us] based on what we requested you to do,” Carollo asked. “Didn’t anybody see this at any point when they were being given?”
“No, sir,” Porro answered. “With 32,000 copies, no, I did not, sir.”
How much you wanna bet he’s the next to suddenly resign from the city?
Diaz de la Portilla later told Ladra that his staff had gift card recipients fill out the same form as everyone else “plus an additional form that details all internal interactions.
“Our forms were actually more expansive and detailed,” ADLP texted, because he never answers the phone, before turning on Carollo. “He has 78 cards unaccounted for. He has $19,500 missing.”
In addition the math problems, the “reimbursement entity” — which Ladra surmises is the county — told the city that there are “two batches they went through that don’t even have any signatures.”
It could be up to 8,600 of those without signatures.
“I know all of us were under extreme stress because the county gave us very limited time to do this. but there’s no excuse for this,” Carollo said, milking it. “This looks horrible. I don’t know if we can ever figure out how many of these people really got these cards or not. And the sad part is that all of us are going to be painted with the same brush.
“Whether its me, whether its any one of us, the mayor, none of us is a prince, a king, a Saudi that is above the law,” Carollo said. “All of us put our pants on in the morning the same way…. we are all as equal as the poorest resident we have in our city.
“And you cannot allow a process not to be followed just because it’s an elected official who decides not to follow and do as they please.”
Missing Miami COVID relief gift cards to be audited by city’s inspector general added by Ladra on
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