Miami Commissioner cleans house at Omni CRA after his crony is kicked out

The executive director fired from the Omni Community Redevelopment Agency last month was just the first casualty of Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla‘s wrath — and/or graft.

ADLP was made chairman of the Omni CRA in February and immediately started to retaliate against employees who may have cooperated with authorities in the investigation into ghost employee Jenny Nillo, his longtime lacky. Since former Executive Director Jason Walker was asked to leave the day after Diaz de la Portilla was named chair, every CRA employee has been chased off — except for one.

Anthony Balzebre, the assistant director who helped pivot the organization’s focus to small affordable housing projects and worked to initiate most if not all the reforms recommended by the grand jury that had once cast the Omni CRA as the poster child of bad CRAs? Gone.

Adam Old, the former director of planning and policy, who got super good at finding pockets of money (read: grants) and, in his effort to help Overtown property owners, was talking passionately about “rehabilitation of naturally occurring affordable housing” before anyone else in town? Gone.

Isiaa Jones, the in-house counsel who came from the city attorney’s office with experience in real estate contractual transactions who took the team’s vision and molded it into partnerships? Gone.

This is the team that turned the ship around.

All three were asked on a Thursday to resign by a Friday in mid March. They were expecting it — everyone else was, too — but maybe not so soon. After all, they had worked with Diaz de la Portilla before, when he was chairman until Nillo was fired. And there’s a lot going on. Somewhere around 30 or 40 projects in the pipeline, like the Wynwood Works mixed-use, mixed housing project depicted here.

But they only lasted one week with the new executive director.

That is now Humberto “Bert” Gonzalez. He was an assistant director at the CRA before, having worked there for seven years under former Commissioner Marc Sarnoff until he was fired by Walker in 2017 because he wasn’t very good at his job. Sources say Diaz de la Portilla doesn’t know Gonzalez is a slacker, but he doesn’t care. Gonzalez was hired as a dig at Commissioner Ken Russell, who used to be the chair of the CRA and because he is exactly what Diaz de la Portilla wants: an unabashed yes man.

“Bert is an experienced independent consultant with a demonstrated history of working in the government administration industry,” reads the thumbnail profile on the CRA website. “Skilled in Nonprofit Organizations, Budgeting, Government, Sales, and Event Management. Strong consulting professional with a BBA focused in Marketing from Florida International University.”

It is a cut and paste from his LinkedIn page, which shows that Gonzalez has been selling automated garages, fences and parking systems since 2019 after he applied for, but did not get, a job as director of Margate’s CRA.

Left from the original staff are Frances Llop-Noy, the project development specialist who manages the grants, Maintenance Supervisor Javier Rivas-Plata, Jesly de los Santos, a legal assistant, and receptionist Jessica Yance.

For now.

There doesn’t seem to be any replacements for the three executives who were chased away. And there’s a lot of work for Llop-Noy to absorb.

Will Nillo come back? Unlikely. The longtime lackey — she’s been with the family since big brother Miguel Diaz de la Portilla was a county commissioner — was unceremoniously fired after she was stopped by police picking up ADLP’s dry cleaning and it was learned that she was a ghost employee at the CRA. She was making $53,000 a year as a “community liaison,” basically keeping eyes out for Diaz de la Portilla, he said.

Anyway, she’s still employed with the city. This time the commissioner’s district office. She was never charged with theft for the wages she stole as a CRA ghost employee. So Diaz de la Portilla hired her back right after Walker fired her. Makes one think: What’s she got on him?

What’s at stake? Millions. And future affordable housing stock.

Even though most of the $66.5 million Omni CRA budget — which, by the way, was approved by the Miami-Dade Commission on Tuesday — is already tied up in ongoing projects and debt service on finished projects like the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center and the Port tunnel, there is still about $10 million a year in programming and operating expenses to play with. Plus a $2.8 million reserve.

Then there is the effort to develop the Miami-Dade School Board property into 10 acres of taxable property that would include affordable and workforce housing as well as parking to be shared by the School Board and the PAC. This is still in formation — which means they can still stick their hands in, or out, as it were.

Diaz de la Portilla has already requested a list of city-owned properties within the CRA district, so he could be looking to create a new project, now that he has a CRA staff he can manipulate and manage. Maybe something anchored by self-storage via Raul Nuñez and his lobbyist, Carlos Lago.

They may have talked about it over lunch at Morton’s on a recent weekday.

If you like what you are reading on Political Cortadito, please take a moment to make a donation that will keep Ladra digging. Thank you.

Alex Diaz de la Portilla, CRAs

Miami Commissioner cleans house at Omni CRA after his crony is kicked out added by Ladra on April 6, 2022
View all posts by Ladra →