Hialeah councilwoman scolds mayor on marijuana smoking in public measure

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Angelica Pacheco starts ‘Dime Hialeah’ YouTube series

In advance of a state amendment on the ballot that could legalize recreational marijuana use in Florida, Hialeah Councilwoman Angelica Pacheco — who says the skunky scent of pot already permeates the City of Progress — wants to outlaw marijuana smoking in the city’s public places. But Mayor Esteban Bovo seems to think that’s unnecessary.

“I don’t know what Hialeah you travel in, where there’s a stench of marijuana everywhere,” Bovo said at the April 9 meeting, where he wouldn’t even put the item on the agenda.

So Pacheco traveled Hialeah from the Home Depot on 49th to the TJ Maxx, to Sedano’s on 16th and 53rd, then the park next to Victor Wilde Community Center and then over to the Chico’s shopping center, talking to dozens of people — men, women, young, old — and asking them if they ever whiffed the odor of weed in the City of Progress, recording it for a 4:24-minute video posted Sunday on her new “Dime Hialeah” YouTube series (Ladra is already subscribed). And they all said yes.

“Everywhere. Stopped at the red light. In the shopping centers,” one man said.

“I work delivering medicine all over Hialeah. And all over Hialeah, at all hours, you can smell the odor of marijuana,” said another.

One man said they sell ganja at a nearby gas station. An older woman said she’s even smelled it at Amilia Earhart Park.

“I took my granddaughter two weeks ago to distract her with the animals, and there were some shameless people smoking marijuana there,” she said.

“What would you say to a politician who says there is no smell of marijuana in Hialeah,” Pacheco asks in the video.

“That’s a lie,” la abuela says. “Or they need to observe better.”

“He should get out of his house and walk around,” one man said.

“I’d tell him to walk around,” another man said.

“He should walk the streets to see.”

“He should walk the shopping centers.”

The message, clearly, is that Bovo should get out more.

Pacheco told Ladra that Bovo wouldn’t even allow discussion on the item. He told her it was just a ploy for her to get on radio with a bombastic ordinance the city does not need.

Read related: Upset in Hialeah council race could spell trouble for Mayor Stevie Bovo

“The mayor of Hialeah is determined not to let me pass any ordinance,” she said. “He ignores all my requests to have items on the agenda.”

He has even been overheard calling her a “chusma” as he left commission chambers.

The two have probably always been at odds, since Pacheco beat his hermanita, former Councilwoman Vivian Casals-Muñoz. But it may have ramped up since she voted in January against Bovo’s controversial RV ordinance, which prevents the use of mobile homes parked at single family homes as housing, and has criticized the process for selecting the members of the affordable housing task force (more on that later).

“I don’t feel that the timing is appropriate,” she said. She asked for a one-year special use permit for family members only and said there could be setbacks. It didn’t fly. Bovo said Hialeah is not in the business of social welfare and if people can’t afford to live there, well then they should just move.

Pacheco said that if Bovo shuts her out of the agenda, she will just have to turn to the public with her items.

“I am only one vote on the commission, but I can educate, inform, shed light on what they are doing,” she told Political Cortadito. “My purpose, my destine is not to make any laws in Hialeah. It’s to expose the truth and inform the residents.

“He’s not going to shut me up,” Pacheco said about Bovo, who did not return calls to City Hall and to his cellphone.