Carlos Gimenez is not the man I voted for in 2011.
The man we once considered an outsider on the dais, the voice of the people,
has turned into the consummate inside deal broker, a man so entrenched in special interests and corrupt that his best friend and campaign finance chair has a $200-an-hour county contract worth $18 million over the next 12 years.
Gimenez went from being Ladra’s “Golden Boy” to a “Tainted Boy” — after he hooked up with the Hialeah hoodlums — and then “Cry Wolf Carlos,” after he kept threatening to lay everybody off, to “Mr. Giveaway,” when he started just giving millions away to millionaires.
It’s been a slippery slope. And as he faces the first real challenge to his dark and arrogant rule, it’s time to remind everyone why Carlos Gimenez should not be allowed to have another four years, what would be his last four years as mayor.
2011 — The Year of Setting Up
The descent started right after being elected in 2011. The new mayor asked the Commission on 
Ethics and Public Trust for an opinion on deals that were brought to the county by one of his two sons — the red light camera lobbyist or the project manager for a major construction firm. He was told to keep an arm’s distance. So he created an arm. Or, rather, five of them.
The deputy mayor system was created specifically to insulate Gimenez from his sons as well as his lobbyist friends and their special interest and still be able to wheel and deal at arm’s length. But it’s all a show. Because don’t think for a minute that dealing with Alina Hudak or Ed Marquez is any different than dealing with Carlos Gimenez. They will do what he wants them to do.
He also cut taxes by 12 percent, without really considering how that would impact the county in the following years. He did this 19 days after being sworn in July 1, 2011. And we’ve been paying the consequences ever since. Talk about inexperience and mismanagement. It was irresponsible. But, heck, it sounds good in robocalls and radio ads.
2012: The Year of the First Taste of Power
In the summer of 2012, Mayor Gimenez got the commission to approve up to $5 million in funding to meet the county’s insurance deductible for damage done by heavy rains that year to the Ziff 
Ballet Opera House at the Arsht Performing Arts Center. Somewhere around 2,500 patrons had to be evacuated after water came gushing through the roof during a May performance of The Lion King. Though the $5 million comes from county coffers, the independent Performing Arts Center Trust was charged with hiring the contractors to make the repairs. Normally the PAC gets the county procurement department to request bids for its projects, but this was an emergency, county staffers told Ladra. And the job went to the company that hired the mayor’s son, Julio Gimenez.
In August that year, his campaign against a challenge from former Commissioner Joe Martinez gets 
caught up in an illegal absentee ballot operation. One of several people caught and arrested with dozens of absentee ballots was seen walking in and out of his Hialeah campaign office. He may not have known about it, but he certainly didn’t do enough about it after he found out. The man who told me personally in 2011 that he would reform absentee ballots to cut down on fraud was now looking the other way because it benefited him.
Nothing happens. Investigators later say they were stopped from going into Gimenez’s Hialeah campaign office because the State Attorney, whose campaign manager was also working for Gimenez, would not seek a subpoena. Nobody got jail time. And nobody followed up on the investigation, even though there was evidence that there were more people involved.
It’s never been spoken of again.
2013: The Year he “saved” Libraries
An obsession with sports stadiums started when early in 2013, Gimenez proposed a tourist bed tax 
increase to fund renovations and a roof at Dolphins Stadium, something he needed the state legislature to pass. He thought the idea was so revolutionary and fantastic — “best idea ever,” he called it — that he went so far as to having it put on fast track for a referendum and having the Miami Dolphins pay for it. The measure failed to get any support in Tallahasee and died.
Not to get too depressed about it, Gimenez flew to Paris for the air show and then later met his pal, lobbyist Jorge Luis Lopez, in Italy so they could get backstage passes to the Vatican.
When he came back, Gimenez proposed fire rescue cuts known as “brown outs” that would have some units at some stations out of service for several hours or days at a time. It wou
ld have severely impacted neighborhood service and response times. After firefighters had several street protests, the idea was dropped and money magically found (one of several times) to keep the fire rescue staffing levels.
But to fix the broken budget — which he had broken two years earlier, folks — Gimenez also proposed closing libraries and drastically cutting library programs and services. After much protest at County Hall and a number of budget town halls around the county, money was magically found again and the administration ended up only closing some branches on some weekdays and cutting staff.
There’s more. Please press this “continue reading” button to “turn the page.”
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