Looks like the race for Miami Lakes mayor is turning out to be a vote of no confidence in former Mayor Michael “Muscles” Pizzi, who was arrested last month on public corruption charges.
The general sentiment around town — where early voting is limited to tomorrow at the Miami Lakes library and 1,073 people have voted absentee so far — is that any one of the candidates will be better than what the town had with Pizzi, who was charged with bribery and extortion after a two-year FBI investigation found he was willing to grease the wheels to get bogus government grants in exchange for kickbacks to him and his campaign.
It was a small poll (163 respondents) , with a larger than average margin of error (7.5%), but in the small town and with the observations and conversations Ladra has had, it seems logical. Plus, the results were given to me by the candidate who did the poll, which was Bennett’s team, which gives it extra credibility because he gave me the results even though he is in third place. That doesn’t happen a lot.
That third place, however, is still within four points of the lead. And Slaton only has one point over Hernandez, who was everyone’s pick as the long lead front runner (never materialized). So it is still anybody’s game.
Ladra is pretty sure that Hernandez has polled, too. Because the campaigns in Miami Lakes stayed pretty clean until he hit Slaton with a mailer on Thursday, indicating he has similar numbers, too. Hernandez won’t call me back, though, ever since Ladra wrote that he was being supported by what I call the Hialeah AB mafia. But what kind of mayor would that make? Someone who won’t respond to you, dear Miami Lakes voter, if you criticize him or disagree with his ideas?
In the interest of disclosure, Ladra has to say she prefers Bennett. Gotcha! Bet you thought it would be the retired Hialeah firefighter, huh? And it’s not because he is my dentist. That would not be enough. No, I would like to see Doc in the mayor’s seat because he deserves it. He has walked the walk and talked the talk. He has been railing against Pizzi’s abuses of power for years, actually suing the city because of the former mayor’s unethical actions. That is someone who is invested in his town for no other reason than it is his town. He was at council meetings when nobody else was, recording the injustices levied on other citizens. He has been there for Miami Lakes. He is excruciatingly transparent.
Unlike Hernandez, Bennett is not using this position as a stepping stone for a greater office. He doesn’t care about anything else except Miami Lakes. In fact, I bet he doesn’t run again. He doesn’t need to. His life is quite full without it. He just wants to fix what’s broken.
Unlike the soft-spoken, gentle Slaton — who is my second choice because neither he nor Bennett have used questionable PACs (more on that later) — Bennett will not be shy about digging up any more dirt that Pizzi may have hidden around. That would probably not be what Hernandez does either. But that is what Miami Lakes needs. A good housecleaning.
Bennett’s numbers are naturally an indication that he is losing some of his Hispanic supporters from last year’s council race to Hernandez and some of his Slaton supporters to, er, well, Slaton.
But he has not given up and is hoping that the responses he gets from people when he walks and knocks on doors every day — that “damn, you were right about Pizzi. I wonder what else you might be right about,” gist — will translate at the polls.
“I was going to run anyway, and I am walking every day and talking to voters, so it is still very close,” Bennett told Ladra Thursday as he was walking.
Interestingly enough, retired Hialeah Firefighter Luis Espinosa, who has a bunch of PAC money despite having first railed against the committee financing method of getting elected, is not registering much of a blip on the radar. Perhaps other people suspect his ties to Pizzi through city activist Maria Kramer, who takes credit for getting Pizzi elected the first time, and Councilman Nelson Rodriguez (who many think Pizzi put in last year’s race against Bennett) and that fact that Absentee Ballot Queen Sasha Tirador, who is also a Pizzi campaign strategist, may be collecting ballots for him. At least she offered to.
Frankly, the four main mayoral candidates — nobody has seen hide nor hair of real estate professional Edwin “The Ghost” Romero — didn’t sound very different from each other at a Chamber of Commerce lunch earlier this month where they presented their ideas and answered questions in a very collegiate way, even complimenting each other.
In fact, it was sorta like an echo chamber.
Bennett, who has said any candidate is better than what they had, couldn’t agree more with everything that Slayton said. Councilman Hernandez agreed with Bennett a couple of times. And Slayton sounded so good that Espinosa said he might even vote for him.
None of the candidates did very much to set themselves apart. But, as usual, the devil is in the details.
Hernandez still likes to drop names. He’s worked with Sen. Rene Garcia and State Rep. Eddy Gonzalez and fulano de tal, he told the crowd of about 80 people. He must have said the word Tallahassee seven or eight times — if not more.
Bennett has toned down his feverish pitch. Guess that’s from the relief of knowing Pizzi is no longer at Town Hall.
Slaton came off as the one with the most historic context. The purist, if you will, who likes the Lakes the way he created it in the first place, dag nabbit, and everyone should stop messing with it.
Espinosa won over the crowd with his charming self-deprecation and straight forward aw shuckness. He took a question from the audience — and right there owned the event — and then later beat Hernandez with a better answer to the councilman’s planted question about economic development than the councilman had himself.
Asking the question was none other than Josh Dieguez, one of the junior G-Men from the Carlos Gimenez mayoral campaigns who is now working to elect Frank Mingo, who also happens to work for State Rep. Jose Oliva. He says that they are not working together, Mingo and Hernandez, but both have endorsements (and money) from Oliva and both are working with Oliva’s go-to boy, consultant David Custin.
Espinosa, who Ladra thinks would have won the vacated council seat (and, yes, I told him he should have run there), stood out in one other way: He is the only one we’ve never heard of before. And, while I have spoken to a couple of voters who think he has some chutzpah to run after not attending a single council meeting, he thinks that is going to work for him.
“I have the utmost resepect for the men sitting here,” he said, as the first to speak. “But we keep seeing the same people over and over and if my campaign does anything, I’d like to see more young candidates like Joshua come out,” he said, referring to Dieguez, who is his neighbor.
Hey, it’s not just a small world; it’s a tiny town.
Miami Lakes mayoral race looks like a close 3-way added by Ladra on
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