Text messages don’t lie: Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez has been caught using several members of his publicly paid senior staff to basically work on his suddenly-halted and possibly aborted congressional campaign. And the executive director of the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust, Jose Arrojo, said they would investigate. An ethics complaint filed Friday […]
The Miami city manager’s sudden resignation Friday has been an exit in the works for months, a power play so commissioners can bring in their own man, say several political observers and sources close to City Hall. Word is that man is Miami Parking Authority Director Arthur Noriega. Under normal circumstances, former assistant city manager Joe […]
Miami City Manager Emilio Gonzalez resigned Thursday, trying to take the high road, rather than face a commission hell bent on having him fired and/or investigated in what looks like a vindictive smear job and power play, starring Commissioner Joe Carollo, who has been trying to fire him for months. Is Ladra the only one […]
P0litical strategist and organizer Juan Cuba, former executive director of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, has a great idea: Let’s recall Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo. And he is not alone. After a meltdown at the city commission meeting last week in which Carollo picked a fight with Chairman Keon Hardemon and then he and his partner in crime, […]
When it was first reported in September that Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez was eyeing a run for Congress in District 26, Ladra thought it was a bad dream. No such luck. Gimenez, who is termed out this year, is expected to announce this week — perhaps as early as Wednesday — that he will run for the […]
Ladra got the most interesting phone call Monday, on the eve of the first debate for the Miami-Dade mayoral candidates in 2020. It was a push poll, likely for former Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas. Why? Penelas was the only candidate that my interviewer spoke positively about during a nearly 20 minute Q&A (okay it took […]
Who would guess that proposed bike lanes would cause so much trouble? A plan to connect the University of Miami with downtown and North Coral Gables via 4.6 miles of bicycle lanes — some of it with accompanying sidewalks — has met resistance from some of the residents on the chosen streets who say they’ve been left out […]
The voting public split the baby in Hialeah Tuesday — if the runoff election was a referendum on Mayor Carlos Hernandez, as they usually seem to be. One of Little Castro’s endorsed candidates won, beating an activist the mayor had arrested early on in the campaign. Jackie Garcia-Roves, who beat Milly Herrera, 54 to 46%, […]
Talk about persistence: It took a fourth try, but former Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla is an elected official again. It also took about a million dollars. But more about that later. In what Ladra is pretty sure is yet another sign of the apocalypse, Dean DLP won the runoff for the Miami District […]
Its quite possible that yet another sweet, no-bid real estate project gets approval in a fast track process for what seems like the worst transit plan ever by the end of the day Friday — before anyone can notice. Virgin Trains may get, in a series of back-to-back emergency meetings, $76 million in half penny […]