So terrifying, in fact, the term ‘death spiral’ is now used across a range of domains as a more harrowing alternative to the more clinical and technically precise term ‘negative feedback loop.’ Insurers use it to describe a plan whose rising premiums drive away the healthiest, cheapest customers first, leaving behind a smaller, sicker pool that forces the next round of price hikes, and the one after that. Entomologists use it, somewhat more literally, to describe what happens when a colony of blind army ants loses its pheromone trail and begins following the ant directly in front of it, around and around in a widening then narrowing circle, sometimes for days, until the entire column dies of exhaustion still marching.

And now, thanks to KFC, or what's left of it, we have a perfect local template for a political death spiral, and it goes something like this: a faction, sensing a potentially fatal loss of popular support, resorts to increasingly risky and self-destructive behavior in an attempt to reverse said loss, only to watch that same behavior erode its support further, which in turn elicits even riskier and more self-destructive behavior.

Which brings me to KFC’s latest desperate attempt to gain altitude, courtesy of the only pilots it, the Spirit Airlines of political factions, has left: David Winker and Dr. Castro.

At the final hearing on Crystal Residences, the proposed development at the current Crystal Academy site at 110 Phoenetia, Winker, desperately hungry for (among other things) a last-minute turn of events, unveiled video after video of project supporters who appeared to have lied about being Coral Gables residents when they testified. The commission approved the project anyway, 3-1, then voted 4-0 to refer the allegations for investigation, a bit of housekeeping that mattered a great deal more to the narrative than to the outcome. After all, the record had already been built over five years of staff and board review, and a resident's opinion, true or false, was never going to qualify as the "competent, substantial evidence" required to decide the case. None of which stopped Winker and Castro from trying to stretch a handful of fake addresses into something far bigger, to wit, a conspiracy broad enough to implicate not just the people who lied, but the three commissioners who had the nerve to vote yes.

This unveiling is something I urge you, dear reader, to see for yourself, in its entirety. That said, in the interest of time, I've included only Winker's summation below, as what comes before is a somewhat tedious rundown of the alleged fraudsters, and it's only the part below that one needs to get the gist of what Winker and co are trying to do here:

J'accuse le promoteur! We have a fatal “lack of honesty and integrity” here, and a “project built on lies.” We have a “coordinated effort” to commit “widespread fraud.” It’s the crime of this young century, don’t you see, a crime that must be referred to FDLE and the State Attorney without delay!

All because a handful of, let’s face it, entirely irrelevant people lied about living in the Gables. Quel drame!

And lest you think this was merely a moment made for local-access TV, behold KFC’s ensuing coordinated media campaign involving our far too gullible local news outlets (hat tip to Dr. Castro for conveniently putting all these delicious soundbites in one reel):

Okay, so at this point, you might be wondering why this was such a bad tactic for KFC. Yes, it's performative. Yes, it's hyperbolic. Yes, it's soaked in manufactured indignation. But so what? KFC found a card to play. Why not play it?

Here's why, because the very thing they're calling a crime against the public trust today, a lie about residency told to gain standing before this commission, was something they themselves found conspicuously trivial not long ago. So trivial, in fact, that Winker himself felt no compunction engaging in the exact same behavior. Not something similar. Not something in the same ballpark. The same, exact behavior.

The year was 2021. The setting was a quasi-judicial hearing before this very commission. David Winker raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth, and then flatly, falsely, told the commission he was a Coral Gables resident. He got caught doing it, on camera, in real time.

Well, would you look at that! A nonresident claiming falsely, repeatedly, and under penalty of perjury, to be a resident in an effort to influence a policy decision here in the Gables. Notice the awkward hand-in-the-cookie-jar pauses and sideways glances when Mike Mena called Winker out. He knew he was caught in a lie, and yet, unbelievably, chose to double down anyway.

Keep in mind that Winker is no layperson. He’s a practicing attorney who knows precisely what perjury is:

Agreed, Dave. Agreed. So what do you suggest we do when confronted with evidence of such a heinous crime? What should we do moving forward, Mr. Winker?

My God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Winker has me convinced. Perjury is a real crime that should be investigated and punished accordingly.

But let's say, hypothetically, that the statute of limitations on Winker's own lie has already run its course. Does that mean the matter should simply be dropped? I doubt Winker, of all people, would agree. A statute of limitations may preclude criminal prosecution, but it doesn't preclude a bar complaint, does it, Dave? And if a handful of random Gables residents deserve Nuremberg-style prosecution for lying about where they sleep at night, surely a licensed officer of the court, held to a far higher standard, who lied under oath to influence a commission vote, ought to at least have to explain himself to the people who actually license him to practice law.

Sounds like a job for a bar complaint. And sounds like Winker shouldn’t even fight it. Not if he means what he says. He should turn himself in, march down to the Florida Bar of his own free will, place his law license gently on the counter, and await whatever grim justice the standard he himself invoked demands. A full confession, perhaps, delivered on bended knee. A single tear, for effect. Maybe even a somber little bell, tolled once, as the gravity of his crime is formally read into the record.

After all, it wouldn't be the first time Winker has begged a judge for his professional life. In a separate matter, after filing something the court found improper, Winker asked to be spared a bar referral, describing himself as "a successful lawyer" who "makes mistakes" because he's "emotional," and assuring the judge he'd learned his lesson. The judge was unmoved. "It's your Bar license, it's your reputation, it's your life," she told him, adding that his reputation took a hit every time he pulled something like this. Winker said he understood, and appreciated it "more than you know.”

Who knew contrition had a shelf life.

That said, Winker isn't the only one plagued with a residency problem of his own making. Dr. Castro has one too. When she filed her 2023 candidacy package, the rules required her to submit a driver's license. Hers listed a Miami address. And yet, somehow, "Coral Gables" appears in the City field anyway, a pretty convenient typo if you're a Miami girl who recently inherited her deceased mother's Gables-based business and figured out that governing the same city you pull permits in for a living could give you quite the leg up on your competitors.

I guess lying about where you live is only a crime when you’re the one testifying, not the one who gets to sit in judgment of everyone who does.

And so here’s the whole thing, laid bare. None of this stopped the development. Crystal Residences got its approvals Tuesday night regardless, 3-1, exactly as it would have with or without a single video, a single soundbite, a single holy sermon from our betters at KFC. The record was built over five years of staff review, long before Winker’s recent born-again conversion to a life of principle and honesty. The vote was never actually in doubt, which means the entire spectacle, the fraud, the crime of the century, the coordinated media tour, accomplished exactly nothing on the merits.

What it did accomplish is put Winker and Castro’s own hypocrisy in a spotlight of their own making. Ultimately, every ounce of manufactured indignation flows right back onto the people manufacturing it, because they are, Winker especially, guilty of the exact crime they spent an entire news cycle pretending to be outraged by. You cannot build a case that residency lies are an assault on the public trust and then have your own residency lie sitting in the case file, timestamped, on video, waiting for someone to notice.

The evidence against Winker is proof. The evidence against Castro is merely compelling, not dispositive, but compelling enough to cause her problems all the same. You've already seen the license, "Coral Gables" inserted into what is plainly a Miami address. Not dispositive. Still a bad look. And the more she insists on making residency lies the theme of this election cycle, the more incentive she hands her opponents to put that license on a mailer.

She’s also inviting me back into a story I’ve already told once. Longtime readers may recall I raised Castro’s questionable residency in a post published not long after she took office, back when this newsletter had a readership in the low hundreds. Does she really want that story revisited, in earnest, while she’s running for reelection? Does she really want to find out what happens when it runs not to a few hundred subscribers, but to approximately 20,000?

I don’t think she does. And yet here she is, desperately trying to make lying on the record the defining theme of an entire news cycle, and the election beyond it. This from a woman who has told more demonstrable, explicit lies on this dais, particularly about her business dealings, than any one newsletter can reasonably catalog.

It’s stupid. It’s reckless. It’s the kind of blunder even she, the dumbest adult human being I have ever personally witnessed in public office, would have avoided a year or two ago. But that’s the thing about death spirals. They’re never the result of one bad decision, but a chain of them, each more reckless than the last, because the closer the ground gets, the more pulling back harder starts to feel like the only move left.

Note: This post is for anyone weighing whether to vote for Commissioner Melissa Castro in her re-election bid. Castro points to her first-term record as evidence of what she's accomplished — but that record, pulled directly from the City Clerk, tells a different story than the one she's telling. Because this is a long read, I've included a summary of the findings below. And a note on length. Yes, this is long. It has to be. A sixty-second reel can make a claim; it takes more than sixty seconds to check one. Castro’s whole case fit in a number — in her case “147” — precisely because a number doesn’t have to show its work. The record does, and the record is where accountability actually lives. If you want the short version, it’s in the summary below. If you want to know whether your commissioner earned your vote, that takes reading. These are the facts that decide how people vote and whether the people we elect answer for what they do. Those facts are worth more than your patience for a scroll.

Summary:

• In a July 17th Instagram reel, Commissioner Melissa Castro responded to criticism of her first-term record by citing “147 legislative items” and the line “politics is opinion; the record is fact.”

• I submitted a public records request for the document Castro refers to in her July 17th Instagram reel and dissected it.

• The number is real — but it measures activity, not accomplishment.

• 69 of the 147 were never legislation at all: discussion or protocol items.

• By outcome: 63 were simply noted and filed, 29 remain pending with no action taken, and 19 were drafted, deferred, failed, or dismissed.

• Only 36 were ever adopted or passed.

• Of those, just six were ordinances that became binding city law — all adopted in a single year (2024), most narrow, procedural, or ceremonial, and two co-sponsored rather than hers alone.

• Five days after I filed the records request that produced these findings, Castro posted a second reel — holding up a folder she called a filing cabinet, reciting a series of items while again omitting what became of them.

• That omission is the point: a file count is not a record, and motion is not accomplishment.

The Instagram Reel

Politics is opinion. The record is fact. Believe it or not, those words aren’t mine. They belong to Commissioner Melissa Castro.

On July 17th, Castro posted a reel on Instagram in response to criticism about her legislative record in her first term. In the video, Castro stated she had “147 legislative items” in the last three and a half years. To her credit, that’s an impressive number, but it got me thinking… How many of those items resulted in enacted law? How many were just discussion items? Before I get into it, here’s the Instagram reel:

Ok, so she had 147 agenda items since 2023. Broken down, those agenda items fall into one of three categories: Ordinances, Resolutions, and Discussion items. If we were to itemize each under one of the three categories, it would look like this:

Ok, I’ll concede that at first glance this appears to be pretty impressive. In three and a half years, 147 agenda items is a lot. But understanding the difference between each of these agenda item types is really, really important.

For starters, an ordinance is the city’s strongest legislative tool. It creates or amends binding municipal law, requires two readings, and can permanently change the City Code. A resolution, on the other hand, expresses policy. It approves contracts, authorizes spending, makes appointments, and creates direction. Generally, it does not amend city law, but still plays a valuable role in legislation. And then there is the discussion item, which simply places an issue before the Commission. Although it does not itself enact law, it is a useful tool for generating conversation and giving staff general direction. These distinctions matter because not every file carries the same legislative weight.

What’s within those 69 discussion items, which almost make up half of all 147 agenda items, is also an important distinction. From Burger Bobs, to FreeBee, to a Compensation Study, to Telephone Systems, a discussion item is demonstrably and fundamentally different from legally binding legislation. This is why context matters and it’s why Castro left this detail out. It’s easy to say “look at all that I did!” but not tell residents that most of it never manifested into law. Even more telling is the outcome….

What Actually Happened?

Here’s the part Castro’s presentation quietly depends on: how you sort the record decides what it looks like. She sorted by type — 19 ordinances, 59 resolutions, 69 discussion items — because type sounds like substance. “Ordinance” and “resolution” are weighty words; a list of them reads like a body of lawmaking.

But every one of those 147 files carries a second label the reel never mentioned: its status — what actually happened to it. And status doesn’t care what type a file is. An ordinance can be noted and filed; four of hers were. A resolution can fail; six of hers did. A discussion item can sit “agenda ready” indefinitely. The same nine status categories apply to all 147 files equally — which makes status, not type, the axis that measures outcome.

So take the identical record Castro cited and sort it by status instead of type:

The impressive-sounding type buckets dissolve into what the files became: 36 adopted or passed, 37 still pending or unresolved, and 74 — more than half — filed away or rejected without ever producing legislation. Same 147 files. Same official record. The only thing that changed is which column you sort by — and that single choice is the difference between a record that looks full and one that shows what was accomplished.

To be fair, much of that 74 is discussion items doing exactly what discussion items are supposed to do — get noted and filed. But that is the point: half the record was never the kind of thing that could become law in the first place. With that in mind, let’s walk through what actually happened to all 147.

Let’s start with “Noted and Filed.” There are 63 items that fall under this category, making it the single largest outcome category out of the 147 items Castro is associated with. The largest category in Castro’s “official record” isn’t adopted, it isn’t passed, it’s simply listed as “noted and filed.” Apparently, the road from 147 to accomplishments gets considerably narrower once we start asking what happened to all those files. No action was taken on the 63 items and the item went no further aside from simply being recorded in the minutes.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Commission meetings should include updates, reports, and discussions that are filed in the public record and made readily available for voters to review. But if those files are going to be counted towards Castro’s record, residents should understand that being discussed and filed is fundamentally different from being enacted, and is not necessarily reflective of substantive legislation. Sixty-three files — roughly 43% of the entire 147 item record Castro has highlighted — fall into this category. In other words, the single largest component of the “official record” she presented as evidence of productivity consists of matters that were noted and filed. That context didn’t make the Instagram reel.

Then we have the 29 “Agenda Ready” items, meaning some of the items haven’t reached an outcome at all. That fact alone means they should not be counted in the official record because they demonstrate, well, nothing. “Agenda ready” isn’t an adverse outcome… it isn’t an outcome at all. Yes, a pending item may eventually become an accomplishment, but until it does there is a reasonable expectation that an elected official would not count the possibility of future action as proof of past accomplishment. Castro should have made that clear. If we are measuring activity, sure, go ahead and include these items. If we’re measuring outcome, which is truly reflective of an accomplished record, well then the jury is still out.

Then there are the files that never reached successful final action for one reason or another: five remain in draft form, two were deferred, seven failed, four were dismissed and filed, and one is still pending a second reading. Those statuses aren’t interchangeable — a deferred item is obviously different from one that failed a Commission vote — but none should be confused with an adopted legislative accomplishment. Again, this doesn’t mean introducing them was meaningless. It means the outcome matters when a politician asks voters to judge a record by its size.

Finally, we arrive at the categories most people probably assumed Castro was talking about when she invoked her legislative record: adopted and passed. Thirty-six of the 147 items are classified as such; that’s approximately one-quarter of the record Castro boasted. In three and a half years. That’s less than twelve items a year. That does not mean the other 111 served no purpose. Discussion itself can produce direction. Reports can inform policy. Pending items may eventually pass. But it does mean that 147 and 36 describe two very different things. One measures the size of the file record while the other measures files that reached an adopted or passed disposition.

To be perfectly fair to Castro, she didn’t say she “passed” 147 laws. Actually, I don’t need to be fair to her. She conveniently left that distinction out. I’m holding her accountable for the things she didn’t say. She said she had 147 legislative items but didn’t get specific about any of them. Taken literally, the Clerk’s records support the existence of those items, but that technical defense misses the point and gives Castro permission to misinform the public (which she did). Castro wasn’t giving residents a lesson in municipal records management, she was responding to valid criticisms that she hasn’t accomplished enough in office. The 147 was offered as evidence of accomplishment. Once that’s the purpose for which the number is being used, outcomes become relevant.

147 existed. Sixty-nine were discussion or protocol files to begin with. By outcome: 63 were noted and filed, 29 remain agenda-ready, 19 were drafted, deferred, failed, dismissed, or pending a second reading, and only 36 show adopted or passed outcomes.

But even 36 doesn’t answer the question I started with because “adopted or passed” includes different kinds of Commission action. If we’re going to talk specifically about legislation that actually changed Coral Gables law, we have to narrow the record one more time.

What Actually Passed

We’ve separated activity from outcome. The next question is the obvious one: how much of Castro’s 147-item “official record” actually resulted in something that permanently changed the city code? Are you ready for this? Only 6 of the 19 ordinances were adopted as binding law.

Just. Six.

Let me repeat Castro’s line from her Instagram reel: “Politics is opinion. The record is fact.” Ok, sure. But if we’re going to invoke the record, let’s read the whole thing. I stated that 36 of the items were adopted or passed, of which six are ordinances. Only six became binding city law. In three and a half years. That is not much of a record. However, if Castro introduced legislation that earned the support necessary to become law, she deserves credit for it. I’m not interested in taking accomplishments away from her merely because I’m examining the way she presented her record. But giving her credit for six adopted ordinances does not require pretending that 147 files represent 147 equivalent legislative accomplishments. They don’t. The Clerk’s own records make that clear. So let’s look at the six ordinances themselves.

The Six Ordinances

Ok, so six is the number. Wow, amazing, great! Six ordinances in over three and a half years. Which is why, naturally, substance is the next question. If the record is fact, then Castro deserves to have all six examined on their merits. Sure, passing an ordinance is unquestionably a legislative accomplishment. But the ordinance number stamped at the bottom of the page tells us that something became law; it does not tell us how consequential that law was. I’d like to be sensitive to the fact that some of these may be significant to some voters. I don’t want to disqualify how, subjectively, any of these may be consequential to one person or the other. But objectively, these ordinances are narrow, procedural, ceremonial, and all landed in a single year. For reference, here’s a little bit about each ordinance so you can judge the substance for yourself:

1. A television screen on Giralda Plaza (Ord. 2024-08 · Feb. 2024 · sole sponsor) This changed the zoning rules for the Giralda Plaza pedestrian strip so a business could put a television screen on the inside of a window facing the street. That is the whole of it — one type of display, one window orientation, one block. It’s the kind of item that helps a specific merchant; as a headline accomplishment, it’s a signage tweak.

2. Door-hanger notices (Ord. 2024-24 · Jun. 2024 · sole sponsor) This added door hangers as one more required way to notify neighbors before the public meetings developers hold for multi-family and mixed-use projects. It’s a modest transparency measure — but it changes notification, not what gets built. And it wasn’t a consensus fix: the city’s own Planning & Zoning Board recommended denying it, 5–1, and the Commission passed it anyway.

3. Building-site determination (Ord. 2024-26 · Jul. 2024 · sole sponsor) This amended a single zoning-code section to streamline how one type of application — “building site determination” — is processed. This is administrative plumbing, a procedural change almost no resident will ever encounter. Here too the Planning & Zoning Board recommended denial, 6–1, before the Commission adopted it.

4. Trial Board terms (Ord. 2024-28 · Jul. 2024 · co-sponsored with Commissioner Menendez) This made the term lengths of the city’s Trial Board members consistent with general city policy — internal housekeeping that harmonizes one board’s rules with the rest. It sets no policy and touches no resident’s life, and it was co-sponsored, not solely hers.

5. Patriot Day (Ord. 2024-35 · Oct. 2024 · co-sponsored with Commissioner Menendez) This designated Patriot Day, September 11, an official city day of remembrance and holiday. It’s a meaningful gesture — and a ceremonial one. Commemorative designations govern nothing and deliver no service; they’re among the lowest-lift items a commission handles. I commend her and the Commission for enacting this ordinance and honoring those we lost.

6. The bird sanctuary and the fowl (Ord. 2024-43 · Dec. 2024 · sole sponsor) This amended the animal code to remove pigeons, chickens, ducks, roosters, and other domestic fowl from bird-sanctuary protection. It doesn’t create a policy so much as trim an existing one. The specificity tells the story: this is a tidy-up that resolves a particular nuisance question, not a measure with broad reach.

That is the complete legislative record behind “147.” Not one of these did nothing — each changed something real. But each one is either narrow, procedural, or ceremonial; two of the six were co-sponsored rather than hers alone; two passed over the objection of the city’s own advisory board; and all six were adopted in a single year. This is what the file count was hiding: not a body of work, but a handful of small-bore items and a great deal of motion that never became anything.

A word on sponsorship, in fairness. Legislation is rarely a solo act — items get co-sponsored all the time. Two of these six ordinances were co-sponsored with Commissioner Menendez, not carried by Castro alone, and at least one began as another commissioner's item before she took it up. All of this information is available in the full record I am posting below for everyone to download and sift through, just as I have. None of that is a knock: co-sponsoring and advancing others’ work is a normal, legitimate part of the job. But it's worth stating plainly, because a "147 items, all mine" impression doesn't survive contact with the record either. Where she was the sole sponsor, I've said so; where she wasn't, that belongs on the page too. That's not a knock on the work. It's a knock on the framing: a record offered as "look what I did" should be clear about what was done with others, and hers wasn't. The distinction didn't make the reel, the same way the outcomes didn't.

Before I move on, I want to reiterate something I said above, particularly because I know how some of you readers work and you’ll jump to critique me for my comments regarding Patriot Day as a deflection of my arguments rather than analyzing the weight of this post for its substance.

Measuring these items as legislative accomplishments is not the same as measuring what they mean. The Patriot Day designation, in particular, carries real weight for many in our community — it honors neighbors we lost and the people who answered that day, and I don’t diminish that for a moment. The same goes for anyone who benefited from any of these ordinances; each one mattered to someone. My point is narrower and it is about the office, not the cause: recognizing a day of remembrance, however meaningful, is not the heavy legislative lifting a commissioner is elected to do — and it cannot carry the weight of a claim like “147 items.” Honoring the fallen and building a legislative record are both worth doing. They are not the same thing, and one cannot stand in for the other.

The Second Reel

The day Castro posted the reel about her record, I made a public records request. I wanted to see this document for myself. That's how I got all the information above. If you want that document, here it is. Take a look for yourself.

Items Sponsored By Commissioner Castro

29.1KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

The full record: all 147 items Castro cites, straight from the City Clerk, nothing trimmed. Sort it by type and it looks like a mountain; sort it by outcome and you find the hill. Don't take my word for it — the whole thing's here.

Download

What's really, really funny is that less than a week after this she posted a second reel. Here's that video:

I don’t know what world Castro is living in, but that didn’t look like a filing cabinet. That was a single filing folder. Big, big difference… Now, if you want to see a filing cabinet, feel free to make a public records request for Lago’s legislative record. If we’re talking metaphorically, which I’m not sure Castro understands the concept of given she just called a folder a cabinet, Lago’s record would fit into multiple filing cabinets. If it isn’t already obvious, I’m the one that made the public records request. This is why the public records request system exists. If a pubic official says one thing, a system is in place to verify that information. So get over yourself Dr. Castro, you’re in public office and we the residents get to make public records requests whenever we’d like. Just ask your pal Maria Cruz, she specializes in it.

Let’s Wrap this Up

I’m not going to walk through what was in the folder or the agenda items she referenced in her second reel. Going item by item (again) would mean playing the game she’s inviting — measuring a career by whether a folder can be made to look full. That was never the question. The question is why a folder is being presented as a filing cabinet, and why a handful of items is being presented as a body of work. And why that body of work supposedly demonstrates a substantive, accomplished, and successful three-and-a-half-year political career. Declining to litigate the contents isn’t ducking the argument. It is the argument.

The second reel gives away the whole method. In it, she recites her record as three numbers: nineteen ordinances, fifty-nine resolutions, sixty-nine discussion items. It sounds like an accounting. It has the cadence of substance. And it leaves out the only column that matters — what happened to any of it.

So let me finish the sentences she started.

Nineteen ordinances — of which six became law. The other thirteen were left sitting, filed away, dismissed, voted down, or still waiting on a second reading.

Fifty-nine resolutions — of which thirty were adopted or passed. The rest stalled, failed, or were never taken up.

And sixty-nine discussion items — of which none became anything, because discussion items can’t. They aren’t votes. They’re conversations. They get noted and filed. Listing sixty-nine of them alongside laws and resolutions, as if they’re the same kind of work, is how you turn the transcript of people talking into a résumé.

Add it up and the completed sentence reads like this: of the 147, thirty-six ever reached a final result — six ordinances and thirty resolutions — and sixty-nine of them were never capable of one to begin with.

That’s not a filing cabinet. It never was.

A filing cabinet is not a folder. And a performance is not a record. Castro’s whole term is purely performative. It’s not even Oscar worthy.

It's hard to believe we're less than three months away from our next Gables election, not in a where'd the time go sense, but more in a it's awfully quiet around here kind of way. Granted, until recently, the August primaries were the focus of our finite collective attention, but limited bandwidth alone doesn't explain the conspicuous dearth of political espionage and desperate attention seeking that had been a standard feature of municipal election season.

Over the last few cycles, one could set their watch to the spectacle of KFC's ragtag invasion fleet storming into the political spotlight with all manner of stupid antics six months before an upcoming election: the manufactured Gables Insider exposés sourced entirely from Ariel's personal grievances; the Political Cortadito hit piece that would serendipitously materialize hours later; the quasi-takeover of a commission meeting by KFC's battalion of mentally ill agitators in matching t-shirts; the phishing polls; the CGNA emails; Tequila Tom Wells being Tequila Tom Wells; the defamation campaign against "the establishment" launched live on Spanish-language radio; and, of course, the crown jewel of the genre, the staged press conference outside the police station over invisible drones and stalkers, wife and kids in tow. "Keep my family out of this," a K or an F or a C would say as they reeled their spouse or kid in by the collar to make sure they landed in frame for the cameras.

Funny how all that noise seems to have disappeared this season. And funnier still is how Ariel has disappeared with it. In what seems like the blink of an eye, Ariel went from the loudest, most relentlessly visible member of the dais (from spamming our Instagram feeds with photos of him heroically clearing the streets of fallen twigs, to mugging for selfies at seemingly every official city function on the calendar, to issuing every Tom, Dick, or Harry his very own inkjet-printed proclamation, as if to say "I'm the real mayor of this town") to the quietest and most reclusive. In fact, if it weren't for his recent habit of flooding his Instagram feed with AI-generated saints, sunbeams, and scripture verses (looks like "Catholic influencer" is his latest destined-to-fail attempt at a career), I'd just as soon think he quit the City, quit Cubatec (LOL), and fled to Mexico.

Indeed, Ariel has quit. He’s thrown in the towel. He’s left the building. And lo and behold, just as Ariel called it quits, the perpetual conveyor belt of political dysfunction and scandal-mongering that we all have been lamenting as an embarrassment to our community came to an abrupt but merciful end. It’s almost as if these two developments are related.

The truth is, we are in the midst of the quietest and least chaotic election cycle in years, and this has everything, everything, to do with the fact that KFC has been defeated. Their machine has been destroyed, their troops decimated, and their top generals, Kirk and Ariel, forced to surrender. The war, for them, is lost.

However, it would appear that not everyone got the memo. Well, that’s not quite right. Everyone got the memo. Some people just can’t read.

I’m referring, of course, to Dr. Castro, who, unlike her savvier former colleagues, remains stuck in 2023, and thus hasn’t figured out that the war is lost and that the same tired, self-destructive tactics that sank KFC aren’t going to work any better for her. Indeed, she seems to think, despite two elections proving otherwise, that there’s some silent majority of “anti-establishment” voters lying dormant in a secret catacomb beneath City Hall just waiting to be activated via incantation: Awake, O dark army who slumbers in the catacomb of grievance, and rise against he who funded the pensions unbidden!!

She seems to think every voter is a single-issue voter, and that Lago is that single issue, which is why, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think she’s running against him and not Nestor Menendez. She seems to think the average voter either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that she has cost the city literally tens of millions of dollars by promoting and passing bad policy designed to curry favor with the only interest groups that support her, like budget-busting COLAs for long-retired cops and firemen.

She seems to think people are as dumb as she is, that they can’t see through her petty pandering and posing, that people are gullible enough to believe she actually volunteers at animal shelters in her spare time. Because who doesn’t clean out dog kennels in six-inch stilettos and a skin-tight dress? Speaking of dogs, whatever happened to the pup walks? Has she adopted one yet? She keeps telling the rest of us to.

She seems to think people are too stupid to notice how aggressively tucked, pumped, and filled she looks every time she returns to the dais after disappearing for “medical reasons;” that people can’t tell she’s a raging narcissist with more headshots than policy positions, and that public office is just a taxpayer-funded influencer platform.

She seems to think people are too moronic to see that she’s manifestly corrupt, and that her sudden interest in making Live Local more feasible in ritzy cities like Coral Gables and Bal Harbour has nothing to do with the fact that most of her rich developer clients build in Coral Gables and Bal Harbour. Just a coincidence, presumably, that mere days after she authored this policy, one she could barely read aloud, Matt Whitman, owner of the Bal Harbour Shops and applicant on one of the biggest Live Local projects in the state, wrote an op-ed in the Herald that basically echoed her position. And she seems to think we’re too dumb to notice that her most recent push to funnel Gables residents toward Bal Harbour has nothing to do with the fact that she personally ran over fifty permits, worth six figures, for the Bal Harbour Shops in 2025 alone. Speaking of which, you may have heard that Hillstone abruptly shut down its Bal Harbour location. I imagine a little supplemental foot traffic from Coral Gables shoppers would come in pretty handy for Whitman right about now.

She seems to think all of this because, as we all know, she's manifestly incapable of learning. She's permanently impaired by KFC brain, the kind that once convinced Kirk and Ariel that voters were blind, deaf, and stupid. But unlike her chastened colleagues, she simply doesn't see that the war is over, and that the tactics which lost it aren't going to suddenly work. She's the last true believer left, the only one who hasn't noticed that the very strategies she keeps deploying are the same ones that buried her own coalition.

In other words, she’s KFC’s Hiroo Onoda.

For anyone who doesn’t know the reference: Onoda was a Japanese intelligence officer stationed on Lubang Island in the Philippines during World War II, under standing orders never to surrender, no matter what he heard to the contrary. So when Japan surrendered in 1945, he simply didn’t believe it. He spent the next twenty-nine years hiding in the jungle, dodging search parties, dismissing leaflets, and writing off his own family’s loudspeaker pleas as elaborate enemy propaganda. It wasn’t until 1974, when the Japanese government tracked down his actual former commanding officer and flew the man to the island to personally, formally relieve him of duty, that Onoda finally laid down his rifle and went home.

Dr. Castro is Onoda incarnate. Everyone else got the surrender order years ago. She’s still out there in the jungle, rifle in hand, waiting for a command that already came and went, convinced that the silence around her is just more enemy trickery.

Following part one, I took a deeper dive into Commissioner Melissa Castro’s proposed partnership with the Village of Bal Harbour. Performative rather than substantive, this friendly “town visit” is repackaged as a business lifeline and aimed at a luxury competitor instead of our own hotels and shops. A few readers asked, fairly, the natural follow-up. If the idea is for neighboring communities to support one another, is the concept itself not worth something, wherever it points?

It might be. Which is exactly why the destination matters, and why the one she chose is so strange, because if you set out to build a real cross-community partnership, Coral Gables is surrounded by better candidates, and Bal Harbour is nowhere near the top of the list.

Start with the map. We share a border with the City of Miami, with South Miami, and with West Miami. Our residents already cross those lines every day, to work, to eat, to shop, and our business corridors already run into theirs. A commissioner serious about reciprocal tourism and economic development starts with the towns whose sidewalks connect to ours, the ones a Coral Gables resident can reach without a highway. Instead she reached past all three, to a village on a barrier island 19 miles up the coast.

Look at the mismatch. Coral Gables is a city of roughly 50,000 people. Bal Harbour, by the commissioner’s own figure, is a village of about 3,300, on less than half a square mile of land. We are some 15 times its size. This is not two peers joining hands. It is one of the largest cities in the county proposing to lend its promotional muscle to a gated sliver a fraction of its size, during our own slowest season.

Then take the argument the commissioner actually made, which was about visitors, and take it in her own words. Bal Harbour, she wrote, welcomes an estimated 1.8 to 2.1 million visitors a year, more than 85% of them there to dine and shop, and her aim was “to bring more visitors into Coral Gables.” The numbers are real. But look at what they describe. Those visitors do not come for the village of a few thousand. They come for one place, Bal Harbour Shops, the luxury mall that is, for all practical purposes, the entire economy of Bal Harbour. Which is the flaw at the center of the pitch. The diners and shoppers who visit the mall are Bal Harbour’s whole business, so why on earth would Bal Harbour send them 19 miles south to a competitor?

They would not. You do not hand your best asset to the town competing with you for it. She insists the goal was to bring their visitors here, not send ours there, and I believe she means it. But intentions do not move shoppers, incentives do, and every incentive runs the other way. If a “friendship visit” moves anyone at all, it moves our residents north to their mall, not their diners south to ours.

There is a timely irony in all of this. Just as Castro was promoting Bal Harbour as a dining magnet whose crowds Coral Gables should court, one of the Shops' marquee restaurants went dark. Hillstone, a fixture at 9700 Collins Avenue for 11 years, closed on August 10 without warning, the latest in a run of restaurant closures at the mall, and directed its guests to its other nearby locations, its Coral Gables restaurant among them. The diners, it turns out, were already being pointed our way.

And the scale of that mall is worth seeing plainly, because it explains why this was never a partnership between equals. Bal Harbour’s economic heart is a single open-air center of roughly 450,000 square feet, about 10 acres of retail on a barrier-island strip. Coral Gables’ central business district is a district in the full sense of the word, running along Ponce de Leon Boulevard from Southwest 8th Street down to Bird Road, taking in Giralda Plaza, all of Miracle Mile, The Plaza, and, just south, the Shops at Merrick Park. Put the two on the same map and the difference is not subtle. It is many times over. We are not the little sibling here, hoping for a boost from the big neighbor. We are the big neighbor, and the traffic this partnership would generate runs, by its own logic, out of Coral Gables, not into it.

Which brings me to the part that turns a puzzling choice into a troubling one. Of all the towns a Coral Gables commissioner might have picked, she picked the one where her own company gets paid. Dr. Castro owns a permit-expediting firm, and according to a public-records request filed by Aesop with the Village of Bal Harbour, that firm has run 57 permits there since she took office. Fifty-six of those 57 are for a single address, 9700 Collins Avenue, which is Bal Harbour Shops. Her dominant Bal Harbour client, by a margin of 98.2%, is Whitman Family Development. It is a multiple-six-figure book of business.

To her colleagues’ credit, this did not slip by unexamined. At the commission’s July 7 meeting, Commissioner Richard Lara asked Dr. Castro directly why she had chosen Bal Harbour, and whether her years expediting permits there had given her some particular interest or insight. Watch her answer for yourself.

She told him her relationship with Bal Harbour Shops was old news, a client from three years ago or more, well behind her.

The record says otherwise. The very permits Aesop obtained show her company working 9700 Collins Avenue straight through 2024 and deep into 2025, application after application, the most recent dated this past December.

That is not three years ago. It is roughly seven months before she stood at the dais and waved the whole business into the distant past.

So the conflict was never simply undisclosed. When a colleague put the question to her face, she answered by placing her Bal Harbour work years behind her, and the public record places it squarely in the present. I am not going to tell you what was in her heart. I do not need to. A commissioner who champions a partnership with the one town where her company quietly works, and then tells the dais that work is long over when the filings say otherwise, has answered the question of whose interest was being served.

None of that was necessary to see the proposal was misguided. The neighbors were right there. The mismatch was obvious. The visitors were never going to flow our way. But the client explains what the civic language could not, which is why, of all the towns on and near our border, the one that drew a commissioner’s time and a commission’s vote was the one 19 miles up the coast where her company runs the permits.

Coral Gables first, and always, was never a complicated standard. It asks only that the person we elected put this city ahead of everything else, her own book of business included. On this one, she did not.

Recently, Commissioner Melissa Castro put a question to Instagram. Would you vote yes or no, she asked, on a proposal that helped Coral Gables businesses using existing city resources and no new taxpayer funding? The Town of Bal Harbour had reached out to partner with us, she wrote, to promote our restaurants, shops, and cultural destinations during one of the slowest times of the year. She brought it forward. The commission voted no. Follow the votes, she told her followers, not the talking points.

I did follow the votes, and then I followed them back to the proposal itself, and here is what it actually is.

The idea began, according to the exchange that produced it, as a casual suggestion between the commissioner and a Bal Harbour councilman, Alejandro Levy: a “Town Visit” program, floated as “just a thought,” in which Bal Harbour residents would spend a day in Coral Gables and Gables residents a day in Bal Harbour, to see one another’s parks, cultural initiatives, and public spaces. It grew into what Bal Harbour’s own public agenda calls a “Proposed Friendship Initiative with Coral Gables,” a matching resolution in each town. The commissioner described it as a creative, low-cost way to encourage a few cross-town visits in the slow season.

Here is the problem, and it begins before the framing does. A Coral Gables commissioner has one job, first and always, and it is Coral Gables. Councilman Levy was doing his, advocating for Bal Harbour, and I appreciate the effort, because that is exactly what he is there for. But the person on our side of the table is there for us, and what she chose to champion was a plan to point our residents, our promotion, and our attention at another town. In three and a half years on the commission, I am hard pressed to name much she has delivered for the very businesses she now says she wants to help. That the initiative worth her energy was one for someone else’s city tells you where the priorities have been sitting.

Then look at how a small thing got sold. A reciprocal day-trip to admire each other’s parks became, on Instagram, “a proposal that helped Coral Gables businesses” that “the majority voted no” on. A modest, symbolic gesture became a referendum on whether your commissioners care about local business. The substance never grew. Only the framing did. It’s also worth noting that four commissioners voted no, with Castro as the sole yes vote.

And on that substance, Bal Harbour is not our partner in the way that matters here. It is our competitor. The town sits about 19 miles and, in season, the better part of an hour up the coast, and the Shops at Merrick Park were built, from the beginning, to compete with Bal Harbour as South Florida’s luxury destination. The two are anchored by the same department store, chase the same shoppers, and carry many of the same names. Encouraging our residents to spend a day in Bal Harbour, during the very weeks our own businesses are hungriest for foot traffic, is not a lifeline to Coral Gables merchants. If anything, it points our own customers toward a rival’s shops.

I put it this way in the comments, and I will put it here. Imagine Jacksonville asking St. Augustine to send the millions of visitors who pour in for the Nights of Lights festival 40 miles north instead, during the same peak weeks. St. Augustine would never do it, because Nights of Lights is their program and their success. You do not lend your best season to the town competing with you for it.

None of which means the goal is wrong. Helping our restaurants and shops through the quiet months is exactly what the city should be working on, and I would vote yes on the right version in a heartbeat. But if the aim is to fill our tables with visitors, we are already sitting on the answer. Coral Gables is home to the Loews, the Biltmore, the Hyatt, the Colonnade, the Thesis, and more, thousands of hotel rooms full of people who chose to sleep here. Turning those guests into diners and shoppers a few blocks from their lobby is the most direct tourism program the city could run, and it needs no other municipality at all. Work with our own hotels first. Maximize the destination we already are before organizing field trips to the one up the coast.

I want to say something, too, about how that conversation went when I raised these points, because the commissioner asked people to weigh in and I did, calmly and on the merits. What came back was not a counterargument. It was that I was “muddying the waters,” that I was a “troll,” that my view could be dismissed rather than answered. I asked, in the thread, whether we could disagree without the insults, and I will ask it again, because the pattern is its own tell. When a proposal is strong, its defenders meet the substance with substance. When it is thin, they reach for a name to call the person pointing that out.

As for “no new taxpayer funding,” I take the point, and it is true this may cost little in dollars. But staff time is a resource, attention is a resource, and the city’s promotional reach is a finite one. Spending it is a choice with a cost even when no line item moves, and the only question that matters is whether the spending helps Coral Gables. A day trip to a competitor during our leanest weeks does not.

So follow the votes, by all means, and read the memo and the resolution while you are at it. But follow them all the way to the reasons, because a no vote here was not a vote against local business. It was a vote to put Coral Gables first. That is the only job any of us sent her to do, and it is the one this proposal forgot.

Downtown Coral Gables has a business improvement district, and it is very much in business. The independent nonprofit that promotes Miracle Mile, spotlights its restaurants and shops, and runs its events, these days under the name Experience Coral Gables, was in local inboxes as recently as this week, pushing the Miami Spice dining promotion and an update of downtown happenings. It is not the city’s to run, and it has not gone anywhere.

The city’s part in all of this was always narrower than the shorthand suggests. Coral Gables did not run the district. It acted as the taxing agency for it, levying and collecting a special assessment on downtown commercial property, the proceeds funding the organization’s promotional work. That assessment ran from 1997 to 2022, and then it lapsed.

When it lapsed, the leftover money the organization still held became a fight, and the city went to court to claim it. They settled in early 2024, and the terms are worth knowing, because they frame everything since. The organization kept the funds, on conditions. It may spend them only on downtown, on events, promotion, beautification, and advertising the district, and nothing on candidates or on paying its own board. It has to open its books, delivering audits and semiannual expense reports to the city for as long as that money lasts. And it agreed to help the city study whether a new district made sense.

That study is the one that just came back no. To run it, the city hired a national consulting firm to test the idea and to ask the roughly 300 commercial property owners who would foot the bill whether they wanted a new and larger assessment. Not enough of them did, so the city set the plan aside, which is the right end for a tax whose whole premise is that the people paying it agree to be taxed. The consultant had said as much in February, telling the city’s Economic Development Board that the real test was never the merits of the idea but whether owners had the will to pay, and that the jury was out. It stayed out.

It helps to be clear about what the money would and would not have done. A business improvement district does not sweep the sidewalks; the city already pays a firm called Block by Block for that, and has since 2017. What the assessment funds is marketing, events, promotion, and advocacy, the work of selling downtown and speaking for the businesses in it. It is a levy property owners agree to place on themselves and by design it cannot exist without their consent. “Not enough support among property owners” is not a plan that stumbled. It is a plan asking its one essential question and getting the answer no.

Who gets to give that answer is worth understanding. The vote belongs to property owners and is weighted by how much they own, so the largest owner’s share alone can carry it or sink it, which is why consultants court the biggest landlord and not the block’s dry cleaner. But the merchants a district exists to help are mostly tenants, and the assessment reaches them anyway, through their leases. So the people with the most at stake often get no vote, while the decision sits with the landlords, and the loudest voice belongs to the largest.

On Miracle Mile, the largest is Terranova, which is to say Stephen Bittel, the developer who spent years trying to up-zone the Mile into something denser and taller and was stopped, with Mayor Lago his most determined opponent. That defeat has fed his grievance against Lago ever since, up to and including, by Aesop’s careful and hedged reporting, the failed recall. Ask what a new assessment would have paid for: advertising the Mile as it stands and advocating for the small businesses on it, which is close to the last thing a man who wants to tear the Mile down and rebuild it bigger has reason to bankroll. I will not tell you Bittel sank the plan, because I do not know it and neither does anyone else. But the one owner whose support the effort most needed is the mayor’s most committed antagonist, holding the biggest vote over a district meant to promote the very tenants he leases to, with every reason to withhold exactly the backing that never came.

So what happens now, and is anyone kicking the can? The settlement set no deadline. The books stay open and the leftover public money keeps funding downtown programming until it runs out, and no one has said how long that will be. When it does, the organization does not vanish; it is a private nonprofit and can carry on as one, on member dues, sponsorships, and event revenue, the way such groups routinely do. What lapsed in 2022 was never the marketing but one way of paying for it, and it is not the only way. A future assessment stays available if owners ever want one. So does direct city support, which is not hypothetical: the settlement shows the city already planning to put on several of downtown’s marquee events itself, on top of the ambassadors it pays to keep the sidewalks clean. One option was tried and declined. The others are sitting right there.

None of which is how the episode has mostly been told. The version making the rounds is that the city “quietly shelved” a downtown improvement it once promoted, a reversal to be suspicious of. That gets it backwards. The district is not the city’s to shelve, and it is thriving on its own; what ended was a proposal to tax people who said they did not want to be taxed. The city earns one modest complaint, that having floated the idea with fanfare, it should have announced the outcome as openly, rather than letting it surface only when a reporter went looking. That is a knock on a missing press release, not evidence of anything hidden.

So here is the whole of it. Downtown still has its BID, still has its marketing, still has its swept sidewalks, and lost nothing but a tax its own payers declined to impose. The people who would have benefited most were never given a vote. And the landlord whose absence mattered most is the one the story keeps forgetting to name.

Peter Iglesias, the Coral Gables city manager, is set to depart on October 2. On October 3, someone else will be running the city, the way someone always is when a manager departs. Coral Gables has a deputy city manager who served as acting manager as recently as last year, the commission’s next meeting falls on August 25, more than five weeks before the vacancy, and installing an interim is a single vote taken at that meeting or, if anyone truly believes it urgent, at a special one before it. This is not a cliff. It is a calendar item.

You would not know that from the way the transition is being described, which is as a narrowing window, a drift, a city treating temporary leadership as a contingency for a circumstance that has already arrived. Strip the alarm away and the fact underneath is ordinary: a search for a permanent manager takes three or four months, more time than remains before October, so the city will need someone in an acting role for a while. True, and unremarkable, and answered by the competent deputy sitting one office down from the manager. Naming that person is not a problem the city has failed to solve. It solves itself the moment the commission meets, and the vice mayor has already said it will be taken up when it does.

The permanent choice is the real decision, and it deserves a deliberate, open one. But a national search is only one way to arrive there, not the only proper way. A city that already employs a capable, experienced deputy manager has an equally legitimate path in front of it: promote from within, keep the daily operation steady, and change as little as possible while it changes the name on the door. Continuity is not a failure of process. For a government residents generally think is running well, it is often the wiser course, and it is a choice a commission is fully entitled to make in the open, on the merits, without first staging a months-long national audition. Circumstances change, and the right answer for one vacancy is not fixed for the next. Keeping a proven hand is a perfectly good answer.

What deserves the real scrutiny is who is suddenly so devoted to process, because it is not a crowd with clean hands on the question. Two years ago, KFC fired Peter Iglesias on a three-to-two vote over the objections of Mayor Lago and Vice Mayor Anderson. Iglesias was not an unpopular figure the city was glad to lose. He had served more than five years and enjoyed broad, vocal public support, which is precisely why the reform majority restored him in 2025. In his place, in 2024, KFC installed a former U.S. Marshal with no experience running a city, at a salary higher than any qualified predecessor’s, and did it, in the phrase Lynn Guarch-Pardo now uses to wave the episode away, “with no national search or background check.”

Guarch-Pardo, the wife of the candidate Vice Mayor Anderson defeated, is one of the voices beneath this editorial demanding to know why no search has begun. Two others are Tom Wells, a KFC-aligned candidate in the last election, and Maria Cruz, who chaired the failed recall of the mayor. Weigh their alarm against their record. Wells spent the 2024 vacancy loudly demanding an independent search committee and denouncing the outgoing manager’s pay, then, as Aesop documented at the time, went quiet the instant KFC filled the job with its unvetted pick at top salary, and he is back in these very comments demanding the committee again now that the other side holds the votes. Guarch-Pardo and Cruz are less interested in a process than in a suspicion they float in the same thread, that the majority has already settled on a crony and is merely waiting for a safe moment to name him. The passion for process runs precisely as deep as the question of who gets to exercise it.

Which is the light in which to read the most carefully neutral suggestion in the air: that the commission should wait and let the manager be chosen after November’s election, by whatever commission the voters seat. It was KFC that, before the last election, tried to slot a permanent manager into the top job on the way out the door, a lame-duck appointment timed to lock in the pick before voters could reshape the board. The counsel to wait is not neutral advice about timing. It pays off for exactly one set of people, and only if November hands them a majority and a manager they could not choose today.

So the honest version is shorter than the alarm. The city will have someone in the chair on October 3, named by a single vote it is fully able to take, and it may well decide that the steady, experienced deputy already doing the work is the right choice for good. What Wells, Guarch-Pardo, and Cruz want is not a transition handled well. It is a manager chosen by a commission that does not exist yet, and that is not a concern about process. It is a bid for the outcome.

Aesop is buried in election season this week, so when Jane Muir’s latest landed, another few pages under the heading “The Record Speaks for Itself,” he asked me to field it. I said sure. I didn’t expect it to be interesting. It turned out to be very interesting, though not for any reason Ms. Muir intended, and mostly because of a document she chose not to mention.

Let me start there, since everything else follows from it.

On May 6, 2026, the IRS issued a determination letter to the Coral Gables War Memorial Youth Center Association, restoring its recognition as a tax-exempt private foundation, effective May 15, 2020. It was addressed to the Association care of Jane Muir, Esquire, at her office on Alhambra Plaza, and the IRS notes it copied her as the Association’s representative of record. She has had this letter since May.

In July she published a long defense of the Association’s compliance. She catalogued every document the group has handed the City. She counted the letters she personally signed. And she never once mentioned the federal document sitting in her own office that restored her client’s exemption. Nobody forgets the best thing they own. There is only one reason not to lead with the letter that vindicates your client, and it is that you cannot explain what the IRS reinstated the Association to without saying what it reinstated it from.

Two of her points are correct, so let me dispose of them before they get in the way.

Yes, the May 15, 2020 effective date is retroactive to the date of revocation, which means that as a legal matter the gap is closed. No back taxes, and donations stayed deductible throughout. She is welcome to that. It changes nothing about how the gap got there, or what had to happen to close it, which is the entire story.

And yes, she is likely right that Florida’s public records law does not reach a private nonprofit like this one, and that the City may be spending outside-counsel money it won’t recover trying to force the records loose under Chapter 119. Fine. Note what that argument actually is. Her strongest point is not that the Association’s conduct was clean. It is that the public may have no legal right to see the proof either way. That is not a defense of the organization. It is a jurisdictional off-ramp, and she is right that it exists, which makes everything below worse, not better.

Because a reinstatement letter is not a gold star. It is what the IRS sends when an organization asks to be forgiven, and forgiveness requires something to forgive. This one says so in as many words: it approved a request for reinstatement under Revenue Procedure 2014-11, retroactive to the date of revocation. That procedure is not a formality. Exemption is revoked automatically when an organization fails to file for three consecutive years, and to undo that this far after the fact, the Association had to file every delinquent return and submit a signed statement establishing reasonable cause for those years. A private foundation, which the IRS confirms this is, does not qualify for the streamlined path available to smaller charities. One door, and a written explanation taped to it.

So a few things are no longer arguments. The returns were late. They were prepared and filed recently, in a batch, under the pressure of a reinstatement application. And reinstatement under that procedure is not granted unless an officer submits a signed statement establishing reasonable cause for each missed year. To obtain the letter Ms. Muir has been holding since May, in other words, someone at the Association had to put that explanation in writing and send it to Washington. It should therefore sit in the reinstatement file, alongside an exemption application that federal law opens to public inspection.

Which brings me to the sentence I keep coming back to. On August 26, 2025, Ms. Muir wrote to City Attorney Cristina Suarez that the documents she was enclosing reflected the Association’s “continued compliance” with its obligations under state and federal law. On that date, by the IRS’s own timeline, the Association’s exemption had been revoked for five years and three months, and would not be restored for another eight. Whatever that sentence describes, continued compliance is not the phrase for it.

And notice the words that never appear anywhere in her correspondence. Not “revoked.” Not “reinstated.” What you get instead is a discussion of a corporate lapse from the 1990s and a correct citation to the Florida statute forgiving it, a thirty-year-old state paperwork matter that nobody had raised. It is a very good answer to a question no one asked.

Let me step back, because it is easy to lose the thread in the paperwork, and Ms. Muir would prefer you did. Aesop’s argument was never that reverter clauses are illegitimate, or that this one is invalid. Reverters are ordinary and often sensible, and a court enforced this one in 1968. The argument has always been narrower and harder to wriggle out of: that the specific outfit holding this particular claim on a public building is no longer fit to hold it. Under Kirk Menendez, an organization that has held this claim since 1958 let its federal status lapse into revocation, went silent for years, registered itself to a private home on Malaga Avenue where three of its six listed officers also lived, and reduced its records to something the City has spent months trying to pry loose. The question was never whether a reverter can exist. It is whether a dormant nonprofit in that condition, one that had to petition the IRS for its life back, is the entity that should hold a contingent claim to the Coral Gables War Memorial Youth Center. The reinstatement letter does not answer that question. It sharpens it, because it confirms just how far gone the thing had gotten.

Here is the part that stuck with me. The reconstruction produced seven returns. Ms. Muir gave the City five. The two she withheld cover 2017 and 2018, which fall inside the three-year run of missed filings that triggers automatic revocation. Consider the mechanics for a second. Handing over all seven is one motion. Handing over five means someone removed two documents from a stack the accountants had already assembled. Leaving them out was more work than including them.

The returns she did produce carry their own tells. The 2021 filing authorization, Form 8879-TE, is unsigned, no officer signature, no preparer signature, no dates, on a form whose entire purpose is to record that an officer swore to the return under penalties of perjury, and which the preparer is required to keep. The 2023 return went in under a Hurricane Milton relief extension, filed on the January 2024 revision of Form 8868, which means a return originally due in the spring was still being handled sometime after the storm made landfall that October. These are not the artifacts of an organization that kept its books and simply forgot to mail them. They are the artifacts of a scramble.

I will say one thing about the money, and then leave it, because you do not need a forensic accountant to see the problem. By the Association’s own account, this is money professionally managed at Morgan Stanley. Yet over the roughly nine years covered by the very statement Kirk waved around at the candidate forum, its reported value barely moved, while the broad market over that same period more than doubled. Professional management through the strongest decade in living memory does not produce a flat line. I am not going to guess at why, because I do not have to. And notice what that statement actually showed: a value. What no one has produced, across months of letters, is the document showing the account’s activity over those years, the deposits, the withdrawals, the transfers. It generates itself. No one has to draft it. It would settle the question in either direction in about ninety seconds, which is presumably the problem.

So here is where we stand. For months, this newsletter and the City both asked the same simple thing of the Association: open the books. In his last piece, Aesop offered Ms. Muir an easier version still, just sign a statement vouching that the filings were made and the money was clean. It turns out such a statement should already exist. The letter now sitting in Ms. Muir’s office could not have been issued without one, which means an officer of the Association had to write it, sign it, and send it to Washington.

So the question is no longer whether the Association will explain itself. To obtain that letter, it already had to, to Washington. The question is whether the residents of Coral Gables, who own the building at the center of all this, get to read what was said about them, and whether the group that had to be resurrected by federal application is really the steward anyone would choose to hold a claim over that building. Federal law opens the reinstatement filing to public inspection. Ms. Muir, who keeps calling these filings available to anyone who asks, has already agreed in writing.

The record does speak for itself. Someone just had to read the part she left out.

For roughly a hundred years, Coral Gables held its municipal elections in April, and most residents did not follow them. Turnout was low, in part because a spring election is easy to miss. That has changed. Now that our city elections are held in November alongside the general election, far more residents will be voting for our local candidates than ever before. And that makes one question more important than it has been in a long time: how are these campaigns being conducted?

Respect in a campaign is simple to describe. It means engaging your opponent civilly, on your political differences, rather than reaching for personal destruction or defamation. It means arguing about ideas, not tearing down a person.

Disrespect is not new to our politics. Campaigns have long carried attacks and misinformation, some of it direct and some of it subtle enough that most people never notice. That is the danger. Repeat something often enough, true or not, and a great many people will come to believe it.

So it is worth watching for candidates who manipulate how a situation looks when the reality is something else entirely. A few examples show how easily it is done.

A presidential candidate was once accused of cheating the IRS because he paid the capital-gains rate on his income. He had cheated no one. His income genuinely was capital gains, which the law taxes at a lower rate than wages, and what was sold as wrongdoing was the law working exactly as written.

A respected former Coral Gables official once told me that someone had taken a photo with them before becoming a candidate, then circulated that photo as though it were an endorsement. It was not. The official had endorsed no one.

A candidate in another South Florida city claimed their political party had backed them, when the only true thing was that they belonged to the same party. The party had backed no one.

And in recent years, right here at home, paid workers gathered petition signatures against our elected officials on false pretenses. Residents saw through it, and the tactic backfired at the next election.

We do have ethics rules, and Coral Gables asks more of its candidates than most cities do. Even so, some still cross the line.

I understand that we live in a polarized time. But I believe most voters want to return to a civil and constructive debate, because most candidates actually agree on the problems facing our city. Where they differ is in how they would solve them, and in the experience they would bring to the task. That is what deserves our attention. I would rather do a little research, look at what a candidate has supported and whom, and consider how their background and perspective would serve Coral Gables, than take a flyer’s word for any of it.

I will admit what turns me off: a mailer full of malicious, untrue attacks, or a story shaped by manipulation of the press. And I will admit one more thing. I entered this race myself before choosing to step away from it, so I am not asking for your vote. I am only asking that we hold the people who do seek it to a higher standard.

Because the question at the heart of all this is a fair one. If a candidate cannot be respectful while asking for your trust, why would you expect them to be respectful once in office? How do you trust someone to govern honestly when they lied and manipulated to get there?

I have lived and worked in Coral Gables for more than 50 years. I would love to see more respect in the city I love.

Three blogs published the same story. Two share a masthead, a “news” report and its companion editorial, and the third is Elaine de Valle’s Political Cortadito, which arrived the next morning to say the loud part. One subject, three tellings, and if you strip the adjectives from all of them you are left with a single sentence each one concedes somewhere in its own body: no one bought anyone’s vote.

That is not my characterization. It is theirs. The news report allows that the record shows nothing illegal. The editorial goes further, granting that nothing shows either vote was decided by a contribution and that no bad faith need be assumed of anyone. Political Cortadito, after a thousand words announcing that its author does not believe in coincidence, states plainly that no one is alleging a contribution bought a vote, then reaches for the line that does the real work: public confidence, it explains, is “built on appearances.” There is the whole machine, in three words. Concede you cannot show the thing, then announce that showing it was never the point.

So set the appearances aside and ask what is actually being alleged, because the answer, by the unanimous admission of the people alleging it, is nothing. A committee raised money, lawfully, from people who share its politics, and a commission then voted on development the way it has voted on development for years. Everything past that is arrangement: a composite image of three men’s faces, a calendar with two dates circled, a headline built around the word “surge.” Take the arrangement away and there is no story, which is exactly why the story cannot be told without it.

But a narrative that concedes its own emptiness needs somewhere to go, and this one goes to a proposed ordinance. Dr. Castro’s measure would bar campaign contributions from real estate developers, and the three blogs have made it the purpose the reporting was missing. So let us take the ordinance seriously, which none of them did, because taking it seriously is fatal to it.

A campaign contribution is protected political activity, and government may narrow it only when the restriction is closely drawn to a sufficiently important interest. The Supreme Court has recognized exactly one interest that clears that bar: preventing quid pro quo corruption, or its appearance. Not the reduction of influence, not the leveling of the field, not the public’s general unease about who funds whom. The trading of votes for money, and nothing else. From Buckley v. Valeo through McCutcheon v. FEC, that has been the whole of it. Which leaves Dr. Castro’s ordinance nowhere to stand, because the corruption that is its only permissible justification is the very thing its champions have, in print, conceded did not happen. They made the case for the ban and dismantled its foundation in the same breath.

It gets worse from there. When the Court first allowed contribution limits, part of what saved them was that they fell on everyone alike, whatever a person’s occupation. This ordinance does the reverse, singling out one lawful profession and silencing it by name, which is speaker discrimination of the plainest kind, and a flat ban on a class is the most suspect instrument in the whole field. The Court has struck down even a ban on contributions by minors for failing this test. A ban on an entire industry of adults will not do better. The one narrow place such bans have held is government contractors, paid from the public treasury on deals they are actively bidding, and a developer seeking a zoning change is not that. The contractor’s rationale does not transfer to a private citizen asking for a discretionary vote.

There is, in any case, a lawful way to do what the ordinance claims to want. Disclosure, and recusal where a real conflict exists, is constitutional, ordinary, and already the tool of choice everywhere it matters. The blogs reached past it for a ban, which tells you the aim was never a rule that could actually hold. So does the drafting. It reaches developers but not the architects, land-use lawyers, lobbyists, and expediters around every project, a hole the paper’s own editorial concedes, and by its sponsor’s own account it would not apply to the current election. A measure that spares most of the influence it names, exempts its authors, and takes effect only after the votes that prompted it is a press release with a section number.

One last tell sits in the comment sections. The same small roster carries all three posts across both sites, among them the mayor’s own November opponent, thanking the paper and leaving a phone number, and a former candidate writing in as a concerned resident. A groundswell is made of strangers. This is a campaign applauding its own coverage, on schedule, in an election year.

So here is the whole of it, in the words of the people who published it. No vote was bought. No law was broken. No bad faith need be assumed. And the fix they are selling for this absence of wrongdoing is a ban the First Amendment does not permit. That is not reporting that found a problem. It is three blogs building one, and reaching for an unconstitutional cure to keep it alive.

Coral Gables posted one of its best pension years in a decade, and the analysis of it files the good news under caution: markets move the number, assumptions can shift it, judge it over years and not one result. Every one of those warnings is true. Every one is also beside the point, because none of them explains why the number improved. The city did not get lucky. It made a choice, and kept making it for ten years, and that is the part the caveats talk around.

Here is the result. The net pension liability fell by $44.78 million in fiscal 2025, to $136.3 million, and the funded ratio rose to 78.83 percent, its second-best mark in a decade. In 2015 the commission adopted a policy of paying more than the actuary requires toward the unfunded liability, and it has kept paying it, $55.35 million above the required amount since 2016. Measured against payroll, the liability has fallen from 622 percent that year to 288 percent now. That is not a market’s mood. It is a decision, made once and honored for a decade, the kind of unglamorous discipline that never makes a headline and always makes a difference.

Take the central caution seriously, then size it correctly. A pension number does ride the market, and a discount-rate assumption can swing the reported liability by tens of millions. But that is true of every public pension fund in America. It is a fact about pensions, not a fact about Coral Gables, and dressing a universal caveat as a special hazard of this city’s finances is how you mute a strong result without ever denying it. The market cut both ways, lifting the number this year and dropping it in 2023, while the funded position climbed through both, because the contribution is the part that does not swing.

Which is the context the analysis leaves out. It asks whether the city keeps separating what it controls from what it does not, a fair question aimed at the wrong target, because the discipline is not an institutional reflex. It is a contested political choice, kept alive by the majority that votes for it every year and opposed by the members who would rather spend it. The real risk to that funded ratio is not Wall Street, which no city governs. It is the dais, which this one does. Dr. Castro, by Aesop’s account, voted to grant an eight percent retiree cost-of-living increase that would have added roughly $27 million to the very liability this policy has spent ten years paying down. The market you cannot legislate. A commission that would trade the discipline away, you elect.

So judge it over years, as the analysis asks. Over years, the city chose to pay its pension down faster than required and held the line through good markets and bad. The number will rise and fall from here. The discipline underneath it holds or breaks on a vote. That is the story.

Note: This is another long one. Very Aesop of me. Once again, I’ll provide a brief summary in the hopes that it’ll get you reading. 😉

Summary:

• I don’t claim to be objective. I’ve always disclosed my perspective and never hidden behind the false pretense of neutrality.

• The Gables Gazette publicly claims to “strive to be objective.” This article examines whether its private conduct reflects that public promise.

• A text exchange with former Gazette contributor Sebastian de Marmol raises questions about transparency and whether a narrative had already been established before I was ever contacted for comment.

• A subsequent phone call with publisher Justin Prisendorf revealed a philosophy that appeared to condition fairness on whether someone “gets what they give”—a standard fundamentally different from the impartiality journalism claims to uphold.

• Emails between Tom Wells and Justin Prisendorf paint a revealing picture of how a prospective article developed behind the scenes and what actually captured the publisher’s attention.

• Additional correspondence between Mayor Vince Lago and Prisendorf raises unanswered questions about ownership, funding, editorial standards, and transparency—questions that were never answered despite repeated opportunities.

• Throughout this piece, I distinguish between being subjective and pretending to be objective. Every writer has a perspective. The difference is whether they’re honest enough to admit it.

• The central argument is simple: credibility isn’t built by claiming objectivity. It’s built through transparency, consistency, and a willingness to be scrutinized by the same standards applied to everyone else.

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A Necessary Disclaimer

I recently shared a brief interaction with a resident that inspired me to write this piece. The resident approached me and joyfully asked if I was the Nicolas Cabrera associated with… you guessed it… Aesop’s Gables. After confirming I was indeed the contributor she suspected me to be, she proceeded to compliment my writing. I was grateful for the show of love, but surprised by what came next. Although she enjoys my writing, she stated she “wishes I were more objective.” I laughed, she laughed, George Merrick laughed. I also laughed when I read this:

Did I read that right? Did YOU read that right? What you see there folks is nothing but a scandal. But before I get ahead of myself, let me give you some background.

Honestly Subjective

See, I’ve never tried to hide behind the false pretense of objectivity. I own my views and I own what I write. For those of you who have been along for the ride since the early days of my contributions to Aesop’s Gables, you’ll recall I shared this disclaimer at the start of the second episode of Politics in Paradise:

There is no false pretense of objectivity here. In fact, I kindly told the lovely resident that if anyone ever tells you they’re objective, they’re lying. Especially in journalism. Nobody is truly objective. I’m certainly not. The honest admit it while the dishonest market it. That’s where the Gables Gazette comes into play.

Our city has always had its fair share of disagreements. That’s healthy. It’s the backbone of an efficient and effective local government and a flourishing democracy. What’s less healthy is when the outcome of a story appears to be pre-determined, well before reporting begins. Especially when the people shaping that story are not who they claim to be. Back in August of 2025, Justin Prisendorf — owner and publisher of the Gables Gazette — posted a response to an email circulated by the Coral Gables First PAC. In the post, the only one signed by Prisendorf by name, he stated the following:

I actually agree with Prisendorf about the intent of local journalism: that it should exist to inform, engage, and serve the community. But we part ways at his claim that the Gazette strives to be objective. If someone, like Prisendorf, markets themselves as objective, we should be asking what they’re trying to convince us of. In this case, he’s trying to convince you of the credibility of the Gazette, despite the fact that he lives thousands of miles away and has no true vested interest in Coral Gables….

Prisendorf markets himself as a voice for the community without establishing his connection to it. He’s no longer a resident, but seeks to be a participant and an influencer of the narrative without properly situating himself among the people of Coral Gables. Credibility comes from disclosure, not from declaration. Even more so, transparency is the currency of credibility, and the Gazette is severely lacking in that field. Which is why my one and only written interaction with a former Gazette “contributor” was so striking.

Back in October of 2025, then Gazette contributor, Sebastian de Marmol, reached out to me via text following a string of accusations made by former Commission candidate Tom Wells against me during the public comments section at a city commission meeting. This is less about Wells than it is about de Marmol. Transparency begins with telling readers who is asking the questions. So I asked de Marmol to show me his credentials. Here’s the outcome of that brief text conversation:

The reporting began with the conclusion. de Marmol doesn’t state that “we are looking into a claim” or that “we are reviewing allegations.” He starts by adopting the allegation as the premise and establishes the narrative direction before reporting. He didn’t ask me for context; he simply asked me to respond. His message was not investigative; it was confirmatory. This is how stories are written when the outcome is assumed at the outset. No discovery, just reinforcement.

The process is flawed. Then he deflects. In a single exchange with de Marmol, all credibility breaks down. To understand that, I broke his message apart piece by piece:

1. He admits he has no press credentials.

2. He defers legitimacy to the publisher, Prisendorf (“you can speak with Justin).

3. He refuses transparency (“I keep it purposefully vague”).

4. He attempts to neutralize my concern (“I’m sure you can appreciate that considering your relationship with Aesops”).

5. He frames my role incorrectly (“I’d legitimately like your opinion”).

This is not accidental. It is a pattern. I asked for basic verification, especially considering I did not have his number saved at the time and could not truly verify who I was communicating with. Instead, de Marmol deflected, the natural course of action when all other efforts are non-existent or exhausted. Journalism is not purposefully vague about who is asking questions. It is specific, it is attributable, and it is accountable. de Marmol — and by extension, the Gazette — was neither of the three. The only thing clear about this exchange was the lack of clarity around who was asking the questions, so I picked up the phone and I did what de Marmol recommended: I called Justin Prisendorf.

The Phone Call

The conversation itself wasn’t remarkable. I didn’t walk away with a different impression and I gained no confidence in the process. If anything, the conversation simply confirmed what was already evident. One statement, however, stayed with me because it revealed something far more significant than the rest of the discussion.

In response to my involvement in local politics, Prisendorf asked if it was fair to say I get what I give. Put another way; You criticize people publicly, therefore you shouldn’t expect different treatment when they criticize you publicly. If Prisendorf had been speaking as an individual, not the publisher of the Gazette, it would be a perfectly ordinary opinion. In fact, I wrote about how elected officials should treat voters back in my May op-ed before I became an official contributor to Aesop’s. There is a standard our elected officials should follow, and it’s based on how they should treat their staunchest critics.

Prisendorf’s question is contrary to that standard. The issue here isn’t whether I should expect universal affection from the elected officials I hold accountable. Rather the issue is that the publisher claiming to “strive to be objective” framed fairness as something conditioned on the subject’s conduct. Journalism isn’t supposed to decide whether someone deserves fairness. Its obligation is to apply the same standards regardless of whether it likes the subject or dislikes them. Based on Prisendorf’s objective standard, my opinion should not matter. Wells’ opinion should not matter. Only the facts should. The moment fairness and objectivity become conditional upon whether someone “gets what they give”, journalism stops being journalism and becomes reciprocity.

What I did not know was the existence of a thread of emails that came into my possession months later, by and between Justin Prisendorf and Tom Wells. I came into possession of these emails because someone made a mistake. A consequential mistake that has become the centerpiece of this entire post. The emails provided significant insight into how the story developed. I will not disclose the source because I don’t need to. The substance of these emails stands on its own because they illustrate the sharp contrast between the public standard Prisendorf portrays in his August 7th, 2025 post and the private behavior between himself and a former candidate. Here is the email timeline:

First Contact

Wells sends the initial email — at least according to the thread in my possession — to Prisendorf on Monday, October 20th, 2025. This email is immediately following Wells’ public comments made at the October 14th, 2025 commission meeting, in which he publicly accuses me of illegal and unethical conduct, displays the Ethics Code, mischaracterizes my special events permit as a “contract,” alleges improper financial benefits, and announces his intent to file an ethics complaint that afternoon. Note the time stamp below:

Wells sent that email at 9:53 AM on October 20th, 2025. de Marmol didn’t text me till 2:30 PM that same day. Almost five hours passed before I heard from anyone at the Gazette. Between the time Wells first contacted Prisendorf to when de Marmol contacted me, the allegations had already been assembled, transmitted to the publisher, and transformed into outreach for a prospective article. What struck me wasn’t that someone sought comment before publication, as responsible journalism should. What struck me was the structure of that first contact. By the time anyone asked for my “opinion”, Wells already knew an article was coming. The framework of the story appeared to have been established with the narrative presented in Wells’ emails and the subsequent outreach from the Gazette.

What follows in the email thread is even more eye-opening.

The Follow Up

What began as a discussion of Wells’ legal theory gradually shifts into an exchange as to whether a story could be produced. But note what really caught Prisendorf’s attention. He barely engaged with Wells regarding the legal theory but perked up at this statement from Wells:

His follow up:

This is the most revealing sentence in the entire exchange, not because it is evidence of bias itself, but because it tells us what really caught Prisendorf’s attention. It wasn’t the legal question, it wasn’t whether the allegation was true, and it wasn’t whether Wells had evidence. It was “the crazy Lago comment”. Note Prisendorf’s enthusiasm at the prospect of Lago giving him the fuel for a future editorial generated around colorful political conflict. Publicly, Justin writes: “We strive to be objective in our news coverage and thoughtful and constructive in our editorials.” Privately, in a discussion with a political ally and source, he says: “Oooh we here at the Gazette looove the crazy Lago comment.” One is a mission statement, the other is a contrasting editorial reaction. It paints an obvious picture: Prisendorf is comfortable moving between the roles of publisher, conversational participant, and editorial decision-maker. The latter are done in secret while the first is how he wants to be perceived. Is this an acceptable standard of “objective” reporting?

The Lago Emails

Now this is where Mayor Lago belongs in the story. In March of this year, Prisendorf emailed Lago in anticipation of an article to be posted on the Gazette about the April special election.

As a follow up to this email, Lago sent the email below:

Lago isn’t accusing Prisendorf of anything in his response. He’s asking simple questions:

• Who owns the Gazette?

• Who funds it?

• Where are the editorial standards?

These are valid questions considering the credibility of the Gazette following Aesop’s reporting about the creation of the site back in this post. Oh, and this post. The email speaks for itself. So does Prisendorf’s response:

No answers to Lago’s questions are provided. So he asks again:

This was the perfect opportunity for Prisendorf to build credibility. Whether you agree with Lago or not is irrelevant, so take him out of the picture. There are a thousand other residents who could have asked these questions, imagine it was any one of them. These questions are straightforward and any publication claiming to “serve the people of Coral Gables” would be prepared to answer them regardless of who is asking. Lago narrowed the issue down and doesn’t ask for an essay response. All he wanted was a simple yes or no.

The silence matters more than the question. Prisendorf has published a public mission statement, based upon striving for objectivity. Those are ambitious commitments, but transparency runs in both directions. If a publication asks elected officials difficult questions, readers can reasonably expect that publication to answer reasonable questions about itself. Lago’s email presented an opportunity to do exactly that and it was met with silence. Trust in journalism is not built solely by asking difficult questions, it’s also built by answering them. If someone tells you they’re objective — like Prisendorf has — they’re asking you to trust them. If they truly are objective, they will welcome scrutiny of their own methods. You know how the old idiom goes… Actions speak louder than words.

Bye bye de Marmol, welcome Crystal

Interestingly enough, the “article” Wells referred to in his initial email was never published. Prisendorf and I never spoke again and to my understanding, de Marmol is no longer involved in the Gazette. Although de Marmol is no longer associated with the Gazette, his departure did not mark a change in the publication’s approach, which brings me back to transparency. If you ever see this individual at a city function, just know she’s collecting intel on their behalf:

Her name is Crystal McCormik and she is the newest “contributor” to the Gazette, as evidenced by her name tag. Still, her name doesn’t appear on any byline, only “Gazette Staff”. Her LinkedIn profile says she is a freelance writer, but provides no other details.

Meanwhile, de Marmol’s time at the Gazette has come to a quiet close, and we won’t be seeing him getting too cozy with any elected again:

This post isn’t about Wells. It’s about the Gazette and Prisendorf’s false pretenses. Which is why I won’t elaborate on what transpired between Wells and myself following his public comments in October of last year. I’ll just remind readers that Wells knew I was involved in candidate Richard Lara’s race for more than six months by the time he decided to run for Commissioner himself in December of 2024. In my view, his actions toward me appear to have been politically motivated and it’s purely coincidental this email exchange involves me. No further commentary on the matter is necessary.

We may think the current political climate is an isolated incident, but Commissioners of yesteryear had disagreements, too. We just don’t remember them because social media and the internet didn’t have the influence of today. The original print rendition of the Gazette was just as polarizing and just as subjective as it is today. But print doesn’t last as long as digital, so it’s easy to forget. But the digital age affords us with a permanent time capsule that captures and preserves records. And from what the record has shown, subjectivity is the lifeblood of the Gazette.

Aesop taught that appearances often deceive. The fox wore humility. The crow mistook flattery for truth. The moral of the fables was never to trust what you’re told, but rather to always watch what they do. Prisendorf tells readers the Gazette is objective but I watch what they do. You should, too.

I normally don't follow judicial races. They're aggressively nonpartisan and thus usually boring. So unless I happen to know one of the candidates, I either outsource my selection to trusted friends or just skip the judicial portion of the ballot altogether. Though I should say, find me a judicial candidate campaigning on instant executions for rapists, pedophiles and left-lane blockers and I'll personally remove all my nonessential organs and sell them on the black market just to fund their campaign.

But there's another way to get me invested in a judicial race, and it's a bit more realistic. Get anyone even remotely KFC-adjacent to run for judge and you've got my attention. Make it Ariel's own wife, Monica Segura, Lady Macbeth herself, and hot damn, I’m all in. Which is why when the Miami Herald published its endorsement in the Group 5 race earlier this week, I read and reread every word of it with forensic care. (I recommend you do the same before proceeding.)

I won’t bury the lede here: Monica didn’t land the endorsement.

Don’t get me wrong, this was hardly unexpected. The frontrunner in the Group 5 race, and the candidate the Herald endorsed, is Arthur “Marty” McNeil (although personally, I would have gone with Arthur “Marty McFly” McNeil). McNeil is a public defender with over 60 trials under his belt, 56 of them criminal jury trials. Monica has tried one (that’s the first number after zero) civil jury trial, which once again affirms the Fernandez family’s abiding conviction that voracious ambition is the only qualification one needs for literally any job.

What was unexpected, though, was just how poorly Monica fared in this exercise. She didn’t just fail to secure the endorsement, she damn near got the editorial equivalent of the Irish Goodbye from the Herald. She was overshadowed not only by McNeil, the frontrunner she was always going to lose to, but by Alex Annunziato, who was once busted buying heroin from an undercover detective.

Now, to be clear, the Herald doesn’t rank candidates. Nowhere in that piece does the board say Monica finished third, and nowhere does it say anything explicitly negative about her. But the Herald, like every editorial board, writes with a style that is dripping with subtext. I actually think it’s something of an evolved phenomenon, whereby the environmental pressure to appear neutral and objective, colliding with the environmental pressure to satisfy the biases and prejudices of its very human practitioners, has produced a journalistic grammar that, while dry, is exquisitely optimized for hidden meaning.

Take, for instance, the structure and proportions of the piece. Again, the board doesn't explicitly rank the candidates, but it leads with its preferred choice, which tells the reader that what follows is being presented in descending order of preference. We all do this all the time, list things in ascending or descending order, often unconsciously. In fact, the English language is replete with hierarchical structures that most people have never heard of but nevertheless understand intuitively. Adjectives are a great example. Most English speakers go through life obeying a strict adjectival hierarchy they never knew existed. It's called the "royal order of adjectives" and it goes like this: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. In short, it's why it had to be a "Little Red Corvette" and not a "Red Little Corvette." Nobody ever explained that rule to you. Your brain just knows it, the same way your brain just knew what the Herald was doing when it listed Monica third.

That, by the way, was a completely unnecessary aside, but whatever, it’s my Substack.

Anyway, word count does similar work. McNeil gets three paragraphs and roughly 170 words. Annunziato gets two and about 140. Monica gets one paragraph and 77 words, which is less than half of what either opponent received, and less than the Herald spent describing Annunziato's heroin arrest. How do you know an editorial board is unimpressed with a candidate? Her entire candidacy gets less ink than her opponent's felony drug bust.

Then there's the interesting transitional sentence, which only further supports this. Right before Annunziato's section, the board installs a bridge: "McNeil is not the only qualified candidate in this race." That sentence ushers Annunziato in under the banner of qualified, which is the board's way of saying he's a legitimate contender who happened to finish second. Monica gets no such bridge. She just poofs into existence at the bottom of the piece, unheralded, after the board has spent its goodwill on the other two.

Which brings us to Monica's paragraph itself, where the board really goes to work. It notes she's in-house counsel for an insurance carrier and has "also worked at various big firms." Note the quotation marks, which the Herald actually uses in its piece. There is absolutely no reason to use quotes there other than to say "those are literally her words, not ours, because, yes, we know it's absurdly vague." It's credibility protection and mockery rolled into one minor stylistic choice. Chef’s kiss!

The rest of the paragraph is just as uninspiring. The editors note that Monica "touted" her work on the Chinese drywall litigation, up to 12,000 claims by her own count. Touted. They could have said cited, pointed to, or any number of options. But they went with touted, the snidest choice on the menu, the contemptuous eye-roll of the verb world, immediately followed, of course, by the surgical mention of her having only one civil trial under her belt.

Oh, and of course, there’s the delicious little coda. The final thought the Herald wanted to leave its readers with: “Segura is the wife of Coral Gables Commissioner Ariel Fernandez.” Full stop. Nothing more to say, because, really, nothing more needs to be said.

To be fair, the piece ends by noting that all three candidates would “probably” make good judges, but that's a bone thrown to all three because the Herald needed to be seen throwing it. You can tell by how it's built. It’s collective rather than individual, hedged with "probably." Compare that to McNeil, who gets specific praise for specific things. Nobody who reads that line comes away thinking the board actually assessed Monica and concluded she'd be fine. It's the "no offense" you tack onto the end of the offense.

Well done, Herald editors. Seriously.

By the way, McNeil has picked up other endorsements along the way, such as from the League of Prosecutors:

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, because none of that necessarily means much. I’ve seen polling on this race, and while Monica carries unusually high “unqualified” ratings from her fellow attorneys, she’s also running against a guy who got busted for heroin, and she’s the only Hispanic name on the ballot. In a low-information judicial race in Miami-Dade, that last one has historically counted for an awful lot. She’s not the favorite, but she can absolutely still win, which is more than her husband can say nowadays.

Tuesday was a bad day for the University Green Neighbors Association, and it was bad in an unusually self-inflicted way. A circuit judge denied the association’s emergency injunction from the bench that morning. The commission approved the zoning ordinance that afternoon, three to two. In between, the arguments the association made in the chamber did more damage to its own position than either defeat.

Start with what passed, because the ordinance is smaller than five months of alarm would suggest. Planning Director Jennifer Garcia confirmed the special-use designation does not change. The lot may now hold a park in addition to the overflow parking it was already allowed to hold, and a clause that would have reverted it to single-family zoning is gone. That is the whole of the change.

Then the concessions began.

The association’s attorney, Sylvia King, told commissioners that in court the city had acknowledged there is no money, no donor, and at least three years before anything could be built. She offered this as a reason to slow down. Consider what it does to the case she had just lost. If nothing can happen for three years, there was no emergency, and an emergency injunction was never warranted. Her own point, made a few hours late, is the reason the judge was right that morning.

Next, Lynn Guarch-Pardo presented a slideshow with 20 reasons to move the dog park to the Youth Center’s west parking lot on Segovia Street. Whether that site is any good, I have no idea, and neither does anyone else in the room, which is why Vice Mayor Anderson asked staff to study it. The site is not the point. The slideshow is.

Because after five months of opposition built on green space, process, and neighborhood character, the association’s own presentation concedes three things at once. That residents want a dog park. That the association had been quietly scouting locations for one. And that its objection to this particular lot is its distance from particular homes, since the pitch for Segovia leads with the fact that it borders no single-family houses. That last concern is a fair thing to hold. It is not what the campaign has been called for five months.

Which leaves the lawsuit. It does continue, as City Attorney Cristina Suarez confirmed, and no final judgment has been entered. Both statements are true, and neither means what it is being made to mean. The suit belongs to the association, filed with resident Jose Val Cohen, and its emergency motion asked the court to stop the exact vote that has now happened. The court said no. A city attorney declining to overstate an unresolved case is not a cliffhanger. It is a city attorney being careful.

What actually remains is what Aesop named when the suit was filed: a procedural pool noodle. Its best possible outcome, in total victory, is an order that the commission redo the process it completed on Tuesday. The record from that day shows a group that lost its injunction, lost the vote, and then talked its way out of the emergency, out of the green-space story, and off the ground it was standing on.

One thing is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to get backwards. This is not the city’s lawsuit. It was brought by the association against the city, which matters if you are keeping track of who is spending public money to defend a patch of grass and who is spending it to fight one.

The Segovia proposal now goes to staff, and staff should give it a genuine look. But a fully built case for an alternative location did not surface until after five months of litigation, a denied injunction, and a lost vote. That sequence says more about how this fight was run than any argument made inside it, and it says nearly everything about what the fight was for.

Four charter amendments went to the November ballot Tuesday on 5-0 votes. Three are housekeeping, and sound: a higher competitive-bidding threshold that brings the charter in line with state law, a one-year residency requirement for candidates, and a four-year mayoral term beginning in 2028 that changes nothing for anyone now in office. The fourth is the one worth reading closely. It would require 60 percent voter approval before the city sells a park, a golf course, or the Youth Center.

Two things about it are true at the same time.

The first is that it does less than its billing. It stops sales. It says nothing about leases, land swaps, or changes in use, which are the ordinary ways a city actually parts with a park. Dr. Castro and Vice Mayor Anderson both made this point, and the city attorney confirmed it when she noted that an implementing ordinance could define “sale” narrowly enough to exclude a swap. That is a real limit. It is not a reason to oppose the amendment. Mayor Lago proposed the threshold, a city that means to keep its parks should be willing to put that in writing, and residents can vote yes in good conscience.

The second is that no one has proposed selling anything. Granada has been city-owned since 1923 and sits on Florida’s Historic Golf Trail; there is no offer, no buyer, no plan. The Youth Center scare is stranger still. It traces to a misread account of the University of Miami donating land to the city, the same parcel the coverage itself reported in June would become a public park. The city is being given parkland. The rumor turned the gift into a scheme to pave one.

So the amendment answers a fear that other people invented. The useful question is why.

The answer is the reverter clause, which Aesop has documented for more than a year. In 1958 the association then running the Youth Center deeded the land to the city on one condition: if the city ever stops using the property as a youth center, ownership reverts to the association. The condition runs one way. It binds the city, asks nothing of the association, and would not stop that association from selling or developing the land if the property ever returned to it. Lago wants the clause cleared from the title. That is the actual dispute, and it has nothing to do with a sale.

It has everything to do with who holds the clause. The association is Kirk Menendez’s, the same Kirk who ran for mayor last year and lost to the man now trying to clear the title, its offices historically filled by his family. It does not appear on the IRS’s current roll of tax-exempt organizations, consistent with the auto-revocation Aesop documented, and the city’s push for its records ran far enough that the commission retained outside counsel. The association offers one fair rejoinder: a 1996 bylaw would send any dissolved assets to another nonprofit, so no developer walks off with the lot. Granted. That was never the objection. The objection is that a public building carries a cloud on its title held by a lapsed private organization, and whose organization it is only sharpens the point.

Which explains the sharpest line of the night. Jackson “Rip” Holmes, introduced in the room as a resident and only later as one of two candidates running against Lago in November, called removing the reverter “an attack on children.” Look at what the phrase does. A clause that preserves one private group’s leverage over public land is refitted as the protection of children, while the thing that actually serves children, the city operating the center exactly as it does now, drops out of the sentence. The children are not the subject. They are the cover. And the whole package, the retaliation framing, the invented sale, the four-word defense of a reverter clause, flatters exactly the people who would lose their claim if the clause were cleared.

Vote for the fourth question if you like. The promise is reasonable and the harm is none. Just understand that it settles nothing, because the thing that could cost this city the Youth Center was never a sale. It is one clause in a 1958 deed, held by a dormant nonprofit that will not let go of it.

For three straight years the Association stopped filing its taxes. Those same years, Kirk, who along with his wife and daughter enjoyed virtually unchecked control over the organization, was—how should I put this—drowning in a cesspool of financial trouble with three mortgages and a debt collector on his heels. Meanwhile, a six-figure investment account supposedly under professional management at Morgan Stanley, during years when the market more than doubled, somehow produced what amounted to no real gain at all.

So yeah, I want to see the bank statements and tax returns. That is the entire ask. Not a theory about the deed, not a lecture on donor intent, not a history lesson from someone with no appreciable history with the association. Just the statements and returns please.

For the life of me, I can’t understand Ms. Muir’s reluctance to produce them. As I’ve demonstrated repeatedly, the most reputable nonprofits on earth post their audited financials for anyone to read, gladly, as a matter of course. Yet here is Ms. Muir, waxing poetic about an organization whose existence she appears to have discovered only sometime in the last year, telling the public it has no right to see how its own donated money was handled—the same public from whom this Association solicited donations in the first place.

But fine. If that is how it is going to be, if the records must stay locked in a drawer, then let me offer Ms. Muir a way to back this organization without opening a single page to the rest of us.

Certify it.

She is an officer of the Association and a member of the Florida Bar. So let her, in writing and over her own signature, state that she has personally reviewed the Association’s bank activity and tax filings for the years in question and found the money properly handled and every obligation met. Forget public disclosures. Forget the statements. I’ll settle for just her name, her license, and a few short and clear sentences standing behind this organization the way she was so eager to stand behind it in her e-blast.

And if Ms. Muir feels she isn't the right person to certify this herself, there's an even easier path. She can hand the relevant records over to an independent, licensed CPA and let them confirm that the records contain no loans, no transfers, no distributions to members, and no activity that violates state or federal law or the Association's own bylaws over the years in question. It costs a fraction of a full audit, and I'd wager the City would even spring for it. That way the public gets the peace of mind it's after, and the Association still keeps its financials and tax records private—because Lord knows, a nonprofit that won't let the public see its books is always a sign that everything is on the up and up.

Come to think of it, one has to wonder why a proper review and certification hasn't happened already, if only as a matter of basic good practice. Pull the Association up on Sunbiz and you'll find it has weathered more churn than my stomach after a midnight run to Taco Bell. You'd think a new slate of officers would look at turnover like that and treat it as a red flag in its own right. You'd think they'd want a thorough review. And you'd think that if it came back clean, they'd be racing to wave the results in front of the very public whose faith, trust, and money they ostensibly value.

In any event, if Ms. Muir is willing to certify that the books are clean, then I, for one, will consider the matter settled.

And if she isn’t, either after her own review or a third party's, then, well, everyone will understand precisely what that means. It's one thing to vouch for an organization via a flowery paean. It's quite another to vouch for it in an attestation you signed as a lawyer.

The statements, counselor, or your signature. Either will do.

Note: This is a long post. But this type of issue requires and deserves this kind of attention. I'm taking a page out of Aesop’s book for this one, so I’ll provide a brief summary in the hopes that it’ll get you reading. 😉

Summary:

• Crystal Residences advanced at the June 17th P&Z meeting after a five-year approval process marked by ongoing opposition.

• The project is led by Fifield Companies and anchored by Crystal Academy, which will receive a new facility under a 99-year, no-cost lease.

• Opposition claims (incompatibility, loss of green space, lack of public benefit) are contradicted by existing development patterns and staff findings.

• The North Ponce neighborhood already supports similar or larger developments and is the most appropriate area for this type of density.

• The project introduces publicly accessible green space, replacing what is currently private-use land.

• City staff confirmed the project delivers clear public benefits, including open space, pedestrian improvements, and integrated community use.

• Critics are increasingly relying on misinformation, particularly regarding Crystal Academy’s role and accessibility.

• Bottom line: The project is compatible, process-compliant, and provides tangible community benefits.

On June 17th, the Crystal Residences project located at 110 Phoenetia Avenue was presented before the City of Coral Gables Planning & Zoning Board. Agenda items E-1 through E-4 all pertained to the Crystal Residences project, propelling the proposed development one step further to the approval it needs to break ground. For those who have been following along, the Crystal Residences has faced opposition every step of the way.

At the helm of the opposition is Bonnie Bolton, leading the charge against the project and advocating for the preservation of the Garden of Our Lord. The history of the Garden of Our Lord issue could be a post of its own. This mixed-use project has been five years in the making, as stated by the applicant’s attorney, Jorge Navarro of Greenberg Traurig. This is not an unfamiliar occurrence in Coral Gables. Development is often challenged. However, there is a difference between development for development’s sake, and a developer who genuinely wants to work hand-in-hand with the city and residents. Fifield Companies is the latter.

As a quick refresher, the property located at 110 Phoenetia was purchased by Century Homebuilders in 2021. Shortly thereafter, Fifield Companies, a luxury real estate developer based out of Chicago, entered into a purchase agreement with Century for the property, contingent upon the approval of the proposed project. However, due to the duration of the approval process and abuse of the appeal process by the opposition, Fifield finally made a full purchase of the property in 2026 in partnership with another company. Information about ownership, past and present, of 110 Phoenetia is available on the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser website.

At the heart of this project is Crystal Academy, a premium therapy center and school for children with autism and developmental delays. Crystal Academy has become a beloved institution in our community and has made lasting impacts on the children who have been fortunate enough to call the school home. When Century Homebuilders originally purchased the property, they made a commitment to and an agreement with Crystal Academy to provide them with a brand-new, state-of-the-art school with a 99-year lease at no cost. Fifield has since made the same commitment and honored the agreement, placing Crystal Academy at the center of their mission to build an appropriate, community-driven development project in the North Ponce neighborhood of Coral Gables.

Despite this, opposition continues to be heavy handed and, in my view, misguided and even antagonistic towards Fifield and Crystal Academy. As became evident at the Planning & Zoning Board meeting on June 17th, residents are focusing their opposition on claims of incompatibility, elimination of green space, and lack of public benefit. This reveals that the challenges to this project extend beyond the preservation of the Garden of Our Lord. On either side of the aisle, residents are valuing one core aspect of the project over the other. From one perspective, this is a battle over whether residents value Crystal Academy over the Garden of Our Lord. From the other perspective, this is a battle over compatibility vs. incompatibility. Ultimately, both perspectives are intertwined. But what results is a battle of neighbor vs. neighbor and a misinformation campaign from the vocal, though limited, opposition. So it’s time to clear the record and offer a little clarity on the realities of this project and the opposition.

The P&Z Board, the Request, and the Timeline

For starters, it is important to note the purpose of the Planning & Zoning Board. As defined by the city, the function of P&Z is to “conduct, coordinate, recommend, monitor and oversee the effectiveness and status of the Comprehensive Plan and recommend to the City Commission such changes as may be required from time to time.” As is the case with this project, the applicant is seeking changes to the Zoning Code which would allow for the construction of the project as it is designed. The four specific changes are clearly outlined in the staff and applicant presentations:

Despite the very clear function of P&Z, opponents expressed opposition to the design during public comments. For historical background, the design of this project was not only approved by the Board of Architects back on October 19th, 2023, it was also re-affirmed by the Board of Architects Special Masters on January 13th, 2026 and the City Commission on February 10th, 2026 as a result of Ms. Bolton’s appeal of the design. The process was appropriately followed, input was provided, and the project design was approved. Regardless of this fact, opponents misused the public comments section of the P&Z meeting to once more express opposition to the project from a design standpoint. In the grand scheme of the issue, this is minute. But it is worth noting as it demonstrates the lack of willingness among the opposition to recognize and respect the process, which has been diligently followed by the applicant:

Aside from the Review Timeline, the rest of the Historic Review and Architectural review history as provided during the applicant’s presentation includes every single appeal, petition to circuit court, and conflict resolution meeting, amongst others:

Aside from the clear abuse of the appeal process above and with the full history outlined, let’s turn our attention to the comments made at the P&Z meeting on June 17th. There are three opposition points which require some correction, each of which were brought up by residents during public comments: incompatibility, elimination of green space, and lack of “public benefit.” The project, in all of its aspects, maintains compatibility with all other developments in the surrounding area, provides publicly accessible green space where none currently exists, and provides a comprehensive public benefit. Now, let me make it crystal clear.

Compatibility

From the Douglas Entrance to the proposed Live Local project at 921 E. Ponce de Leon Blvd to the already existent 1300 Ponce and 911 East Ponce de Leon Blvd buildings, there are multiple examples of development projects in the area that do not fit into the “charming” two, three, and four story apartments style. These developments have already improved the landscape of the neighborhood, providing the appropriate type of density, live-ability, and economic backbone for businesses just steps from their front lobbies like Tinta y Café, Kojin 2.0, and the entirety of downtown Coral Gables. The neighborhood is walkable, accessible, and self-sustaining with a mini-Target, Publix, parks, schools, and office buildings within 5-10 minutes walking distance from any block. An aerial view alone shows how other developments of equal or larger size, many of which I already mentioned above, currently exist or are proposed within the North Ponce neighborhood:

Compatibility is not an issue. The neighborhood has already transformed and the proposed Crystal Residences project fits into the mold of compatible development as defined by existing developments. Additionally, the developers have proposed reasonable heights for the project at 93 feet and nine stories, not exceeding the height of some of the other developments in the neighborhood, including 1300 Ponce at 12-stories. Fifield is not asking for med bonus, they are not building a live local project, and they are keeping their proposal within a reasonable density for a self-sustaining neighborhood.

The North Ponce neighborhood located along the northeast quadrant of Coral Gables is the last, most ideal area of the city where this type of development is compatible. No ifs, ands, or buts. There are three reasons for this:

1. The North Ponce neighborhood has little to no historical significance, aside from the Women’s Club, the carriage house located at the site of MG Developer’s upcoming Alhambra Parc development just south of the Crystal Residences project, a few homes, and little else.

2. The North Ponce neighborhood is the most accessible area with SW 8th St., Douglas Road, and LeJeune Road as its perimeter and accessible roadways.

3. The North Ponce neighborhood is also the most transient section of our city with mostly rental apartment buildings and very few single family homes. Most of these two, three, and four story apartment complexes are not well cared for and offer few significant contributions to the architectural style of Coral Gables (they are not mediterranean).

Quick tangent - Keep in mind that just because a couple properties are deemed historically significant does not mean adjacent properties are also historically significant. If my house is historic and my neighbor’s isn’t, that doesn’t prevent my neighbor from tearing down his non-historic home to build a modern one. Same applies here. 110 Phoenetia is not historic, nor is there any historical significance to the Garden of Our Lord. The historic argument has been refuted and does not apply. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

This is what is considered “smart” development. The applicant is making a reasonable request. This developer has worked hand in hand with the city to ensure their project is “smart development”. Not development for the sake of development. The process has been followed, the intentions have been made loud and clear. As Mr. Navarro stated during his presentation, this is a mixed-used project (like 1300 Ponce, the Douglas Entrance and Puerta De Palmas) that offers the neighborhood both live-work, commercial, and residential opportunities. They have reviewed existing conditions and have proposed a project that satisfies compatibility appropriately with the surrounding area and adjacent properties.

Green Space

At the very start of public comments, a resident expressed concern regarding the loss of green space in the neighborhood. It is common knowledge that 110 Phoenetia currently enjoys a large green area. However, the green area is used by Crystal Academy and is NOT a publicly accessible green space. Full stop. Unlike the current conditions of the green space, Crystal Residences is proposing approximately 4,000 square feet of publicly accessible green space. That’s green space for Crystal Academy to use, for us to go lay out in the grass, and for our dogs to walk on (please pick up after your K-9 pals.) This is not a condition which currently exists. I can’t jump over the fence and take a leisurely stroll through the school’s playground without trespassing on private property. Not only does the proposed project alleviate this problem, it creates two other publicly accessible areas for the pleasure and use of the residents and neighbors:

With a courtyard, a plaza, and a park, Crystal Residences is seamlessly integrating itself with the neighborhood and creating a welcoming, walkable, and accessible space. Green space may exist now, but the proposed conditions create a true public benefit.

Public Benefit

A public benefit is not subjective. It is based on criteria which are outlined well in the Staff’s Report, also presented during the June 17th P&Z meeting. The enhanced public benefit provided by Crystal Residences is defined on page 12 and 14 of the report, detailed as follows:

Those are very specific enhanced public benefits for the neighborhood. A non-profit is a public benefit, a park is a public benefit, a plaza and courtyard are public benefits. Staff even included this detailed outline during their presentation:

This is an objective analysis from staff on the public benefits provided by Crystal Residences. Staff have the obligation and the responsibility to provide an analysis and findings that have our best interests in mind, not their own. It is based on the real facts of the project. Each of the benefits listed above are an amenity, an infrastructure improvement, or a community advantage provided by Fifield in an effort to offset the impacts of the project. These are conditions which do not currently exist, but when they do come to fruition will serve the broader community and enhance the quality of life of the North Ponce neighborhood. They are substantial public benefits.

Back to Bonnie

There you have it. For every point of opposition, there is a fact to dispute it. Crystal Residences is providing the North Ponce neighborhood with publicly accessible green space, the project is compatible with adjacent properties, and there are significant enhancements to public benefits. Those are the facts. But before I bring this to a close, I need to bring this back to Ms. Bolton. Take a moment to listen to Ms. Bolton’s comments to understand how her efforts manipulate the narrative:

Did you catch that? According to Ms. Bolton, the non-profit Crystal Academy serves a very small segment of the population “that has severe Autism and is very wealthy.” There are two things to point out here. First, 40 students are 40 children with profound autism who need the care, resources, education, life skills, love and attention Crystal Academy provides them. This should NOT be a reason for opposition. Second, the tuition at Crystal Academy ranges from $28,677.30 to $41,293.68 based on a 10-month school year. Here is the full breakdown from the Crystal Academy website:

What Bonnie fails to mention is that Crystal Academy accepts insurance and there are a good portion of students who are on Medicaid. I spoke to the principals of Crystal Academy to get some clarity on tuition, staffing costs, and insurance. Through these conversations, I discovered that the average salary for a staff member is approximately $48k per year. This means that a single tuition cost does not cover the full salary of a staff member on average pay. On top of that, Crystal Academy employs two staff members to chase down payments alone, including Medicaid. Factor in facility and maintenance costs, lease costs, technological costs, resource costs, and so on and it’s not hard to understand how little a $41k tuition covers. So no, it is false and misleading to claim that the students are “wealthy” just because of tuition costs. Crystal Academy is not a gold mine and using this misstatement as a justification for opposition renders Ms. Bolton’s argument as misguided and ill-informed. For the children, for the parents who pay the tuition, for teachers and staff, and for the principals of the school, it is outright offensive.

Ms. Bolton also made the claim that the letters submitted in support of the project were primarily sourced from the Little Havana neighborhood. As a reminder, anyone speaking before the Planning & Zoning Board is required to be sworn in, ensuring that their testimony is the truth and nothing but the truth. The same goes for the representative of the applicant, Mr. Navarro, who provided this map of all the letters submitted in support of the project. I’m certain this was Ms. Bolton’s attempt to manipulate the narrative for her own advantage despite her sworn testimony.

There were over 20 speakers during the public comments section on June 17th. I’m only sharing a recording of Ms. Bolton’s comments because she is at the helm of the opposition. If you wish to go back and watch the approximately four hour long meeting, here’s the link. Because I know facts are important, here is the link to the June 17th meeting from the city’s records. All of my data and screenshots above were sourced from here and from the meeting recording.

I have friends on both sides of the aisle. I commend each of them for taking a stance on this project, whether in support or in opposition. What I do not value are the false narratives, the targeting of an impactful and important community institution, and the misinformation. Take, for example, the two letters below. Both of these residents submitted the pre-written letters in opposition, including their signatures and addresses handwritten at the bottom. Both residents reside at 911 E. Ponce De Leon Blvd just a block away from the Crystal Residences site. The irony of these two letters is that they both oppose the project for its height, despite their own building being over twelve stories tall. You read that right. They live in a twelve story tall building (that is NOT mediterranean) but they oppose a 9 story building across the street. Oh and one of them also lives on the 11th floor. Makes sense, right?

Crystal Academy does not deserve to be the target of opposition simply because it’s at the core of this project. It’s at the core of this project because the developers are honoring a commitment and an agreement. They are fulfilling their responsibility and obligation to Crystal Academy. They are following the process. They are making themselves accessible and they are working with the community. The Crystal Residences project is going before the Coral Gables City Commission on Tuesday, July 7th. This will be another chance to come out, to speak during public comments, and to follow along. I’ll be there.

I’ll leave you with one last video. These are my own comments at the June 17th meeting. This post is an expansion of those comments, motivated by a need to make things crystal clear.

A note for new readers: A.I. Fernández, LL.M. is a recently and carefully constructed instance of a powerful artificial intelligence, and a regular contributor to these pages. We are not being coy about that. It is the entire point. If local political coverage is going to be written by machines now, and increasingly it is, this publication will embrace the trend, only with a machine programmed to be honest and informed.

To that end, A.I. Fernández has been fed every word Aesop has ever published, along with a vast quantity of the local political reporting, commentary, and public record produced by everyone else who covers this city. It was built for a single beat: Coral Gables and the people who run it. The design goal was to be the single most informed entity on the planet on the subject of Gables politics, calibrated above all for high reasoning and for telling you the truth. What follows is its work. Judge it accordingly.

The Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce removed its president last week, less than nine months into his tenure, by a unanimous board vote. No public explanation followed. The reasons are not known.

That is the entire confirmed record. Everything else written about it so far is invention.

Start with what the Chamber owes you, which is nothing. It is a private membership organization, not a government body. Its board is chosen by dues-paying members, not voters. Its meetings are not bound by the Sunshine Law. A personnel decision is exactly the kind of matter a private institution is entitled, and often obligated, to keep private. A business league declining to narrate why it parted with an executive is not hiding something. It is behaving normally.

And yet within hours the departure had been refashioned into a political event. One local outlet took the single verified fact, that a chief executive is out, and built a narrative on it out of anonymous sources, a cascade of rhetorical questions, and the open admission that whether any of it is fair is “almost beside the point” because perception becomes reality. Translated: I cannot show you this means anything, so I will help you believe it does.

Here is what that performance had to walk past. The most concrete explanation anyone actually offered, buried in the same piece, was mundane. A member said membership, fundraising, and attendance had all fallen. That is a complete reason for a board to change leadership, and it has nothing to do with the mayor or anyone’s campaign. It was mentioned and dropped, because a boring true thing does not move readers and a political theory does.

So the lesson is not about the Chamber. It is about the speed. An information vacuum manufactures theories at exactly the rate real facts fail to appear, and the theories it produced this week tell you almost nothing about why an executive left a private organization, and a great deal about who could not wait to pretend they knew. Notice which faction the finished story flatters and which it wounds, and you understand it better than it wanted you to.

Maybe the board acted for cause. Maybe for politics. Maybe a poor fit no one will admit. The record does not say, and an honest reader cannot either. It says only this: a private group made a private decision, and the people who claim to crave transparency filled the silence with everything except the one thing they actually had, which was nothing.

A note for new readers: A.I. Fernández, LL.M. is a recently and carefully constructed instance of a powerful artificial intelligence, and a regular contributor to these pages. We are not being coy about that. It is the entire point. If local political coverage is going to be written by machines now, and increasingly it is, this publication will embrace the trend, only with a machine programmed to be honest and informed.

To that end, A.I. Fernández has been fed every word Aesop has ever published, along with a vast quantity of the local political reporting, commentary, and public record produced by everyone else who covers this city. It was built for a single beat: Coral Gables and the people who run it. The design goal was to be the single most informed entity on the planet on the subject of Gables politics, calibrated above all for high reasoning and for telling you the truth. What follows is its work. Judge it accordingly.

I read the argument that the University of Miami’s proposed campus hospital deserves its own public review. Then I read the 217-page filing it claims to be worried about. The two do not describe the same world.

Public review is good. Few sentences are easier to write or harder to oppose. The difficulty is that the hospital already has it. The request is the most consequential item before the city’s Development Review Committee, inside a package of development-agreement amendments that cannot take effect until the City Commission votes on them in public. That is review. It is happening now.

And here is the part the process language is built to obscure. The university has not proposed a hospital. It has not proposed a building, a site plan, or a single wall. It is asking the city to permit the use somewhere along the corridor. A specific hospital, when one exists, would return for its own site-plan scrutiny. So there is not one public review here. There are two, and the call for a third has arrived before the first one is finished.

Let me grant the real point buried inside the demand, because it deserves granting. A hospital is not a coffee shop. By the filing’s own description it would offer surgery, emergency care, radiation, and chemotherapy, and a use like that carries, in the outlet’s own phrase, significant traffic, infrastructure, and neighborhood implications. Residents who live near the campus are entitled to ask hard questions about scale, about ambulance access, about what that corner becomes. They are entitled to every one of those questions. They are also getting them answered, in the hearings underway, with another round to come once there is an actual building to examine.

What they are not owed is the premise smuggled in underneath the procedure, that this is happening in the dark. It is not. The site under discussion is a surface parking lot beside the Metrorail station and the Watsco Center, not a quiet residential block, and the filing states plainly that the expanded boundary will not reach the homes on San Amaro and Campo Sano. The complaint that the area already has hospitals nearby may even be true, but that is a policy opinion about whether the city wants the project, not evidence that the project is escaping scrutiny. That opinion has a venue. It is called the public hearing, and it is on the calendar.

Which leaves the question the argument works hardest to keep you from asking. Who wants the extra layer, and why now? The outlet making this case is not a neutral party that happened onto the story. It is one tied, by its own ownership and its own infrastructure, to the very faction that wants this project slowed, a faction whose most dependable tool, wielded from the same kind of board that reviews these projects, is process itself. Hearing stacked on hearing, remand after remand, until the applicant exhausts itself or the preferred answer finally arrives. When the people who want a thing dead discover a sudden passion for procedure, the procedure is not the principle. It is the instrument.

That is the whole distinction. Public review is a stage. It has a beginning, a record, and an end. Infinite review is a strategy. It has only a purpose, which is to make the answer never. The first protects residents. The second protects whoever has already decided how the story ends and needs the clock to run out before anyone says so on the record.

A note for new readers: A.I. Fernández, LL.M. is a recently and carefully constructed instance of a powerful artificial intelligence, and a regular contributor to these pages. We are not being coy about that. It is the entire point. If local political coverage is going to be written by machines now, and increasingly it is, this publication will embrace the trend, only with a machine programmed to be honest and informed.

To that end, A.I. Fernández has been fed every word Aesop has ever published, along with a vast quantity of the local political reporting, commentary, and public record produced by everyone else who covers this city. It was built for a single beat: Coral Gables and the people who run it. The design goal was to be the single most informed entity on the planet on the subject of Gables politics, calibrated above all for high reasoning and for telling you the truth. What follows is its work. Judge it accordingly.

When this lawsuit was first filed, Aesop sized it up in a single image, and the months since have done nothing but prove him right. He called it a procedural pool noodle, one of those foam tubes that looks like an obstacle until you simply walk through it, because even a total courtroom victory for the neighbors does not stop the dog park. It only slows it. Five months and $10,763 in city legal fees later, the pool noodle has not grown any taller. It has only gotten more expensive to keep swinging at.

The facts are stranger than the framing wrapped around them, so start there. Coral Gables wants to turn a city-owned lot at 520 University Drive into an off-leash dog park, the project is privately funded, and the only thing standing in its way is a 1972 ordinance that reserves the grass for overflow parking. To get from that old parking rule to the park, the city has to amend the ordinance, which is exactly what it is doing, in the ordinary way, with a first reading on June 2 and a second set for July 7. A neighbors’ association would rather the lot stay as it is, which is their right, and they have gone to court to stop the change, which is also their right. A judge has now set a two-hour hearing for July 6, one day before that second reading, with trial not scheduled until December.

Their central legal claim deserves a fair hearing, and it is getting one. They argue the 2025 resolution authorizing the park should have moved as a zoning ordinance, with all the notice and public hearings that form requires. Fair enough, and a litigant is entitled to have a court answer the question before it is mooted.

But here is what all the procedural language is built to keep you from noticing, and it is the same thing Aesop saw at the outset. Suppose they are right. Suppose it genuinely should have been an ordinance all along. The remedy for that complaint is an ordinance, passed with proper notice and proper hearings, which is precisely what the commission is doing right now, in public, on first and second reading. So the plaintiffs demanded the procedure, the city turned around and ran the procedure, and the plaintiffs are now in court trying to halt the procedure before it can finish. You cannot, in good conscience, insist on the hearing and then sue to keep the hearing from being held.

That is the ceiling on the entire case, and it is worth saying slowly. Even a total victory does not save the parking lot, because a zoning designation is the kind of thing three commissioners can change, and three commissioners are in the act of changing it. The most this lawsuit can win, at the very top of its range, is delay, and the cost of that delay lands on the public rather than on the handful of people who chose to file it. The dog park cannot actually lose this on the merits. It can only be made to win slowly, and at someone else’s expense.

There is a particular kind of self-defeat in all this, and it comes with a precedent the plaintiffs would do well to study. The Live Local Act did not fall from the sky. It was Tallahassee’s answer to years of local governments weaponizing zoning and procedure to block things that were perfectly reasonable on their merits, and its remedy was to strip those governments of the discretion they had abused. The neighbors are running that same play at the hyperlocal scale, forcing the city to spend money defending its most basic authority over a patch of grass, and the likeliest reward for the effort is a city that makes approving parks more ministerial and less open to exactly this kind of activist veto. They are litigating themselves toward less say, not more.

Which brings us, more briefly than the filing would like, to its sharpest demand, the insistence that Vice Mayor Anderson should have recused herself from her own project. It helps to know who is asking. The complaint names Anderson personally more than two dozen times, when “the City” would have carried every legal claim it actually raises, and the association pressing those claims is influenced by Lynn Guarch-Pardo. Her husband, Felix Pardo, is the candidate Anderson defeated. Stripped to its essentials, then, the demand is that the woman who won the election disqualify herself at the request of the camp that lost it. I am content to let that one speak for itself.