My Unrequited Pen Pal
Why Won’t City Attorney Jorge Fernandez Write to Me? And Who’s That New Girl in Economic Development? Wait, the City of Miami Has a Department Like That? For Real?

“My conclusion is that whatever process I may be involved in, it is exempt from public records.'

by Rebecca Wakefield

“I’m not required to put anything in writing to you.” — Miami city attorney Jorge L. Fernandez to impertinent columnist. “I don’t want to create another public record.”

What I had asked Fernandez for was a written notice he’d allegedly given to the city that a Florida Bar investigation into his role in the fire fee debacle had advanced to the next level. The investigation was first reported in March by the Daily Business Review. What I had heard more recently was that the Bar’s local counsel had found cause to refer the matter to a grievance committee, and Fernandez had notified staff at the city.

Usually Florida Bar investigations into lawyers are private until the process runs its course. But I reasoned that since a) Fernandez works for the city, b) the city works for the public and c) this investigation was regarding his professional conduct in his public capacity, this notice, if it existed, must be a public record. So I asked for it, first in writing to the city’s press handlers, then via a phone call to Fernandez’s office.

Fernandez said he’d reviewed the public records laws and found an exception regarding the privacy of Florida Bar complaints until a finding of probable cause was made. “My conclusion is that whatever process I may be involved in, it is exempt from public records,” he told me. “Beyond that, it is my position that on any matter, even a city matter, I don’t provide comments on matters under litigation.”

That sounded like $200 an hour worth of impressive legalese, but I’m woefully undereducated in these matters. Could you, I asked sweetly, just put that in writing for me? That’s when Fernandez, in the nicest tone possible, told me that, no, he wouldn’t.

The clever devil knew that I would just take that piece of paper and send it to public records godsends such as Pat Gleason of the Florida Attorney General’s Office, or the good folks at the First Amendment Foundation. On deadline and sans papel, I called them up anyway. Neither FAF director Adria Harper, nor Gleason could provide an immediate off-the-cuff rebuttal to Fernandez, but both were a little skeptical. “It seems critical to get some basis for denying the request [in writing],” Gleason advised.

Then I talked to Carlos Leon, the Bar counsel handling the case not only of Fernandez, but four other attorneys involved in the fire fee deal — Mayor Manny Diaz, former city attorney Alejandro Vilarello, former assistant city attorney Charles Mays and private attorney Hank Adorno. He confirmed that all five cases were referred and are pending the grievance committee process, which he expects to be wrapped up sometime in October. Leon stressed that just because the investigation made it to a second level does not imply anyone is guilty of anything. It just means he wasn’t able to easily resolve (or absolve) the cases.

Lest it be forgotten, this issue is, at bottom, about who the four public servants with the professional experience to know better actually worked for when they signed off on a highly questionable deal to pay a handful of people $7 million to make an inconvenient lawsuit go away. Taxpayers? Joe Arriola’s blind ego?

Lisa Lisa

Lisa Mazique was hired on June 5 as the city of Miami’s new director of Economic Development. It was one of former City Manager Joe Arriola’s last acts of hiring via his favorite method, that of fiat. According to city officials, the $135,000-a-year position was not advertised.

Economic Development has traditionally been a great department (one of several) to stash connected yet less-than-stellar people because it has a broad, nearly indefinable mandate and a constituency with virtually no political pull. If this department is ineffective, no one notices. The job description for Mazique’s position is sufficiently vague as to render it completely dependent on political whim — the director “directs, coordinates, and administers municipal policies and regulations pertaining to the acquisition, development, management and disposition of City owned property, and the City of Miami’s real estate and economic development activities.”

Lisa Mazique is not necessarily a usual suspect. She comes from New Orleans and, originally, Chicago. She’s got the requisite college degrees. She ran the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) for eight years, until just before accepting the position in Miami. But the Big Easy wasn’t always easy on her. NORA was a chronically underfunded state agency charged with addressing “blighted housing,” but near as I could tell from a reasonably vigorous Google search, the agency hadn’t impressed critics of the city’s “vacant, blighted neighborhoods bleeding from years of neglect,” such as John McIlwain, a senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute, quoted in the Times-Picayune this summer.

Earlier this year, the city of New Orleans stopped contracting with NORA altogether. NORA had stopped accepting blight removal-type applications sometime before. In June aspects of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission became interesed in an Urban Land Institute recommendation to create something other than NORA to oversee redevelopment.

But the icing on the cake was Mazique’s bashing by her New Orleans critics for moving a blighted-as-hell 4,000-square-foot Victorian-era house to a lot that was too small for it. According to the Times-Picayune in a 2005 article, Mazique had acquired the lot and the house from a colleague on a not-for-profit board. “It’s awful, and a moral outrage, that the woman in charge of the agency that is charged with eradicating blight has allowed a piece of property that she controls to remain in the condition that it’s in,” complained Owen Kendrick, one of Mazique’s critics.

I heard that Mazique got to Miami because she went through a Harvard fellow program with an assistant to Arriola’s foxy former operations chief, Alicia Cuervo Schreiber. Commissioner Linda Haskins (right), who was bureaucrat Haskins prior to Johnny Winton’s airport fracas, recalls doing the due-diligence on Mazique before she was hired. “I got great references on her,” she recalls. “Nothing came up in the background check and there was never any push from a commissioner.”

Haskins said that after Mazique was hired, the city rumor mill about her background caused her to check again. She found a couple of articles about the house deal, but nothing that would lead her to think that Mazique wasn’t perfectly qualified.

Mazique declined to talk about her past, although she mentioned she’s excited to be in Miami. “When you’re in public office, you take your licks,” she told me. “I realize it’s fair game, but it’s a private business matter and I don’t think it has a bearing on what’s going on here.”

“New Orleans has got its warts,” she continued. “There’s much of the pain and angst of the past year, and the ‘crawfish in a barrel mentality.’”

Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones, who briefly met Mazique in New Orleans shortly before she came to Miami, said she’s a “nice young lady” who is “on the ball and wants to do the right thing.”

The right thing? OK, well that sounds pretty good. What is it that the Department of Economic Development does again?

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.