Know Thyself

Miami Beach has some housekeeping to do, while Miami faces the prospect of a protracted mayoral campaign.

By Rebecca Wakefield

Tomás Regalado stretches his populist wings. Photo by Harry Emilio Gottlieb

I’ve always liked Miami Beach City Manager Jorge Gonzalez, despite my natural inclination to be wary of all upper level management. He’s sharp and facile and, even when pressed, possessed of a wicked sense of humor.

But the recent scandal in the city’s Building Department gives me pause. Maybe I’ve been taken in by Gonzalez’s boyish bureaucratic charms, or the fact that he rarely seems as hapless as County Manager George Burgess, or as obviously a politician’s errand boy as Miami City Manager Pete Hernandez.

A couple of weeks ago, news broke that a sleazy developer wore a wire to help nab three city building officials he was tired of paying off to get his projects through various official hoops.

The developer, Michael Stern, dropped more than $100,000 in cash, plus a car and a Rolex. Former chief building code compliance officer Andres Villareal, chief structural plans examiner Mohammad R. Partovi and planner Henry Johnson, were each charged with varying counts of bribery and racketeering.

The bunch got caught because another sleazoid — former chief electrical inspector Thomas Ratner — rolled on his old colleagues after he was caught taking a kickback from a contractor. Stern got immunity for cooperating. With any luck, prosecutors will roll the new crew into dropping a dime on their higher-ups.

My first thought was that, well, at least this scandal reflects Miami at its ethnically diverse finest. It just proves that corruption here has less to do with where you come from than with the conditions you find yourself in when you get here.

Which brings me to my point. The city response to this scandal, in various media, has been to tighten all sphincters and portray the problem as limited and isolated. It’s three bad guys, not a bad department nor a bad administration.

But here’s the thing: If the system people work within is not well-structured or monitored, the rotten apples will find a way to take advantage of it. If those people get away with it, time and again, even the less morally ambiguous employees will start to feel like chumps for not getting in on the game. Even more likely than actual corruption, however, is employees just not performing up to standard. Why care when your bosses don’t?

It made me smile to read in last week’s SunPost about South Pointe activist Frank Del Vecchio’s little crusade against the city’s laissez-faire approach to traffic and parking concurrency for the Bijou Hotel in his neighborhood.

Del Vecchio made life miserable for a few city officials until they made sure the process was done more or less right. He may end up making the city a few million bucks (in mitigation fees it might not have otherwise collected). Very few sane people are willing to go to that kind of effort.

What the city needs is an adopt-a-project program. I called up Del Vecchio and asked whether he’d be willing to lead a battalion of citizen soldiers who would adopt building or redevelopment projects and watchdog them to completion.

Del Vecchio thought I was a bit mad (true), but then said the City Commission needs to create a blue-ribbon committee of volunteer experts to prepare a really detailed plan for getting “inside the belly of the beast and find out who’s doing what,” as he put it. Then the city would hire a firm to do the internal review.

To me, a blue-ribbon anything usually just produces a lovingly crafted report that does nothing but collect dust. Some city commissioners have talked about doing an audit to follow the money trail, but I agree with Del Vecchio that the fundamental problem is not how much money a handful of guys may have stolen. It’s the process that allows them to do it and get away with it.

“You can do audits till kingdom come and it won’t tell you anything,” Del Vecchio argued. “You need to look for patterns. It’s not simply, follow the money. It’s look at the process.”

Of course frank self-evaluation is always the hardest thing to do. But Jorge Gonzalez and the city commissioners who keep him employed need to buck up and take their lumps on this one.

In other news, Miami City Commissioner Tomás Regalado announced on Wednesday that he’s officially running for mayor — next year. Well, the election isn’t until next year. Regalado has started the clock significantly early.

When I asked him why, he said it was two things. One, he knows he can’t raise the kind of cash Manny Diaz did in his previous runs, so he’s relying on a rolling populist movement to generate the votes he can’t buy with advertising.

And two, he’s got a lot of time on his hands since the untimely death two months ago of his wife of 35 years, radio personality Raquel Regalado. “I spent a lot of my time with Raquel,” he told me. “I cannot sit and stare at the ceiling. This will help me, I don’t want to say to heal, but in a way it will help to have other things in my mind.”

I’ve appreciated the maverick role Regalado often plays in Miami City Hall. He’s mischievous, occasionally demagogic, but generally takes the side of the people in most issues. This has made him popular with a growing class of disgruntled residents who feel left out of the grand “world-class city” plans of current Mayor Manny Diaz.

Regalado will continue this role as he spreads across the city, soliciting resident opinions. I asked him how, after years of being the outsider, he could recast himself as a leader for the entire city. “I’m sure some people will say that this guy should not be mayor,” Regalado replied. “’He’s not a team player. He’s a naysayer.’ I think I can help other members of the commission because I understand the needs of a district. I think Manny Diaz didn’t understand that. He had these grandiose plans and ideas and didn’t focus on the real needs.”

Real needs to Regalado mean cutting off the high salaries of unnecessary contractors and bureaucrats and putting the money into the basics, such as streets, cops, firefighters. “I will not be running against Manny Diaz, but I will be campaigning against big spending and not taking care of basic needs,” he said. “That is what residents want. Of course, I could be wrong. If they want museums [instead], then I will not be elected.”

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com