The City of Miami Beach's Blind Eye

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Opposition report on the performance of City Manager Jimmy Morales and the City Commission that continues to see no evil for its own sake.

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Administrator Jorge Gonzalez (left) and politician Jimmy Morales (right)

THE CITY’S BLIND EYE
Déjà vu - Miami Beach Turns a Blind Eye
Cinco de Mayo 2014
By David Arthur Walters
MIAMI MIRROR
Jimmy Morales has managed the City of Miami Beach since April Fools’ Day last year. Almost
everybody knows by now that he is nice guy and a homeboy, what with all the media hype
about his roots in Miami Beach, how he met his wife at high school football game, how he cried
when he was shoed in as city manager without any city management experience simply
because he was a political insider, although the city is supposed to have an apolitical, strong
businesslike city manager. But all that is entirely beside the point. Miami Beach is rooted in
corruption. The best dentist to do the extractions and implants is seldom the nicest one, and
probably hails from out of town.
First impressions are lasting. I did not like Jimmy’s looks when I first saw him, but looks are
deceiving. The former city manager is a handsome fellow, yet the community was sorely
disappointed by his arrogant demeanor, especially when the commission that had ignored his
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faults for over a decade suddenly did a volte face and blamed him for the faults most of them
had ignored and some of them were probably guilt of.
This point is this, that we must not judge the Morales administration on superficialities but on
substance. Morales admitted that he has continued with programs instituted by his
predecessor. Since employees may be descended from a culture where moral and criminal
corruption are commonplace, where wrong has been done so long it seems right, or where
wrong was right to begin with, they now have the benefit of ethics training and an ethics
hotline so they may tell the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. By the way,
Morales was one of the creators of the county Ethics Commission, the very commission that
allowed him to cop a plea for allegedly unethical campaign finance accounting.
Already we sometimes wish we had Gonzalez back, or that the city commission had let him stick
around for a year to allow him to accomplish the radical reforms some commissioners said they
dearly wanted. After all, he knew best what was wrong, and did his best to fault the
commission for that.
Most of all, the new city manager would be a change agent, or so it is said. The change effected
so far is intangible, insubstantial, or something invisible in the air. There is reportedly a change
in management attitude emphasizing the customer service approach the latest mayor waxed
enthusiastic about during his campaign. Employees are supposedly given more leeway to make
decisions and make mistakes.
Alas, that may be part of the problem, not the solution. Of course, there should be a delicate
balance between Kiss Ass and Kick Ass strategies. Anyway, City hall is allegedly a warm and
friendly place now that so many people have been replaced i.e. fired or forced out, which is
always a bad way to build confidence and trust in those whom the knife missed.
Morales’ supporters say that city staffers feel more confident to make decisions, yet they do
not identify the decisions and their measurable results, if any. In fact, his naïve confidence in his
subordinates and his nice-guy tolerance of their failures betrays him for what he is, an
inexperienced administrator. He like anyone else is capable of learning on the job, and his
political experience is an asset in that regard; hopefully he will learn and do a lot before too
much damage is done.
For now, the awful truth, which becomes increasingly obvious to people dealing with the
“reformed” system, a truth that surviving employees admit off the record, is that the bureaus
of the bureaucracy are in a damned mess. Go see for yourself; maintain your sense of humor
for a Kafkaesque experience.
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The Customer Service Approach absent real improvements in service is mere rhetoric for
gullible reporters who should know better, who should go after the facts, and who should not
ignore the facts under their noses. Alas, publishers prefer not to offend the authoritative news
sources they need to sell advertisements nor would they offend the public when it wants to be
flattered into believing that it will be well served.
i

Last December Morales promised the commission that, “Things in the past that may have been
swept under the rug, are not being swept under the rug, and I think that has already begun to
change the culture a bit.”
In fact, he had already done that. He promised me personally in June that he would not sweep
under the rug the allegations whistleblower David Weston had made about the Building
Department, which he called a R.I.C.O operation. And then he did just that, using his new
human resources director as the rug. He broke his promise to address the commission in
response to Weston’s claim that he was fired on ethics charges trumped up by the city
attorney’s office because he too persistently complained that millions had gone missing.
ii

Let us heed the sagacity and hypocrisy of the nicest person on the commission, Ed Tobin, who
was insistent that Gonzalez be gotten rid of right away after nearly fourteen years of accolades
from the commission. I like Tobin a lot, and I still believe he would make a great city attorney
when Raul Aguila retires, but I started becoming suspicious of him when a lunch invitation
turned into an invitation for coffee and that turned into a cancellation, and then I heard about
the goings on at Sunset Harbour involving tow companies, his law firm, and real estate
developers such as our new businesslike mayor. The Ethics Commission cleared Tobin of
interfering with the Gonzalez administration, although whether that would have been unethical
or not was left unclear by the Ethics Commission’s typically murky account—the city
commission was advised to pass an ordinance against it. And now commissioners are allegedly
encouraged to deal with department heads directly if not the city manager.
Tobin, in a bitter email rant directed to Gonzalez in April 2012, said, “You have failed to hold
executives accountable for their performance. We have a Strong City Manager form of
Government. That means you run the Cities day to day operations. The Commission has very
little say so in regards to the day to day operations. Commissioners are not privy to any matters
of employee misconduct or malfeasance. We get that type of information from newspapers,
blogs and the rumor mill. Commissioners have complained many times even in our retreats that
you do not hold your executives accountable. We have complained that there are no
benchmarks. I have complained that you do not do written evaluations of your executive team.
We pay our employees the best in the State and our benefits are the best. We must ask why we
have all this corruption. Corruption in this instance is a byproduct of the lack of oversight and
accountability. The waste and mistakes we have pointed out over the years is staggering. I must
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hold you accountable for a host of matters both in and out of the newspapers of late that bear
on your ability to manage. I am sure that this latest scandal involving the code inspectors will
not be our last.”
I was considered an enemy of the state and accused by Tobin of smoking pot because I
editorialized that no reform should be expected, that the whole lot of reformer were faux
reformers. I kept updating commissioners and mainstream reporters with prodigious anecdotal
evidence that there was no real change taking place other than in the police department.
The good deeds of police officers were eventually punished by the so-called reformers when
they gained the majority. Police brass who instituted welcome changes were gotten rid of, and
now we are to have Dan Oates, a celebrity chief of police imported from Colorado with great
fanfare, an outsider to blame for what will invariably go wrong in this subtropical Dodge City
with its lamebrain party events.
We certainly do need fresh blood, but that is not to say that outsiders solve all problems. Much
is to be said for community policing, for example, yet, on the other hand, it is best to rotate
cops frequently lest they become too familiar and friendly with the wrong people.
Chainsaw Al Dunlap could have been consulted by the commission. Instead of political insider
Jimmy Morales, the commission might as well have imported as its city manager, Wayne
Cauthen, the celebrated public administration genius who was Denver Mayor Wellington
Webb’s chief of staff before becoming the first black city manager of the Heart of America
(Kansas City, Missouri). He and the mayor, positive mental attitude guru Kay “Mayadevi”
Barnes, were a boon to real estate developers, ramping up taxes and running the taxpayers into
debt. The Kansas City Star got a $200 million downtown printing plant as quid pro quo for
trumpeting downtown revitalization, private/public partnership program. “Ignore Naysayers”
was the motto of the dynamic duo.
Nothing has measurably changed in the City of Miami Beach, despite the high expectations
ensuing from the decapitation of the former strong city manager and the replacement of the
weak mayor with a Clinton friend who spent millions to purchase a majority junta, an
investment that might prove foolish when the honeymoon is over, when the positive mental
attitude wears off because there is no longer any room under the rug to hide measurable
performance results.
Morales bragged privately that he has fired sixty people, bringing in new heads, but he says
little or nothing about what he and his heads have actually accomplished, other than destabilize
the departments and make a mess of things. Yes, the Miami Herald paints a pretty subjective
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picture for the time being. Still, he sorely needs a press agent to report measurable objectives
achieved, if there are any, but that goes against his grain as a lawyer.
He knows about the dirty details, and he does not want to give the media ammunition. When
dealing with police issues in the county, he said that the less that is said the better, that the
facts should speak for themselves.
Good luck with getting all the facts and nothing but the facts out of Morales, ma’am, or all the
truth and nothing but the truth. He is a lawyer and a politician. Even worse, he is a human
being.
There is no good without evil, and s/he who ignores evil is good for nothing. The major daily
should be more willing to print the ugly details that it knows very well instead of keeping them
under the rug. The commissioners, deluded by wishful thinking, are blinded by the aura of their
great leader, the new mayor, and his right-hand man. They should not rely on rosy mainstream
reports about someone who did not run for governor because few people know anything about
him. They should listen very carefully to the opposition press and to critics who have good
reason to be critical of officials no matter how lovely they look in Aloha shirts when visiting the
Keys instead of flying out to real Hawaii.
Cynical journalists and watchdogs, walking around the street in broad daylight bearing
flashlights, have sent many factual reports to the manager and the commission, so many that
the commissioners consider it spam. Never mind. I know the commissioners no longer respond
to my reports, with the exception of Commissioner Deede Weithorn, who demanded that I stop
updating her—at least she read them when her family’s interest in the city’s tennis
management contract was the subject.
Morales’ apologists point to the so-called restructuring of code compliance from a division to a
department, without mentioning that nothing has changed except that the director of the
department who was supposed have fixed things two years ago has even more power not to fix
things now that he has less supervision, without mentioning that he has allowed hundreds of
obvious violations of signage code and sidewalk café code to persist as he sits on his résumé
with its FBI credentials to justify his position and to protect the position of his assistant who
was part of the problem that led to the latest wave of FBI arrests.
Morales’ apologists applaud him for bringing with him a new building official from Miami, a
building official who ignored my reports about a renegade unlicensed general contractor, who
was doing millions of dollars of unpermitted and permitted work on the beach, and in Miami,
where he, for example, renovated his downtown office and apartment building without
permits, with the knowledge of inspectors who refused to show up during nights and weekends
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while the work was ongoing, and who apparently staged inspections during the day, finding no
work in progress because the contractor was tipped off shortly before their arrival.
The contractor could not figure out why anyone would report his violations because, he said,
everybody does it, everyone knows it, and nobody cares. If you get caught doing unpermitted
work, you pay the fine if you cannot wiggle out of it, and you probably can. If you are not
caught, you have “gotten ahead of the job.”
Now this same building official together with Morales have introduced the program that
Morales says was so successful in Miami, called phased permitting, a confession of
incompetence that sanctions early starts providing that the developers agree to hire their own
inspectors and to hold officials and the city harmless for their negligence, with the bribe of a
few hundred dollars going into the city coffers instead of other pockets. He and Morales are not
above permitting phased permit jobs without prerequisite county permits, or letting
construction go ahead after complaints are made. Galbut’s Kaskades at Gale was phase
permitted despite the fact that the necessary environmental permit was obtained in advance,
and Morales and his building official allowed construction to proceed full blast after being
notified of the violation.
As for the commission, nothing has really changed at that hydra-headed root of corruption with
its law firm and good old boy entanglements, except that a majority junta now controls the
spoils.
Commissioner Tobin had originally expected that the same old problems would persist, and he
was quite right. And the situation may grow worse instead of better because now the
commission, including, ironically, Commissioner Tobin, have turned a blind eye to outside
information, relying wholly on their “Supermanager” to do a great job. His spectacular aura was
enhanced by a May Day report in the only legitimate source of news, as far as they are
concerned, the Miami Herald, which is not wont to bite down too hard on sources of the
authoritative news that sells papers unless they are indicted or arrested.
“I trust him almost blindly. I know he has the utmost confidence of most, if not all, of my
colleagues,” Commissioner Michael Grieco told Miami Beach beat reporter Christine Veiga for
her May Day report, ‘‘City manager hits one-year mark in Miami Beach.’
What a foolish thing to say! That is how the commissioners got into trouble in the first place,
placing blind trust in Jorge Gonzalez, failing to listen to their constituents, failing to demand
from him adequate, empirical evidence of positive performance, failing to heed the warning
signs until news of the arrests of code enforcement officers appeared in the press.
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I was disappointed to see Commissioner Grieco make such a foolish statement, literally
identifying the city commission as a ship of fools doomed to rubberstamp the chief executive’s
every move. Have the politicians not read Hamilton?
iii
I am not alone in calling him a jerk for his
dismissive manner, yet we could use a jerk to get things done for the community, not just for
the majority junta whose main interest is in what set of developers shall get to develop which
real estate projects they are fond of. Yet we certainly do not need another fool on the
commission.
In fact, I had just petitioned Grieco
iv
to have the city’s code compliance division of the building
department audited because I saw no improvement there under the same administrators since
the scandal, yet the city manager praised the administrators, petitioned the commission to
convert it into a freestanding department under the same directors, and the city commission
rubberstamped the petition into a resolution without any factual evidence of improvement in
performance, with Commissioner Tobin referring to the catchword, “integrity.” That means the
city manager’s loyalty to moral principles is beyond reproach; alas that good intentions are not
good deeds.
I could go on, simply to confirm a local publisher’s opinion that I am too repetitious, and I
should confine my articles to 800 words at 6 cents each. I am a great believer in the usefulness
of repetition because sometimes it takes me a long time to get the point. I said that I could
wipe my rear with a fifty-dollar bill, but I would rather tell what I consider to be the truth for
nothing short of 60 cents a word, to which he responded, “If there’s not in money in it, it’s not
worth doing.”
I shall not go on, then, except to give Morales a B for personality and a D for performance. Since
he is a politician, he will shed the low mark off his back like a duck, without a quack. Since he is
an administrator, he may start managing by objectives and have auditors internal and external
report his progress, if any.
--XYX--

i
“Seemingly independent, and sometimes really so, the press can afford only to mount the cresting wave,
not go beyond it. The editor might as well shoot his reader with a bullet as with a new idea. He must hit
the exact line of the opinion of the day. I am not finding fault with him; I am only describing him. Some
three years ago I took to one of the freest of the Boston journals a letter, and by appropriate consideration
induced its editor to print it. As we glanced along its contents and came to the concluding statement, he
said: “Couldn't you omit that?' I said, “No; I wrote it for that; it is the gist of the statement” “Well,' said
he, “ it is true; there is not a boy in the streets who does not know that it is true; but I wish you could omit
that.” I insisted, and the next morning, fairly and justly, he printed the whole. Side by side he put an
article of his own in which he said: “We copy in the next column an article from Mr. Phillips, and we
only regret the absurd and unfounded statement with which he concludes it.” He had kept his promise by
printing the article; he saved his reputation by printing the comment.” “It is a singular fact that, the freer a
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nation becomes, the more utterly democratic the form of its institutions, this outside agitation, this
pressure of public opinion to direct political action, becomes more and more necessary. The general
judgment is, that the freest possible government produces the freest possible men and women, the most
individual, the least servile to the judgment of others. But a moment's reflection will show any man that
this is an unreasonable expectation, and that, on the contrary, entire equality and freedom in political
forms almost inevitably tend to make the individual subside into the mass and lose his identity in the
general whole…. In a country like ours, of absolute democratic equality, public opinion is not only
omnipotent, it is omnipresent. There is no refuge from its tyranny; there is no hiding from its reach; and
the result is that, if you take the old Greek lantern and go about to seek among a hundred you will find not
one single American who really has not, or who does not fancy at least that he has, something to gain or
lose in his ambition, his social life, or his business from the good opinion and the votes of those around
him. And the consequence is that, instead of being a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly blurting out
his own convictions, as a nation, compared with other nations, we are a mass of cowards. More than all
other people we are afraid of each other." Quoted in Wendell Phillips, The Agitator, by Carlos Martyn,
Funk & Wagnalls, New York: 1980

ii
See ‘New City Manager Sweeps Allegations Under Rug,’ Miami Mirror, July 3, 2013

iii
“It has been mentioned to the advantages to be expected from the co-operation of the Senate, in the
business of appointments, that it would contribute to the stability of the administration. The consent of the
body would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint. A change of the Chief Magistrate, therefore,
would not occasion so general a revolution in the offices of the government as might be expected if he
were the sole dispenser of offices.” Alexander Hamilton, No. 77 The Federalist Papers”
iv

May Day 2014
Commissioner Michael Grieco
CITY OF MIAMI BEACH
RE: Call for Internal Audit of Code Compliance Department
Your Honor:
I petition you to take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that Internal Auditor James J. Sutter is
instructed to conduct an immediate audit of the performance of the Code Compliance Department since
his previous examination of its performance subsequent to the latest arrest scandal.
You may know that I have criticized Mr. Sutter’s work in the past; namely, the audit of Green Square,
which was long overdue, after repeated demands from the community, because Green Square was
"protected." My criticism was not entirely negative. The auditor brought out many important factors that
the contractor would rather not have had exposed after being in a virtually continuous breach of its
agreement for nearly a decade,
As you know very well, Mr. Sutter examined the performance of the Code Compliance Division in 2012,
and separately examined sidewalk café issues. Now my anecdotal studies indicate that the performance of
the Division has not improved from that pathetic period, and has perhaps gotten worse except for its
rhetoric and public relations.
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Indeed, some wronged persons are so infuriated at the lax, discriminatory and selective enforcement that
they are considering seeking legal action against the city and several of its officials..
Yet, the Commission, at the behest of the City Manager, unanimously approved or rubberstamped the
conversion of the Division into a Department, placing at its head as director Hernan Cardeno, who was
given command of the Division for the sake of improvement in 2012, and endorsement as his assistant,
Robert Santos, the Director of the Division since 2010, without any objective evidence of improvement.
In fact, the city manager has, at least according to the results of a recent public record request, admitted
that no objective evidence of improvement was submitted to the Commission with his request for
confirmation.
Rest assured that I have nothing personal against Mssrs. Cardeno, Santos, and Morales. Nevertheless,
since our type of government calls for a strong city manager with professional management experience,
intending that the city to be managed in a businesslike, apolitical manner, and since the city now has a
successful businessman for its mayor, I am not alone in expecting that the city's business be conducted
professionally, to be “managed by objectives.”
I am willing to entertain the notion that Code Compliance cannot be improved, that its performance is the
best possible, given the resistance on the ground to ivory tower theories.
Nonetheless, I insist that the performance, whatever it is, should be known to anyone interested,
especially to its administrators, in factual terms, to the fullest extent possible. And to that end another
study of the performance of Code Compliance is warranted, a study that should welcome inclusion of the
provision information from "outside" sources. I pray you to make sure that happens, hoping that
Compliance is not "protected."
Happy May Day!
Sincerely,
David Arthur Walters NOC

CC:
Philip Levine, Mayor
Jimmy Morales, City Manager
Hernan Cardeno, Director, Code Compliance Department
Robert Santos Alborna, Assistant Director, Code Compliance Department
James Sutter, Internal Auditor




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