On political corruption, blind Retrievers and the Miami Herald by gimleteye

The Sunday Miami Herald, “Land in probe has big-name ties”, will send waves of irritation through Miami’s development community. The report links prominent developers and business partners Armando Codina and Sergio Pino in a Doral land deal under scrutiny by the federal grand jury investigation of county commissioner Pepe Diaz.

A year ago, Codina sold the main part of his real estate business to Florida East Coast Industries, Inc. in a complicated transaction valued at over $100 million. Today, Codina is the lead director on the Board of Directors of AMR (American Airlines), a director of General Motors, and other major corporations. He is President and CEO of Flagler Development Company and the Codina Group.

Pino is the founder of several businesses connected through “Century”, including a plumbing supply company, U.S. Century Bank and Century Builders. As a lobbyist for his own and other interests, he is one of the main stanchions of support for the majority of the Miami Dade County Commission.

The question, though we can guess the answer, is why Pepe Diaz, a county commissioner with a background in law enforcement, believed he did nothing wrong by accepting a free vacation and private jet flight on Pino’s plane to Mexico shortly after Diaz voted on a zoning change in his district that was worth tens of millions of dollars to his host?


From the county commissioner point of view, all Diaz has done is to facilitate what is good for his district, zoning to expand tax base through development on vacant land.

Zoning of property exists to be altered. It is not fixed in stone, like the Ten Commandments. The Eleventh Commandment, apparently: what happens in Cancun, stays in Cancun.

To recount from yesterday’s Herald report: early in 2003, Commissioner Diaz helped Flagler Property—which Codina was not involved with at the time--zone the Doral property to industrial use.

In December of the same year, Pino purchased the 465 acre property for $80 million. According to the Herald, Pino “subdivided his portion and sold part of it to an investment group, that includes himself, for $152 million.” It is kind of like buying two lots, selling one off and getting the other for free.

Re-zoning is big business.

For instance, Codina is pressuring the county commission to re-zone his 465 acre Beacon Lakes project—a development once outside the Urban Development Boundary now zoned industrial. Part of Codina’s argument to persuade the county commission to move the urban development boundary in 2001 was that his project would not include polluting industries since it is adjacent to county wellfield protection zone: at the time he argued that he would not ask for other zoning which would be potentially more harmful.

So in this context—with the building boom minting centi-millionaires—why would Pepe Diaz think he’d done anything wrong is supporting the re-zoning of property he had already encouraged for one kind of development into an “environmentally friendly”, “traditional neighborhood design”, a plan he had praised as “something of beauty” in the zoning hearing by the county commission.

From Pino and Codina’s point of view, all they are trying to do is create more value, by up-zoning large tracts of land when there is a scarcity of land in the first place.

The federal grand jury of Diaz is seeking a subpoena of “all records related to the property, and records of any occasions when Commissioner Diaz, who championed the rezoning effort, recused himself from matters pending before the commission.”

This seems to be the nub: should Pepe Diaz have recused himself from any decisions regarding the property?

As far as Natacha Seijas is concerned, there is no reason to recuse. Seijas was indignant—positively indignant!—in 2005 when the suggestion was made that her ally, Barbara Jordan, should recuse herself from a zoning decision involving the annexation by Florida City for a Lennar development project that would have eventually entailed a vote to move the Urban Development Boundary, represented by her sister, Sandy Walker, on the one hand, and her brother, Otis Wallace, on the other, the mayor of Florida City.

In the order that prevails at the county commission, the people who need to recuse themselves from involvement in zoning matters are citizens.

Citizens who have concerns that might override zoning decisions in favor of developers: schools, traffic, infrastructure coss, the environment, are simply out of order.

That’s what Natacha Seijas, the de facto county commission chair, means when she commands citizens to show “respect”: what she really means is, obey our order.

The response of Seijas—strongly supported by Pepe Diaz—to the citizen’s campaign to recall her was to punish any future effort to petition the people’s government by raising false signatures to a criminal offense and the threshold for signature gathering to a level that virtually assures there will never be a recall effort of an incumbent commissioner, again.

In this world order, why wouldn't Pepe Diaz climb aboard the private jet at Tamiami or Opalocka Airport without a care in the world?

There is no problem with the environment: that’s something that laws and regulations protect (of course, Seijas and Diaz both supported the elimination of public hearings for zoning requests by rock miners, whose activities have put carcinogens in the drinking water aquifer serving 2.3 million Miami-Dade County residents.)

Looking at it from Diaz’ point of view, taking a vacation with friends in the Caribbean was a lot less than what Joe Martinez did, then chair of the county commission, in 2003 with a sales contract for a piece of land sold by a politically influential developer that didn’t close until January 2005.

In December 2005, the Miami Herald reported that earlier in the year, then-county commission chair Martinez put down 1 percent to purchase vacant land from Caribe Homes, owned by then president of the Latin Builders Association, Charlie Martinez, at $8 per square foot when comparable land, 18 months later, was selling for $16 per square foot.

In its multi-decade history, it was only the second time that Caribe Homes sold vacant land to a private person.

According to the Herald, Charlie Martinez was initially “very skittish” about the deal. “At issue is a handful of votes Joe Martinez made during the months he was under conract for Caribe Homes—votes that helped create special taxing districts for Caribe developments, incluing the one for which he was buying property. During that 18-month window maybe he should not have been voting on anything on Caribe,” Myers told the Herald.”

In March 2006, the Miami Herald turned up another Joe Martinez story: that the Miami Dade Ethics Commission, headed by Robert Myers, gave Martinez the go-ahead to accept free services from a Latin Builder Association board member in drywalling his 5300 square foot West Dade home and getting free help lining up subcontractors, obtaining quotes and doing the kinds of things that people pay general contractors thousands of dollars to handle.

Ana Menendez, Herald columnist, wrote, “The political class long ago decamped to an alternate ethical reality, a kind of Circus Abamoff where perceptions and moral dilemmas are something to be managed.”

The ethics commission hunts down public corruption as effectively as a 15 year old Labrador with cataracts chases tennis balls: it knows it’s there but has no idea which way to find it.

So in other words, there is no problem. That is what Codina will say. That is what Pino will say. That is what Diaz will say. That is what Natacha will say (but she will say more, she will say she doesn’t have any email whatsoever and you know why.)

If you are one of the agency department heads who bent to her will and suffered acid reflux for doing so, or Bruno’s, or whoever is nominal chair, don’t worry: be quiet and there’s a job at Post Buckley Shuh Jernigan or another engineering company or a compliant municipality like Hialeah, waiting for you on retirement.

We are not inclined to blame the Herald, as Codina and Pino will be doing today.

But we do have a question: on the one hand, your reporters write strong stories about rum drinks on Hatteras in the Cancun and private jet travel between developer and pal county commissioner in which allegedly no county business is discussed. Why, then, when you had the chance to endorse county commissioners, did you support incumbents and urge voters to resist the temptation to “throw the bums out”?

If we edited the Miami Herald, we would post a score box right on A2 in the bottom left corner: every single edition of the paper would record the number of days that the Miami Dade County Commission has failed to enact ethics standards and reform and would highlight the most flagrant ethical lapses that the blind Retriever of the Ethics Commission has failed to find.

We don’t need the reminder, but 2.3 million people who live in Miami-Dade County, do.