Redland, the Wades, and the armies of compassion: Part 4 ... by gimleteye

"It is a joy to be here with members of the armies of compassion. I'm really glad you're here and I appreciate your inspiration to our fellow citizens. I believe you are a constant reminder of the true source of our nation's strength, which is the good hearts and souls of the American people." President Bush discusses Volunteerism, Sept. 8, 2008

For those of you who have followed this series, it is lengthy. You may want to go back, and begin with the first and following parts, before jumping to forward.

For Part 1, click here. For Part 2, click here. For Part 3, click here. Please click on "read more" for Part 4 of this series.

On New Year's Day, I will print the conclusion, Part 5. After revisions, I will post the entire piece. There have been some good comments on the earlier posts. Thank you for the input.


In the end, all the recall attempt against Natacha Seijas accomplished was to penalize a lazy notary and scar the life of a 26 year old petition gatherer whose first involvement in American politics involved a mistake that brought law enforcement down on him like a ton of bricks.

But from here, to there, is a drama that wraps up the ideals of democracy in the heavy folds of suppression; it is a feeling of steely determination clanging on iron bars of the castle door, inviting the institutional abuse of power by organs of government charged with protecting individual liberty, freedom, and the right of citizens to petition their government.

A bill of complaint against County Commissioner Natacha Seijas was appended to a November 2006 fundraiser solicitation by The Committee for Recall of Miami-Dade Commissioners: voted in favor of moving the Urban Development Boundary to further enrich big developers, instead of protecting the wellbeing of taxpayers and our limited water supply, voted in favor and defended preventing Miami-Dade County citizen’s right to vote on the Strong Mayor amendment, spending tax dollars to hire expensive attorneys to prevent the people from voting, voted in favor and defended the powerful rock mining owners so they can obtain permits to blast and dig without going to public hearings, voted in favor and defended mitigation fees imposed on new cities and voted against letting the people of the Falls and Redland vote on incorporation, verbally attacks and is disrespectful to citizens and County staff who differ from her opinion and speak in public hearings before the Miami-Dade County Commission, under her watch, the Miami Dade Water and Sewer department allowed developers to not pay millions in water usage, the scandal with the cell phone abuses, the loss of millions of dollars meant for affordable housing, and our County was sanctioned by the state for not complying with the 2005 Growth Management law, Seijas gave $10,000 of her District 13 funds to the lobbying arm of an insurance company, Seijas has spoken against protection of wildlife and preservation of our 2 National Parks, and last but not least: Seijas demanded removal of a banner in the lobby of County hall designed to bring attention to the genocide and starvation in Darfur, Africa.

What the campaign didn’t say is that Seijas has been the de facto chairman of the Miami Dade County Commission for many years, inducing fear and loathing from within county agencies and wielding authority for the $7 billion budget of the county like a cudgel.

There is something glorious about what the Wades did: from the ranch-style house in Redland, where they have lived for 28 years—volunteering most of that time in one battle after another to protect farmland and the quality of life from suburban sprawl—for weeks on end Pat Wade would drive an hour on the Palmetto Expressway to the edge of Seijas district, to a Winn Dixie in Miami Lakes. At rush hour, the drive would take two hours, not one.

Late in the afternoon, and all day on weekends, she would ask strangers to sign the petition for recall of Natacha Seijas. The Wades had defended Redland for 28 years; now they were spending hours and days in what would be their last gift to Miami-Dade County.

The recall effort against Seijas would be the first since 1972 in Miami-Dade County. From their small rural enclave, Redland, in meetings held at night in the quiet of rural Florida with nothing but millions of acres of Everglades on one side and a building boom of historic proportions on the other, the Wades and their team of volunteers wondered where to hide the first petitions that had been collected to force a recall vote of their nemisis, Natacha Seijas.

Pat Wade says today, “People were too scared to take them. No one wanted them in their house or office. They told me, you have more hiding places. So we put the petitions in a plastic container and hid them in an outbuilding on our property.”

The feeling of estrangement is a shared emotion on the highway in Miami; the lines to separate lanes of traffic really have no meaning when the only constancy getting from place A to place B is the uncertainty; how bad will the traffic be? Put yourself in the shoes of the Wades and the other volunteers; you have certified your petition recall and now you have to collect the signatures. What do people know about Natacha Seijas, that she should be recalled?

At the time, Seijas was a four-term county commissioner, born and raised in Havana. Within her district, almost entirely Hispanic, she has been exceedingly attentive to constituents, mostly middle and lower-income families, just like a good pot-hole politician should. But it is clear enough from polling and election results that very few voters—especially the elderly voters whose graces Seijas cultivates carefully—know about or even care what happens through Seijas’ office in respect to the county edges, like Redland.

But put yourself in the Wades’ shoes, stuck on the Palmetto, understanding how estrangement is the essential feature that has allowed so many thousands of acres to be destroyed for unsustainable growth; in the ceaseless stream of cars around them on their daily voyage into Seijas’ political stronghold, how many people cared enough about a wetland, or stream, to make anything more than the smallest contribution? How many would do, what the Wades and their allies did at the other end of the drive, in the parking lot of Winn Dixie?

It is tempting to imagine the frame of this story is two women of equally strong will and equal determination to uphold what they believe in. But it is the wrong frame. It is the story of two powerful women, but only one of them commanded the full weight of government, a privilege she may believe she is entitled to, in deference to her election by constituents. That is not, however, her privilege and she paid no price for wielding it like a cudgel.

In the Winn Dixie parking lot, Pat Wade would approach strangers to sign the recall petition. “Most people would stop and listen. Some people said, ‘I’m not political and don’t know much about it.’ ‘Well this is just to get it on the ballot, and you will have time to do research,’ I would say. Some union people who came by, said, ‘I really shouldn’t be signing this, but she has to go.”

Looking back, Pat Wad says, “She was every bit as vicious as we thought. That woman (Seijas) or Terry Murphy (her chief of staff) went over those petitions, and I’m sure she was vindictive.”

From start to finish, the story of the Seijas recall is about the abuse of power in Florida’s most politically important county. The final result is incidental. What happened between the beginning and end can be encapsulated in a single word: intimidation.

To this day Seijas continues as the de facto chair of the county commission: no business of the county passes without her stamp of approval. Over time, that stamp has been wielded with a heavier and heavier hand. An account by Miami New Times suggests that Seijas lives a secluded life beyond her appearances at County Hall. She enjoyed a no-show job at the YMCA of Greater Miami paying her a salary of $52,499.

To Miami’s lobbyists and power brokers, she had proven her worth as a reliable enforcer of the status quo; in particular, with respect to zoning issues. In the early 1990’s, she proved a quick study of Miami power politics. She had not only proven her mettle by ram-rodding the no-bid lease for the Homestead Air Base on behalf of campaign contributors, she mastered the micro-management of contract awards at Miami International Airport, the largest economic engine in the county, forming a symbiotic relationship with lobbyists like Rodney Barreto and Sergio Pino.

It was a massive affront to Seijas’ sense of order that Anglos from the Redland would organize to upset the balance of power that delivered Hialeah over and over again; her sinecure, a fortress built from political contributions from Cuban American developers who lived in gated communities in Coral Gables, South Miami and Pinecrest and whose influence carried to the Florida legislature and beyond.

The recall effort began in January 2006. The Wades and a core group of like-minded citizens formed a political action committee, raised a small amount of money, and drafted a petition for Seijas’ recall.

In order to qualify for a district recall election, the Wades and their allies needed more than 6,000 qualified signed petitions. Individually, and with limited assistance from paid petition gatherers, the Wades ventured into the Hialeah political fortress. With limited funding and only a few Spanish-language speaking volunteers, the campaign enlisted individual paid petition gatherers who did speak Spanish; they were paid $10 per hour. Pat Wade says they didn’t compensate by the number of petitions generated—the normal way that petition gathering companies organize—“we didn’t want them to be tempted by corruption.”

It is an important point because the campaign knew from the first their every action would be highly scrutinized. Every petition had to be signed and addressed, and petition gatherers were required to sign each page and each page was required to be notarized.

In May 2006, the Clerk of the Court Harvey Ruvin disallowed 3978 signatures out of 6177 submitted because the petition circulators did not print their names in block letters as required by county ordinance. The county ordinance governing petitions only provides that the circulator’s name must be “printed”. The Clerk of Court determined that “print” meant block letters and not cursive, despite the fact that any search of the county database finds thousands of legal documents signed in cursive script. Ruvin’s action was a setback. The campaign responded by filing a lawsuit in circuit court.

Pat Wade was a witness at the trial. She made the following discovery. The evidence submitted by the county against the campaign, based on the use of cursive signatures, glided over the fact that she, herself, had signed her name with some of the letters running into each other, cursive-style. Not a single petition collected by a member of the political action committee was challenged. “The ones they zeroed in, on,” says Wade, “were the poor ladies from Nicaragua helping us. Why? Our opponents believed they were the ones who could be intimidated.”

In the hallway during the trial, Wade began a conversation with an election official, Ivy Corman, that would have resonance later. “She was haranguing me about the folding over the tops of the petitions. I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘Well you should have seen ones that came in through the elections department, all folded over.’” The intimation was that the campaign was hiding information from the people who were signing the petition.

Based on the selective application of the signature rule by the county, the state court ruled that the Clerk of the Court had erred and allowed the election to proceed, setting a December 2006 date.

Seijas’ legal team was led by Stephen Cody, an attorney who shared office space with Miguel De Grandy, a lynchpin of the Seijas support structure. De Grandy, recognized by the Latin Builders Association as attorney of the year in 1995, developed his practice with Greenberg Traurig. He was the principal Miami attorney advocating for HABDI, the prospective developer of the Homestead Air Force Base. A former state legislator and advisor to Republican causes, De Grandy was one of the Florida legal team representing Bush in the contested 2000 election, and chief counsel for Jeb Bush’s transition team in 2002. It would be a check from Miguel De Grandy to Ken Forbes, later, that would focus the ire of the Florida Division of Elections.

Forbes was a long-time political operative in South Dade who was well-known for serial political action committees wherever he sensed opportunity. He mounted a counter-attack; a PAC formed around a recall petition aimed at Pat Wade, as a member of the local Community Council 14. Forbes, a resident of Princeton—a small, predominantly African American community to the east of Redland—wrote to the Clerk of Court notifying his campaign against Wade. The statement of reason for recall against Wade included that her “statements and votes reflect an anti-growth, anti-business agenda that has significantly impaired the economic health of the area.” Forbes’ PAC did not target any of the other community council members who frequently sided with Wade.

Although the Clerk of Court challenged the recall petitions, irregularities that allowed the Ken Forbes effort to quickly move forward were ignored . Later, the Florida Division of Elections—at the instigation of the Wades—would examine the Forbes’ records for campaign violations and, ultimately, successfully bring charges against him.

The Wades spent hours collecting signatures in Seijas’ district. But the atmosphere of intimidation was never far from the challengers’ minds. Seijas called her opponents, “people I despise.”

One Sunday in March, petition circulators outside of the Miami Lakes Publix supermarket were accosted by Seijas in a rage. “''She started shaking her finger at me like a schoolteacher,'' said Elisa Toruño, who lives in South Miami-Dade. She and other volunteers were collecting signatures outside the Publix on Miami Lakes Drive when Seijas approached them. Toruño said Seijas accused them of getting paid to collect signatures, then grew angry when told the women were in fact volunteering their time. ''She got really upset, and got in my face,'' said Toruño, a diminutive 68-year-old who used a Spanish word for ''brave'' to describe herself. “But I wasn't intimidated. Probably I am more guapa than she is.” Toruño said Seijas then marched into the Publix and complained to managers, who came out and asked the women to leave.”

The harassment of petition gatherers did not stop there. After Seijas became aware of their presence, store managers at Publix, Sedanos and Wal-Mart began calling the police to stop the petition circulators, particularly the Hispanic ones the campaign was able to hire. Seijas was so infuriated with the Wades, that she prodded the state attorney to conduct an investigation .

For those seeking to change government by petition, it is not a trivial matter how and where you are able to collect signatures. In a state whose landscape is largely defined by suburbia, malls and shopping centers are virtually the only place where people congregate or stop their cars long enough to share a public space.

Some petition circulators were harassed by Hialeah city police. Seijas counted among her strong supporters the mayor of Hialeah, Julio Robaina ,and John Rivera, president of the Police Benevolent Association of Miami-Dade. Rivera “sent letters to Hialeah residents warning of petitioners disguised as Miami-Dade Election Department employees.” On more than one occasion, during the 60 period in which the campaign was required to submit the required number of petitions, police pulled over petition circulators as they went from neighborhood to neighborhood by car. After a routine ID check and check of petitions, the circulators were allowed to proceed, but in at least one case, the same car that had been stopped was stopped by another squad car only a few minutes later.

At the same time, according to Wade, investigators from Miami-Dade law enforcement were going from house to house in Hialeah with blown-up photos of the drivers licenses of petition circulators, asking residents if they actually signed a petition ‘handed to you by this person’. Was the right answer, for the respondents, yes or no? As might be expected from an area populated by Hispanic immigrants from countries bearing the history of dictatorships and police repression, many answered, no.

During this time, Wade says she had received a call from a friend who was a private investigator. The friend had done a job for a political operative who was very close to Seijas. “He told me, Seijas is looking for your home address.” Wade’s address and phone number are unlisted.

Members of the political action committee who allowed their names to be used in the campaign against Seijas were further harassed. One individual, a bailiff in the county court system, was threatened with his job. The Hispanic circulators –from 12 to 15 in total-- were also subject to criminal investigation; an alarming development that put people making $10 per hour in view of costly legal bills. The chilling effect was palpable.

Seijas called on all the developers she had helped with zoning decisions for years in the month leading up to the election. On November 17th, ‘South Dade Growers for Natacha’ held a fundraiser for her at a restaurant on Krome Avenue, with a solicitation by organizers from the Dade County Farm Bureau board of directors on behalf of a political action committee called Citizens/Peoples’ Choice.

Seijas called in all her chits: the Service Employees International Union in Broward contributed $50,000, Greenberg Traurig, $5000, the Police Benevolent Association, $5000, and an assorted list of Miami’s top development and lobbying interests. The Citizens to Protect the People's Choice PAC raised $433,930, while the People Improving Our Neighborhoods PAC added an additional $12,060. The groups brought in 10 times the $44,018 raised by the Wades and their allies on the Committee for Recall of Miami-Dade Commissioners.

With limited funds and harassed at every turn, the campaign against Seijas had difficulty gaining traction, especially among an Hispanic population in a municipality who needed to persuaded to vote in special election related to the bad conduct and performance of a county commissioner that required voters to think beyond local issues.

Take the environment, for instance. Although polling shows that Hispanics are extraordinarily receptive to the notion that bad politics are responsible for environmental destruction, mainstream environmental organizations in Miami have had difficulty in turning local Hispanics to activism. In the case of Natacha Seijas, environmental groups had ample reason to become involved: for more than a decade, individuals and organizations had endured her insults and attacks—delivered with depressing regularity—from the dais at County Hall. For Seijas, it had become a form of blood sport that delighted her supporters in the audience and watching the proceedings from television or webcast.

But in their calculation, the environmental groups –also strapped for funding and with virtually no organization in Hialeah—had little to gain by a campaign that seemed, at worst, to be simply poking the beehive that had tormented them (on the Everglades, water supply, lime rock mining in wetlands, manatee protection, on and on) with a stick. Within county government, Seijas’ penchant for meddling in the operation of environmental-related agencies was well-known: what was there to be gained by environmentalists for putting the few regulators who were sympathetic to their aims under further and rougher scrutiny? With little scope for direct political activity, groups like Audubon focused on working with and trying to influence processes.

Other Miami environmental groups who are most inclined to grass-roots activism, like Clean Water Action, had made significant inroads in communicating political aims with Hispanic audiences. In 2003, for instance, the environmentalists had mounted a considerable public outreach campaign in Hispanic districts, generating tens of thousands of contacts to county commissioners—to then chairman of the county commission, Joe Martinez, in particular—to stop a development outside the Urban Development Boundary sought by Lennar Homes in Florida City. The movement, called “Hold The Line”, grew to absorb repeated applications to move the Urban Development Boundary, including Hialeah and an application sought by Armando Codina, a prominent Republican and former business partner of Jeb Bush.

Martinez was deeply irritated by the phone calls and petitions that flooded his office at the time, and the possible emergence of an opponent who could harness the building energy. For environmental groups and civic organizations, overcoming the inertia and suppression of their core issues—in the public realm and mainstream media, too—is difficult at any time but never more so than it was during the building boom when production homebuilders, fueled by a tsunami of easy money, were frantic in a growing orgy of platted subdivisions in farmland; otherwise known as Natacha Seijas’ bread and butter.

According to Mike Pizzi, one of the organizers of the recall campaign and recently elected the mayor of nearby Miami Lakes, “Part of the problem is that we (had) been banned from (Hispanic) radio. In other words, Seijas and her people are on the radio every five minutes, but the (Hispanic) media refuses all requests to present the other side. I am assuming that some big money is paying for these programs.”

As if to affirm their support for Seijas, in early December 2006—only two weeks before the recall vote against Seijas—the majority of Miami-Dade County Commissioners approved two measures aimed directly at petition circulators and recall efforts. The Miami Herald opinion page called them “revenge driven ordinances to intimidate petition signature gatherers and, potentially, the people who sign them.” The commissioners didn’t care: they were approved. It was time to show the colors and for the regiment to stand in line behind their leader. Both measures were subsequently overturned in state court.

In total, Seijas handily raised $500,000, far outmatching the recall forces whose ammunition had been largely spent in the campaign and legal defense. The Miami Herald wrote, “Many developers, builder and landowners that stand to benefit financially from movement of the line contributed to political action committees (PACs) that supported Seijas during a recall election last year, according to records.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to reflect on the pressure that was building on the Wades and their campaign allies, or, what their emotions when an unmarked squad car with two Miami-Dade investigators appeared at their home, on an early December evening in 2006. The Wades had done nothing wrong: they invited the investigators into their house without qualm but asked and were allowed to tape record the conversation that ensued.

They asked questions like, what do you have against Seijas? Who started this? Who trained you to collect petition signatures? Who did you train? Did you fold the petition at the top to hide what it was all about?

The folded petitions recalled the earlier conversation Pat Wade had, in March, with the elections official who intimated that petition circulators were lying to the pubic; among the charges that was leveled at the Wades directly from the dais by county commissioners in their fusillade on December 1st. Today, Wade recalls that she had gotten an answer from one of the PAC members, Millie Herrera; the petitions were legal size and the folder that Ms. Herrera had used to keep them was only letter size, and so she folded them to fit.

Seijas survived the December 20th special election, in a lopsided 5,423-to-2,940 vote.” 11 percent of eligible voters turned out for the special election. Reflecting an intense effort to drive elderly voters to the polls, “almost 5,000” of the votes were cast early.

The consequences of the Seijas recall effort had both near and far-reaching ramifications.

In respect to the failed effort against Pat Wade’s community council seat, John Wade charged the state attorney of a double-standard: “(Centorino) is not investigating Forbes because Wade and his wife were members of the anti-Natacha Seijas political action committee…’There seems to be a double-standard here… as if the state attorney’s office is picking and choosing who they want to prosecute.”

In April 2007, the Florida Elections Commission finally ruled against Ken Forbes, who had mounted the recall attempt against Pat Wade. “Chief among the alleged violations: a $2,200 check from the committee’s campaign account that Forbes made out to himself and told investigators was used to pay campaign workers, a commission report said.” Also at issue, a $500 check reported as a cash contribution from Seijas’ Svengali, Miami attorney Miguel De Grandy. The check was made out to Forbes’ wife.

In February 2006, the Florida legislature passed a bill to tightly regulate signature-gatherers; S 1244 was called the Petition Fraud and Voting Protection Act. The Florida League of Women Voters filed suit in federal court against the measure on May 18, 2006. The state LWV had no inkling of where the energy for this bill originated. “I’m not sure what our representatives in Tallahassee were thinking when they voted for this law,” said Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida. What they were thinking of, was Natacha Seijas’ recall in Miami-Dade County. In August 2006, a federal district court in Miami blocked enforcement of the law.

In 2007, the Florida legislature passed another bill aimed squarely at the collection of petitions on private property. SB 1920 was proposed by Publix, the supermarket chain that had felt the lash of Seijas’ fury in Hialeah. The measure was directed at the kind of petition circulation that the anti-Seijas petitioners had worked out, at supermarkets. Signed into law by Governor Crist on June 27, 2007, the bill allows private businesses to prohibit citizen petition drives on their property. The bill provides that a private person exercising lawful control over any privately-owned property, including commercial property open to the public, may prohibit all activities on the property that support or oppose constitutional amendment initiatives. It was supported by the Florida Chamber of Commerce and opposed by public interest groups like Sierra Club.”

On February 28, 2008—more than two years after the recall election—two people were arrested and charged with breaking the law governing signature collection. One was a notary who had notarized the signature of a circulator when the circulator was not present. For Anibal Roberto Orellana-Ramirez, as a 26 year old, it was his first exposure to US politics. His crime: a half sheet of signatures he had forged. Indeed, of all the thousands of people who had been involved in the Seijas recall attempt, the pressure on the State Attorney’s Office, the Clerk of the Court, on the Miami-Dade and Hialeah police, of all the pressure of developers to come to the rescue of their enabler, it came down to a lazy notary and a kid who was paid $10 an hour and was thrilled to make a difference and, instead, learned that the cost of a mistake can be high or low, depending on who is weighing it.