Natacha Seijas, US Century Bank: top supporters, going down with the ship ... by gimleteye

County commissioner Natacha Seijas, facing a recall election next week in Hialeah, represents the land speculators and developers whose greed and determination to turn every last square acre of the county into suburban sprawl symbolizes the poverty of imagination that is a hallmark of South Florida. The political forces in Miami Dade who championed sprawl-- leading by force of campaign contributions that shut out all opposition-- center around the Latin Builders Association and its directors.

Seijas, in a recent public opinion poll, likely to face defeat by an angry electorate next week. What is not clear, and has never been clear to the electorate, is the extent to which Seijas stands for the influence peddling and horrendous politics that came to full expression through suburban sprawl. Seijas' approval ratings are at rock bottom, but so are her supporters and their business lines that depended on massive infusion of capital to service debt loads built on land speculation. Take her top supporters for example; Century Homes and US Century Bank.

Sergio Pino, Ramon Rasco, Jose Cancela, Augustin Herran: the founders and directors of US Century Bank had a simple purpose: to extend the empire of suburban sprawl to the Everglades in Miami-Dade, using up every buildable acre. They are among the biggest land speculators, as individual investors, outside the Urban Development Boundary (projects like Parkland) where they are still at work, hand in glove with Lennar and other publicly held companies, to push sprawl into farmland. They are omnipresent at County Hall where their political influence deformed the entire purpose of local government during the run up to the biggest housing boom and then crash in Florida history-- miming the economic fortunes of the nation--, turning the county zoning department into an embattled and stressed hothouse where planners either grew skin thick as a rino's or found another place to work.

Seijas and staff including Terry Murphy played the central role in shaping the accommodation of power, money and authority in government to the needs and preferences of the builders and bankers. In the case of the Homestead Air Force Base fiasco, tens of millions of dollars and nearly a decade deformed the focus of local government to serve their plans. Wasted. The subsidiary effect of so much lobbying was to degrade every other effort to protect Miami Dade's quality of life and environment. For example, there was nothing coincidental about the M-D Police Department looting the environmental fund, millions of dollars cobbled together from fines collected by polluters. Snatch and grab has been the entire culture of county government, with its corner markers set down in clear scents on the playing field by the big dogs. Yes, Ramon Rasco and the HABDI investors were about aviation and how to maximize private profit, but the real play in Homestead was for suburban sprawl: to make billions by putting tens of thousands of newcomers into crappy subdivisions in South Dade, the Redland and West Dade.

US Century Bank was at the forefront: a homegrown bank to serve the mortgage needs of sprawl. Like Seijas, the bank is rated zero today. The latest report by Bauer Financial has some astounding statistics: in the quarter ended Sept 30, 2010, loans to insiders as a percentage of total networth was 62%, or eighty percent higher than its peer group. Partly, as a result, Bauer rated US Century with a single star, representing a "troubled bank" rating. In the latest quarter, as of Dec 31, 2010, that ratio -- of insider loans to total net worth, soared to 76%, or ninety three percent higher than its peers. The bank has four times the amount of nonperforming assets compared to its peer group and ten times the value of repossessed assets-- essentially sprawl waiting for the next crop of gullible buyers-- to its net worth. Although the Bauer report notes that the bank is "adequately capitalized", US Century is one of the financial system's walking dead: alive thanks to the generosity of the Federal Reserve, propping up speculators who continue to influence local, state and national politics.

In the end, the piggy bank serving Natacha Seijas will be absorbed by another investor-- a bank too big to fail perhaps, or a financial engineer who wipes out shareholders for pennies on the dollar in order to start afresh on the game of sprawl with a clean slate. Like BankUnited, US Century will have great memories of hosting basketball stadiums, fundraisers for Republican candidates and Chamber of Commerce luncheons, where everyone nodded in unison what a swell thing it is to take wetlands and turn them into something profitable, what wonders the "free market" is compared to Havana or Managua or Caracas. US Century will go the way of the dodo, the bird that couldn't fly. Its assets will be scavenged while the politicians who supported all those shifted costs to taxpayers and voters will retire to Ocala, cashing in their undeclared gambling chips or foreign corporate ownership of condos in the Bahamas or Panama. They will sink from sight to be recovered at a fraction of their original worth, like the 73 foot Donzi that sunk this week in Gables Estates and salvaged. It is called, "Century Star", and if its walls could speak who knows what else we would learn about these years when our options shrank to the size of a inflatable dinghy.

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