Calusa Campground: Miami Dade County Commissioner Pepe Diaz gets his day before the county commission... by gimleteye

Tomorrow, Pepe Diaz has his day before the county commission. The Monroe County Commission. Therein hangs a tale.
The Florida Keys have always been a playground for Miami politicians; mostly under the sign of "what goes on in the Keys, stays in the Keys." Why not? The Keys are a place to cut loose (Joe Gersten), to speculate in property, or just let one's hair down. Things began changing during the real estate boom in the mid-1990’s. Suddenly it no longer seemed a developer's dream that Key Largo could be a bedroom community serving sprawling Miami-Dade.

There was the Homestead Air Force Base fiasco, that advertised proximity to the Keys as a drawing point for $10 billion of economic impacts. Lennar attempted to snuggle permits for a small city of 12,000 outside the Urban Development Boundary, a stone's throw from the Monroe County line, called Florida City Commons. Miami-Dade commissioners, like Pepe Diaz, couldn't vote the development forward fast enough, but it foundered in the housing market crash. And road widening, everywhere, including the 18 Mile Stretch.

Ask a resident of the Keys what they think about being married to Miami, and most will shake their heads, no. The people of the Keys treasure their Conch Republic just the way it is.

Jose Pepe Diaz is a charter member, as Eyeonmiami likes to say, of the unreformable majority of the Miami-Dade County Commission that uses zoning decisions for big developers and land speculators to guarantee permanent incumbency. Diaz owns at least one lot in a former trailer park, now condominium association in Key Largo, called Calusa Campground. As a “zoning council member” for the association he claims to have spent four years in the effort to obtain a development agreement with Monroe County. That agreement, subject of tomorrow's hearing, will ostensibly remove the source of hundreds of code violations and a legacy of bad relations with the county. Its collateral effect will, also, vest all 367 units of the 28 acre facility with the right to convert an RV lot into a transient, single-family residence.

To get a sense of this odd disproportion of interest, as a county commissioner, consider that: in 2007, Monroe County's budget was $373.1 million. Miami-Dade's was $7.3 billion.

Local zoning is the mother’s milk of Florida politics. Its utility in cementing incumbency is a core value for Diaz and his colleagues in Miami-Dade. Consider this example: Diaz has been the driving force on the Miami-Dade County Commission to move the Urban Development Boundary closer to the Everglades to accommodate a new Lowe’s Home Improvement Store. (A state court recently supported the state of Forida and intervenors and rejected the county's approval.) The Lowe's application that was vehemently opposed by citizens tired of the costs of sprawl; on families, on the Everglades, and the inevitable distortion of democracy that send concerned citizens to court to battle their own government.

The Lowe’s application was not only about providing a nearby hardware outlet for locals who didn’t want to get in their car to drive to Home Depot a few miles a way, or a charter school for needy students. It was also about using families to agitate for more growth and services to constantly expand development into "low cost" wetlands.

The May 20th meeting of the Monroe County Commission invites comparison. There was Pepe, on the other side of the dais, surrounded by local citizens dressed in white T-shirts as a “show of support”.

At least one Monroe County Commissioner was unaware that the Miami law firm and lobbyist, Tew Cardenas, the commission recently hired on behalf of the county was also representing Calusa Campground. (Mario DiGennaro, Diaz’ ally on the Monroe County Commission, owns a trailer park in Homestead, Florida, purchased through the New Aquarius Corporation.)

Al Cardenas, founding partner, is a top general in the Bush political dynasty: he was a Bush Pioneer, former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, and among other benefits that association conferred, his firm was designated “outside counsel” to the South Florida Water Management District. The former Miami-Dade water czar Roman Gastesi who is now Monroe County manager is a former Tew Cardenas lobbyist.

On its website, Calusa Campground offers: “An island paradise situated at the gateway to the Florida Keys at mile marker 101, near John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, the Calusa Campground Resort and Marina offers gated, bayfront resort community living for sale or vacation in luxurious RV condominiums surrounding a beautiful marina with direct access to the Atlantic Ocean via Marvin Adams Cut.”

But this island paradise has been engulfed, for years, in hundreds of code violations, citations, law enforcement actions and a legal battle that is costing neighbors hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The development agreement depends on a contested easement. The property Calusa Campground uses as an entrance and exit is under separate ownership. But there are other issues as well: long-time neighbors who value privacy are alarmed at the party-atmosphere of Calusa on weekends, dangerous boat traffic, and especially, the suspicion that the 367 owners will use a secondary road as a reliever for cars, boat trailers, trucks, and RV’s. In addition to code violations, there is also violation of US Army Corps regulations in the construction of illegal boat docks along an adjacent canal.

“I’m not going to let my house and two children fall victim to weekend parties, trash and garbage everywhere and a high volume of traffic,” said Harbor Drive resident Kelli Cuppett to the Key Largo Free Press (Calusa redevelopment hung up by access issues”, March 25, 2009) A local judge recently ruled in favor of Calusa’s claim to an historic easement. But it is not just the easement that is a problem for local neighbors.

Local neighbors are determined that the only other ingress and egress—through their small homeowner’s association—is not used as a release valve for whatever is coming to Calusa. So what is coming to Calusa? A trailer park seems small stuff, hardly worth the involvement of Tew Cardenas. And Tew Cardenas has been pushing its legal weight around, plenty, dividing neighbors and seeking to impose a cone of silence. For some reason, publicity on the Calusa Campground issue has struck a raw nerve. A dead silence has descended over the controvery, leading to tmoorrow’s hearing.

On May 20th, Pepe Diaz addressed the Monroe County Commission: “I understand the frustration of residents of Keys. I respect you want to keep a certain lifestyle. That’s why we come here. We love it. I understand. Everyone is passionate and everyone has their way of being. We’re here to work with staff. This is positive in every nature. … This is balanced and this gives a straight normality to a system that has been all over the place. Your frustration is our frustration. What is right and what is wrong. We just want to have our weekend and some more days here or there, that’s what we want to do, maybe later on life I can do that.”

It is hard to know what Pepe wants, because the public experience in Miami-Dade is that when Pepe has a zoning ordinance he is promoting, as in the case of Lowe’s, there is always another angle.

Then, too, there is the question of sincerity. “I will tell you that our intent has always been honorable and respectful to this community and will continue to be,” Diaz told the Monroe County Commission. Only a few minutes later, in the parking lot outside, Diaz confronted the property owner at the heart of the easement controversy, Albert Vigil, and called him “an extorionist and a racist.” Never mind, that Vigil—like Diaz—is Cuban American.

Vigil, who owns the property used for access by Calusa Campground, has spent more than a hundred thousand in legal fees on the issue of whether Calusa Campground has a legal easement to his property. He alleges that Diaz and insiders are spreading their own legal fees among condominium association owners while at the same time buying units as the come to sale. The association has spent more than $5 million on sewer and water upgrades to resolve longstanding code vilations. “As a share comes up for sale, they are supposed to offer it to everyone. Since the board is notified, only, of any foreclosure action, they (the board) are gobbling everything up.”

Vigil and a partner purchased their property for $250,000 and have offered it to Calusa for $1.2 million.

On April 23, 2004 Pepe Diaz paid $205,000 for a unit in Calusa Campground. (It is listed in Monroe County records at 1500 square feet and assessed at $292,164.) 2004 was the same year that Diaz “received $20,000 … from what federal prosecutors describe as a shell company used to conceal fraudulent proceeds from a hospital kickback scheme.” ('Naked Politics', Miami Herald, July 24, 2008) Diaz listed the funds on his public disclosure form from a medical supplier, Kaufman Medical Products. He later told the Herald it was “a bonus for work performed for the Astri Group”, owned by Carlos and Jorge de Cespedes. In a statement of income filed with Miami-Dade County in 2003, Diaz reported primary income of $78,000 from the Astri Group.” Documents listed his title as Director of Corporate Affairs for the Astri Group. (“Pepe Diaz Cancun Visit is Probed”, Miami Herald, June 10, 2006).http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/533817/pepe_diazs_cancun_visit_is_probed/index.html
The de Cespedes, who are now serving time in federal prison, also co-signed documents for Diaz’ condo unit at Calusa Campground.

A federal investigation was examining the relationship between the ultimate zoning lobbyist and developer, Sergio Pino, Carlos De Cespedes, and Diaz, who had taken a “fishing trip” to Cancun aboard Pino's private jet during a period when the Miami Dade county commission was considering a development approval for Pino project called Grand Bay Entities. Pino, a prominent campaign fund raiser in Miami Dade county commission races, was also in 2004 a Bush Ranger. No charges were filed.

A recent article in the Florida Keynoter reported: “After a long week at work, Miami-Dade Commisioner Jose Diaz likes to escape to Key Largo for a weekend of fishing and relaxation. His destination: Calusa Campground… Last Wednesday, the Monroe County Planning Commission said the RV site owners at Calusa Campground and other Keys RV parks can build vacation homes on their RV pads—and they can do so without waiting in line for building allocations in accordance with the county’s rate-of-ordinance, known as ROGO.” (3/30/2009)

At the end of the day, tomorrow, the main value of the development agreement may be to secure the rights to build a single family home, designated transient, on each of Calusa’s 367 lots. The Rate of Growth Ordinance (ROGO) is a unique aspect of local law in Florida. It is meant to create scarcity, in terms of building units, in order to protect a reasonable time for hurricane evacuation out of the Keys.

Looking at Keys real estate today, and the massive oversupply out of the housing boom, it is hard to say that ROGO, first implemented in 1992, did much good by limiting the vast overdevelopment of the Keys. The fact remains, ROGO units are not easy to come by. There is a complex point and tier system that is meant to fairly allocate growth but also provides opportunity for lawyering and lobbying. Wherever scarcity meets politics there is opportunity to make a lot of money.

In the case of Calusa, it is possible that the owners of ROGO units could trade or sell them for a right to construct similarly zoned property, or affordable housing, somewhere else in the Keys. The value of those ROGO rights could be worth millions, or, very little. But many paid as little as $35,000 for an individual lot at Calusa.

It certainly wasn’t planned that way. Up the Florida coast at Briny Breezes, at around the time Diaz became involved in Calusa Campground, a development group offered to pay trailer owners $510 million to owners of each of 488 trailers on 42 acres fronting the Atlantic. The news turned trailer park owners into instant millionaires.

Today, the Keys are sinking under the weight of for sale signs. By August 2007, the deal for Briny Breezes collapsed; a victim of the housing bust. It is hard to know whether units at Calusa purchased in the froth of the housing boom, like Diaz’, retain anything near their assessed value. It is a question millions of Florida homeowners are asking themselves every day.

Some kind of consolidation, separation, and transfer of ROGO units to affordable housing seem to be the play for trailer parks in the Florida Keys. Perhaps Calusa Campground is the model for a grand development that will wrap up scarcity and opportunity in a way that only works when “local control” is secured by powerful lobbyists. The only thing certain about the controversy at Calusa Campground is that legal costs for all parties total hundreds of thousands of dollars. Neighbors, contesting illegal boat docks whose permits cost only a few hundred dollars, have spent tens of thousands in court.

Whatever happens at the Monroe County Commission tomorrow, the Calusa Campground story is not over by a long shot.