Regalado wants to debate issues; Gimenez? To create issues

As the election gets closer, Carlos Gimenez and those friends and family who benefit from his elected office have gotten more desperate in their attempt to hang on to power and the goose that lays the golden egg.

First, they say that she was against police body cameras. False. Regalado simply said that there needed to be a policy and standard operating procedures in place first. She testified to this in Tallahassee, as a leader should, urging for a uniform policy to guide departments. This month, she was vindicated when a study by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights raised concerns about departments that rush to use body cameras without any policies or standard operating procedures.

Then, they say that she has been late or missed a bunch of school board meetings. Wrong again. She doesn’t always go to the proclamations and awards given out for the first hour or so, but Raquel Regalado has probably introduced more legislation than any other school board member in the history of the school board. You don’t do that by missing meetings. And anybody who knows her knows that she is an absolute workaholic.

The next allegation is an even bolder lie, just as absentee ballots began to arrive: They say she committed fraud, claiming a Homestead Exemption on a home she did not reside in.

Last week, a blogger with malicious intent wrote about this false allegation that the Gimenez campaign had fed him. How do I know they fed him? Because three different reporters have admitted to me that they were provided with the same information. That’s standard for campaigns and not a surprise. We, too, have provided reporters with information given to us. Or did you think the Miami Herald’s Doug Hanks found out about Ralph Garcia Toledo and his $200-an-hour job at Water and Sewer all by himself?

The difference is, the information we provide to the media is true. I say “we” because I am officially on Team Raquel in a media and communications role. That means that when I get information or tips that I normally would write about on this blog, I instead try to get others to write about it in the mainstream media. Because I know the TV stations and the daily paper have a bigger audience. And that is part of my job on the campaign. Not writing about the campaign here, like some of the Gimenez apologists will charge. Recently, I have been forced to publish the information here because the election is getting closer and voters deserve to know. But everything I write and everything I forward to other reporters is true.

The mayor and Dotty Vazquez in 2012. She now works in his office — The mayor and Dotty Vazquez at his Hialeah campaign office in 2012. She now works in his office at County Hall as a county employee.

Like the fact that a well known boletera who helped Gimenez in 2012 — an election in which his campaign was tainted with absentee ballot fraud — is now working in the mayor’s office as a $36,000-a-year aide doing public outreach in the senior centers,no less. Or that the mayor — who gave millions away in federal housing grants to the wrong people (wink, wink) — has proposed to pay the demanded refund to the U.S. Housing department by promising portions of future federal grants for several years. You know, after he’s no longer mayor we’ll get less federal housing money. And the concern that his cuts of domestic violence funding and police units could be rooted in a personal attitude toward women and relationships because of his own 2004 charge and his son’s charges of domestic violence.

Meanwhile, the information provided by the Gimenez campaign is false. Raquel Regalado is at every meeting or almost every meeting (maybe she missed one or two of them in six years, I don’t want to overstate). She is all for body cameras — done the right way. And she never committed any fraud. And that’s why none of the mainstream or legitimate media jumped on the story when they first got the property information, which was public.

In fact, it took the blogger several visits to the property appraiser to make this story happen. That’s right. It wasn’t a story, there was nothing there, until the blogger took comments made by Regalado out of context, cobbled together a story ignoring any facts that didn’t support his theory, and then got the appraiser to go after her three weeks before the election. When he was told that she didn’t have a property for them to lien, this blogger took it upon himself to inform the appraiser about a family home she got 10 percent of after her mother died, so they had something to move on. Maybe the media should start reporting on how this blogger set this whole thing in motion. What motivated him to cobble together this story out of comments taken out of context and bent to his hypothesis?

Once Raquel provides the complete documents, this will all be over.

Because it is ludicrous to believe that, as a sitting Miami-Dade School Board member, Raquel Regalado would intentionally cheat her own constituency for what? For a measly $2,000 or $2,500? Because the rest of it is interest and penalties. It is even more ridiculous to imagine that even if she had been evil enough to take advantage of the situation, she wouldn’t have taken care of it when she decided to run for mayor. What’s $2,500 to millionaire Norman Braman, her main donor?

It wasn’t taken care of because she didn’t even know about it. Fraud, ladies and gentlemen, needs intent. It is defined as the “intentional use of deceit, a trick or some dishonest means to deprive.” Key word: Intentional.

Yes, she moved out of her house and into a rented home. She was in the midst of a contentious divorce and her ex-husband had a claim on the house they had once shared. Meanwhile, the bank was foreclosing because she could not afford, as a newly-single mother, both the mortgage payments and her daughter’s autism therapy. It was not a difficult decision for her to make and any parent can understand. She abandoned the house so that her ex-husband would take up residence and possession of the home he had some rights to, as per the divorce settlement. He had every intention of moving into the home. When he didn’t, the foreclosure moved forward.

She never rented the house to anybody, as is the case with real Homestead exemption fraud cases. Nor did she claim another Homestead exemption on the new home, as other people committing fraud do. She didn’t stay and live in the house for free during the foreclosure. And, in fact, since she wasn’t paying the mortgage, she didn’t continue to pay the taxes on it. Property Appraiser Pedro Garcia said the property taxes for both years that Regalado didn’t live in the house were paid for by the mortgage company that took possession of the home. Foreclosure proceedings take time. Her name was still listed on the property but the home was no longer Raquel’s. The bills were paid by the bank.

So the oversight isn’t even hers! The mortgage company got the tax bill and paid it, failing to make the changes to indicate there was nobody living in the home anymore and that it was in the process of foreclosure.

See? There’s no there there. But you can’t fit all that on a robo call.

Curiously, before Raquel could clear things up, the Gimenez campaign already had their own robo call out to voters using the word fraud three times. It went out immediately after the story — like it had already been written and edited and approved and produced. Paid for by some Committee for Integrity — yeah, right — that is unlisted as a PAC or ECO, probably a non-profit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors. Astute political observers might surmise that the robo call — and the whole story and complaint to begin with — are part of the long planned political strategy mapped out by the Gimenez team against the only real challenge they’ve had in five years.

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Carlos Gimenez, Raquel Regalado

Regalado wants to debate issues; Gimenez? To create issues added by Ladra on August 12, 2016
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