Jonah Wolfson shuts down shady Miami Beach PAC — $1.5 mil later

Jonah Wolfson shuts down shady Miami Beach PAC — $1.5 mil later
  • Sumo

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now Levine has an opponent who was encouraged to run against the mayor, in part, because of the very PAC.

RFP had become a liability.

Weithorn said  she got literally hundreds Levine Wolfson PACof calls about it in the past six to eight weeks and she had begun to give them Wolfson’s contact info. “I am really happy that the people in Miami Beach found this PAC as distasteful as I did,” the commissioner told Ladra late Thursday.

“I spoke to hundreds of residents who were nauseated and who were deeply saddened that Miami Beach had sunk this low,” Weithorn said.

Read related story: Miami Beach candidates shy away from mayor’s shady PAC

Just look at Wednesday’s candidate forum at the National Hotel. Sponsored by the Miami Beach Bar Association and the Miami Beach Latin Chamber of Commerce, questions about the PAC dominated the session and were the first ones asked by CBS4’s Eliott Rodriguez. Even the candidates that the PAC was formed for didn’t want to align themselves with it.

But if Wolfson can’t shake down donors for political reasons then he is going to make sure nobody else can, either. The commissioner said he is going to bring an ordinance to the next commission meeting that would prohibit elected officials, candidates and/or their designees from soliciting contributions from vendors, lobbyists or real estate developers with any interest in Miami Beach projects.

“We should hold ourselves to a higher standard,” he wrote.

Well, it’s about $700,000 too late for that, isn”t it?Weithorn mailer shady Because that is how much the PAC has spent so far, just through July without counting the Miami Herald ads or anything else in August.  Maybe they won’t have that much money to return, after all.

And so shutting it down might not be such a sacrifice. Maybe it’s the logical conclusion.

They already collected about $1.5 million, paid their consultant David Custin $80,000 through a transfer to another PAC to help the slate of candidates get elected, aired some TV ads that made Levine look like he’s done so much already, and got a couple of swipes in at Commissioner Weithorn and her husband Mark, who is running against one of Levine’s chosen ones. Their work is done. Time to move on.

“During the last two months of my service,” Wolfson wrote to end his statement, “I will continue to lead Miami Beach in the right direction, with dignity and integrity.”

Um, too late for that, too, bro.

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