Miami City Commissioner Ken Russell lost his first political battle Thursday when he failed to get 
any support whatsoever on his move to terminate City Attorney Victoria Mendez after she failed to provide all the emails he asked her for about a certain Coconut Grove lot split and development.
He didn’t even get a second to his motion.
Russell has said that Mendez, who makes $215,000 a year, intentionally withheld some of the emails he requested on the development application for a lot split on Battersea Road. She gave him 13 emails dating back to November 2015. When he requested the same email search from IT, he got 39, and the conversation started in October. The attorneys even provided the city attorney with draft language for the resolution.
“The whole 39 told a different story,” Russell said.
The freshman commissioner says the emails show that Mendez went above and beyond to help the developer get a positive ruling on the application to divide the property into five lots so he could build five homes. The original ruling from planning and zoning was that the application needed a document called a warrant. The emails suggest Mendez shopped it out to different attorneys on her staff until she got the decision she was looking for.
She also assured Javier Vazquez, an attorney/lobbyist for the developer with whom she is rather friendly, that she was doing all she could to resolve the issue. And one email indicates it might not have been an easy sell.
Read related story: Miami commissioner wants attorney fired for missing emails
“Javier, we’re having a hard time on this. Let’s talk next week,” she wrote on Oct. 30 last year. This was after she had told an assistant city attorney to talk to him and “see how we can figure out.”
That email was among the ones that were withheld from Russell. So was the one that had been sent by Assistant City Attorney Amanda Quirke the day before, on Oct. 29. “I spoke to Javier today. I reviewed this issue at length with planning and zoning to see if we could get to the same interpretation, but we could not,” Quirke wrote. “This is an unplatted lot that has had a house on it for more than 50 years. It is a building site, and no building site shall be diminished in the NCD 
without a warrant.”
Quirke was no longer needed for meetings after that, as Vazquez indicated in an email Oct. 30 to Mendez’s assistant Marta Gomez about a meeting she was trying to reschedule for when Quirke would be back.
“My client cannot afford to keep waiting. Respectfully, we know Amanda’s opinion on the matter. We are simply wanting face to face time with Vicky to give her our interpretation,” he wrote.
Mendez chimed in: “Have Goldberg come up to speed with alternatives and we can still meet without Amanda.”
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