If Miami’s new Mayor Eileen Higgins thought her first gavel strike would come with a ceremonial smile and a welcome bouquet, City Hall disabused her of that notion quickly. Very quickly. After the ceremonial but legally required acknowledgment of the Dec. 9 runoff results at Thursday’s commission meeting, things really start to roll. Applause. Smiles. […]
Political amnesia: The day Edmundo González became optional Well, that didn’t take long. South Florida’s elected leaders have perfected the political pirouette — and Venezuela just watched them spin 180 degrees without missing a beat. After months — months — of pounding their chests, waving flags, and solemnly declaring Edmundo González Urrutia the rightful president of […]
Kendall has spent decades being talked at — by developers, planners, politicians, traffic engineers, and anyone with a westward-pointing map and a bulldozer. This Wednesday night, Kendall gets to do something radical. It gets to talk about itself. The Kendall Federation of Homeowner Associations is hosting another Kendall Talk reunion, but this one isn’t about […]
Trump talks oil, we watch a regime change in real time So let’s dispense with the fairy tale right away. This past weekend, the United States didn’t “assist democracy,” didn’t “help the Venezuelan people,” and didn’t conduct some tidy law-enforcement operation against a bad hombre with a cocaine habit. The U.S. bombed a sovereign nation […]
He partnered up with Larry Spring in November Oh, look. City Hall’s revolving door is spinning again. Before Art Noriega even finished clearing out his desk as Miami’s city manager — his last day at work is the next meeting Thursday — he had already lined up his next hustle. And not quietly, either. Paperwork […]
Francis Suarez didn’t just leave City Hall. He left the city. He closed. Just days after officially exiting public office, Miami’s former mayor — newly free of pesky disclosure requirements and public information requests — quietly upgraded his lifestyle with a $7.4 million home purchase in unincorporated Miami-Dade County, just north of Sunset Drive. No […]
Does anybody want to know how much it is costing Coral Gables taxpayers to go after the War Memorial Youth Center Association? Because, apparently, it’s going to cost $500 to find out. Ladra did a public records request for all invoices from and payments made to outside attorney Israel Reyes, who is the one who […]
Ladra must have misheard. Didn’t newly sworn-in Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins say she would conduct a proper search for a new city manager? You know — open it up transparently to competition and seek résumés from city managers who have, say, managed a city? Because what Miami got instead was a memo quietly sliding across […]
Dear Mayor Eileen Higgins, Welcome to the City of Miami — where the skyline keeps climbing, but our fire trucks and patrol cars struggle to keep up. If anyone tells you the city’s public safety system is “just fine,” you might want to double-check. They’re not lying, exactly — they’re just reading from old talking […]
Nearly three years after what Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava memorably called a “Super Bowl Sunday inferno of garbage,” the county and the former operator of the Covanta waste-to-energy plant that burned down in Doral are now locked in a full-blown blame game — with millions of dollars, a $2 billion replacement project, and the […]