Category Archives: Coral Gables

This one in the Mayor’s race. First question: who are you supporting in the Mayor’s race? I said Korge, so the questioner told me he was on the Pensions Board and failed to prevent the pensions crisis, and that although he’s been critical of negative campaigning, a group supporting him [unnamed] has been doing negative campaigning.

Is this call — which since it is a “poll” isn’t covered by ordinary disclosure rules — paid for by Slesnick or Cason? We may never know. (Although it would help if other people getting the call note in comments who is and especially is not being attacked.)

Huge haul today. Pity the postal workers.

I got:

• Two anti-Cason attack mailers (one new, one re-run)
• Three Mayor’s race cards: two from Korge, one from Slesnick
• Two Group 4 mailers: a GIANT card from Quesada, and a four-pager from Rosenblatt
• One Group 5 from Kerdyk

That makes eight. Eight.

I also got a robocall at lunch time (why do they do them at mid-day?), in which retiring Commissioner “Chip” Withers endorsed Frank Quesada.

Some of these, notably one of the Korge and the Rosenblatt mailers, mark departures from previous campaign styles — the gloves are coming off.

The Anti-Cason Mailers

One of the two mailers is a rerun of the one I got on March 31st, see Today’s Dirty Campaign Mailer. The other one is new:

The return address on this one is “The ECO Committee For Coral Gables Future, 3606 S. Waverly Circle, Tampa, Fl 33629” which is almost identical to the sourcing on the other mailer which both last week and today is identified as coming from the “Committee For Coral Gables Future,” same address. I have no idea what the addition of the ECO means, if anything. Are there two separate organizational registrations in City Hall? Two separate funds? Or is there less here than meets the eye?

You can click on the picture above for a higher-contrast version. It hits the same issues as earlier ones: Cason has only lived here two years, he didn’t vote in the only election he was here for, he has hired a campaign manager “with questionable ethics” who “has been convicted of bribing an elected official in Miami” and “is awaiting to be deportation to Cuba.” (Yes, the grammatical error is in the original. We deserve better grammar.)

[Update: There are so many large graphics here that I’ve put the rest of this long post in the continuation section.]
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Tuesday I had an hour-long talk with Coral Gables Commission Group 4 candidate Frank Quesada. He is a commercial litigator with Fowler, Rodriguez, Valdes Fauli, a well-respected Coral Gables law firm. Some of it was off-the-record chat, but I also asked him some questions on the record. His answers in the inset quotes below are verbatim as are the parts in quote marks; parts without quote marks on in [brackets] are my paraphrase.

Quesada brought with him an annotated copy of the City budget and walked me through some of the things he thought were problems. He said the #1 issue in the race is the pensions issue. “I can guarantee you that I’ve done more work than any other candidate on this issue. …. I sat down with independent actuary.” A big part of the problem is that the pension plan presumes a 7.5% return on investment, but returns fluctuate. If the return is below 7.5% then the city is on the hook for the deficit. At present there is a $197 million unfunded liability; Coral Gables is part of a national problem.

Switching to a cash balance plan will solve the problem going forward, but will not deal with past shortfalls. A cash balance plan will protect the city from new unfunded liabilities. (Cash balance plans are defined benefit plans that have features of defined contribution plans. In particular they shift the risk and (if they exist) the benefits of fluctuations on the rate of return to the employees, thus removing the need for the employer to put up cash if there are shortfalls.)

Quesada also noted that the City expects a report from a pensions actuary in May, and it must base any plan going forward on that report. The next milestone is that the agreement with the firefighters ends Sept. 30. That said, the City’s freedom in the past was not as great as some candidates are making it sound. For example, he said, state legislation requires that municipalities allow a minimum of 300 hours of overtime be allowed in final pension calculations if it uses the current type of plan. The cash balance option is more attractive due to relatively recent changes in federal pension legislation. [I think this is would be the Pension Protection Act of 2006?]

More generally, “Polls show voters think things are on the right track. I tend to disagree somewhat, in that I think our budget has gone higher than t should be.” In 2005 the city had $52million in property tax revenue; now it gets $69-71million, thus there is $18 million of additional revenue from the property tax. Yet the size and population of Coral Gables hasn’t changed. “Why does it take an additional $20 million to run the same city?” The answer, he said, was primarily pensions. “Fixing pensions will help … that’s half of it.” The other half seems to be to try to get lots of smaller savings, such as by moving the election date to one where the county is having an election.

I asked him one of the tough questions people working for other candidates have been feeding me: Given that he used to work for Bill Kerdyk, and indeed trumpets this as part of his experience, if elected, will he just be a Kerdyk clone? Mr. Quesada answered by first describing how he came to be working for Bill Kerdyk.

I started [getting] involved in high school, I started a music program, petitioning the administration…. When I went to Villanova I was the only student on the Board of Trustees….I was involved in student government…it was a great feeling to make changes on campus … and to see people happy with the results.

I took a year off before law school. … [I have] no desire for state or federal office. … [a person] can make more change on the local level. …

[When I returned to Coral Gables I] volunteered for Kerdyk, [but] had no previous connection [with him] … I was very involved with the trolley … with the public works department … the biggest issue was the funding.

Quesada also suggested that he’s more independent than Kerdyk.

I am very conservative, but it depends on the issue …. I don’t like to be told how to vote … I like to gather facts… I like to hear expert opinion.

(For what it’s worth in this nonpartisan election, Quesada is a registered Independent.)

I also asked about the candidate’s forum in which I thought his answers were not substantive – they tended to be of the form, ‘I will be researching this very very carefully’ rather than, ‘I have researched this and here is my answer.’ Quesada blamed the format and suggested that at the Ponce Business Association Forum about a month ago (audio is here) he’d given meatier answers when allowed more than 30 seconds to do so.

Mr. Quesada seems to be hard-working and very earnest. In particular he seems well up to speed with the fine details of the city budget, and has clearly given both the pensions issue and some other savings issues some serious thought. He makes a strong case for his candidacy.

One phone call, two mailers. The phone call was picked up by my answering machine about 1:30pm. It featured the very nice recorded voice of Nancy Sanabria asking my answering machine to support her husband. Great sound quality too. Probably the nicest robocall I’ve gotten yet. (Pity about the candidate’s politics.)

Like yesterday’s robocall, today’s Sanabria mailer touts his endorsement by Ralph Cabrera.

Speaking as just another confused voter, I personally don’t find this much of a selling point, since I couldn’t tell you much about Mr. Cabera, but that may say more about my faults then about either of them.

The mail also brought a mailer from the temperamental Richard Martin. Although the pictures below are the same size as I’ve been using for the other mailers, this one is actually only about half as big. It’s not very slick, as you might expect from a campaign with a more limited budget.

Although I’m moderately active politically, my interests have mainly been with federal offices — particularly Congress. They’re small enough races that you might make a difference, big enough that they might matter nationally. This Coral Gables election is really the first time I’ve focused so much on the city’s politics, even though I’ve lived here since 1992. So this has been for me a process of first figuring out what the issues even were, then figuring out who was on which side, then slowly figuring out which side I’m on. Being a blogger with I suppose dozens of readers in the city (apologies to the many many hundreds of you from out of town who are probably sick of the whole subject — hang in there, it ends next Tuesday, barring recounts) I also got to meet some of the candidates, which has been interesting. When there are this few likely voters, even a blog that might reach a few dozen counts, I suppose.

Politically, Coral Gables is not much bigger than a small town. (Sometimes this election feels a little like a run for college class president a big university. There are not that many issues, and a lot of it is very personal.) And when you look at the number of people deeply involved in city politics in a continuing way, it’s smaller still, although not immune to county-wide political currents.

All this is by way of prologue to pointing you to this totally inside baseball posting up at Political Cortadito, Gonzo, the gypsy & the PACman. This stuff is hard to follow without a scorecard, and she seems to have one.

Five more days until the Coral Gables election. Just two mailers today: another in the Quesada series — the one defines “tax” like we don’t know what that means — and a, get this, TWELVE pager from Mayoral candidate Jim Cason. It’s actually a pretty effective piece of mail, but as it opens out like a two-sided fold-out poster, I’m going to have some trouble scanning it.

I’ll update this item when I get it scanned, but it may be a while.

Update 1: Scanned the Quesada mailer.

Update 2 (4/7): I’ve placed the whole Cason 12-page monster in a handy downloadable .pdf file.
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