By George Volsky
georgevolsky@aol.com

"Now is the winter of our discontent,” is how Shakespeare would have described the current ambience in Coral Gables; Charles Dickens would have certainly added it is also “the winter of despair.”

These are no exaggerated metaphors. True to form, Tuesday’s meeting of the city commission projected a picture of political leadership practically paralyzed even though it was fronting  symptoms of an impending fiscal tsunami.  As never before, commissioners, principally Mayor Don Slesnick, appeared not only dispirited and bereft of ideas, but also even devoid of hope. Citywide, a new case of unauthorized use of a Purchasing Card (P-Card) has reignited critical comments about new unrestricted and unwarranted spending of taxpayers’ money, which had reached its zenith during the 8-year-long disastrous administration of the disgraced former city manager, David Brown. 

Commissioner Chip Withers, referring to his and his colleagues’ reluctance to discuss the city’s financial problems, said the he didn’t want to add “more stress to the already stressful situation.”

The usually gung-ho Slesnick, unaware of the irony of the subject, only spoke briefly about… city sewage.

Commissioner Ralph Cabrera, who made bare his tense relations with City Manager Patrick Salerno and the fraternal ones with embattled City Attorney Elizabeth Hernandez, mentioned without elaboration “the shortage of money.” Cabrera said that things in the city were “dysfunctional” and “in shambles,” then cryptically added: “I don’t know how long I am going to serve on this commission.”

But except for a brief reference by Vice Mayor Bill Kerdyk to wasteful spending on countless consultants, during its relatively short meeting the commission was basically in a blah-blah-blah, driveling mode. Nothing serious was discussed for the second meeting in a row.

And there were no expressions of reprobation of the Lori St. John-Joe Rodriguez affair, the news of which has spread through City Hall like a wildfire.

Last month St. John, the city auditor, had Rodriguez, an employee of Finance Department Purchasing Division, pay $800 with his P-Card – made infamous by Brown - for her current attorney license in Colorado, for two years of unpaid license fees and a fine. Had the Gazette not been tipped about the dubious action (which one resident called a “super-chutzpah operation”), St. John and Rodriguez would have gotten away with it.

Civil activist Roxcy Bolton said that she and several of her friends were outraged over what St. John did. “I am absolutely shocked. We cannot accept such abuse, nor a mindset that spending taxpayers’ money at will is not a problem. What she did is terribly wrong. David (Brown) told me he had brought her from Colorado to straighten things in City Hall, and look what she had done.” 

Salerno said he would have denied St. John permission to pay for the Colorado license with the city funds. He said that she admitted having made a mistake and reimbursed the city. But he added that so far no written reprimand has been included in her personal record.

Most observers believe that a stern letter of admonishment would be the least punishment for such an action.

According to Salerno, Hernandez and her labor consultant, James Crosland, informed him that under certain conditions, should a valid out-of-state license benefit Coral Gables, the city could pay for it. But neither Hernandez nor Crosland provided Salerno with a written basis for their opinion, nor as far as it could be ascertained nothing like the St. John payment had ever happened in the city before.

(The city attorney and her consultant are yet to answer a legal quarry by the Gazette, namely why they had advised the city commission to drop a demand that David Brown return $25,000 which he had pocketed after changing vacation rules that benefited him personally. Both lawyers said that Brown was authorized to change rules by a 1957 city ordinance. According to the City Clerk, that ordinance, which wasn’t even referring to vacation payments, had been invalidated several times since its passage almost 53 years ago. )

Nobody in the city could explain what benefits could Coral Gables derive from having paid St. John’s Colorado license. Conceivably she could re-open her law firm in that state, which she apparently had there before coming to Coral Gables to an accountant position in the office of Brown. That would not be unlike the case of the well paid senior aide to Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez, who until The Miami Herald discovered it, had been frequently jet-hopping to Panama for his second, equally well-remunerated job.

Now more than ever, Coral Gables residents are beginning to closely observe the city’s expenses, and demand that the media do the same. One of the most egregious is the administration’s penchant for retaining the services of expensive consultants, even to perform simple tasks that salaried employees could easily do. Today it would be unthinkable that an official would spend almost $2,000 for gold-embossed stationary and envelops, which City Attorney Elizabeth Hernandez cavalierly did a couple of years ago.

There is also a demand that the commission revisit the issue of car allowances, and that the number of city boards be reduced to save money. Coral Gables residents have become spending conscious because they fear that should city revenues drastically diminish - as it is likely – and as Coral Gables is obliged to contribute millions more to the retirement fund, for the fiscal year that begins October 1, the commission will approve another property tax increase and fee hike.

Thus both the residents and the commission are apprehensive about the budgetary numbers of the first quarter of the FY 2009-2010 which should be available soon, possibly next week. And many have doubts about the veracity of our financial reporting. They recall that right up to the April 2009 election, figures provided by our administration and accepted as true by Slesnick and his colleagues, contained not a single dark cloud on our fiscal sunny skies. 

Then, after the election a sudden deluge; virtually all of our multimillion reserves disappeared overnight. The city was saved from a monetary disaster only because, fortunately, South Florida had a hurricane free season. But on that Coral Gables cannot count every year.