Last night I attended the Coral Gables Commission Candidates’ Forum for Group II, organized by the Ponce Business Association. There are three candidates in Group II: Marlin Holland Ebbert, Ross Hancock, and Vicente Carlos Lago.
If this election were just about money, it would be a cakewalk: at the most recent filing, as reported by gableshomepage.com, Marlin Ebbert reported raising $22,845, Ross Hancock had raised all of $1,555, and Vincente Lago had banked $124,553. While the money looks completely one-sided, both of the other candidates do have something going for them: Ebbert has a large family and a social network arising from a long history of civic engagement; Hancock comes off a near-win campaign for State Rep so he must enjoy some name recognition. Hancock was the only candidate to mention the funding issue, which came up eloquently in his closing statement.
The format of the Forum was simple: three-minute openings from each candidate, then audience-submitted questions read by the moderator. Each candidate had two minutes to reply to each question, and at the end there were two-minute closing statements. There might have been just over a hundred people in the audience at the Coral Gables Congregational Church, and I – no longer a spring chicken – felt like one of the younger ones. Local CBS4 news anchor Eliott Rodriguez, a Coral Gables resident, was the genial moderator.
Although the candidates differed on only a handful of substantive issues, the 90-minute event was surprisingly revealing about the candidates’ contrasting styles, experience, and attitudes. Marlin Ebbert seemed like the classic concerned citizen: she was the least scripted, the worst at keeping to time, but seemed very sincere. While it’s clear she’s been active in the community for years, and had been doing her homework, she still came off as not always fully up to speed on some financial details. It wasn’t surprising to learn she’d been running the PTA at Coral Gables high – she seemed like the type to organize stuff and do it well. On the other hand, Ms. Ebbert’s account of leading the eviction of local squatters came off as a bit heartless: One of the homes in her neighborhood was in foreclosure for five years; the bank let it fall into disrepair. Then some squatters moved in. They mowed the lawn, they cleaned up the place, even put up Christmas decorations, paid the water and electric bill…the last item being their undoing: Ms. Ebbert noticed the air conditioning running, and notified the code enforcement people … ultimately leading to their eviction. My reaction was that as she had described it, all the squatters were doing was increasing local property values, but Ms. Ebbert seemed offended by riff-raff in our midst: “We can’t have squatters in Coral Gables”. [The Miami Herald covered the eviction in February. The story gives conflicting accounts as to whether the residents were scammers or victims of a phoney lease, suggests the interior was not as well maintained as the exterior, and also notes the allegation that someone stole various appliances.]
Vincent Lago was the most telegenic (he’s also the youngest). He had the sharpest jacket, the crispest-sounding sound bites. He also came off as pretty sincere, salting his comments with many anecdotes based on a near-lifetime in the Gables. But he said three things that worried me: First he said he would never ever raise taxes. Then later he said that he “would never compromise services, just as I said I would never raise taxes.” In so doing he failed to admit the possibility – the likelihood – that these two pledges would ever conflict, much less confront the question of which of those pledges should come first. I am not a fan of magical thinking. In the discussion of a proposed anti-leaf-blowing ordinance, Mr. Lago said he is for limited government and personal choice. That’s a nice sound bite, and may be a good general principle, but in the context it seems at odds with the entire ethic and history of Coral Gables: we are, after all, one of the nation’s original planned communities. We have, for example, a notoriously extensive and detailed zoning code which many see as important to maintaining the nature of the city. Mr. Lago may mean he’s for the status quo, or that he’s for regulations he likes (e.g. no boat bay on Matheson Hammock) and against those he doesn’t like (banning leaf blowers), but it wasn’t possible for me to figure out what the guiding principle if any might be.
Ross Hancock was the candidate for radio. He looked the most rumpled, but talked the best game. He was, of the three, the only one expressing a vision that went beyond the immediate problems facing the city: he thinks we better start worrying about global warming now, while there’s time to plan what we’ll do when the water table rises causing both street flooding and problems with the potable water supply. Even the perception that Coral Gables is at risk of rising tides will increase our home insurance premiums, he warned persuasively, make it hard to sell homes, and nearly impossible to secure mortgages. This, even more than his focus on taking control of schools in order to make our schools as good as other city services and remove the greatest barrier – poor school options – to corporate relocation, had me leaving the room thinking he was the most impressive candidate of a generally credible crew.
Below I reproduce my notes of the event for those who want a less filtered account of the forum. These are not verbatim transcripts, but rather my summaries, unless I put “quote marks” around a text, in which case I did attempt to scribe it verbatim. I also inserted a couple of personal comments in [brackets]. [Update: Howard Cohen of the Miami Herald covers the forum.]
