Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Some Coral Gables residents are getting a Spanish alternative to the English-language attack ad aimed at Mayor Jim Cason. It’s clearly a targeted mailing as I did not get one.

I think this one is perhaps going to be slightly more effective than the English one:

The main message is more streamlined: Cason is a big spender.

The image at the bottom left on which “Coral Gables” appears (via Photoshop?) on the label of a liquor bottle is a particularly interesting touch. Are they trying to suggest Cason is living it up on the taxpayer’s dollar? Or that he’s a big drinker? Seems below the belt either way.

Note that this mailer, like the English-language one, is sourced to “Citizen Action Inc. 1172 S. Dixie Hwy #250”.

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.]

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I don’t think this is going to work nearly as well as they hope.

Yesterday I received my first attack mailer of this Coral Gables Commission Campaign season, one aimed at incumbent Mayor Jim Cason.

I’ve put a full .pdf of the anti-Cason attack mailer online; below I discuss who sent it, and then explain why I think it’s not a very effective piece of advertising.

Whodunnit?

As there is only one other candidate in the race, the mailer must be in support of the challenger, Commissioner Ralph Cabrera. But the mailer is not sourced to his campaign, giving him some degree of deniability.

The legally required sponsorship line reads

Paid electioneering communication
paid for by Citizen Action Inc.
1172 S. Dixie Hwy #250
Coral Gables, FL 33146

Best as I can determine from Google maps this is a PO Box address at a local UPS store.

Citizen Action Inc. is a local political consulting firm. The official registration for Citizen Action Inc. with the Florida Division of Elections lists only Keith Donner as Chairperson, Treasurer and Registered Agent. They were assessed a fine of $500 for being a day late with their campaign finance report in 2012. (A day really matters when the report is due two business days before the election!)

According to the Sun Post, Citizen Action Inc has a record of doing hit-style direct mail advertising. Check out Donner’s direct-mail outfit, 50 Blue.

But no matter–the key question is who paid for the ad. Given this was the pattern in the most recent Coral Gables Commission election, it is more than possible that the mailings were not paid for by Cabrera but instead by a third party. The chief suspects have to include the public services unions which have some reason to be unhappy with the Mayor. It could, for example, easily be the police union. The Coral Gables Fraternal Order of Police made independent expenditures for candidate Gonzalo Sanabria in the 2011 Commission election.

What’s Wrong With the Mailer

Leaving aside all questions of appropriateness and financing, I think there are two problems with this mailer as a matter of bare-knuckle tactics: it is both too negative and not negative enough.

By ‘too negative’ I mean that I think there is a significant portion of the most active Coral Gables electorate that really doesn’t like negative campaigning. On the other hand, negative campaigning is hardly new around here, much as people like to be shocked, shocked, shocked that it is going on.

By ‘not negative enough’ I mean that, even taking into account that I may be more jaded than the average consumer of attack mailers, I found the brickbats directed to Mayor Cason to be somewhat unconvincing. (It may bear mentioning here that I was not a supporter of Jim Cason in the previous election, and I am at present undecided about this year.) I am NOT saying that the effort should have been more like a previous Keith Donner effort that crossed the line.

What are the charges?

First, Cason “has not sponsored a single initiative or even a single item for discussion by the City Commission.” Eh? So? Was there something that wasn’t being covered by the others? In the last election the knock on Cason was that his history suggested he might be a bull in a china shop; now you are saying he is too deferential to the other Commissioners?

Next charge: Cason voted for higher fees and new fees. By my lights this is probably the most effective one on the list. But the problem here is that like many voters who moved to the Gables precisely because it offers better city services than just about anywhere in the county, I am not against city services — I like them! In order to exist, City services obviously need revenue, so I’m not sure what to make of this charge. I do sort of wonder why localities like Coral Gables insist on so many user fees when if they would just call them taxes I could deduct them from my federal return, but I suppose the word “tax” is just so toxic that even if they tried to explain we’d save money being taxed instead of being subject to fees it might not fly.

Third charge is that Cason “voted for $22 million in new spending” for supposed “pet projects”. Well, that’s a lot of money, and I’d like to know more about where it went, but until you tell me specifically what the projects were and why they were bad, I am not going to bite. (Note also that these projects had to pass the Commission, and Cason is just one vote there; so at least two other Commissioners had to like these ‘pet’ projects.) One of Cason’s mailings listed a bunch of ribbons he’s cut over the past two years, and they didn’t look particularly toxic, or particularly exciting, to me. Cabrera’s statement I published recently says we should be spending more money on traffic calming. Personally I HATE most of the traffic calming structures that have been installed in my neighborhood as they just make it harder to get anywhere. Tree-filled medians on not-particularly-wide streets are not high on my priority list either.

Final charge is that Cason “refuses to do anything about crime spree”. Leave aside the fact that the current crime uptick is mostly property crime and the mailer tries to make it sound as if rapists and murders were stalking the City Beautiful. What the mailer doesn’t tell us is what the Mayor should have done or failed to do. I would have thought this was a matter for the Chief of Police. Is the suggestion we need a new Chief? Or more cops? If so, why not say so? Even Cabrera’s issue statement that I published only suggests that we need more transparency about crime data, not any concrete action. It’s going to take more than that to sell me.

And here’s a final point: I think the last few national elections involved so many negative mailers with particularly ugly photos of the target that this schoolyard-level tactic is now approaching the end of its shelf life.

Since I put up my original post on the Coral Gables Commission candidates’ top three issues, I’ve had two more responses; with the addition of Mayoral candidate Commissioner Ralph Cabrera and Group 2 candidate Vicente Carlos Lago, I’ve now got responses from all the Coral Gables Commission candidates except Group 3 candidate PJ Mitchell. [Update: PJ Mitchell did respond in a timely way….but my spam filter ate it. I’ve got everyone now.]