By George Volsky
georgevolsky@aol.com

Marjorie Adler, the city’s Human Resources director, will be gone in a few weeks. She won’t be missed. Her departure, reportedly not voluntary, signals the beginning of personnel changes that City Manager Patrick Salerno is said to be implementing, together with the tightening of Coral Gables’ administrative structure.

December 31 was the last day in the city of Alberto Delgado, Public Works director, who stepped down reportedly over a work disagreement with Salerno. A licensed engineer, Delgado has received several offers to work in the private sector.

Previously, Sharon Greaux, who for decades managed the city’s legal office, suddenly resigned apparently unable to work with embattled City Attorney Elizabeth Hernandez, or as a friend said because “she couldn’t take Liz any longer.”

As the New Year dawns, the first question that city employees have been asking one another is “who will be the next to go?”

To say that Adler was the least liked person in City Hall is an understatement. It hasn’t been her dour, humorless personality, and the air of faux superiority that she has tried to project – after all personnel directors are not popularity contest candidates. Adler’s problem has been that, hired by the disgraced former city manager David Brown, she has become insufferably arrogant. Brown’s unconditional crony and willing to do his bidding - rules and regulations be damned - she has been seen universally as unfair, unprofessional and wasteful.

According to several experts, the HR department, which employs 12 people and costs taxpayers annually $1.5 million, could easily service a city of 150,000.  Out of the $1.5 million, over $1.1 million goes for salaries and benefits, $147,000 for unexplained “other professional services,” $60,000 for even more mysterious “tuition reimbursement” and $21,000 for “employee training.”

The “training” expense is a joke. Under Alder’s tutelage her employees, especially in dealing with the public, have adopted her haughty attitude, gaining the dubious distinction of becoming the most impolite in the city.  On one occasion, requesting a public document I was asked to identify myself. When told that under the Florida Law seekers of public record didn’t have to identify themselves, an employee with undisguised insolence said I had to because it was the director’s order.

Last year, Adler personally jostled civic leader Roxcy Bolton out of HR offices. Adler avoided a severe judicial punishment because Bolton – one of  Florida’s first feminists - refused to file a complaint of physical aggression against another woman. Adler also reprimanded Procurement Supervisor Danilo Benedit when in an email he reported to her a serious impropriety taking place next to his office.

Adler not only failed to investigate the improper incident, witnessed by two other employees, but she also accused Benedit of harming the city because his email became a public document. After Benedit protested, the reprimand was cancelled, but Brown did not chastise his crony.

Seeking information from Adler’s department is degrading to the public. HR is the only office in the city which separates itself from residents by a two-way mirror: you don’t see who’s inside but they see you. It’s like police detectives observing unseen when arrested individuals are being interrogated. Thus it might not be outlandish to wonder if Alder looking into her own mirror doesn’t see there a doppelgänger of herself.

But unprofessional as Adler has been (she was in effect fired from two jobs prior to landing in Coral Gables), she is not the city’s weakest link. That position is firmly occupied - according to most residents and two commissioners – by Hernandez. 

Hernandez does not work for Salerno. She was hired by the city commission and can be fired by its three members at any time. So far she has had – to use the vernacular – three commissioners in her pocket. But there are insistent rumors in City Hall that one of the three is having doubts about retaining her services.

It is not because over the years Hernandez has paid millions to outside law firms spent millions on often unwise and losing litigations. It is not that Hernandez outsources even small, routine legal tasks that could be easily performed by her or her assistant, Lourdes Alfonin.

All that is old hat, as has been Hernandez’s less than brilliant drafting of city contracts. The new issue is the case of non-payment by the Biltmore Hotel, now in her portfolio. Her problem stems from an apparent change of attitude by the commission toward the Biltmore management which runs the hotel under a contract with the city and which for about a year has not been paying rent and a percentage of the gross of hotel business.

The commission, which up to quite recently had adopted a lackadaisical posture toward the Biltmore debt – reportedly over $2.5 million now - is becoming disobliging about the hotel’s refusal to pay the rent and about what some commissioners describe as  Hernandez’ supine demeanor when dealing with the Biltmore’s management.

Certainly the correspondence between the hotel and Hernandez, letters that recently became public, indicate that the city attorney writes to the Biltmore like a supplicant rather than a property owner who is rightfully offended by his renter’s contractual non-compliance.  According to well-informed sources, Hernandez has also recently committed a serious legal faux pas in the Biltmore-Coral Gables controversy, signing a document which was highly detrimental to the city’s interests.

As for the residents, Hernandez is still to answer a question, officially posed more than one month ago, why the city cannot proceed against Brown to recover $25,000 he paid himself after he had changed city benefit rules. Brown’s change was initially declared illegal by James Crosland, Hernandez’s labor adviser. But later, inexplicably, the same lawyer wrote the commission that Brown was authorized to act as per “a resolution.”  Yet according to the City Clerk that resolution, passed in 1957, had since been made inoperative several times by other relevant ordinances.

Neither is Hernandez exploring legal venues against Brown for making purchases of gasoline and diesel fuel without going through the bid process, recently discovered by Salerno. Interestingly, the Miami Herald reported Tuesday that Florida authorities are investigating allegations that Ruben Almaguer, who Monday resigned as head of the state’s disaster preparedness, had violated federal and state laws, among others by making purchases without bids.