By George Volsky
georgevolsky@aol.com

On Tuesday, at the end of the City Commission’s meeting, Mayor Don Slesnick delivered his political sayonara. But 24 hours earlier another meeting took place signaling the city establishment’s thumb-down to his leadership.

On Monday, more than 60 prominent local businessmen, lawyers and other professionals filled up the large second floor catering space of the John Martin’s restaurant to listen to City Manager Patrick Salerno, a meeting sponsored by the Coral Gables Ponce de Leon Business Association. 

It was more than the taxpayers’ interest to hear the new city manager and ask   questions for which Slesnick has been unavailable in an open, uncontrolled forum. The Ponce group’s weekly information lunches draw mostly two dozen people; that occurred when Slesnick spoke over a year ago, and regaled the audience with his usual bromides. 

Monday’s record attendance indicated that the city’s business community has accepted the political reality which is that the center of Coral Gables’ governance had moved from the office of Slesnick to the office of Salerno, something that the mayor’s Tuesday announcement has indirectly and unwillingly confirmed.

Why Slesnick chose to announce that he would not seek re-election, which most people expected, is a mystery. One factor, according to City Hall insiders, could be that it had finally dawn on him that, rightly or wrongly residents overwhelmingly regard him as being co-responsible for most of the misdeeds of the disgraced former city manager David Brown.

The mayor and his commission colleagues might not be totally irrelevant. They still have the power to dismiss the city attorney at any time, and a growing number of their supporters urge them do so as soon as possible. Slesnick, presiding at commission meetings, still can treat with disrespect people with whom he disagrees, as it happened recently to Nick Di Donato, the Canadian entrepreneur willing to invest more than $1.5 million to undo the city’s Coral Gables Country Club fiasco.

Still, last year’s vote instituting term limits has rang the knell of death to the  present commission – end not immediate though inexorable. There will be no election this year in Coral Gables, but the April 2011 vote is only 14 months away. Chip Withers has told friends he’ll definitely not run again (for his last term), and several candidates are already lining up to vie for his seat. Next year Vice Mayor Bill Kerdyk can run for his last re-election as commissioner, or for a two-year mayoral term, which he apparently intends to do, putting as much distance as he can between himself  and the now lame duck mayor.                                         

No such option is available to Anderson and Cabrera, who as a result of the term limit vote have become lame duck commissioners as well. Both still have over three years as commissioners, but as they know that time flies ever so quickly. (They could conceivably resign next year and become candidates for mayor.) Cabrera has a life outside the commission, a successful health insurance business. Not so Anderson who reports the city’s $29,000 annual salary as her only income.  She will probably bemoan abandoning her comfortable city billet.

Term limit or not, the commission could have become relevant, at least in the eyes of most city residents who are not privy to unsavory City Hall antics. Yet it has had little disposition or courage to openly and comprehensively discuss  several serious issues that have bedeviled the city for more the last two years, among them the Brown affairs and his P-Card waste,  the dwindling revenues, the huge pension payment debt, the non-payment of rent by the Biltmore Hotel, the finances of Coral Gables Museum and its managing entity, the exorbitant  payments by the office of the city attorney to outside law firms, and the uselessness of several city departments. Nor has the city commission ordered embattled City Attorney Elizabeth Hernandez to file charges against the allegedly transgressing administration officials.

On Monday, Salerno addressed most of the aforementioned issues without downplaying their seriousness and dire consequences. He warned that it might be difficult if not impossible for the city- and its employees – to maintain the status quo. His operative words were sustainability and fiscal discipline. But according to him to sustain economic viability – within the tightening economic constraints – city employees will have to make sacrifices, especially in their pension contributions. He said that in Sunrise, Fla., the city he had administered for over a decade, employees were contributing 25 percent toward their retirement cost, while in Coral Gables the highest contribution was 10 percent.

Salerno said that in the seven months he’s been on the job, he has been discovering almost daily scandals originated in the previous administration, adding: “I was looking for one and was finding two.” He indicated that it was up to others in the city to initiate judicial actions against persons responsible for the past misdeeds.

In an indirect critique of the management of the Business Improvement District (BID), whose director Mary Molina has recently presented to the unquestioned commission a glowing report about Coral Gables’ downtown, Salerno said the Miracle Mile was the district’s “weak link” and that $10 million might be needed to refurbish it from top to bottom.
Coral Gables must become an “aggressive player” competing for local, national and international business, he said, rather than sitting on its laurels and “deciding who should enter” the city. For this, he added, a “change of   culture” will be necessary.

In order “to build credibility” his administration will have to be “restructured and reorganized,” he said. Some functions might be outsourced, he suggested, but his first task was to “put together a new team.” Even though Salerno did not elaborate, his statement presaged the departure of several department directors who will become redundant after he merges and downsizes what most experts view as the city’s top heavy and inefficient bureaucratic structure.