Gables moves to sell $3.5 million city parking lot. The buyer is the vice mayor’s boss

The Coral Gables City Commission voted Tuesday to move forward with a plan to sell a public parking lot for $3.5 million to a developer that would join the property with two adjacent lots for a new project.

But a wrinkle came up during the meeting: The partners behind the listed buyer — Delaware-registered JRFQ Holdings, LLC. — also own the MSP Recovery Law Firm where Vice Mayor Michael Mena has been employed since July 2019.

Before the vote Tuesday, Mena made the relationship known, and said he would not be recusing himself from voting after seeking an opinion from city attorney Miriam Soler Ramos. He told the Miami Herald Wednesday that the relationship between him and JRFQ Holdings partners John Ruiz and Frank Quesada, a former Coral Gables commissioner, was “hardly a secret,” and that the item being voted on “was not remotely controversial.”

The legal opinion

The surface lot at 350 Greco Ave. was most recently used as the city’s COVID-19 testing site. In its memo explaining the sale, the city said it doesn’t make much money off the lot and that the sale will “thus have a long-term positive effect.” In its most profitable year, the lot brought in just $71,000, according to the memo.

“The individuals looking to purchase the property also happen to be the owners of the company for which I work,” Mena said during the meeting. “The company has nothing to do with this transaction.”

In the legal opinion Ramos wrote to Mena, she remarked that the Delaware entity and the law firm are separate, unrelated entities, and that Mena only has a relationship to the firm. She added that Mena would not “directly or indirectly profit” by the item, and that the benefit to JRFQ does not benefit the law firm.

The approval of the sale will go to a second vote May 25.

Attorney David Winker, who often represents groups of residents in Coral Gables, sent a letter Tuesday night to the city attorney and the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust, alleging Mena’s vote is prohibited under Florida law.

“The Florida Commission on Ethics, the state’s ethics watchdog agency, has repeatedly and consistently interpreted the foregoing statute as barring another city commissioner from being involved in an entity that does business with the municipality he serves, including selling or purchasing property,” Winker wrote, citing a case out of Polk County where the state ethics board said a city commissioner was too conflicted to vote on the sale of a public property to a charter school where the commissioner then worked as general counsel.

“This past election sent a clear message — Gables residents want a change in direction toward more transparency and accountability and less ‘special deals for special people,’ ” Winker said Wednesday. “That message seems to have been lost on City Attorney Miriam Ramos as she greenlights Commissioner Mena cheerleading and voting in favor of a no-bid sweetheart sale of city land to the lawyers that employ him.”