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07-03-2008, 03:21 AM

Story got dumped. But read this.

COMMISSIONERS TO BROWN: YOUR TIME’S UP

At the onset of the Watergate affair, John Dean, Richard Nixon’s attorney, told his boss: “We have a cancer that’s growing” in the White House. Dean’s statement effectively ended Nixon’s presidency. Likewise, at the Monday June 30 “workshop” of the City Commission three of its members with verbal blows practically terminated the tenure of City Manager David Brown.

Brown’s departure - “better sooner than later ” as Commissioner Ralph Cabrera put it - appears preordained even without the forthcoming and probably devastating ruling against him by state prosecutors. Several questionable actions by Brown have been criminally investigated for several months by the County’s Public Corruption Bureau and the State Attorney’s office. Besides the manager’s alleged falsifications of city documents, law enforcement agents are probing other compromising issues involving Brown.

Anticipating severe criticism, Brown had vaguely pledged to retire within two years or maybe sooner. That didn’t satisfy Vice Mayor William Kerdyk and Cabrera and, more importantly, Mayor Don Slesnick. Until recently Brown’s staunch ally, the mayor, together with Kerdyk and Cabrera in effect ordered Brown to give them the exact day of his departure.

“Be specific,” Slesnick told Brown, “we get lots of complains.”
Indicating the residents’ growing dissatisfaction with what others called Brown’s “dysfunctional” administration, the mayor said he’d received messages even blaming City Hall for the failure of last Saturday’s implosion of a Ponce de Leon building. Scolding the manager expertise at another point, Slesnick said: “We seem to be going nowhere, certainly not from A to Z, sometimes from A to B and then back to A.”

The drubbing of the manager was relentless. He was accused by the three commission members (who could fire him at their next regular meeting) of having wasted $2 million in “mistaken” police union litigations, of canceling the 4th of July celebrations, of hiding from them the failure of the entity managing the Coral Gables Country Club to pay their bills, of his disastrous bureaucratic cabal with Pinecrest, among other costly blunders.

But Brown did have two supporters. Commissioner María Anderson is probably grateful for his help in gathering a huge campaign chest for her 2005 re-election. She also remembers fondly expensive meals Brown had paid for her with residents’ money. (Some of her and his lobbyist friends observed unhappily the manager-bashing in the commission’s chambers.) Yet even Anderson, who spoke little during the 133-minute “workshop,” concluded by saying that City Hall is “a sad state of affairs.”

Commissioner “Chip” Withers, trying to help Brown, actually “did him in.” He said that in the police labor negotiations Brown was blameless because the unions have taken advantage because of the “loopholes” in city’s labor contracts. Gene Gibbons, head of the police union, who sat quietly in the commission’s chambers up to that moment, couldn’t take in any more. “Stick to the facts,” he shouted at Chip. “The state regulators, not the loopholes, determined that Brown was totally wrong.”

Taken aback, Chip changed his track. Dave’s problems, he said, are due to a “smear campaign” in my Gazette columns and "in emails of civic activist Robert Burr.”

I don’t know what Robert thinks, but I’m sorry for Chip. Like many worn-out, frustrated politicians he cannot digest unpalatable trut and blames fact bearers for his woes. Also, he possibly wanted to get even. What happened was that my column reported recently that on 6/10/2006 Chip and Finance Director Don Nelson were Brown’s guests at a Biltmore Hotel $241.30 lunch (including a $48 bottle of Robert Moldavi cabernet), the meal that the manager paid for with the taxpayers’ money. I asked Chip whether he had drunk wine during that “city business” meal, a violation of Coral Gables’ regulations. He tersely replied: “No, I never drink at lunch. I only have Diet Coke.” By contrast, Nelson was forthright: “Sure, the three of us drunk the wine.”

Did Withers lie? The readers will decide. But his reply certainly makes him the only person in the United States who doesn’t know the difference between Coca Cola and wine. And, as Cabrera suggested, he’s also become “comfortably” cozy with the administration.

While all commissioners were pledging that the removal of Brown would be “civilized and professional,” the manager seemed to have lost his professional marbles. He proposed that in the future some 150 contracts the city administers would have individual managers. Will the city hire 150 new employees?

For City Hall insiders the “workshop” was mostly old hat. The only new and startling news was Cabrera’s disclosure that very prominent members of the University of Miami’s Board of Trustees told him that City Attorney Elizabeth Hernandez should be fired.

georgevolsky@aol.com