"The Colbert Report," P-Card scandals, staples, and other things.

Ever heard of the City of Coral Gables? I have since I worked there for 10-years, but if you haven't heard of it you're in for a surprise.

Coral Gables, also known as the City Beautiful, is a municipality in Southern Florida. It is also a place where very wealthy people live, thrive and, yes, hate each other. It is the place where neighbors snitch on each others' residential code enforcement violations, even if its about only a shrubbery an inch in violation of the code.  Some people say it is a special place, a unique and historically moral place, known for both its beauty and architectural marvels.

Despite the beauty and the wealth (and the snitching), the City Beautiful seems to be mired in political scandals, corruption and love-triangles between its top-brass. There are too many scandals and allegations of public corruption to even start mentioning.  The allegations of corruption didn't start overnight.  It took a long time simmering, and no one listened.  Now, it seems, everyone is slowly beginning to pay the price of complacency, mostly the mayor and commissioners.  Of all the possible scandals I can write about, I will simply allude to one of the weirdest ones, this one having to do with the City's issued "P-Card" which is a Visa card.

Here's how it goes:

This past Christmas, 2007, Coral Gables Police Major Scott Masington did a seemingly nice thing. He gave 30 motorcycle, bicycle, and other cops Casio watches. Problem is, he paid $625 with his City's "P-Card".

By Coral Gables policy, that's not allowed. The whole thing might have ended there, but this being the City Beautiful, it didn't. When a critic of the City's administration, a retired columnist named George Volsky, began looking at the receipts from city cards, he found much, and I mean, much more impropriety. Volsky, by the way, seems to be life-long enemy of the City's current administration. If the vitriol of his weekly columns are any indication, he takes the shenanigans of the Mayor and City Manager very, very seriously. For starters he calls any sympathizers of the administration "poodles", and that's just the nice things he can say about them. To the City Attorney, someone named Elizabeth Hernandez, he has given the enviable title "Loophole Liz."

Regardless, back to the scandals.

Among the things that Volsky found, was the fact that the IT computer employees had charged hundreds of dollars for pizza and doughnuts, and the Public Relations guru (a woman with too many hyphenated names-- Maria Rosa Higgins-Fallons) had even bought dinner for her family. That's not all, of course. Others bought vittles at a Chinese joint and the local Publix Supermarket.

But the best find was this: the City Manager, David Brown, apparently violated policy by purchasing expensive wines at lunch.

When busted by Volsky and by another employee, Brown simply instructed his underlings to backdate two receipts to fool the investigators from the local state attorney's corruption office into believing that he'd reimbursed portion of his expensive and lavish meals on those dates. Brown went as far as instructing the employee in question the best way to staple backdated falsified documents in order to make sure they looked legitimate. The employee, undaunted, reported him nonetheless to the state attorney's office. Fearing retaliation, he went on to write a very public incendiary letter not only about the falsified invoices, but about other things as well.

Major Masington never could have guessed it would turn out like this.

And now this is where the sublime turns into in-your-face ridicule. It seems that the local weekly newspaper the Coral Gables Gazette has been sponsoring a public discussion blog slated as the place to dish out all the gossip, truths and lies alike about the city officers.

Wouldn't you know it? This Blog, called City Hall Confidential, is now almost two years old and going strong if judged by the large number of members and its readership. The daily entries read like a mini soap opera of who stole from whom; who slept with whom; who is a bigger public corruption criminal. Some of the entries are outright weird, but most, surprisingly, have turned out to be quite accurate.

Along the way, the mayor, Donald D. Slesnick, trying to cash in the notoriety of his City's scandals even made an appearance on the Colbert Report for a segment titled "People Destroying America" (I kid you not). Slesnick was defending, of all things, one of the most archaic and idiotic zoning truck laws in the country which had been overruled as unconstitutional. Needless to say he was made to look like... well, you know... you be the judge.  The City promised to appeal the court's decision.

The City ended this sad chapter by quietly letting Brown go, not over the civil conviction of forging public documents, but over his long-term sexual tryst with the Mayor's secretary.  Rumors aside, there seems to be legitimate reasons to believe that the woman in question did sleep her way to the top, and her skills as secretary are greatly wanting.  As of the writing of this, everyone including the Mayor have gone publicly saying they didn't know about the long-term sexual tryst.

I could write much more about the latest mishaps of this most precious little city.  But I think you get the point by now.  Sadly for many, what could have been a great city has turned into the butt of jokes.

Is there a lesson to be learned in all of this?  I think there is: before you do something bad make sure you know how to staple documents yourself, which is why below I've provided three of a limited number of web-sites dedicated solely to the  fine art of stapling paper. Just make sure that before you do it, you're not a public official.

As for Brown, perhaps we should end this article by quoting his personal philosophy in life, as quoted in own Brown's biography: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  It is a lesson each one of us should learn before admonishing, judging and casting the first stone at another person.