The problem with this action by Colonel Klink is that when it comes to the backroom instructions intended to look out for friends or screw enemies that makes up a lot of the interference that goes on between City Commissioners and city employees, little, if anything will probably change over the long run.

Among the very first stories I wrote - back in 2010 - was this expose of how Commissioner Sarnoff and his Chief of Staff Ron Nelson, were repeatedly violating the provisions of Section 4 of the City Charter to make sure that Alice Bravo focused her attention on servicing the "very high dollar taxpayers," in the Brickell area who expected their concerns to be taken care of expeditiously.

It seems like it was only days ago - 12 days to be exact - since I wrote about former City Commissioner Marc Sarnoff''s current campaign that involves pointing out how badly he believes things have deteriorated in his District since he and his lovely wife Teresa were essentially run out of town with pitch forks welded by folks who had had enough of his high-handed "Pay For Play" bullshit.

True, we now have Commissioner "Selfie Boy" Russell, who on occasion creates a longing in some to see Sarnoff the scorpion return, and because this is Miami where something bad is often lurking just around the corner, Sarnoff and his playmates are hard at work evaluating all the angles as they wait to see if "Selfie Boy" will in fact sign that "resignation letter" on April 24th, in order to continue his ill-fated run for Congress.

We'll get to that letter and its ramifications, including rumors of Sarnoff's scheming to get back on the City Commission for another day, because today we're focusing on one the consequences of my March 7th story, when I included a portion of Section 4 of the City Charter in that story that I have been arguing since 2010 has been flagrantly violated by just about every City Commissioner along with the Mayor, and which now seems to have prompted Colonel Klink impersonator, and current City Manager Emilio Gonzalez  to send the below email to the Mayor, the City Commissioners, their Chief's of Staffs, along with an accompanying Official City Bulletin from the Director of Human Resources to every city employee last Friday morning.

NUMBER 11 - MARCH 19, 2018

For the 8 years that Sarnoff was a Commissioner, he basically ran his District and an independent enterprise, personally approving or disapproving just about everything that occurred within it's boundaries.

One way he did it was through his bullying of the City Attorney and her staff.  Now that he's scheming to come back, he's reverted to his old ways and has recently been seen visiting the City Attorney's Office, where this time he's furthering the interests of legal clients without bothering to register as a lobbyist.

The story above is just one of multiple stories that I wrote in the early years of doing this blog that detailed with great specificity the ways that Sarnoff and his staff repeatedly violated Section 4 of the City Charter, and it was his behavior that encouraged his fellow Commissioners to behave in asimilar fashion, like the time that Commissioner Frank Carollo called the Chief of Police after he was stopped for a traffic violation, that ended up in his finally having to cop a plea of No Contest to the charge of Exploitation of Official Position.

You can expect that there will be some lip service paid in the next few weeks as the city employees at the bottom of the Totem Pole try to evade the scrutiny of the Colonel and his spies, but I give everyone 60 days and things will more or less get back to "normal."

In the meantime expect the Colonel to use these instructions to wage his own personal battle with a couple of the City Commissioners.

That's where the popcorn comes in.  

I know that some of you will be as shocked as I was to learn that in addition to waving the flag and proclaiming himself a true, blue patriot, the Colonel might also be operating with a personal agenda beyond his well documented penchant for everything Republican, but the rumors, like toil and trouble, are bubbling up about Emilio and as always, when I get to the bottom of all of it you can rest assured that the only place that you'll learn what the Colonel's up to will be here on the Crespogram Newsletter - so stay tuned.

In the interim, now that I seem to have the Colonel's attention - after all he'd  probably have never learned about Section 4 of the City Charter if I hadn't included it in my story about Sarnoff - might I be so bold as to suggest that he focus some attention on the Planning and Zoning Department, and especially on the way that a handful of land use lawyers treat that department as their personal fiefdom.

This is another problem that has festered in the city for years, and which in many ways is a lot worse than the City Commissioners ignoring the City Charter, because having a handful of lawyers literally writing whatever legal or zoning opinions and/or other documents that they need to allow their developer clients to pour concrete wherever their devious, conniving little hearts desired is one reason why this city is so fucked up today.

Back in 2010, the lawyers for a guy named Mark Siffen - (See Miami New Times story below,) who wanted to put a monster LED billboard tower atop a parking garage that he wanted to build on Miami Herald property just east of the Boulevard supposedly had his attorneys write the actual language that made the whole scheme possible.

It never got built for other reasons, but it was not for lack of Siffen's lawyers literary skills and Sarnoff's stage management that the deal got passed by the City Commission.

Those were fun days,

Now the current head of Zoning is a fellow named Devin Cejas, who refuses to answer emails, seems to seldom be at work, and has managed to be named in a recent federal lawsuit filed against City, as not only a defendant because of his position as a city official, but also named personally as a defendant - allegedly for Perjury at that.. (See Count VII - Page 31 of 42)

And, if that weren't enough, it seems that Cejas had previously signed off on a couple Consent Orders requiring him to surrender a license, which points to wrong doing in a previous career in the insurance business.

COLONEL KLINK LAYS THE LAW DOWN TO THE INMATES OF LUFT STALAG 13 - (AKA CITY OF MIAMI,) AND THE ONLY PROBLEM IS THAT LIKE INMATES ANYWHERE WHO HAVE BECOME USED TO RUNNING THE ASYLUM, COME MONDAY MORNING SOME OF THEM ARE GOING TO BE VERY UNHAPPY, SO BUCKLE YOUR SEAT BELTS AND GET YOUR POPCORN, THE SHOW IS ABOUT TO BEGIN

IT USED TO BE THAT YOU ONLY HAD TO WORRY THAT THE MIAMI HERALD WOULD REMOVE THEIR STORIES FROM PUBLIC ACCESS. NOW IT SEEMS THAT THE MIAMI NEW TIMES HAS STARTED DOING IT TOO

There is no telling how, or whether Colonel Klink will succeed in herding the cats who supposedly report to him to quit doing all the bad things that they've become accustomed to doing, but the odds are, I would say, slim at best, because while the Colonel is out and about with his personal staff making sure to be seen being the City Manager, the boy wonder Mayor of Miami is busy traveling hither and yon and posing for pictures like he's got a movie or a book coming out, instead of focusing on running a major American city.

There are many reasons why this latest campaign of municipal governance might not succeed, and few that provide support for why it might. but no matter what happens, I expect popcorn sales to go up in the city limits.

In Miami, history sems to disappear into a Black Hole, much the way that light disappears into the Black Holes in space.  

Nobody remembers what happened 6 months ago, much less 6 years ago, and the news media - especially the Miami Herald - has long been a principal contributor to that problem by removing their stories from public access either weeks, and most certainly months after publication.

In a time of digital access, Miami's newspaper of record doesn't believe in providing the community with access to their history, and that's a real problem.

In writing the above story, when I came to the part about Mark Siffen and his efforts to get the City Commission to go along with his plan to build a massive  LED billboard wall atop a parking garage, I wanted to refresh my memory, and so I went to the Miami New Times website to look at copies of stories that I knew they had written about this incident at the time.

To my surprise, the stories were gone!  See the screen grab above.

Now, if you're a regular reader of this site, you know that I've on many occasions linked to New Times stories, in part because the Miami Herald either didn't write a story, or worse, had removed their story from online access, and I considered the New Times archives a valuable resource, not only for me, but for the community.

The removal of the stories involving Mark Siffen are very troubling, because they contained information that I'm sure he - as he has moved on from Miami and become a bigger real estate player than he was 8 years ago - would now want to make sure were no longer accessable, including these 3 paragraphs in one of those stories.

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The Siffen effort to try and build that LED wall, coming as it did when I was first beginning to write about the City of Miami and Sarnoff,  was my first realization that, as I would write about over the years, the City of Miami was being run largely as an organized criminal enterprise, and the elected officials like Tomas Regalado and Marc Sarnoff were at best grifters, and at worst out and out criminals.

Just because Katherine Fernandez-Rundle, the corrupt Miami-Dade State Attorney has refused to prosecute any of these crooks doesn't mean that what they've gotten away with wasn't criminal.

So, it's distressing to discover that the Miami New Times has chosen to remove the stories about Mark Siffen, because sometime before the ocean comes over the seawalls, someone really needs to write a history of Miami at the beginning of the 21st century, and to do so, they'll need access to stories like Siffen's if they are to ever get an understanding of what really happened here.

Miami New Times did not respond to my request for an explanation of why these stories disappeared from their website.

It's Miami, Bitches!

COCONUT GROVE WALK AROUND ON MONDAY