The former city commissioner talks about the influence of lobbyists in City Hall, the failure of Coconut Grove zoning reform, and the challenges facing Commissioner Damian Pardo.
Ken Russell served as the District 2 City of Miami Commissioner, representing Coconut Grove, from 2015 to 2022, leaving office a year early to mount an unsuccessful bid for a U.S. Congressional House seat. Russell sat down recently in his Coconut Grove home with the Spotlight’s David Villano. Last week, in the first part of the interview, we heard Russell’s thoughts on the district voting map saga, prospects for an expanded commission district, and why he’s no fan of former City Attorney Vicky Mendez. This week he explains what influences (and undermines) City of Miami governance, what derailed Coconut Grove zoning reform, and why Commission Damian Pardo may succeed with his policy agenda. Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Spotlight: You first ran for office in 2015 as an outsider promising to address the culture of corruption and influence peddling that has long plagued City Hall. What surprised you most when you began pursuing that agenda?
Russell: Let me answer by saying this. The city attorney felt that a big part of her job was to protect the finances of the city. She would bring up this concept of fiduciary duty. In her mind, that fiduciary duty included making sure no one who sued the city could win, even if the city was wrong. And she felt her job was to protect the finances of the city, not the ethics of the city, and this can lead to some poor decisions. From the land-use perspective, for instance, I remember the city attorney advising me to be pro-development because it puts more money on the tax rolls, and then, logically, the commission has more money to disperse and to play with. But this was problematic because the city attorney shouldn’t be advocating for policy. The commissioners should be making the financial decisions and the land-use decisions, and relying on legal advice only when it’s requested. All of this – and the access provided to lobbyists and land-use attorneys– are what led to my efforts to have her fired when I took office.
Spotlight: Are you saying that lobbyists and land-use attorneys had access to the city attorney in ways that influenced city policy?
Russell: The city attorney had a pretty open-door policy with lobbyists and land-use attorneys. So, when applications [for land development] come in, the planning and zoning staff, along with the city attorney, opine on those applications. They help steer the commissioners on what is legal, what is not legal within the code and the law. But it’s become a philosophy of some within the administration that the city attorney and other staff should help enable those applicants. To the layman, that looks like corruption at its highest because someone’s applying for something they maybe shouldn’t be able to get and the city administration coaches them into a successful application. I don’t think the resident who is applying for a permit to change the façade of his home would ever get that kind of help and attention.
Spotlight: There was some speculation that those lobbyists, working on behalf of developers, worked to derail one of your key policy initiatives – a revamping of Coconut Grove’s zoning code, or what we know as the NCD overlay – which the commission rejected despite broad community support. Is that what happened?
Russell: With the NCD, perhaps I tried to do too many things at once. Amendments to the neighborhood conservation district would have brought significant improvements to the code on how we build in Coconut Grove, what’s allowed for existing residents and what’s allowed for new development. So, my goal was to overhaul that document to strengthen tree protection, push against overdevelopment and massing. As a community, I felt that everybody was on our side. That massing was getting out of control, tree removals were getting out of control, the demolition of what should be historic structures was getting out of control, all for the sake of profit in building large cubes, and the large cubes were simply a mathematical factor of our existing code. And that’s where I hit the snag. The world of development recognized they’re currently shoehorning 5,000 square-foot homes on 5,000 square foot-lots, and they didn’t want that party to stop.
Spotlight: And you couldn’t find two others commissioners willing to support it, even though it had absolutely no bearing on their districts or their constituents. Why?
Russell: The developer pressure was huge on this issue because the demand in Coconut Grove to build was very high. They were advocating to every other commissioner to outvote me.
Spotlight: As I recall it didn’t even get to a vote. Were you surprised that nobody else on the commission joined you in support?
Russell: Developers and their lobbyists give money to the campaigns of all the commissioners because they all vote on issues that affect them. And then with the Grove’s NCD reform, a group of developers got together and created a fake grassroots organization – what’s known as astroturfing. The group, I think, was called Grove Beautiful. And this was a group of quote unquote interested residents who were supposedly pushing back against legislation that would limit their personal freedoms to do what they wanted with their properties. Sounds great, but it was actually developer driven, created and assembled to produce a counter narrative based on a personal freedom issue, a development rights issue, a financial issue. And that, in the end, was the eventual undermining of it: the idea that someone limited in what they could build on their land would also be limited in how much money they could make. Well, the entire code is full of that. You can’t build a 20-story building next to a single-family home. The code is what dictates that. So, is that person who wants to build a 20-story building limited? Yes, of course they are. And so this red herring was utilized to undermine the intention of the legislation, and it failed.
Spotlight: District 2 has a pattern of electing a commissioner who presents themselves as an outsider, eager to clean up corruption and abuse of power. And yet for various reasons, their terms in office come to an end with voters largely dissatisfied with the results. While Damian Pardo seems to have a similar reform mandate from voters, what must occur for him to be more successful than his predecessors?
Russell: This is very interesting. If you come into politics on a wave of activism, your base of support are activists. And activists work in absolutes. There’s not a lot of room for compromise. However, when you’re working in politics, if you’re trying to accomplish things, compromise is necessary. And when someone begins to compromise – not their ethics, but their decisions – and you don’t follow lockstep with the demands of the activist community, you’re suddenly shunned by them. Which is a shame, because the very people that supported you, to get you in office, suddenly start throwing stones.
Spotlight: Can Pardo avoid a similar fate?
Russell: It’s really the expectation of the electorate going in rather than the product that comes out four years later. With Pardo, he is calling for reform and transparency as his number one mandate. But he’ll also need to deliver projects and constituent services for the community over your next four or eight years and he’ll need the votes of other commissioners to do that.
Now Pardo has something I didn’t have when I was there, which is a teammate – someone who has his back, in (District 1 Commissioner) Miguel Gabela. They both came in on a similar wave of reform, and they seem to be backing each other on some hard initiatives. But they’ll still need that third vote.
