Miami District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo and staff were missing in action at last week’s Ministerial Alliance meeting. Community leaders question why.
Miami District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo and his staff have stopped attending the community meetings organized by West Grove organizations like the Coconut Grove Ministerial Alliance, and neighborhood leaders say the move seems punitive.
Pardo and his staff were advised by the City Attorney’s office not to attend the meetings after the organizations filed an unfair housing complaint against the City of Miami and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) decided to investigate.
HUD officials opened their investigation in July 2024, a year after the Ministerial Alliance and two other organizations filed the complaint. The complaint accuses the city of adopting planning and zoning policies that led to the mass eviction and displacement of hundreds of Black residents on Grand Avenue in the West Grove.
“It was a directive from the City Attorney’s office, because they are in litigation,” for district staff not to attend the meetings, a District 2 spokeswoman told the Spotlight.
Community leaders question that rationale, however, noting that former District 2 commissioners and staff frequently attended Ministerial Alliance meetings in the past despite active litigation between neighborhood groups and the city over other issues.
The absence of Pardo and his staff became a point of discussion at the first Ministerial Alliance meeting of the year on Saturday January 4 at Greater St. Paul A.M.E. Church when Anthony Alfieri, director of the Center for Ethics and Public Service at the University of Miami School of Law, raised the issue.
“It seems to me that it is disrespectful, and we should do something about it,” he said.
Alfieri noted that former District 2 commissioners, including Marc Sarnoff, Ken Russell and Sabina Covo and their staffs, regularly attended Ministerial Alliance meetings while other lawsuits against the city were pending.
“We have been suing the city for years,” Alfieri said. “But suddenly, suddenly, times apparently have changed.”
The City Attorney’s office did not respond to questions from the Spotlight about whether it had advised Pardo and his staff to absent themselves from West Grove community meetings and, if so, why.
The City of Miami is not shunning the meetings entirely. Miami Police Commander Daniel Kerr, who oversees Coconut Grove, attended Saturday’s meeting of the Ministerial Alliance to provide an update on neighborhood crime.
Still, Carolyn Donaldson, the vice chair of GRACE (Grove Rights and Community Equity) said the absence of District 2 felt like retaliation for the HUD complaint.
GRACE and the Coconut Grove Village West Homeowners and Tenants Association (HOATA), joined the Ministerial Alliance in filing the HUD complaint.
“The way the commissioner (Pardo) approached us about it, and we have been having conversations with their lack of presence, I understand that this directive is coming to them from their legal department, from the City Attorney’s office,” Donaldson said on Saturday. “The City Attorney has told them that they cannot attend our meetings – this meeting, the HOATA meeting, and the GRACE meetings, due to the litigation.
“I raised the concern about it being retaliation because we have had other legal matters, that we have been successful in the outcome, and it never restricted their attendance in the past,” she added. “It was only once the HUD litigation was filed that they said that we are now being subjected to this restriction.”
If District 2’s absence is in fact based on legal advice from the City Attorney’s office – again, the City Attorney’s office did not respond directly to an inquiry from the Spotlight – Alfieri described that advice as nonsense or, in his words, “piffle.”
“It is very important for our political representatives to show up and engage in a civic discourse and dialogue. We do not have to address the HUD fair housing complaint with Commissioner Pardo or his staff. We can talk about all sorts of things regarding the needs of this community,” Alfieri said.
“So, it seems to me that while there are issues of professional responsibility that the city appropriately should address regarding privileged communications and confidentiality, we can certainly accommodate those concerns in order to facilitate a civic collaboration between the commissioner, his team and this community. It’s not a hard lift.”
Editor’s note: Commissioner Pardo’s statement on this subject arrived after the Spotlight went to press and is published here as a letter to the editor.
