Fritz and Franz Ferdinand (Part 2)

If at first you don't succeed, lie, lie again.

There is a phrase I wanted to open with but can’t. I promised long ago to avoid it at all costs, and so I hope you will forgive me for falling back on a loophole: Iyay oldtay ouyay osay.

I am referring, of course, to Ariel’s latest crusade to fire the city manager, the one he officially commenced this week without even a hint of vulgarity or sensationalism, but rather with class, dignity, and discreet professionalism. Just kidding, he used one of his promotional e-blasts to distribute a memo to tens of thousands of residents announcing the super exciting news that he intends to end someone’s career (at least he didn’t try to sell ad space on this one). What’s more, it would appear Ariel was obliged to share the news with a few of his favorite bloggers before he shared it with any of us. How else could Political Cortadito have written about it before the e-blast went out? I suppose our esteemed commissioner decided to go with Residents First-ish on this one.

Ariel engaging in his favorite pastime—showing people the door.

To be fair, seeing this one coming was not exactly a triumph of political prognostication. Ariel’s moves are relatively easy to predict once you have developed a decent mental model of the man, which, in and of itself, is surprisingly straightforward. All you have to do is follow this fairly simple heuristic: within any given set of circumstances take the most vindictive thing you can imagine, combine that with the laziest thing you can imagine, combine that with the most self-aggrandizing thing you can imagine, and then combine that with the most self-defeating thing you can imagine. Voilà! You have just entered the mind of Ariel Fernandez.

Furthermore, you can cross-check your mental Ariel Bot with information from a few key indicators. Mrs. Maria Cruzchev is one such indicator, albeit the loudest and crudest one. She’s KFC’s abuela with no filter, the one with the tendency to say what everyone in the group is thinking but is unwilling to say out loud. You may have suspected KFC was strategically adrift a few months ago because they were power-tripping on their new three-vote majority, but you knew it as soon as Mrs. Cruzchev showed up to a commission meeting in a t-shirt that literally had the phrase “In Coral Gables, it takes three to tango” written on it.

But whereas Mrs. Cruzchev is something of a lagging indicator, Ariel’s blogs are your strongest leading indicators, as they have been tasked with providing air support for all of KFC’s operations, to bomb the beaches before the ground invasion begins. It is why CBS 4’s coverage of the Fritz and Franz discussion after the last commission meeting was actually about Fritz and Franz, while Gables Insider and Political Cortadito’s coverage was almost entirely about the manager and how much of a loose cannon he suddenly is. One is news while the other is messaging, and Ariel’s messaging was providing an extremely clear signal that another attempt to remove the manager was imminent.

Et tu, Brute?

That said, I was only directionally correct on this call. I actually botched the timing. You may recall how at the end of last week’s post I mentioned my apprehension about the upcoming Ides of March (March 15th, the day Julius Caesar was brutally assassinated on the floor of the Roman Senate). It was an allusion to what I thought would be an attempt to oust the city manager during the March 12th commission meeting.

It is not that I keyed in on that particular meeting because I thought Ariel actually figured the Ides of March into his plans—he has neither the historical literacy nor the poetic touch for that. It is that I gave Ariel too much credit and assumed he would at least allow the Fritz and Franz negotiations to run their course and engage in a bit more ground softening before launching his final assault. It seemed as though, at a minimum, he would give the manager three weeks to broker a deal with Mr. Neuweg, since three weeks is exactly what the commission, at Ariel’s behest, directed the manager to dedicate to the negotiations:

Good God, you almost have to admire the man’s adamantium imperviousness to shame. Rather than wait a measly three weeks for the talks to either succeed or fail, Ariel chose to not only plunge a knife into the back of the city’s chief negotiator, but to actively undermine the negotiations from behind the scenes as they unfolded. Have a look at the beginning of this email exchange between Ariel and city staff less than one week after the commission meeting:

So, here we have the city’s asset manager emailing the commission an update on the ongoing Fritz and Franz negotiations. In that email, the asset manager enumerates a long list of DBPR violations that included a mix of health and licensure issues. These violations were issued as the result of a November 15, 2023 inspection. The asset manager advises that she was relaying those violations in order to refute an on-the-record claims made by the tenant at the prior commission meeting. This gets Ariel riled up, as you can tell from his reply (I am including the rest of the email chain here as well):

Here we have Ariel replying to the asset manager’s email in his characteristically sober and judicious manner by attacking the city manager for 1) not being mentioned in an email he didn’t write, 2) not addressing “concerns” in August that did not materialize until November, and 3) not following the will of the commission despite doing exactly what the commission instructed him to do.

At this point the manager jumps in and, in a manner of speaking, kindly reminds Ariel that because the flux capacitor on his DeLorean was broken back in August, he was unable to time-jump three months into the future and familiarize himself with those DBPR violations, and that by continuing to negotiate with the tenant, he was following the commission’s directive to the letter. To this, Ariel tersely replies as follows, “How often do we check with the DBPR for issues with our tenants? Please provide me with all DBPR violations/status report for all our current tenants. Thanks.”

Yes, burn it all down! City-wide retribution! Everyone must feel the pain! Anyway, the manager makes one last attempt to politely educate Ariel but I am going to go out on a limb and assume he did not get anywhere with that.

I am sorry, friends, but we have arrived at the point of insult here. For Ariel, this was never about Fritz and Franz. It was only about himself and his unsatisfied vendetta. Had he any genuine concern for Fritz and Franz, he wouldn’t have been the last one in the Gables to discover they were in a lease dispute with the city. He would have opened those emails that had been sitting in his inbox since September, the ones that had Fritz and Franz written in big bold letters in the subject line; he would have read the “terms” of the lease and familiarized himself with the relevant facts and course of dealings before placing the issue on the commission agenda; he would have crafted well-reasoned and diligently rehearsed talking points on Fritz and Franz and improvised his comments on the manager instead of the other way around; he would have followed up by dedicating a fraction of his precious time toward brokering a solution instead of lobbing a bunch of rage emails at the city manager; and he would have refrained from upstaging Fritz and Franz with all his grandiose off-with-his-head proclamations until the business was done having its moment in the sun.

But he didn’t do any of that. What he did was stumble upon an issue that, unbeknownst to him, had recently become the hot topic among the grassroots and saw what looked like an opportunity to turn a critical mass of residents against the administration and, in so doing, convince Kirk to finally go along with him on firing the manager. What he didn’t realize until a few days ago, because he can’t be bothered to perform even a modicum of due diligence, is that the manager and his staff are on very firm footing with regard to Fritz and Franz. They did exactly what they were supposed to do as fiduciaries, and that is a cold, hard truth that not even Ariel, the King of Cognitive Dissonance himself, could ignore once reality finally bored its way through his thick skull. And once it did, once Ariel realized Fritz and Franz didn’t have the juice he was looking for, he kicked it to the curb like it never existed and moved forward with plan B. Nice knowing you all, it was fun, thanks for the t-shirt.

Plan B

There is no need to speculate on what plan B is. Ariel spells it out right there in his memo:

“At our last City Commission meeting, City Manager Peter J. Iglesias' stated, ‘as far as I'm concerned, this is not going to happen. If the commission wishes for that to happen, the commission can go ahead and do it.’ This was a direct and public insubordination of this body which has raised much concern for residents about the Manager's willingness to address their needs and concerns.”

In other words, Ariel’s only remaining play is to lie to you, to lie so brazenly that it constitutes gaslighting. He is demanding that you ignore your lying eyes, your lying ears, your lying brain and believe whatever he tells you the manager said rather than what you actually heard the manager say. Either that or he thinks you are just plain stupid. Probably both.

He needs you to believe the utterly asinine notion that the manager sat right there on the dais and told the commission he intended to defy it. He needs you to believe the manager just staged an insurrection. He needs you to believe that January 23rd was Coral Gables’ January 6th.

He needs you to ignore his own shoot-from-the-hip stupidity. Let’s take another look at this gem of a moment:

WTF is this imbecile saying? Are we really supposed to pretend that Kirk has been with Lago and Anderson this whole time? That the last six months never happened?

Are we supposed to forget that the manager included the commission’s salary increases in the new budget against the wishes of Lago and Anderson precisely because three commissioners ordered him to? How many letters are in KFC? Hold on, let me count. I’ll even use my fingers for Dr. Castro: K—that’s one. F—that’s two. C—that’s three!

Here is the thing, unlike Ariel, I definitely do not think you are stupid. I think you know that when the manager says “I answer to three members of the commission” he means that he answers to the commission as a governing body—which cannot do anything unless at least three members agree— not any one commissioner. In other words, he means the exact opposite of what Ariel is claiming. And if you are wondering why the manager would need to say something like that in the first place, it is because he has to work with someone who does not understand what a chain of command is and who thinks it is perfectly acceptable to bark orders at everyone, even FPL employees, as though they report to him:

This right here is your problem. Ariel is a commissioner, but thinks he is an entire commission unto himself. He has no business directing this individual to the restroom much less directing her to immediately stop all work. It is why you always hear the phrase “through the manager” on the dais. It is how things are supposed to be done.

By the way, and this is going to be real a shocker, but Ariel, clueless as always, completely jumped the gun and embarrassed himself here. As it turns out, FPL was not trimming any trees on the golf course. It was the city trimming an invasive monkeypod tree that is in the process of being consumed by a strangler fig. It was all being done in accordance with best practices. See for yourself:

Jerks all day

Ariel is not upset because the manager does not obey the commission. He is upset because the manager does not obey Ariel. To put it another way, Ariel’s problem is not with the manager but with the city charter. He was elected commissioner, which apparently is not the role he signed up for. It is far too limiting.

The role Ariel wanted, what he thought he was entitled to as a result of the messianic treatment he received from his overzealous supporters, was the role of God Emperor. He wanted pure power, complete obsequiousness, and unquestionable authority. It is why he had a problem with Suramy Cabrera, Miriam Ramos, Ed Santamaria, and Jessica Keller. It is why he has a problem with Ed Hudak, Zeida Sardinas, Diana Gomez, Raquel Elejabarrieta, and Martha Pantin. And it is why he won’t stop until he solves his biggest problem of all, Peter Iglesias.

It all brings to mind a quote from one of my favorite fictional characters, Raylan Givens from Justified (I’ll use language that is less earthy than his): if you run into a jerk in the morning, you ran into a jerk. If you run into jerks all day, you’re the jerk.

Note: I will likely be back with a mini post on Monday. I have a couple of thoughts to share on Kirk’s role in this.