KFC's City Hall Vacation
Imagine you're cruising down the turnpike in your aging but trusty station wagon, family in tow, when suddenly you blow a tire. Just as you pull over, your spouse leaps out and stomps along the shoulder screaming, “We're stranded!” Unfazed, you check the trunk and discover that you have a fully inflated spare tire and a working jack set. A passing Road Ranger even stops and offers to change the tire for you.
You tell your spouse not to despair, as these things happen and you'll be back on the road in less than 15 minutes—but they won’t have it. They simply refuse to drive any further, spare tire or not. They insist, despite not being able to articulate precisely why, on forcing the entire family to grab their bags, hike four miles to the nearest exit, and hole up in a motel until the car can be towed to a certified mechanic and completely overhauled, which is liable to take a few days at the very least. Having no other choice, you give in. And as you all hoof it up the road toward the nearest exit, your children relentlessly buffeted by the turbulence of eighteen-wheelers barreling by as they struggle to roll their little suitcases down the gravelly shoulder, your spouse turns to you and shrieks above the commotion of the busy highway, “Look at what you made us do!”
If this overwrought scenario strikes you as too absurd to be believed, then you clearly haven't been keeping up with KFC's latest crisis du jour: the 'forced' vacation of City Hall—despite the availability of temporary and simple solutions to keep it operational.
That said, that’s as far as I'll go with the theming of this post. Don’t get me wrong, the parallels between KFC’s attempted ‘vacation’ of City Hall and the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise were almost too good to resist. Oh, how I wanted to run with Ariel and Dr. Castro as Clark and Ellen Griswold, and Kirk as crazy cousin Eddie cleaning out the Griswold's septic tank, aka the cesspool (of corruption).
But, alas, some stories don’t really merit the whole song and dance. No, this vacation of City Hall farce is a bit too absurd, hyperbolic, and blatantly contrived to merit the full thematic treatment.
It’s not that there aren’t a good half dozen angles to explore, an abundance of absurdities to sink one’s teeth into. To be sure, if you look closely enough, there’s plenty of overlap between KFC’s attempt to shut down City Hall and other seemingly unrelated behavior. Take for instance, Ariel’s obsession with the partition wall in front of the mayor’s office and his recent efforts to aesthetically convert City Hall into your neighborhood Applebee’s by way of that hideously tacky banner he made for his office, or the inappropriate and increasingly close relationship between KFC and the police and fire unions.
Regarding the latter, are we sure we’re entirely comfortable with the president of the local fire union chaperoning Ariel and Kirk on their buddy-buddy trips to Tallahassee? Are we supposed to think this is kosher?
The connections abound, indeed. But for the sake of keeping this remotely readable, I’ll leave the periphery unexplored on this one, and will focus instead on the core issue, the main, if obvious, takeaway here: that this City Hall fiasco was obviously one of Ariel’s harebrained, wag-the-dog operations—the kind of half-baked and poorly executed ‘optics’ set piece that one can expect from a thrift-store PR consultant and wannabe political strategist.
Ir-Rationale
The reason this is all so obvious is twofold. First, is the fact that despite the explicit rationale for vacating City Hall was blown up live and in color by the city’s engineer, KFC and their marionette manager nevertheless clung tooth and nail to idea of vacating City Hall. To do this, they had to shift the proverbial goal post so far it left the stadium entirely.
Indeed, if someone insists that action X needs to be taken solely because of concern Y (and Y is all they talked about from the beginning), but then concern Y is fully and unequivocally negated, action X should be deemed unnecessary. And so when an individual refuses to abandon X in light of that negation, and instead spontaneously introduces concerns A and eventually B, you have proof that this individual was always—to use the proper logical-mathematical term here—full of horseshit. You know, without a doubt, that this person was using something called "reverse reasoning," i.e., identifying a desired outcome and reasoning backward to justify it.
From the jump, Ariel's (he took the lead on this one) sole justification for vacating City Hall hinged on "safety." Not your garden-variety OSHA standards, not some ergonomic keyboard concerns, but actual life-and-death safety. City Hall, according to Ariel—armed with his well-earned expertise in absolutely nothing—was in imminent danger of collapse, à la Champlain Towers in Surfside (it would seem there's no tragedy this man won't exploit for political purposes).
When the city's engineer confirmed that simple shoring work could make City Hall perfectly safe to occupy within days, Ariel and KFC pivoted their argument. No longer questioning whether the building could be safely occupied, they now debated whether occupation was the safest choice—transforming a practical engineering matter into the equivalent of counting angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Of course it’s safer to not occupy City Hall at all. But that will always be true, not just for City Hall but for any building. There’s always a nonzero chance that any building, regardless of its condition, will collapse at any time. And so, technically speaking, an empty building is always going to be safer than an occupied one. But then while we’re at it, why don’t we all just work from home, since that would be technically safer than having to drive to an office?
It's all so incredibly stupid, which is why Aimless Amos had to pivot even further and invoke “environmental” concerns as the real reason for vacating City Hall. Suddenly, all that incessant scaremongering about imminent collapse and Champlain Towers was reduced to mere well-intentioned exuberance on Ariel's part. The real concern all along, folks, was the noise and the dust!
Do me a favor. See if in the photo below you can see past the thick clouds of toxic dust and spot the temporary shoring that is now installed at City Hall (it took about a week to install). If you squint and look really closely, you can kind of make out what looks to be metal scaffolding acting as shoring. It’s tough, I know, but just try:
Were you able to make them out? Now imagine how noisy those pieces of motionless metal must be. Consider the clamor they’ll be making for months, years even, as they… just sit there. And to think this shoring had to be installed in City Hall’s finance department, which has been unoccupied for roughly a year. Think of the zero people who would be affected by this dramatic environmental disturbance.
I cannot stress enough how unserious these people are. They put all their eggs in the easily debunked theory that City Hall was on the brink of collapse, then pivoted without thinking to vague and poorly conceived environmental nonsense. And when that failed to land? They essentially threw up their hands and offered the logical equivalent of “Whatever, I know my truth.”
I’ll close this section with Andres Viglucci’s assessment in the Miami Herald, who in journo-speak, essentially confirms that these people are, in fact, morons:
It’s unclear given Wood’s reassurances why Rojas decided to vacate City Hall.
On Tuesday, Rojas alluded to “environmental” concerns from construction dust in the building that could pose a health hazard to city employees and the public. But he did not specify what construction projects would produce the dust or why it could not be contained. A city spokeswoman could not provide further details.
It WaS a CoNsPiraCy!
The second big tell that vacating City Hall was entirely political theater can be gleaned from how far Ariel had to reach, and thus how much damage he had to inflict on his own credibility, to somehow turn this into an indictment of Peter Iglesias and the so-called (and stupidly named) Lago/Anderson-led “establishment.”
Anyone even passingly familiar with Coral Gables history knows that City Hall's need for extensive restoration has been common knowledge for years. The idea that our century-old building's condition was somehow a closely guarded deep-state secret is so absurd that only Ariel could conjure up such nonsense.
Here, in a letter recently sent to the editor of Coral Gables Magazine, is what local historian, Patrick Alexander, had to say about City Hall:
Sir:
The latest controversy to embroil our dysfunctional City Commission - closing down City Hall and relocating all its workers and functionaries – could have been resolved a quarter century ago.
Early in 2000, using the original plans approved by George Merrick, then City Commissioner Dorothy Thomson and Mayor Raul Valdes Fauli had proposed construction of a 60,000 square foot annex to City Hall on the site of the current parking lot. The new building would have housed the bulk of the administrative staff and offered the public a more modern and efficient environment for the issuing of licenses and permits. Phineas Paist’s original building would have been reserved for Commission meetings and more formal events, and thus spared the physical wear and tear of daily public administration.
The City had already borrowed $20 million from the State of Florida to execute this plan until it was stopped by public protests led by legendary activist Roxcy Bolton who characterized it as an attempt to keep the public out of City Hall. Ms. Bolton’s objections were supported by then Commissioner William Kerdyk Jr. and other commissioners including former mayor George Corrigan.
As a result, the project was demolished, work was halted, and the surface parking was restored. Twenty-five years later we now have a $20 million parking lot and a badly worn-out City Hall in need of repair.
For which (for once) neither Mayor Vince Lago nor Commissioner Ariel Fernandez can be blamed.
The only thing I’ll add to that is this: while it’s true that neither Ariel nor Lago are to blame for City Hall’s condition, only one has attempted to blame the other.
(By the way, I'm halfway through Mr. Alexander’s latest work, Coral Gables: The First Hundred Years, and I already cannot recommend it highly enough. Both compelling and enlightening, this elegantly erudite journey through a century of Coral Gables history serves as a perfect companion to Arva Moore Parks' beloved works that grace so many Gables coffee tables. You can grab your copy of The First Hundred Years here.)
Then there is the esteemed Mayor Dorothy Thomson, who added her always valuable perspective to Mr. Alexander’s observations:
How short-sighted the prevailing citizenry power group was at that time. The current office space unavailability that exists presently due to the needed City Hall remedial work, would not be a factor, otherwise. Nor would the city be facing an enormous expense due to having to find temporary rental space for its employees—many of them working from home two days a week until rental space is found.
As you can see, only a spiritual carpetbagger like Ariel could think City Hall's need for extensive repair work would come as a surprise to anyone. But here's the real kicker: Mr. Gables Insider himself wrote about these very renovations in January 2023:
Although the Manager wants to address the issues when City Hall is renovated, at the present moment there are no immediate plans for that to take place. In fact, staff confirmed to the Commission last year that the City had $6 million in a fund for the renovation, but that fund has been depleted to just over $57,000.
Wow, it sure seems like Ariel the mere citizen was all over City Hall, its renovation plans, and how it was being funded through the budget. The most informed man in Coral Gables seemed to be, well, pretty darned informed.
So how is it that nearly two years later Commissioner Ariel found himself completely in the dark vis-à-vis City Hall’s condition?
Well, according to Ariel, all of this critical information was carefully kept hidden by virtue of Peter Iglesias not spoon feeding him all the relevant details during briefings. Setting aside the fact that I don’t believe Ariel for one second when it comes to any account of his relationship with the former manager, I remain unable to wrap my head around how Ariel had such a firm grasp on the many finer points of our city’s affairs when he was a normal citizen, but then became so helpless and uninformed upon being elected to the commission. Something doesn’t add up here.
Speaking of adding up, I’m wondering if Ariel has access to that top-secret deep-state document insiders refer to as the municipal budget, the one that contains numerous references to the multi-year restoration of City Hall and a capital-project line item of $4,227,152 dedicated to the City Hall Complex. If only Ariel had seen this document, he might have been able to, you know, ask questions:
Ah, so it would appear Ariel is familiar with this budget doohickey after all. So what was his ultimate excuse for not knowing about existing plans to renovate City Hall despite it being right there in the budget? Well, per Ariel, merely listing an item in the budget is simply not good enough, not for a commissioner explicitly tasked with carefully scrutinizing said budget. No, just sticking something in the budget, no matter how prominently it’s featured, is tantamount to hiding it.
Says the guy who essentially told residents complaining about his self-awarded 102% raise: Durrr, next time read the budget you bunch of ignorant fools!
So why would Ariel feign ignorance over something we know, without question, he was fully aware of? Why not just seize upon the very recent discovery regarding the one possibly compromised structural column and see if you could leverage that exigency into vacating City Hall? Why overextend yourself by manufacturing a coverup when you and 10,000 other people already knew City Hall needed extensive repairs?
The answer is painfully simple: forgoing blame would not help the narrative. Ariel knows that election season is about to begin in earnest and all he can feel are headwinds. Kirk surrendered any semblance of individual identity to a collective called KFC. Therefore, KFC’s record is Kirk’s record; a record that is entirely defiance and dysfunction. A record whose highlights include KFC’s self-serving raises, the disgraceful termination of a decent public servant, and the inexplicable impulse to pile millions of dollars of debt onto the city’s books for pet projects and electoral base shoring. Oh, and I almost forgot, the ambush hiring of a hapless and deeply compromised nobody who lacked the qualifications to be hired as a meter-maid much less a city manager.
Thus Ariel needed to flip the script, so to speak. He needed a way to convince the residents that the slow-but-steady disintegration of our government—from sanitation services, to the building department, to public works—has nothing to do with the massively incompetent city manager he hired with zero vetting, but his predecessor. He needed to reboot the “shadow government” and “establishment” nonsense that helped get him elected, and the only way to do that was to cook up something he could try to pin on someone who has been out of the picture for nearly a year.
That’s no easy task. The facts simply don’t support that kind of narrative jujitsu. Which is why we saw Ariel twist himself into a pretzel trying to turn City Hall into a story of lingering neglect and conspiracy, going as far as to try to shut it down for no good reason, and right before an election to boot. He needed you, more than anything, to stop noticing the absolute dumpster fire he and his friends have become, and instead look back toward a different time, to 2023, when the bad guys were the right bad guys—his political enemies.
And that is some classic KFC logic for you. Everything that was wrong with the Gables yesterday was the fault of yesterday's leadership, and everything that's wrong with the Gables today is...also the fault of yesterday's leadership. That's what this entire charade about vacating City Hall is really about—shoehorning that ridiculous logic into your brain at practically any cost. But much like our hypothetical family trudging down the turnpike because of a perfectly serviceable spare tire, Ariel and the rest of KFC's attempt to manufacture yet another crisis ended up exactly where you'd expect: stranded as the result of its own stupidity.