Kirk's Chronicles (Part 1): Miami's Mindless Mediocrity

You knew this was coming. I’ve been warning you for the past year and a half—the skeletons in Kirk’s closet would only remain hidden for so long.

Actually, I find the old “closet” cliché doesn’t do Kirk justice, nor does it possess the requisite cinematic flair befitting the commission’s resident movie buff. Perhaps a more apt metaphor for Kirk's woeful yet assiduously whitewashed past might be the infamous swimming pool from the horror classic Poltergeist—the one that, near the film's climax, erupts with a mass of decaying corpses, unleashed by the cursed Native American burial ground upon which the ill-fated house was built.

Fun fact: In order to elicit genuine fear from the actors, the film's producers used real human skeletons…and a copy of Kirk’s personnel file…during the infamous pool scene.

Granted, while we've examined Kirk's shady real estate transactions and his surreptitious, though poorly concealed, quest to up-zone his current home to attract potential developers, that examination was cursory at best (and worth revisiting soon). Moreover, not once during his four years in public office has anyone looked closely at Kirk's professional history, particularly the almost 15 years he spent snaking through the bowels of the City of Miami before finally being excreted in quiet but unmistakable disgrace.

Until now.

In this first installment of what is slated to be a three-part series, we’ll look at Kirk’s tenure at the City of Miami, from his early years as an assistant city attorney to his abrupt termination as Ken Russell’s chief of staff. It promises to be a fascinating, if tragic, saga that will reveal how Kirk:

• Took a job as an assistant city attorney at the cusp of 40 (a decade older than typical), yet managed only a middling performance rating after six years

• Doubled his taxpayer-funded compensation by simultaneously serving as MSEA Executive Director while drawing a city salary

• Failed to maintain legally required meeting minutes at MSEA, allegedly lost rent checks, and left the agency in such disarray it was eventually abolished

• Returned to the city attorney's office only to be reprimanded for "insubordination and incompetent performance," forcing his resignation

• Made one final attempt as chief of staff to Commissioner Russell, but was fired after just 60 days for, according to sources, Kirk’s being "one of the laziest human beings" his superiors had ever met

Miami’s “C-student”

I should note that the overall picture of Kirk's time with the City of Miami can get a bit murky. Much of what I will share below had to be gleaned from a voluminous batch of public records, though I was fortunate to track down a few high-quality sources for added clarity. But beyond the challenge of teasing insights from mounds of paperwork, there's the dizzying circuitousness of Kirk's employment history with Miami. The man's personnel file reads like one of those old Family Circus dotted-line comics, with Kirk playing the role of little Billy pointlessly weaving in and out of various departments at the City.

Nevertheless, if only because they were utterly unremarkable, Kirk's early years at Miami seem to provide the clearest picture. According to Kirk's file, he was initially hired by the City as an assistant city attorney in mid 2002, a position he seems to have held without distinction until 2008. I say without distinction because despite being six years into his career and "appearing" in over 900 matters as an assistant city attorney, Kirk is only able to muster a competency score of 3.09 (out of possible 5) in his 2007-2008 performance appraisal—a score that according to a source who used to conduct similar evaluations at the City meant Kirk was, in practical terms, “basically a C-student."

But perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised by Kirk's middling performance, given that he was hired at the tender age of 39—roughly ten years older than the typical entry-level assistant city attorney. Maybe Kirk was merely a late-late bloomer on the cusp of true greatness, right?

If only.

MSEA and the Infamous Double Dip

Unfortunately, Kirk's stint as a middle-aged assistant city attorney would prove to be his golden age, his peak, his veritable professional prime. It was also the last time his career path would follow anything resembling a straight line. What follows is a dizzying sequence of role changes and overlapping positions that leads one to wonder if Kirk was desperately searching for his calling or simply trying to stay one step ahead of his own mediocrity.

After departing the city attorney's office, Kirk briefly surfaced in what appears to be a project management role—a position he held barely a year before it quietly disappeared. By January 2010, he had somehow landed in the city manager's office with the title of “Senior Assistant to the City Manager” which seems to have morphed later into "Intergovernmental Affairs Liaison,” though I have seen one mention of Kirk being an “Interim Director” in the City’s records (Kirk on his résumé refers to this position as simply "Intergovernmental Affairs Director"). This new role would occupy him, at least nominally, until 2014.

But it’s only just begun to get complicated. Sometime in 2011 Kirk landed yet another role, one that appears to have been kept on a different set of books entirely: Executive Director of the now-defunct Miami Sports and Exhibition Authority (MSEA).

As any close follower of City of Miami politics can tell you, MSEA was an infamously mismanaged and highly problematic agency that came under heightened scrutiny in 2018 when an audit revealed in somewhat shocking fashion that then-director Lourdes Blanco was earning two salaries from the City of Miami, one as a regular employee and the other as director of MSEA. Needless to say, this ruffled a lot of feathers both in and out of Miami City Hall, as MSEA was already in the hot seat for a host of issues stemming from years of mismanagement—years that include 2011-2014, when Kirk was the executive director.

In fact, one of the most revealing aspects of the 2018 MSEA audit wasn't just that Blanco was receiving double compensation—it was that this practice had been quietly inherited from her predecessor, Kirk Menendez. According to documents Blanco herself submitted to the public record, Menendez had also received dual compensation from both the City of Miami and MSEA during his tenure. But here's where Kirk's notorious aversion to transparency comes into play: because he failed to maintain basic meeting minutes during his time as executive director, there was literally no paper trail documenting when or how this double-payment arrangement was established or approved.

It's almost hard to fathom Kirk, of all people, ripping off taxpayers by unethically maximizing his publicly-funded salary while methodically hiding it from public view, isn't it? That’s definitely not something the people of Coral Gables could ever imagine Kirk doing.

This lack of documentation became a critical issue when former MSEA board member Nathan Kurland later revealed that for approximately a year under Menendez's direction, no one kept the legally required minutes of authority board meetings. As Kurland noted with no small irony, there weren't even any minutes to record board members questioning why there were no minutes being taken. This systematic failure to maintain basic records left massive holes in MSEA's institutional memory, with Blanco later stating in court documents that she had to rebuild the organization's history "from scratch" when she took over. From the Miami Herald:

Another former member who served on the board for 11 years said on Friday that he only knew of Blanco’s salary from the authority.

“I had no idea she was also getting a check from the city manager,” said Nathan Kurland, a Coconut Grove activist.

Blanco maintains she was operating under an arrangement that is long-established and well-known.

“That policy was founded long ago and has been followed consistently to date,” Blanco wrote in her May 30 response to the audit, which she forwarded to each commissioner this week. “All city commissioners and board members of [the authority] have been aware of this historically and no eyebrows or questions have ever been raised.”

The auditor recommended the city review Blanco’s salary and benefits package “for appropriateness in light of the issues outlined in the findings” and write a policy for how Blanco should be paid.

Kurland said he questioned aspects of the authority’s management even before Blanco became director. He said that for about a year during his tenure under a previous director, no one kept legally required minutes of the authority’s board meetings, leaving a hole in the record of the board’s actions. Kurland said because of this, there’s no record of board members questioning the lack of basic documentation of their work.

“There’s no minutes to reflect why we’re wondering why there were no minutes being taken,” he said. Kurland said Blanco began keeping a record of meetings when she took over.

But the minutes weren't the only things missing during Kirk's tenure. According to Blanco's public statements, Menendez had failed to properly report revenues in MSEA's budget and had even managed to lose rent payment checks made out to the authority. The financial disarray was so complete that by the time the 2018 audit rolled around, the authority had essentially no proper policies or financial controls in place. Here’s Lourdes Blanco as reflected in City of Miami Speaker notes circa 2018:

This pattern of mismanagement under Menendez's leadership had real consequences for Miami taxpayers, particularly regarding the Watson Island development. Without proper documentation of board decisions and agreements, disputes erupted over who was responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in infrastructure costs. In one particularly telling example, a $348,273 payment for electrical infrastructure became a point of contention precisely because there were no minutes recording what had been agreed to during Menendez's tenure.

The cumulative effect of these years of mismanagement was devastating. By 2018, MSEA's reputation was so thoroughly damaged that Miami Mayor Francis Suarez declared the authority had "outlived its usefulness," leading to its ultimate abolition in October of that year—a fitting epitaph for an agency that, under Kirk's leadership, seemed allergic to maintaining its own history.

Reprimands, Resignations, and Firings

Oddly enough, Kirk's malfeasance as executive director of MSEA had little to do with his accelerated downfall at the City of Miami. Remember, the dirt on Kirk's double-dealing at MSEA didn't come to light until 2018, which means his eventual ouster from the City came down to something far more mundane: sheer incompetence.

Shortly after leaving MSEA, specifically in November 2014, Kirk was suddenly transferred out of the city manager's office and back to where it all began—the city attorney's office. You'd think that with over a decade of municipal experience now under his belt, including three years as the executive director of a semi-autonomous agency, Kirk would have returned triumphantly, perhaps on the fast-track for a deputy role or better.

Nope. It was back to the assistant city attorney role—or "legislative liaison," technically—and back to that $87,000 salary (I’m not sure if he kept his coveted car allowance though) that we now know represents Kirk's compensation sweet spot. Then again, maybe returning as a humble assistant was merely a formality, a procedural necessity positioning Kirk to rapidly climb the organizational ladder as adroitly as one might expect from a 52-year-old municipal veteran. That was probably it, right? Surely, Kirk was poised to blow the doors off the place, wasn't he?

Oh, I see. But hold on, maybe this was all part of Kirk's grand strategy for rapid career advancement. Perhaps, in some 4-D chess sort of way, Kirk's, ahem, "insubordination and incompetent performance" was merely a ruse, a kind of professional rope-a-dope that would leave him positioned to execute his career masterstroke. Maybe he simply ignored his basic duties as a "liaison" because he was working on something more important—kind of like how he's ignored his basic duties as a city commissioner for the past four years.

Damn, I guess not. Turns out that act-your-age-and-get-your-shit-together reprimand really was the proverbial final straw. But hey, at least they afforded him the dignity of allowing him to resign. They could have summarily fired him on the spot, in front of all his friends and colleagues, and made him perp walk out the door in the middle of a workday. Then again, no one's that evil.

So that must have been it for Kirk and the City of Miami, right? Surely, after 13 years of highly impressive pilferage and general incompetence, Kirk was ready to take that dazzling skill set of his and parlay it into real success, maybe this time in the private sector?

Nope! He's baaaaaack (good Lord, it really is like Poltergeist). Less than six months after being shoved out the City of Miami's backdoor, Kirk comes crawling back, hat in hand, looking for a job—this time as then-commissioner Ken Russell's chief of staff. And guess what? Somehow, in a stunning display of the public sector's famously lenient employment standards, Kirk lands the job in December of 2015.

Finally, Kirk had found his true calling. Under the tutelage of Ken Russell, Miami's dynamic rising star and future mayoral prospect, surely Kirk would flourish. After all, being chief of staff to a city commissioner is basically a paint-by-numbers job—show up, answer some emails, manage a small staff, don't antagonize your boss's constituents. Even Kirk couldn't mess this up. At long last, his redemption arc was about to begin.

Yikes, that was quick. While the official record maintains a diplomatic silence as to why Kirk lasted a mere 60 days as Russell's chief of staff, I happened to track down someone with direct knowledge of the affair. According to this unimpeachable source, Kirk was initially hired because he seemed "harmless" enough—a qualification that, in retrospect, speaks volumes. However, Kirk quickly distinguished himself as "one of the laziest human beings [they] ever met," someone with "no work ethic" whatsoever. Indeed, in the brief span of two months under Kirk's leadership, "all hell broke loose" in Russell's office.

You really have to hand it to Kirk: getting fired from a government job is widely considered next to impossible. Yet our man managed to pull it off not once, but essentially twice. That's the kind of overachievement you simply can't teach.

The Steep Price of “Public Service”

The most damning aspect of Kirk's professional history is how perfectly it presages his conduct as commissioner. The same patterns of apathy and indolence that plagued his tenure at Miami have defined his four years on our dais. Anyone who follows commission meetings should be familiar with the sight: Kirk, tilted back in his chair, staring vacantly into space as though spirit-walking in the astral plane. Indeed, Kirk's legendary unresponsiveness to constituents and notorious aversion to rolling up his sleeves renders the label of “one of the laziest human beings” more prophecy than indictment.

Kirk clearly squeaked by in 2021 riding not only Lago's support, but also his carefully cultivated image as the clean-cut and jolly soccer dad—the familiar face from the community. It was as if he were running for homecoming king rather than public office. And we, the residents of Coral Gables, were credulous enough to fall for it. We elected Kirk not based on vision or qualifications, but because—to borrow the words of my source—he seemed "harmless." And let me be very clear: I was the first to fall for it. Even worse, I penned a post in the early days extolling Kirk's virtues as a man of the community. If Coral Gables is a village of idiots, then I am, without question, the chief idiot.

But it's rarely too late to acknowledge one's mistakes.

I take no particular pleasure in dishing on anyone, even politicians. But I find my usual reservations melting away when it comes to someone so utterly devoid of moral restraint as Kirk, a man who has persistently, gluttonously, and unapologetically gorged himself at the public trough for much of his adult life. And I think this kind of scrutiny is beyond fair game for someone seeking public office—especially the mayor's seat. It's the bare minimum we should expect. If Kirk's dismal and despicable résumé isn't fair game for public discourse, then nothing really is.

But this litany of failures and borderline malfeasance is merely the appetizer. In part two of this series, we'll examine Kirk's post-Miami years, a period I like to call his "wandering years." It's an interesting chapter during which Kirk, despite not having anything resembling an actual career, somehow manages to score himself a tidy little windfall.

Stick around.