The Bullet We Dodged

Though it's still bouncing around.

At the very least, Phishingate, the latest in the endless series of "-gate" scandals plaguing the Gables, should serve as a vivid reminder that KFC, like herpes, is the gift that keeps on giving. Here we are, almost two and a half years after we indulged in that ill-advised political ménage à trois with a couple of political prostitutes, and new lesions are still erupting across the body politic.

Nevertheless, one of the few virtues of modern government is that the same bureaucratic inertia that renders it slow and inefficient lends it a kind of limited resistance to corruption and malfeasance. Political infections may be painful, but they’re seldom terminal, no matter how many pathogenic Ariels invade the system.

So while Phishingate is likely the most important and potentially consequential political story of the day, it's not strictly existential to anyone but Ariel. The trollies will continue to run on Miami time.

Therefore, barring major developments, I’m going to shift my attention to other matters as Phishingate continues to percolate. There appears to be an active criminal investigation underway anyway, and investigations, as you know, have their own timeline.

That said, I should respond briefly to a couple of questions that keep popping up in reader emails, the first being what I think about Ariel's suspicious absence from the July 1st commission meeting and his remarkably early departure from the July 2nd budget workshop.

My take is that his absence was suspicious indeed. Ariel missed the July 1st meeting for ostensible health reasons, but short of being hooked up to life support somewhere, it's hard to fathom why he couldn't attend via Zoom, as he has before when ill. The sudden onset of symptoms the following day, just as public comment was about to begin, wouldn't you know, is equally perplexing. Once again, Ariel could not be present in commission chambers, and while technically on Zoom this time, he encountered incredibly improbable technical difficulties that just so happened to prevent him from interacting with anyone until the closing minutes of the meeting. This from the MacGyver of multimedia who could sink down to the Mariana Trench (where the wreckage of his political career currently rests) and still find a way to broadcast live on at least four different platforms with nothing but a rusty anchor and a decayed whale carcass. I mean, for God’s sake, the guy carries a camera tripod around with him practically everywhere he goes as if it were an EpiPen, just on the off chance that he can film himself saving humanity from some life threatening emergency, like a twig that happened to tumble onto the street.

Taken as a whole, one could be forgiven for suspecting Ariel's real motive here was to avoid having to contend with inconvenient questions while on the record. All the ills that befell him just so happened to remove him from the scene the moment there was any danger of someone leaning into a microphone and asking, "So tell us, Commissioner, is any of what was alleged in the Aesop post true?"

To be sure, Ariel faced a classic catch-22 when it came to addressing the allegations on the record. His only two options were equally problematic. He could either admit to being behind the surveys after two years of coverup, obfuscation, and denial, or deepen an already deep hole by perpetuating the lie. Neither should be survivable for Ariel, hence his assiduous avoidance, for the first time in his life, of cameras and microphones. In my view, Ariel's suddenly going AWOL is tantamount to pleading the Fifth, which may be the best option one has in certain legal contexts, but amounts to admitting guilt in the court of public opinion.

The other question I was asked at least a half dozen times was what I thought of Ariel's quote to the Gables (Insider) Gazette, which appears to be the only comment Ariel has made on the story since it broke:

"I look forward to the politically motivated investigation which will clear my name."

Let's ignore the tragically inartful phrasing and focus instead on what I think is the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose setup Ariel was going for here. When the investigation reveals the allegations are true, then it will be because the investigation was a politically motivated sham. But if they somehow prove to be false (spoiler alert: they won't), then it will have been a flawless, thorough, and fair investigation that settled the issue. Ariel covers all the bases with one nonsensical sentence. Still, maybe it's just me, but I can't help but think an innocent person would directly and unequivocally deny the allegations rather than preemptively poison the well by declaring the investigation "politically motivated" before it's even properly begun. By undermining the process before it starts, Ariel essentially admits he expects damaging findings. Otherwise, why would he need to discredit them in advance?

The B-Team’s blunder

As most of you already know, I’m a tad sick in the head. Case in point, I voluntarily—I mean for little more than my own twisted enjoyment—watch most of the city’s televised board meetings, particularly those of the Planning and Zoning Board (PZB), the most powerful board in the Gables after the commission. To all the local political junkies out there who don’t follow the PZB, you don’t know what you’re missing. The thing about KFC is that it was never truly limited to the commission, thanks to their stacking critical boards and committees with allies and proxies that are just as extreme, combative, and as bloodthirsty as they are. As a result, you’ll often find the same feral aggression, unhinged belligerence, and jackbooted absolutism that characterizes KFC has metastasized into every board they've managed to appropriate. This pattern, incidentally, is just further evidence that the discord and dysfunction that defined the commission between April 2023 and April 2025 emanated from KFC rather than anything else, as similar discord and dysfunction was routinely witnessed throughout the various KFC-controlled boards. The common denominator is unmistakable.

The July 2nd PZB meeting demonstrates this well, and serves as a compelling reminder of why we must be ruthlessly selective about who we entrust with the levers of power. Here's the backstory: sometime last year, a development application came before the PZB for approval. The proposed project—an eight-story mixed-use building located along the stretch of MetroRail that runs through the Gables—was ultimately rejected 3-3, with board member Robert Behar recusing himself due to his involvement with the project. Two of the three ‘no’ votes were cast by Felix Pardo and Sue Kawalerski, both of whom represent the true locus of KFC influence over the board.

Fast forward to the July 2nd meeting, where, lo and behold, the same project was back before the board, except this time it was even larger and wasn't seeking the board's approval. Rather, it returned as the sole inspiration for a new zoning overlay being proposed by the City. You see, thanks to the project's proximity to the MetroRail line, it falls within Miami-Dade County's Rapid Transit Zone, or RTZ. Projects located within the RTZ have the option of bypassing their municipality and obtaining approval exclusively from the County through a special application. It's essentially a Plan B for qualifying projects, but a Plan B that's significantly more generous in terms of height, floor area ratio, parking, and setbacks than the city's zoning code. Hence the proposed new zoning brought to the PZB. It was the City's way of trying to win back the developer with special zoning parameters that essentially mimicked the County's more generous standards.

So let's chew on that cud for a moment. The City is now attempting to effectively upzone an area near the MetroRail in order to convince a developer to bring his project back to the city for approval (so that the Gables can have at least some influence over the project) rather than circumventing the City altogether by running it through the County. In other words, thanks largely to Felix and Sue, the eight-story building that the PZB imperiously rejected can now very easily become a 15-story building with no parking, unlimited FAR, and no setbacks…and there isn’t a damn thing the City can do about it except cry "Please, please, oh pretty please come back to us and we promise this time we’ll be nice."

This move by the developer represents the inevitable fulfillment of a familiar warning, to wit: "I can build something much worse than what I'm proposing as of right, so please do us both a favor and approve the project that is before you, as I've done my best to be accommodating." The hardcore anti-development crowd, of course, never took this threat seriously, always rolling their eyes as if it were mere saber rattling. And while I don't think the developer of the project in question pivoted to the County purely out of spite or vengeance, I do believe it demonstrates what inevitably happens when a developer chooses to maximize their property rights and avail themselves of the legal optionality that many foolishly like to pretend doesn't exist.

Keep in mind, the County wasn’t the only potential off-ramp for this developer. Thanks to our faithful servants in Tallahassee, there's also a Plan C (the nuclear option as some call it): Live Local. One frequently overlooked bit of background on Live Local is that it was passed largely as a check on increasingly extreme forms of local NIMBY-ism. How profoundly ironic that the most aggressively pro-development, anti-home-rule piece of legislation to emerge from Tallahassee in decades would not have been possible without the Sues and Felixes of the world; people for whom what used to be a sensibly conservative approach to development has gradually snowballed into a no-holds-barred religious war against the property rights of millionaires.

At any rate, it was nothing short of remarkable to watch Felix and Sue sit through a two-hour meeting devoted exclusively to this matter and struggle to internalize the direct causal relationship between their denial of the smaller project and the emergence of a potentially much larger one. Although, you could tell by both the egg dripping down his face and his rare bout of speechlessness that Felix came to realize he had made some sort of boo boo:

Unfortunately, the camera wasn't on Felix when Robert Behar diplomatically ripped him and Sue a new one for putting the city in such an unenviable position, but I would imagine he was positively squirming in his chair:

Still, it was surprising to see Felix struggle so noticeably with the implications, requiring multiple explanations of basic procedural elements from his colleagues and the PZB's attorney. I, for one, was led to believe the man was practically the Sun Tzu of zoning—at least that's the impression one gets whenever his lips part. In fact, one could be forgiven for assuming Felix is the world's foremost authority on all matters of human endeavor, because no matter what the discussion entails, when it's Professor Pardo's turn to talk (and he makes damn sure it usually is), he doesn’t merely chime in. He preaches. He lectures. He holds forth, droning on and on and on with a pomposity that suggests whatever he's currently saying is the wisest thing anyone has ever said—kind of like me, except you won't find me filibustering late into the evening to a room full of meeting attendees who just want to go home to their families.

Felix’s visceral need to pontificate is so instinctive and insufferable, I often wonder how much it must suck to be stuck behind him in the McDonald's drive-thru:

Employee: "Welcome to McDonald's, may I take your order?"

Felix, slowly removing his spectacles: "You may, but first we must ask, 'what is an order?' Let us start at the beginning: Four score and seven years ago, a man felt a pang, the pang of hunger…"

Then again, Felix really is a bona fide genius when measured against Sue, whose cognitive limitations encompass not only zoning knowledge but simple logic and basic manners. As evidenced by practically every word out of her mouth, Sue was, in a word, lost. It was as if she couldn't wrap her head around the fact that this project was pursuing the County route through an established legal framework that had been in place for years, not because the County was capriciously interfering in local matters.

Indeed, Sue seemed constitutionally incapable of grasping that Coral Gables is a city within a county within a state within a nation, and that this necessarily entails overlapping jurisdictions, competing authorities, and inevitable limitations on local control. She appears to believe the Gables is some sovereign island floating alone in the vacuum of space, an island over which she and her fellow zealots gained total tyrannical control thanks to a fluke election in April 2023. Thus, it never occurred to her that developers could simply go over their heads and appeal to a higher authority, one that, tragically for Sue, doesn't answer to her whims. Why else would she dare speak to County Commissioner Raquel Regalado, who appeared before the PZB as a courtesy, and who is effectively Sue’s boss at the County, as though she were some subordinate summoned before the Spanish Inquisition?

Allow me to ask an intensely serious and profoundly philosophical question here: who the f%@! does this woman think she is? Commissioner Regalado was gracious enough to attend the PZB meeting to explain how the RTZ works so that the City could better mirror its standards in an effort to regain the jurisdiction it had squandered thanks to Felix and Sue's self-sabotaging imperiousness. Regalado wasn’t compelled to be there at all much less subject herself to Sue's oblivious hectoring and toxic personality. It's one thing to habitually talk down to developers, addressing them as "you people" as Sue has been known to do. After all, the worst they can do is bypass the city's authority and use Live Local to turn eight stories into forty. Pfft, no big deal.

We might even choose to overlook the racist dog whistles and other forms of needless alienation that Sue likes to engage in, like the thinly veiled contempt she showed for Asians when she made these remarks at a PZB meeting, remarks that earned Sue the wrong kind of attention from the County’s Asian-Advisory Board:

But alienating a relatively popular county commissioner? You're talking about burning bridges with someone who actually has the power to help (or hurt) the Gables at the county level for many years to come.

Call me crazy, but maybe allowing one of the most toxic personalities since Mrs. Cruzchev to occupy a seat on the city's second most powerful board wasn't exactly a stroke of genius. Perhaps we could find someone with a basic understanding of zoning law who also isn't so belligerently reckless that she alienates literally everyone she encounters, including the very officials whose cooperation we desperately need. I mean, when you're so insufferable that even the CGNA secretly thinks you’re a bit too much, maybe it's time to reevaluate your role in the community.

More broadly, Sue and Felix exemplify the cognitive pathologies inherent to all fire-and-brimstone political movements, whether ultra-MAGA, Antifa, or KFC. Such movements are invariably the product of emotion rather than intellect, which explains both their passionate adherence and their systematic blindness to inconvenient realities. Revolutionary fervor requires energy that cold, dispassionate analysis simply cannot provide. When movements are fueled by raw emotion, e.g. anger, resentment, envy, etc., anything that challenges their emerging dogmas necessarily triggers aggressive defensive reactions. Cognitive dissonance becomes not a bug but a feature, requiring fierce resistance to ideological threats even when those "threats" are simply basic facts about how the world works. This is precisely how you get two allegedly intelligent people appearing blindsided by well-established laws and the elementary concept of overlapping jurisdictions. KFC's radical anti-development ideology cannot survive even the briefest encounter with reality; it disintegrates the moment you introduce fundamental aspects of governance like the existence of county and state authority, basic property rights, or simple electoral math. Hence their perpetual shock when these realities assert themselves, as if reality itself should have been reshaped by the sheer force of their righteous indignation.

Not for nothing

You may be wondering why I’m focusing so much on ostensibly minor role players like Felix and Sue, especially when the two thirds of KFC that remain on the commission are trapped in their own political (and highly newsworthy) death spirals. The reason is twofold.

First, though Ariel may be the founding father of the movement, KFC is nonetheless just that—a movement. Like a Black Mirror version of the American experiment, it’s an idea that has transcended its founders and threatens to live on. Now that Kirk is gone and Ariel and Dr. Castro are clearly politically inviable, there is bound to be a power shift within the broader movement.

Hence the title of this post, which alludes to the fact that had April gone differently, we could have found ourselves with a KFCWP commission, which inevitably would have entailed Tom Wells slurring random footnotes from Robert's Rules of Order in between Felix Pardo's lengthy sermons on subjects about which he doesn't even know what he doesn't know. More importantly, this commission would have been dominated by people who have demonstrated in their own current stations a complete inability to reconcile reality with their revolutionary ideals. Ideologues who envision Coral Gables not as a modest municipality within a complex web of overlapping jurisdictions, but as some sort of galactic government that answers to no one and nothing, existing strictly and entirely as a manifestation of their own fevered thoughts and utopian wishes.

The frightening reality is that such an outcome was entirely possible. Had enough votes shifted in April, we would have witnessed the complete capture of city government by people fundamentally incapable of governing, zealots who mistake obstruction for principle, who confuse tantrums for advocacy, and who have proven time and again that they would rather burn down the entire system than acknowledge the basic constraints of law, jurisdiction, and reality itself. We dodged a bullet indeed.

The second, and perhaps more personally compelling reason, is that counterfactuals aside, Sue and Felix are major players even in the current timeline. And I don't just mean through their roles on the highly powerful PZB, nor their positions as heirs apparent to the KFC throne. I mean through what they do behind the scenes, by who they advise, who they influence, and what clandestine activities they pursue when they think no one is watching. I have good reason to believe that Felix, in particular, is far more active in the shadows and much less forthcoming about his various entanglements than he'd like us to believe. His public persona as a grandfatherly know-it-all may be genuine, but it's hardly complete. The truth is, there's far more wool being pulled over the public's eyes than most residents realize, and not all of it involves the commission. And that, dear readers, is precisely what we will explore in my next post.