The Dogs of War

Today’s title was inspired by one of Shakespeare’s more famous lines. Spoken by Mark Antony in Act 3 of Julius Caesar, the complete line is “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.” Interestingly, “havoc” had a precise technical meaning in Shakespeare’s day. It was a specific military command that dissolved the rules of engagement and signaled to soldiers (the dogs of war) that all restraint was lifted and troops were free to murder, pillage, and sow chaos.

Here in Coral Gables, we have our own dogs of war. Fortunately, they don't murder or pillage. They do, however, sow chaos. They spy on their neighbors. They file false police reports and spread malicious rumors and seek to destroy families. They sic code enforcement on their political enemies. They use campaign donations to resurrect failed “news” websites in order to produce copious amounts of AI-generated propaganda. They incorporate, they recall, and they sue.

Enter the University Green Neighbors Association (UGNA), an association formed by a smattering of NIMBYs and KFC-adjacent activists that is currently suing the City to halt the construction of a massive 10-acre, 40-story Live Local project about to be built mere steps away from their quaint little neighborhood.

Just kidding. They’re suing to stop a dog park. A motherf’n dog park.

The group’s slogan is “Keep University Green,” which makes perfect sense as dog parks are known for being sprawling concrete jungles with massive structures hulking over their surroundings:

Note that with the “Mediterranean Bonus” the height of this doggy bridge could easily exceed 48 inches.

Rest assured, its mission is every bit as coherent as its motto. The UGNA is seeking injunctive relief, which in this case means they’re asking a judge to block construction of a dog park that has yet to be designed and permitted. In the interests of keeping this post shorter than the complaint itself, I won't dissect every allegation. I'll simply note that the suit appears to suffer from a fundamental ripeness problem, as it’s essentially asking a court to invalidate an idea. The commission passed a resolution expressing intent to develop the park. That's it. There are no plans, permits, or contracts. City staff is still gathering public comment at parksprojects@coralgables.com. The injunction the UGNA is seeking is the legal equivalent of an activist chaining herself to a tree to block bulldozers that a logging company may or may not deploy 18 months down the road.

In any event, the legal merits of the case are probably the least interesting aspect of this affair. It’s the broader strategy and context that matter here, because even if the UGNA succeeds, it fails. Allow me to briefly unpack that.

A Procedural Pool Noodle

Procedurally, the UGNA’s lawsuit is the equivalent of blocking someone’s path with a pool noodle. You know the kind I’m talking about, those foam tubes your kids smack the crap out of each other with in the pool. It doesn’t take a world-class athlete and aspiring fitness influencer to clear one of those.

The suit’s a pool noodle because even if it were to succeed, it would result in a do-over, not a veto. The special zoning designation the plaintiffs claim prevents the establishment of a dog park is a municipal designation, one the commission can amend with three votes. In other words, the big hurdle here is a zoning status that the City set and that the City can change whenever it wants, and quite easily at that. The complaint also invokes Miami-Dade County ordinances restricting dogs in public parks, arguing no legal zoning category exists for a standalone off-leash dog park under existing county or city code. This is the suit's most substantive non-procedural claim, and one that still doesn't do a whole lot, since the city can simply create that zoning category through proper ordinance procedure. One more step in the do-over. A slightly taller pool noodle.

Not to mention the do-over wouldn't even be particularly disruptive, seeing as how the park is only now entering its early conceptual phase. It’s not like there’s a crew ready to break ground tomorrow. Even the more aggressive, albeit tenuous, claims like the Sunshine Act violation, or the stronger resolution-versus-ordinance argument, would, if successful, compel the city to retrace a few procedural steps and run the process correctly. Which they will. And which will produce the same dog park. Whoopee.

The Political is Personal

The most striking, and interesting, aspect of the complaint is how intensely and specifically it targets Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson. Seeing an elected official called out by name in litigation is one thing, but Anderson is named personally over two dozen times. She’s portrayed as the architect of an alleged conspiracy, a bad-faith actor who made promises she never intended to keep, and a political operative who deliberately manipulated the public process to benefit her allies while excluding her opponents.

The thing is, the complaint didn’t need to do any of that. Every legal claim in the suit, from the Sunshine Act violation to the resolution-versus-ordinance argument to the zoning issues, could have been established by referring to “the City” or “City officials.” The procedural deficiencies either exist or they don’t, and they don’t become more or less valid based on whose dream project this allegedly was. The decision to name Anderson so specifically, so repeatedly, and in such deliberately unflattering terms (personally visiting neighbors with a small dog in tow, making false assurances, orchestrating a year-long freeze-out of known opponents) smacks of someone having a score to settle.

But who could that be? Who within the upper ranks (such as they are) of the UGNA might plausibly possess such palpable animus against Anderson. Who in this photo could possibly have an axe to grind with the vice mayor?

Did you guys pick up on my subtle hint there? Did you guess the lady on the far right, Lynn Guarch-Pardo? If so, well done. You’ve got a keen eye for detail.

Seriously, though, it all starts to make more sense now. Lynn Guarch-Pardo is married to Felix Pardo, who you’ll remember ran against Rhonda Anderson last April and lost…badly. Anderson defeated Pardo by a margin that left little ambiguity about where the community stood. Political defeats sting, but they sting considerably more when the person who beat you has the audacity to build a dog park two blocks from your house.

This is not to say that every member of the UGNA harbors ulterior motives or isn’t at least trying to act in good faith. Some of them are probably just neighbors who genuinely don’t want a dog park outside their window, and that’s fair enough. But Lynn is a different story. She’s never exactly hidden her disdain for Anderson, and her presence in the upper ranks of this organization is hardly incidental.

It is, however, explanatory. And it becomes even more so when you factor in the Felix Pardo Gazette. Regular readers will recall that the Gazette and the Pardo campaign share more than fond memories and philosophical alignment. DNS data links the two operations in ways that neither Felix Pardo nor the Gazette has ever acknowledged, much less explained. In the absence of any explanation, reasonable people are left to draw reasonable conclusions. Which makes it worth noting that the Gazette has taken a conspicuously keen interest in this story, publishing not one but two pieces on the dog park dispute in as many weeks, both displaying an unusually intimate familiarity with the matter.

Chasing Their Own Tail

Indeed, I strongly suspect this dispute is largely a Pardo-driven affair, not only in light of the foregoing, but because the UGNA’s meta-strategy is predictably self-defeating in a particularly Pardo-esque way. The City can build a dog park if it wants to. If it has to make a small modification to the zoning code, so be it. It is not constitutionally or statutorily preempted from exercising such relatively minor discretion over public spaces. The City isn't trying to build a soccer stadium, it's trying to turn a patch of grass into a slightly more useful patch of grass. No judge or higher jurisdiction is going to step in and tell the City it ultimately can't.

Nor will it become a grassroots rallying point. Sure, the Pardos and their neighbors on Cadima are highly invested in this, but do you really think residents in the South Gables are going to get worked up over a dog park next to the Youth Center? We’re not talking about the Thesis or the Plaza here. This is not some massive development. It’s a park. No one opposes parks in the abstract.

All of which means this issue is a loser for the UGNA both legally and politically. But the biggest blunder is strategic, and it's the kind of strategic blunder that has a very specific historical precedent.

Recall how Florida's Live Local Act came to exist. It didn't just materialize out of the ether. It was a direct legislative response to years of what Tallahassee viewed as chronic, reflexive, and bad-faith obstruction by local governments. It was a broadside against municipalities that weaponized zoning codes and procedural technicalities to block housing projects that, at least to state legislators, were perfectly reasonable on their merits. Legislators grew tired of watching local majorities use procedure as a cudgel against their own residents' interests, and they responded by aggressively curtailing municipal home rule.

The UGNA is running the same play, just on the hyperlocal level. By filing a lawsuit to obstruct the city from exercising routine discretion over a public green space, by forcing the city to spend legal fees defending its most basic authority, and by making the entire process maximally painful and procedurally burdensome, the UGNA is handing the city every incentive to do exactly what Tallahassee did to municipalities, to streamline, simplify, and make the approval of parks and recreational facilities more ministerial and less susceptible to activist veto. The UGNA is litigating itself toward a world where it has even less say, not more.

And if that dynamic sounds familiar, it should. Felix Pardo, as a member of the Planning and Zoning Board, has already demonstrated a penchant for this particular brand of self-defeating intransigence. His and Sue Kawalerski’s reflexive opposition to The Mark compelled the developer to abandon the city process entirely and invoke the RTZ, after which the city found itself in the humiliating position of having to coax the developer back to the table with its hat in one hand and a more generous zoning code in the other.

Which brings us back to "Keep University Green." It's worth pausing on that slogan for a moment, because dog parks are, almost by definition, green. They are grass and trees and open air. In fact, the city's proposed design makes it greener and adds flowering trees and plants. The alternative, formalizing the lot's existing zoning designation and paving it into the overflow parking facility it technically is, would be considerably less green. So what, exactly, are they keeping it green from?

The truth is, "Keep University Green" is anti-development grammar shoehorned into a dispute that has nothing to do with development. It's a linguistic habit, a reflex borrowed from fights that actually made sense, like battles against Brickell-style towers and mixed-use behemoths where the threat to green space was real. The UGNA knows only one language, and so it maps that language onto whatever the current grievance happens to be, regardless of whether it fits. In this case it doesn't fit at all, because this was never about green space, but rather about not wanting to hear the occasional bark from across the street, about a political wound the Pardos have been licking since last April, and about a group of people who have mistaken their personal grievances for an actual cause.

Ultimately, the dog park will be built. University will remain green. And the Pardos will lose once again.