Monorail proposal loses support after ethics report on insider access on Asia trip

The monorail proposal by Genting and partners lost a key supporter Wednesday when a county commissioner asked to kill a review of the plan, pointing to an “alarming” ethics report about the project’s role in a May 2018 trip to Asia led by Mayor Carlos Gimenez.

Eileen Higgins, one of two commissioners whose districts include the proposed four-mile monorail route over Biscayne Bay, released a memo asking the board to reconsider its May 19 vote allowing the Gimenez administration to review the $770 million tax-funded project to use a Canadian monorail company to complete the long-delayed “Baylink” line between Miami and Miami Beach.

She cited a report by county investigators showing how the Gimenez administration initially did not share with the press the Genting meetings held during the well-publicized trade mission to China and Japan. The meetings occurred on a Hong Kong leg that, according to county emails, was largely arranged by a monorail partner with political ties to Gimenez.

“I cannot ignore this lack of transparency, even if means the residents and workers of Miami-Dade County must wait even longer for Baylink,” Higgins said in a letter to Inspector General Mary Cagle.

Ethics report on 2018 county Asia trip

The May 22 report from the county’s Commission on Ethics and Public Trust resulted in no enforcement action. It did not single out any county official for wrongdoing or cite any ethical breaches beyond improper erasure of temporary phones issued during the trip that the Gimenez administration has already said was a mistake.

“The whole thing with Genting was they were interested in investing in Miami-Dade County. So we went there to listen to what they wanted to do,” Gimenez said during an online press conference Wednesday. “The Ethics Commission found nothing else wrong with that. ... It really didn’t require two years of investigation to come up with the conclusions they came up with. We made the changes they recommended [on temporary phones] way before they suggested them.”

While the ethics report contains some new details from the China trip, the bulk of the account was previously reported in the media.

Higgins, who is running for reelection this summer and recently drew a prominent opponent in former school board member Renier Diaz de la Portilla, asked Cagle for advice on “who can best lead an objective” process for awarding the bid. In an interview, Higgins said she wanted to know if the county could start a “new” bidding process and not be reliant on the monorail proposal.

“That proposal is tainted,” she said. Higgins said she wants to see Miami-Dade pursue federal dollars for the Beach project, and possibly skip the upfront financing offered by the monorail group.

Higgins was one of the 11 commissioners who voted to authorize the Gimenez administration to begin initial talks with the monorail partners, which includes lead investor Meridiam, the company behind the PortMiami Tunnel project. Despite a six-month process designed to draw multiple bidders, the monorail venture was the only group to submit a proposal.

“This is a project she championed,” Diaz de la Portilla said Wednesday, calling the monorail proposal a ‘boondoggle’ that Higgins should have opposed from the start. “What a hypocrite.”

Hong Kong trip led to Miami monorail bid

The ethics report contained new details about the role of lobbyist Ralph Garcia-Toledo in arranging the Hong Kong trip that brought Gimenez, some commissioners and others to a Genting cruise ship on March 16, 2018, for a dinner with Chairman K.T. Lim.

The trip occurred more than a year before the county received an “unsolicited” proposal to build a monorail from Garcia-Toledo and Genting, with a station planned by the casino company’s waterfront Miami property.

Investigators produced an email exchange from early 2018 from Gimenez where transportation chief Alice Bravo included Garcia-Toledo in communications with a foreign company seeking to welcome the mayor while in Hong Kong.

Kieran Bowers, president of Swire Properties, a Hong Kong-based developer that built Miami’s Brickell City Centre complex, contacted Bravo about arranging a dinner with Gimenez and the delegation to discuss the company’s aviation division, Cathay Pacific.

“That evening (14th) definitely works. I will confirm the names of the people attending as soon as possible,” Bravo wrote on February 27, 2018. “I have cc’d Mr. Ralph Garcia-Toledo who is making most of the arrangements for the trip and works closely with Genting.”

In his email, Garcia-Toledo, finance chairman for Gimenez’s 2016 reelection campaign, played the role of scheduler for the mayor.

“Let me make it perfectly clear, the Mayor WILL make himself available to visit with Swire/Cathay Pacific while in Hong Kong,” Garcia-Toledo wrote on March 10 to Bowers, copying Bravo on her private account. “Let me again thank you for all your assistance.”

In a statement on Wednesday, the monorail group said the report “clearly” established nobody on the trip violated any laws and “simply confirms” prior media reports.

“The timing of this memo’s release raises serious questions and suspicions about its ultimate intent,” read the statement from Aqualand. That’s the company owned by Garcia-Toledo and Jesse Manzano-Plaza, the lobbyist and former Gimenez campaign manager who is also a partner in the monorail deal.

While the Swire event was listed on itineraries released to the Miami Herald and Univision in 2018 after inquiries about the planned Asia trip, the Genting events initially weren’t made public.

Both news outlets “requested copies of the Mayor’s travel itinerary for the ‘China trip’ weeks after the Genting meetings in Hong Kong had been scheduled,” the ethics report stated. Yet both were supplied with itineraries “that did not disclose the Hong Kong meetings with Genting.”

Gimenez’s office corrected the record in late March 2018 after the Herald independently learned of the cruise ship sessions.

The administration said an error led to the county not being able to turn over public records related to the trip. The Herald requested text messages sent and received by Manny Gonzalez, the county trade director who organized the Asia trip.

Gonzalez is a family friend of Garcia-Toledo, a godfather to one of Gonzalez’s children. Until 2013 and while working at the county’s Aviation Department, Gonzalez was listed as the registered agent for Aqualand Development, a Garcia-Toledo company that would become a partner in the monorail proposal in 2019, according to the ethics report.

Ten days after the Herald’s request, the county said the temporary phone issued Gonzalez had been wiped of data as a precaution against Chinese digital sabotage.

Ethics investigators said they couldn’t determine who wiped the phone, or if the data had even been cleared when the county told the Herald the text messages were gone.

The report concluded Jose Marticorena, a county technology specialist assigned to the Mayor’s Office, said the phone was wiped even though he hadn’t yet retrieved the phone from Gonzalez and hadn’t checked to see if the texts were still available.

He told investigators he might have gotten “questionable” information from staff, but the ethics report described his account as communicating “at best inaccurate and at worse, false information” about whether the Herald could access the texts on the phone. Marticorena was not immediately available for comment Wednesday.

This story was originally published May 27, 2020 at 7:14 PM.