Former Miami Lakes building official says he resigned amid pressure to issue permits
When developer Carlos Perez hit a permitting snag in his renovation of a single-family home in Miami Lakes in early 2020, he reached out to Mayor Manny Cid through a mutual friend: Marty Caparros, who is Perez’s neighbor in Southwest Ranches and the CEO of development company Prestige, which contributed to Cid’s last reelection campaign.
Cid then visited the property and put in a call to the town manager, asking him to set up a meeting between Perez and Miami Lakes Building Official Michel Mesa.
Suddenly, an administrative dispute over unpermitted construction had turned political — or at least it looked that way.
Two other elected officials, council members Jeffrey Rodriguez and Joshua Dieguez, also spoke with Perez and then the town manager about Perez’s permitting woes, records show. Perez retained Javier Vazquez, an attorney and lobbyist (and a childhood friend of the town manager) to help him communicate with the town and set up a meeting with Mesa.
And at a town council meeting last March, after Perez and several members of his construction team griped about their ongoing struggle to communicate with Mesa, the council voted to create an “ad hoc” committee of building industry experts to recommend changes to the building department — even as two council members, Marilyn Ruano and Luis Collazo, argued it was an improper attempt to influence a department that should remain independent.
Mesa resigned abruptly last June on the same day as Permits Director Lourdes Rodriguez, who said in her resignation letter that “current circumstances [had] swayed” her to leave.
Mesa, who departed after accepting the building official job in Bay Harbor Islands, didn’t make any allusions to current circumstances in his resignation note. But now, in the face of a Dec. 21 lawsuit filed against him by Perez’s son, Carlos Perez Jr. — for whom the elder Perez was renovating the home at 14412 Rosewood Road — Mesa is speaking out.
In a statement Monday, Mesa told the Miami Herald he wouldn’t have left Miami Lakes last June if not for attempts by Perez and his team “to undermine the integrity of the building department.” While several town officials told the Herald they believed Mesa had left for better pay in Bay Harbor Islands, Mesa said it was “widely known” that the situation with Perez played a role in his decision.
Last week, in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against him in Miami-Dade Circuit Court — which accuses Mesa of vindictively withholding permits after he learned Perez had called on the mayor for help — Mesa said he felt pressure to green-light Perez’s project after the town discovered renovations had been performed without permits.
“This frivolous lawsuit is an outrageous, malicious, and actionable abuse of the Court system by an applicant for a building permit who is upset because the Defendant refused to cave into the plaintiff’s efforts to corrupt Miami Lakes City Government,” reads Mesa’s motion to dismiss, which was filed by attorney Michael Pizzi, a former Miami Lakes mayor.
‘A power struggle’
The lawsuit against Mesa is an unusual attempt to hold a building official personally liable for his professional actions. Perez Jr. had previously sued the town of Miami Lakes — a more typical course of action — but dropped the case in federal court last March. Building officials are generally immune from liability unless they are proven to have acted maliciously or recklessly.
The multi-year debacle has raised questions about what role, if any, elected officials should play in the operation of local building departments. Florida law says building officials must act independently, “without interference from any person.” But several Miami Lakes officials said there’s nothing wrong with how Perez’s case was handled.
Cid, the mayor, said his visit to the property and subsequent request that the manager arrange a meeting was standard practice, and simply part of his broader effort to ensure residents’ needs are met.
“Anybody in the community can request I go to their home and see what the issue is,” Cid said. “It’s the same way I act with every single resident.”
Rodriguez, who told the town manager he believed Mesa was mishandling Perez’s case and also proposed the ad hoc committee, said his focus was always on improving the town’s communication with residents, not on trying to influence the building official regarding life safety decisions.
Perez’s case, he added, wasn’t the only one that had revealed room for improvement in the department.
“We are the sounding board between residents and government,” Rodriguez said. “It is within our purview.”
But not every town official saw it that way. Ruano, who voted against the ad hoc committee, said she still feels the committee’s formation was part of a “political witch hunt” against Mesa. And Perez, she said, was using elected officials to try to run political interference.
“When [Perez] started calling on council members, what they were trying to do was to influence the building official. That’s what I truly believe,” she said. “It really just became a power struggle.”
According to the website Political Cortadito, the resignations of Mesa and Rodriguez also initially prompted Town Manager Ed Pidermann to come to their defense.
In a July interview, Pidermann reportedly called the March meeting at which Perez and his team had criticized Mesa “an orchestrated parade of people who disparaged the building department and the administration.” Political interference, he added, had “probably” led to Mesa’s and Rodriguez’s resignations.
But the morning the story was published, Pidermann emailed the author (Elaine de Valle, a former Herald reporter) to say she “misquoted” him. “I never told you that the reason why they left was political interference. I advised you to speak to the 2 of them directly to hear from them why they left,” he said.
Speaking with the Herald last week, Pidermann said elected officials acted entirely appropriately by passing along Perez’s concerns to him, letting him fulfill his role as a go-between and a buffer with the building department.
“I don’t think that they’ve ever leaned on me [politically]. None of them,” Pidermann said. “In fact, it would be illegal for them or me to try to do that with a building official.”
‘He’s paying the price’
In his court filing last week, Mesa invoked the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, where 98 people died last June, to underscore the crucial role of building officials in keeping people safe. Surfside’s former building official, Ross Prieto, faced criticism after the collapse for telling owners the building appeared to be in good shape, even after he received a report detailing structural damage.
“As the entire nation learned from the tragic events of the Champlain Towers building collapse, if Building Officials do not uphold the building code and do their jobs, people die,” the court filing says.
Kawa Foad, an attorney for Perez Jr., told the Herald he was “disgusted” by the comparison.
“They’re comparing apples to lasagna,” Foad said. Perez’s property in Miami Lakes, he said, “was an uninhabited property that was in bad condition. They were trying to fix it as quickly as possible.”
Perez admits he started work on the Rosewood Road home without the required permits, saying he was hampered by the shutdown of the building department in the early days of COVID-19. The unpermitted renovations included construction of a terrace, installation of impact windows and doors and interior remodeling.
When a town inspector noticed the work in April 2020, the building department tagged the structure as unsafe, as is called for in the county code. But the lawsuit says Perez did everything aboveboard after that — submitting revised structural plans in response to feedback from Mesa and commissioning ground-penetrating radar scans to prove the work had been done properly and according to plan.
Mesa, according to the lawsuit, was upset when he learned Perez was seeking help from the mayor. Driven by a “fragile ego,” he rejected meetings with Perez and withheld the needed permits, the lawsuit alleges, ultimately costing Perez and his son over $100,000 in legal fees and property damage as the house languished.
The lawsuit also says Mesa insisted on X-ray images of the unpermitted work, rather than the ground-penetrating radar scans that Perez and his team of experts said are industry standard and safer for humans.
Ultimately, the dispute was settled last May by the Miami-Dade County Board of Rules and Appeals, which found Perez should be allowed to submit GPR scans in lieu of X-ray — paving the way for the permits to be issued.
But Mesa says he had safety in mind, not vengeance. The lawsuit, his court filing says, is an attempt “to continue harassing and slandering [him] because he was a municipal building official who did his job.”
Ruano, the council member, agrees.
“They’re complaining that our building official didn’t behave properly. I think it’s the complete opposite,” she said. “He didn’t cave to political pressure and now he’s paying the price.”
This story was originally published January 11, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
