Lubby Navarro says in court she’s not guilty of fraud, stealing $100K in public money
Former Miami-Dade School Board vice chairwoman Lubby Navarro formally pleaded not guilty Friday to charges that she spent $100,000 of taxpayer dollars on personal items and trips for herself and her ex-boyfriend.
In a brief hearing before Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Milton Hirsch, Navarro stood silently next to attorney Ben Kuehne, who told the court his client was not guilty of any of the charges.
After state prosecutors said they were satisfied Navarro posted a $100,000 bond with legitimate funds, Hirsch set a tentative date of April 22 for Navarro’s trial.
“She’s a good-standing person who’s served her community well,” Kuehne said of his client, outside the courtroom after the hearing concluded.
Navarro, 49, who served on the School Board for seven years until resigning at the end of 2022, is facing two counts of organized scheme to defraud and two counts of grand theft, charges that could land her in prison for as many as 55 years.
Prosecutors contend she spent upwards of $100,000 of public money on a host of personal items, pricey trips with her boyfriend and to stock food and equipment in his Fort Lauderdale restaurant, the Shook Market. Navarro was arrested Jan. 11 and spent two nights in the county jail.
Her 98-page arrest warrant — which only covers audits of her expenses in 2022 — reads like a bizarre fiction crime novel. In it, prosecutors allege she used a pair of district-issued credit cards to splurge on trips to Disney World with her boyfriend and his family and a trip with her boyfriend to Las Vegas, where they wined and dined at the Wynn Hotel. She’s also alleged to have shopped a lot at Walmart and other stores, buying clothing, food and wine.
She also stocked more than inventory at her boyfriend’s restaurant, investigators said. She used her School Board credit cards to outfit the restaurant with refrigerators, a wine cooler and top-of-the-line espresso machines.
READ MORE: Lubby Navarro spent lavishly on ex-boyfriend’s restaurant and him, investigators say
And she made some bizarre purchases, apparently for herself. One purchase, according to investigators, was a fake silicone pregnancy belly that she is alleged to have used to try and impress upon her boyfriend that she was pregnant.
The alleged misdeeds were only discovered after Navarro resigned from the School Board in December 2022, a day before a new state law went into effect barring elected officials from working as lobbyists. Navarro, at the time, along with her School Board job, worked for the South Broward Hospital District and its Memorial hospitals as a lobbyist.
It was her failure to fill out an expense report for the last month in the year that landed her in hot water. The job fell to the school district’s chief of staff, Jose Bueno. He noticed Navarro had spent more than $13,000 in December on her credit card — more than twice her limit — and began to take a closer look.
READ MORE: Lubby Navarro kept asking for spending limit on district credit card to be upped. It was
What Bueno found was that Navarro had asked for and was granted an increase in her spending limit for most of the year in 2022, three times more than doubling her limit. And that her submitted invoices were often doctored, sometimes sloppily with White Out.
Navarro left the School Board because of her hospital district lobbying job. Since her arrest, she’s been placed on unpaid administrative leave by the hospital district, which has launched its own investigation into her spending.
This story was originally published February 9, 2024 at 12:38 PM.
