In Miami-Dade, Christian Ulvert helps candidates win elections and developers win deals

When developer Paul Lambert needed help winning county land for the Miami Wilds waterpark under Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, he hired a consultant who knows her well: Levine Cava’s campaign director, Christian Ulvert.

“We knew that we needed some help messaging,” Lambert said in an interview about Ulvert’s previously unreported work for Miami Wilds, the controversial project once planned for county land outside Zoo Miami. “Just the same way he does for elected officials. It was to give us advice on how to message it.”

Ulvert, 42, became locally prominent in politico circles for his work running campaigns for Democratic candidates across Miami-Dade County. Though not a registered lobbyist, he also works as a communications consultant for private-sector clients, advising developers and others seeking favorable decisions from Levine Cava and favorable votes from the 13-member County Commission, where Ulvert has three campaign clients: Commissioners Danielle Cohen Higgins, Eileen Higgins and Micky Steinberg.

His ties to county office holders could expand even further after the Nov. 5 election, since his company, Edge Communications, is managing the campaigns for the Democratic nominees for sheriff, tax collector, elections supervisor and clerk.

The two sides of Ulvert’s business give him an enviable advantage as a paid consultant. On the one side, he’s the top political operative for the county’s newly reelected mayor and her slate of candidates seeking to run Miami-Dade agencies. On the other side, he’s sought out by companies eager to win deals from Levine Cava and others holding power in Miami-Dade government.

Ulvert’s consulting work doesn’t violate county lobbying rules, according to the Miami-Dade Ethics Commission. But it does expand his role and influence in local government with each candidate he helps get into office.

While Levine Cava ultimately killed the Miami Wilds project, Ulvert’s previously unknown work assisting Lambert sheds light on the duality of his role as a paid advisor to both politicians and private-sector executives as they stand on two sides of a given deal.

Lambert told the Miami Herald he wasn’t paying Ulvert to pitch the project to Levine Cava or other elected officials. Instead, he said Ulvert was hired to offer advice on the best way for Lambert and partners to make their case to the administration, County Commission and the public.

Lambert recalled how Ulvert put it: “‘I can help you figure out how to message this correctly for the mayor, but also for the commission. But I’m not a lobbyist. You’ll still need to have … other people working on the lobbying side.’ That’s what he told us,” Lambert said. “‘That’s what I do. I know messaging.’”

Ulvert said Levine Cava was aware he was helping Miami Wilds with what he described as a grassroots communications plan focused on the best way to build support for the waterpark in areas around the zoo.

In his interview, Lambert also emphasized that Ulvert’s work focused on a broader campaign to build public support for a project that was largely backed by the county’s elected officials until it ran into trouble last year.

“Even though certainly the mayor was part of the audience and the commission was part of the audience, the public was the main audience,” Lambert said of Ulvert’s work for the Miami Wilds effort. “Because at that time, the mayor and the commission didn’t have a problem with Miami Wilds.”

Ulvert told the Herald that he has no role in lobbying any elected officials, including Levine Cava. Instead, he described his work for Miami Wilds and other companies pursuing county deals as focused on communications and not politics.

“I always make clear: If you are looking for someone to advocate for your cause with a lawmaker or an elected official, you need to go hire a lobbyist, or sometimes a zoning attorney,” Ulvert said. “I am neither of those things.”

Ulvert may be the ultimate insider in Levine Cava’s orbit, both on and off the campaign trail, but he says his conversations with the mayor never tread into issues that private-sector clients are pursuing with the administration.

In an interview, Levine Cava said she’s never had a conflict with Ulvert running her political operation while working for private-sector clients, too.

“His private-sector consultation, as I understand it, is primarily around strategic communications,” she said. “If there’s an issue, then we don’t talk about it.”

The ultimate insider

While lobbyists regularly use political contributions to keep on friendly terms with elected officials, no private-sector player has the kind of extensive relationship Ulvert enjoys with Levine Cava.

Since she took office in November 2020, Levine Cava’s Our Democracy political committee and her 2024 mayoral campaign have paid more than $3 million to Ulvert’s Edge Communications and its related entities, according to campaign-finance reports. Because those dollars cover payroll for campaign staffers, television and radio advertising, printing costs for materials, polling and other expenses, it is not known how much of the money represents actual profit for Edge.

Ulvert ran her first political campaign 10 years ago, when Levine Cava, then a nonprofit executive, won an upset in 2014 by unseating the most conservative county commissioner on the board, Lynda Bell.

At the time, Ulvert was head of the SAVE Dade gay-rights advocacy group and, along with his husband Carlos Andrade, was suing Florida to overturn the state’s ban on same-sex marriages. He had clashed with Bell after she blocked adding transgender protections to the county’s human-rights ordinance. When Bell declined his request for a meeting on the issue, Ulvert said he told her: “You’ll never forget me.” (In an email, Bell said she did not recall the conversation. “I have a pretty decent memory,” she said. “I doubt that conversation took place.”)

Ulvert helped Levine Cava win an easy reelection to her District 8 commission seat in 2018 before the two engineered a 2020 mayoral run that, for the first time, tapped Democratic Party resources and organizers to win Levine Cava the county’s top job in a race that is technically nonpartisan.

When Levine Cava took over the mayoral suite of offices on the 29th floor of the Stephen P. Clark Center, she continued to turn to Ulvert for advice, while paying him $6,000 a month for political consulting work. In 2021, the Miami Herald reported on text messages showing that Levine Cava ran a transit memo by Ulvert — “Waiting on your last look,” the mayor wrote — before releasing it to the County Commission and also got advice from Ulvert when she was landing the ill-fated FTX sponsorship deal for the county’s Miami Heat arena.

In 2022, one of Ulvert’s publicly known private-sector clients, the government of Qatar, paid for Levine Cava and other county officials to make a visit to the Middle Eastern nation. Ulvert and one of Qatar’s local lobbyists, Jacqui Carmona, were on the trip, too.

In January, Levine Cava left some commissioners annoyed when they learned through her State of the County address that she would ask them to put a $2.5 billion bond package on the November ballot. While the mayor kept her plan under wraps inside county government, Ulvert knew about it months earlier and had already polled the issue with likely voters. In April, Levine Cava said she was shelving the bond plan until 2026.

Along with serving as Levine Cava’s top political consultant, Ulvert has a hand in shaping the mayor’s official messaging out of County Hall.

He’s in frequent contact with Levine Cava’s chief of staff, Johanna Cervone, a former communications director for Florida’s Democratic Party, where Ulvert was once political director. Text messages released by the mayor’s office earlier in the year show Cervone regularly contacting Ulvert for advice on Levine Cava’s messaging and public image.

“Thoughts on posting a pic with Danny Perez from meeting today?” Cervone texted Ulvert on the afternoon of Jan. 2 after Levine Cava met with Danny Perez, a Republican state lawmaker in line to be Florida’s House speaker later this year. “Thanking him for his commitment to Miami-Dade?”

The texts, acquired through a public records request, do not show a response from Ulvert. The following morning, Levine Cava’s social media feed had a photo of her meeting with Perez and others at Miami International Airport, with the message: “We are grateful for the productive meeting with Speaker-Designate of the House, @Daniel_PerezFL.”

Christian Ulvert’s clients, known and unknown

Ulvert’s work helping the private sector try to profit off the public sector is partially detailed on the website of Edge Communications, which lists past and current clients.

Along with the Democratic politicians who have hired him — Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Florida Rep. Ashley Gantt, and current and former state senators Jason Pizzo, Jose Javier Rodriguez and Annette Taddeo — there are companies, unions and nonprofits. Those include Miami’s Magic City Casino, the Laborers’ International Union of North America (best known as LiUNA) and the Everglades Foundation. Ulvert said Edge last represented the Everglades Foundation about eight years ago.

Other clients aren’t listed but have been publicly disclosed or written about. A Miami Beach developer hired Ulvert in 2016 for public relations help during a fight in that city over a project when his client, Philip Levine, was mayor. That year, Ulvert also made a rare appearance in County Hall when Uber hired him to help with media strategy during its successful fight to legalize ride-hailing apps in Miami-Dade.

Ulvert’s known clientele also includes developers seeking county deals. Developer Michael Swerdlow has paid him for consulting services, both Swerdlow and Ulvert confirmed. In the last year, Swerdlow secured a no-bid deal on Miami-Dade land for a new Costco near Homestead, and the developer is also pursuing county parcels for a residential and commercial complex in the Liberty City area.

David Martin, another developer with county projects, has hired Ulvert to run referendum campaigns for municipal deals requiring voter approval — including Martin’s failed bid to redevelop the Miami Beach Marina in 2020. This year, Edge is getting paid to promote the residential and commercial project Martin and partners want to build on land owned by Miami on Watson Island, between downtown and South Beach.

But an untold number of other Ulvert clients have managed to stay under the radar. Miami Wilds, for one, isn’t listed on the Edge website and had not previously been reported.

The county’s ethics rules don’t require a campaign consultant like Ulvert to register as a lobbyist if he’s just giving companies advice on how to persuade the elected officials he works for, Jose Arrojo, then the director of the Miami-Dade Ethics Commission, said in May shortly before leaving the agency for a different job. While lobbyists must disclose the names of clients who are paying them to speak to government officials, consultants can keep their client list confidential.

The rules also allow someone who is advising county bidders to regularly communicate with elected officials, provided that person isn’t making his or her client’s case.

“They’re not lobbying, they’re just advising firms on the best way to make their case,” Arrojo said. “If this person has access to an elected official and is speaking to this elected official on a daily basis because they’re friends or because they’re a paid political consultant, this person should not be advocating on behalf of a third party. That would constitute lobbying.”

Presenting something palatable

When Levine Cava took office in late 2020, she inherited a county engineering deal with a private group in talks to build and operate a monorail system linking Miami to Miami Beach. The new mayor’s administration tried to negotiate a final contract as projected construction costs soared past $1 billion and wealthy South Beach condo dwellers rallied to derail the effort.

In 2021, the monorail group hired Edge Communications as the project awaited a final deal from the Levine Cava administration.

Christopher Hodgkins, a Miami executive who was part of the monorail team, said Ulvert never joined team lobbyists for meetings with elected officials but instead offered polling data and advice on how the project could be presented as something palatable to Miami Beach, as well as to the Levine Cava administration and to county commissioners.

“He was never at a meeting we had with the mayor. He never claimed he was talking directly to the mayor,” Hodgkins said. “He would talk about what the political ramifications were. What people were thinking? What was the Beach’s perspective? What would Commissioner Higgins, what would the mayor think, of this and that?”

While Ulvert was working on the monorail team, one of his political clients was the leading foe of the project. Dan Gelber, Miami Beach’s mayor at the time, said he considers Ulvert as something of a son after giving him his start in politics with a paid position fresh out of Florida State University as communications director for Florida House Democrats when Gelber was minority leader in the late 2000s. That led to Ulvert running Gelber’s multiple campaigns for office, including a failed bid for Florida attorney general and two successful runs for Miami Beach mayor.

“Some consultants will do the blocking and tackling of a campaign. And some consultants will give you a visionary path without the detail work. Christian does both,” Gelber said. “That’s why he’s been very successful.”

Gelber said he was aware of Ulvert’s work for the team pursuing the county monorail project, a transit route that would link Miami Beach to private land on the Miami waterfront where Genting, a Malaysian casino operator, wanted to build a resort. Gelber, who has helped lead the fight against casino expansions in Miami-Dade, said he didn’t have an issue with Ulvert quietly being on the opposite side of the monorail debate.

“He’s entitled to represent anyone he wants to,” said Gelber, who last year joined Levine Cava to preside over a waterfront vow renewal ceremony for Ulvert and Andrade. “It’s not really an issue.”

For more than a year into her first term, Levine Cava’s administration continued negotiating toward a monorail deal. Even after the development budget spiked to more than $1 billion, her administration defended the plan and successfully argued against a transit oversight board endorsing a Metromover extension to South Beach as a more practical alternative.

“This corridor has been studied since 1988,” Eulois Cleckley, Levine Cava’s transportation director, told the Citizens Independent Transit Trust board at the Oct. 28, 2021, meeting, urging members to stick with the monorail plan. “This quite frankly is the best opportunity to deliver this connection.”

But her position flipped a year later, when Levine Cava announced the monorail project wasn’t feasible and endorsed the same Metromover extension that her administration fought against months earlier.

“We are officially shifting gears,” Levine Cava said at a press conference. “And we’ll start working to expand the Metromover system. It will be an easy, familiar, one-seat ride from Government Center all the way to South Beach.”

Ulvert described his work for the monorail team as focused on grassroots strategies related to building support on Miami Beach. He said he didn’t advise Levine Cava on monorail issues and said she has ample help on policy decisions from her mayoral office staff, while he focuses on her political life outside of County Hall.

“She has a very well-seasoned team,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.”

Having a mayor’s political team overlap with the county’s lobbying corps isn’t unusual. When Carlos Gimenez was mayor between 2011 and 2020, his campaign manager was registered lobbyist Jesse Manzano-Plaza. The volunteer finance chair for Gimenez’s campaigns was Ralph Garcia-Toledo, a registered lobbyist and county contractor who helped win Miami-Dade contracts under Gimenez.

As registered lobbyists, Garcia-Toledo and Manzano-Plaza were authorized to pitch their clients’ plans directly to the mayor, something Ulvert cannot do. But, unlike for Ulvert, county rules required Garcia-Toledo and Manzano-Plaza to add their names to a county registry listing lobbyists and their clients.

Garcia-Toledo and Manzano-Plaza were at the center of the monorail bid when Gimenez was mayor and remained on the team as Levine Cava took office and Ulvert was hired. Later, Ulvert was on the same team as Garcia-Toledo and Manzano-Plaza for another high-profile effort to win a county contract under Levine Cava.

In 2022, Lambert, the Miami Wilds developer, was helping lead a different team pursuing a development deal to build a $241 million hotel at the county-owned Miami International Airport.

Operating under the name Parmco Airport Hospitality, the Lambert team was ranked second by a county review board that summer, with the high score going to a hotel venture formed by Fontainebleau owner Jeff Soffer and Stephen Ross, the New York developer who owns the Miami Dolphins.

While Parmco got the lower score, the recommendation wasn’t binding on Levine Cava. She got to decide who to recommend to county commissioners for the hotel contract.

Though not known publicly at the time, Ulvert was advising Lambert and others on the Parmco team in their bid for the hotel deal.

“He was pretty clear: ‘I can help you figure out how to message this correctly. For the mayor but also the commission,’” Lambert said. “‘But I’m not a lobbyist. You need to have support and other people that are working on the lobbying side.’ That’s what he told us.”

As the underdogs after the second-place ranking, the Parmco team hoped to get a leg up from the county with its backing by labor unions. Parmco had already signed preliminary “peace” agreements with two unions: IBEW, representing electricians, and LiUNA, representing construction laborers. Those agreements commit an employer like Parmco to not oppose organizing efforts to recruit workers to become dues-paying union members.

The two unions wrote Levine Cava on Nov. 28, 2022, urging her to throw out the selection panel’s scoring and start fresh with a new bidding process that would put more weight on labor-friendly elements, including agreements for higher wages and local-hiring pledges. One of the unions, LiUNA – had Ulvert as a consultant at the time, paying him about $7,500 that month, according to the union’s federal regulatory filings.

Less than a month later, Levine Cava largely did what the unions asked. On Dec. 21, 2022, she released a memo saying she would reject the ranked bids and issue a new request for proposals (RFP) for the airport hotel that put an emphasis on those labor-friendly elements.

”A project of the scale and scope of the airport hotel presents a major opportunity for Miami-Dade County to set a new procurement standard based on our values and priorities,” she wrote in a memo to commissioners. “A new process designed under our more rigorous procurement standards will help us reach a stronger financial outcome and create the greatest value possible for taxpayers.”

While the mayor’s surprise memo gave Parmco a second chance at the top score in a new bidding contest, the change wasn’t well received by Lambert and other team members, according to multiple sources involved. By starting fresh, Levine Cava eliminated the chance of using her discretion to overrule the selection board and unilaterally recommend Parmco as the preferred hotel developer to the County Commission, which has the final power to award contracts.

The following day, Ulvert was on a conference call with Lambert, lead partner Darryl Parmenter, Garcia-Toledo, Manzano-Plaza and others. Multiple participants described a tense exchange between Garcia-Toledo and Ulvert over Levine Cava’s intentions.

One participant, who didn’t want to be identified discussing the private meeting, said Ulvert replied: “The mayor is looking at this closely. She’ll do what is right.”

Nevertheless, that meeting marked the end of Ulvert’s role on the airport hotel team, according to multiple people familiar with the Parmco team.

Levine Cava later decided to stick with the original bidding process and in April 2023 recommended the Ross and Soffer team as the airport hotel’s developer. County commissioners awarded that team the contract 12 weeks later.

In describing his role on the Parmco team in an interview with the Herald, Ulvert said it was limited to lining up the union support that the developers thought would be helpful in their pursuit of the county deal.

“That’s the lens I had,” Ulvert said. “It’s no secret I do a lot of work with labor.”

In her own interview, Levine Cava cited LiUNA as an Ulvert client that happens to overlap with her policy agenda. “I’m a LiUNA fan,” she said. “I’m just a fan of the way that LiUNA does its work.”

She cited her rejection of Lambert’s push for the Zoo Miami waterpark as an example of how hiring Ulvert doesn’t mean favorable treatment from her administration.

“You saw what happened with Miami Wilds,” she said.

This story was originally published November 1, 2024 at 11:22 AM.