A son of Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez is part of a group pursuing a commercial complex and dormitory to be built on county land that would serve as a rehabilitation center for young criminal offenders facing time in Miami-Dade jails.
Julio Gimenez, a longtime construction executive, said he is providing building expertise for the proposal by Neighbors and Neighbors Association, a nonprofit that already holds county contracts to run job-training and other programs.
“I am volunteering,” Julio Gimenez said in a text message this week. “I offered my assistance, for I believe it to be a worthy cause.”
Mayor Gimenez cited his son’s role in a January memo announcing his recusal from decisions on the dormitory project, leaving a top deputy and a department head to handle the talks.
Deputy Mayor Maurice Kemp, who supervises law enforcement and housing agencies under Gimenez, and Corrections Director Daniel Junior, a Gimenez department head, recently traveled to San Francisco on a trip tied to the proposal. The two senior Gimenez appointees toured the residential facility that Neighbors and Neighbors is using as the model for the complex the nonprofit wants to create in Miami. Called Delancey Street, the facility offers participants places to live on the top floors and places to work on the ground floor.
“We got a chance to look around, see what kind of businesses they run,” Neighbors and Neighbors director Leroy Jones said of the November trip with Kemp and Junior. “They got a chance to see what I was telling them.”
Julio Gimenez did not make the trip, but electronic calendar records show he attended several meetings with Jones at the offices of Kemp and Junior to discuss the project. That included a July 2 meeting on the 29th floor of County Hall, the suite of offices where the mayor and his deputy mayors work.
The mayor’s Jan. 12 recusal memo triggered a charter provision giving Commission Chairman Esteban “Steve” Bovo final authority on whether to recommend the proposal. Bovo said this week he was not familiar with the proposal. Kemp said this week it was too early to decide whether to advance the proposal to Bovo for a final decision on presenting it to the 13-member commission.
“We’re going to continue to have discussions,” Kemp said, “and see if we can come up with something we want.”
Julio Gimenez and C.J. Gimenez
The mayor has two sons whose careers have overlapped with the county government he runs as Miami-Dade’s full-time chief executive earning $250,000 a year. When Gimenez was first elected mayor in 2011, Julio Gimenez worked at Munilla Construction Management, a firm with multiple county contracts that is now best known for being the contractor behind the Florida International University bridge that collapsed on March 15. Carlos Gimenez obtained a memo from the county’s Ethics Commission in 2011 recommending he recuse himself from decisions involving MCM while his son worked there.
His other son, Carlos J. Gimenez, works as a lobbyist. His clients have included companies pursuing deals with the Gimenez administration. The most notable one was Donald Trump, who employed the younger Gimenez as a city-level lobbyist while in talks with the mayor in 2013 and 2014 to win a management deal for the county’s Crandon Park golf course. The deal fizzled shortly before Trump announced his presidential run in 2015.
C.J. Gimenez is also registered as a lobbyist in Miami for the David Beckham group, which recently won a referendum to use city land for a soccer stadium and is in talks with the county for the potential use of Miami-Dade land for practice fields and youth clinics. Mayor Gimenez said he recently met with Beckham partner Jorge Mas and Miami-Dade Commissioner Javier Souto about the possibility of putting the training center within a county park.
MCM also employed C.J. Gimenez as a lobbyist in the past, and tapped him after the bridge collapse for what the younger Gimenez said was “pro bono” communications advice for a company owned by relatives of the Gimenez family.
Julio Gimenez has already joined with Jones to pursue a different deal with Miami-Dade. He and other investors want to use county-owned land in Homestead to launch a small steel mill there. The group has tapped Neighbors and Neighbors to help close that deal, with Jones joining Julio Gimenez in meetings with Commissioner Dennis Moss, whose district includes the potential mill site. Julio Gimenez said Neighbors and Neighbors would provide job training for local residents who want to work there. Mayor Gimenez also issued a recusal memo on that project.
In a statement, Gimenez said he’s followed county rules on recusing himself from proposals involving family, and that he does not talk about the issues with the deputies involved. As for continuing to preside over talks with the Beckham group while the partnership employs his son, Gimenez said that’s not a problem.
“On the talks involving the Beckham-Mas group bringing a soccer academy to a county location, I do not need to recuse myself because I have no family member lobbying the County for this project,” Gimenez said in the statement released Thursday. “My son C.J. represents the Beckham-Mas group on soccer stadium issues involving the City of Miami, not Miami-Dade County.”
Neighbors and Neighbors Association
Jones enjoys significant support within Miami-Dade government. His organization provides a range of services to lower-income residents, much of it funded by Miami-Dade. Neighbors and Neighbors runs Employ Miami-Dade, the Gimenez job-training program the mayor launched in 2014. The county agreed in 2018 to pay the group $575,000 to run the program for the year.
The nonprofit also runs the county’s small-business grant operation, known as the “Mom and Pop” program. In 2017, the county signed an agreement sending about $377,000 to Neighbors and Neighbors for running business incubators in low-income neighborhoods in Miami and South Dade.
Jones wrote to Kemp on Nov. 29, 2017, about setting up a meeting with Junior for a potential project using the county’s former women’s detention center as a new facility serving graduates of the county’s “Boot Camp” program for young offenders.
Kemp, a former Miami fire chief, was new to County Hall then. Gimenez hired him as deputy mayor overseeing corrections, police, fire and housing in September 2017. At the time, Junior was interim head of corrections. Gimenez promoted him to permanent director in February.
Jones said Julio Gimenez was brought into the Delancey Street effort because Neighbors and Neighbors wanted someone with building expertise.
“I just asked Julio for some volunteer services to help me,” Jones said. “I know he has a construction background.”
Calendar entries received through a public-records request show the younger Gimenez attending his first Delancey Street meeting at County Hall on Jan. 10.
In a text message, Julio Gimenez said he isn’t tied to any company that might get the construction contract for the project. “I have been friends with Leroy,” Gimenez wrote, “and he told me about the Delancey mission.”
The proposed Delancey Street Village would be the most ambitious project yet by Neighbors and Neighbors, involving the construction and operation of a 24-hour residential facility housing people living there either as an alternative to jail time or as a possible next step once released from incarceration.
In an interview Wednesday, Kemp described the Delancey Street concept as “impressive,” and said Miami-Dade could use that kind of facility as an alternative to incarceration for low-risk offenders (best known as a “diversion” program) or as a transition from jail to independent living (a “post-incarceration” option).
“It’s still at the discussion phase,” he said. “We’ve been talking about the feasibility of doing something here.”
Central to the talks is Miami-Dade providing land for the project.
Emails show Jones asking Kemp and Junior for help in locating a suitable site from surplus land controlled by Corrections.
One site mentioned in emails was the old North Dade jail, which sits next to a lake on State Highway 9 near the Golden Glades interchange on I-95. In a Jan. 17 email, Jones suggested Miami-Dade’s Environmental Resources Management division issue a permit to allow the lake to be filled, and use Boot Camp graduates to help complete the work.
In a “joint venture with a for-profit partner, NANA would like to submit a proposal to you to begin the process of filling the lake,” Jones wrote to Kemp and Junior. “This effort would create immediate jobs for NANA and Boot Camp graduates in the demolition, construction and truck driving fields.”
In an interview, Jones said the North Dade site remained a possibility for the Delancey Street village. Kemp said the property is being considered for an unrelated project he declined to identify.
Bringing Delancey Street to Miami
By June, the Delancey Street project had been mapped out on a different patch of county-owned land. Jones sent Junior architectural drawings for an eight-story “Delancey Village” on land in Miami where the Dolphin Expressway meets I-95. It holds a building that once was the county’s jail for women, but now is used for temporary holding facilities and other Corrections functions.
The drawings show a ground-floor commercial area with places where residents could work: a pizza shop, offices and about 2,700 square-feet of retail space.
There would be 92 beds on the floors above, most of them sharing bathroom facilities. About 25 beds would be in private apartments. There also would be dining areas, a fitness center and meeting space for the residents.
Kemp said Thursday that the former women’s jail remains an important facility for Corrections on a daily basis. “The facility also contains inmate bed space which can be utilized in the event of an emergency,” he said.
In San Francisco, Delancey Street participants run a string of businesses, including a restaurant, catering company and an annual Christmas-tree lot and decorating service. About 300 people live there, and revenue from the businesses they run generates enough money to sustain the complex, said founder and president Mimi Silbert. The non-profit receives no government dollars, Silbert said, a bragging point that leaves some in disbelief when she shares it.
“It’s a concept where everyone thinks it can’t be the way I say it is,” Silbert said. “It just works.”
Some residents come as part of a requirement to avoid jail, she said, while others apply for residency on their own. The main punishment awaiting them is being forced to leave if they violate the complex’s rules. “It’s very strict. Very disciplined,” she said of Delancey Street. “But very huggy.”
Jones said the regimen for residents would be modeled after the San Francisco program, with residents no older than 27. Participants must agree to live there for at least two years, and be subject to rules passed by a governing board made up of other residents. He said the San Francisco model, now expanded to five other cities, shifts responsibility for keeping order from staff to the offenders.
“You really can’t believe it can be done,” Jones said. “It’s run by the inmates themselves.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2018 4:47 PM.