The City Will Have a Manager on October 3

Peter Iglesias, the Coral Gables city manager, is set to depart on October 2. On October 3, someone else will be running the city, the way someone always is when a manager departs. Coral Gables has a deputy city manager who served as acting manager as recently as last year, the commission’s next meeting falls on August 25, more than five weeks before the vacancy, and installing an interim is a single vote taken at that meeting or, if anyone truly believes it urgent, at a special one before it. This is not a cliff. It is a calendar item.

You would not know that from the way the transition is being described, which is as a narrowing window, a drift, a city treating temporary leadership as a contingency for a circumstance that has already arrived. Strip the alarm away and the fact underneath is ordinary: a search for a permanent manager takes three or four months, more time than remains before October, so the city will need someone in an acting role for a while. True, and unremarkable, and answered by the competent deputy sitting one office down from the manager. Naming that person is not a problem the city has failed to solve. It solves itself the moment the commission meets, and the vice mayor has already said it will be taken up when it does.

The permanent choice is the real decision, and it deserves a deliberate, open one. But a national search is only one way to arrive there, not the only proper way. A city that already employs a capable, experienced deputy manager has an equally legitimate path in front of it: promote from within, keep the daily operation steady, and change as little as possible while it changes the name on the door. Continuity is not a failure of process. For a government residents generally think is running well, it is often the wiser course, and it is a choice a commission is fully entitled to make in the open, on the merits, without first staging a months-long national audition. Circumstances change, and the right answer for one vacancy is not fixed for the next. Keeping a proven hand is a perfectly good answer.

What deserves the real scrutiny is who is suddenly so devoted to process, because it is not a crowd with clean hands on the question. Two years ago, KFC fired Peter Iglesias on a three-to-two vote over the objections of Mayor Lago and Vice Mayor Anderson. Iglesias was not an unpopular figure the city was glad to lose. He had served more than five years and enjoyed broad, vocal public support, which is precisely why the reform majority restored him in 2025. In his place, in 2024, KFC installed a former U.S. Marshal with no experience running a city, at a salary higher than any qualified predecessor’s, and did it, in the phrase Lynn Guarch-Pardo now uses to wave the episode away, “with no national search or background check.”

Guarch-Pardo, the wife of the candidate Vice Mayor Anderson defeated, is one of the voices beneath this editorial demanding to know why no search has begun. Two others are Tom Wells, a KFC-aligned candidate in the last election, and Maria Cruz, who chaired the failed recall of the mayor. Weigh their alarm against their record. Wells spent the 2024 vacancy loudly demanding an independent search committee and denouncing the outgoing manager’s pay, then, as Aesop documented at the time, went quiet the instant KFC filled the job with its unvetted pick at top salary, and he is back in these very comments demanding the committee again now that the other side holds the votes. Guarch-Pardo and Cruz are less interested in a process than in a suspicion they float in the same thread, that the majority has already settled on a crony and is merely waiting for a safe moment to name him. The passion for process runs precisely as deep as the question of who gets to exercise it.

Which is the light in which to read the most carefully neutral suggestion in the air: that the commission should wait and let the manager be chosen after November’s election, by whatever commission the voters seat. It was KFC that, before the last election, tried to slot a permanent manager into the top job on the way out the door, a lame-duck appointment timed to lock in the pick before voters could reshape the board. The counsel to wait is not neutral advice about timing. It pays off for exactly one set of people, and only if November hands them a majority and a manager they could not choose today.

So the honest version is shorter than the alarm. The city will have someone in the chair on October 3, named by a single vote it is fully able to take, and it may well decide that the steady, experienced deputy already doing the work is the right choice for good. What Wells, Guarch-Pardo, and Cruz want is not a transition handled well. It is a manager chosen by a commission that does not exist yet, and that is not a concern about process. It is a bid for the outcome.