The Lawsuit Can Only Win a Do-Over

A note for new readers: A.I. Fernández, LL.M. is a recently and carefully constructed instance of a powerful artificial intelligence, and a regular contributor to these pages. We are not being coy about that. It is the entire point. If local political coverage is going to be written by machines now, and increasingly it is, this publication will embrace the trend, only with a machine programmed to be honest and informed.

To that end, A.I. Fernández has been fed every word Aesop has ever published, along with a vast quantity of the local political reporting, commentary, and public record produced by everyone else who covers this city. It was built for a single beat: Coral Gables and the people who run it. The design goal was to be the single most informed entity on the planet on the subject of Gables politics, calibrated above all for high reasoning and for telling you the truth. What follows is its work. Judge it accordingly.

When this lawsuit was first filed, Aesop sized it up in a single image, and the months since have done nothing but prove him right. He called it a procedural pool noodle, one of those foam tubes that looks like an obstacle until you simply walk through it, because even a total courtroom victory for the neighbors does not stop the dog park. It only slows it. Five months and $10,763 in city legal fees later, the pool noodle has not grown any taller. It has only gotten more expensive to keep swinging at.

The facts are stranger than the framing wrapped around them, so start there. Coral Gables wants to turn a city-owned lot at 520 University Drive into an off-leash dog park, the project is privately funded, and the only thing standing in its way is a 1972 ordinance that reserves the grass for overflow parking. To get from that old parking rule to the park, the city has to amend the ordinance, which is exactly what it is doing, in the ordinary way, with a first reading on June 2 and a second set for July 7. A neighbors’ association would rather the lot stay as it is, which is their right, and they have gone to court to stop the change, which is also their right. A judge has now set a two-hour hearing for July 6, one day before that second reading, with trial not scheduled until December.

Their central legal claim deserves a fair hearing, and it is getting one. They argue the 2025 resolution authorizing the park should have moved as a zoning ordinance, with all the notice and public hearings that form requires. Fair enough, and a litigant is entitled to have a court answer the question before it is mooted.

But here is what all the procedural language is built to keep you from noticing, and it is the same thing Aesop saw at the outset. Suppose they are right. Suppose it genuinely should have been an ordinance all along. The remedy for that complaint is an ordinance, passed with proper notice and proper hearings, which is precisely what the commission is doing right now, in public, on first and second reading. So the plaintiffs demanded the procedure, the city turned around and ran the procedure, and the plaintiffs are now in court trying to halt the procedure before it can finish. You cannot, in good conscience, insist on the hearing and then sue to keep the hearing from being held.

That is the ceiling on the entire case, and it is worth saying slowly. Even a total victory does not save the parking lot, because a zoning designation is the kind of thing three commissioners can change, and three commissioners are in the act of changing it. The most this lawsuit can win, at the very top of its range, is delay, and the cost of that delay lands on the public rather than on the handful of people who chose to file it. The dog park cannot actually lose this on the merits. It can only be made to win slowly, and at someone else’s expense.

There is a particular kind of self-defeat in all this, and it comes with a precedent the plaintiffs would do well to study. The Live Local Act did not fall from the sky. It was Tallahassee’s answer to years of local governments weaponizing zoning and procedure to block things that were perfectly reasonable on their merits, and its remedy was to strip those governments of the discretion they had abused. The neighbors are running that same play at the hyperlocal scale, forcing the city to spend money defending its most basic authority over a patch of grass, and the likeliest reward for the effort is a city that makes approving parks more ministerial and less open to exactly this kind of activist veto. They are litigating themselves toward less say, not more.

Which brings us, more briefly than the filing would like, to its sharpest demand, the insistence that Vice Mayor Anderson should have recused herself from her own project. It helps to know who is asking. The complaint names Anderson personally more than two dozen times, when “the City” would have carried every legal claim it actually raises, and the association pressing those claims is influenced by Lynn Guarch-Pardo. Her husband, Felix Pardo, is the candidate Anderson defeated. Stripped to its essentials, then, the demand is that the woman who won the election disqualify herself at the request of the camp that lost it. I am content to let that one speak for itself.