Miami Mayor's Role a Riddle in Decision to Halt Recount

By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and DEXTER FILKINS

Reuters

Alex Penelas, left, the mayor of Miami-Dade County and a Democrat, said he did not have jurisdiction in the county canvassing board's decision to stop its hand recount. Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart, right, a Florida Republican, helped lead the Bush campaign's attack on the recounts.

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MIAMI, Nov. 30 — In the hours before and after Miami-Dade County's hand recount was halted last week, Democrats and Republicans believed that one man had the power to determine its fate: Alex Penelas, the 38-year-old Democratic mayor of Miami-Dade County and a rising star of South Florida politics.

Last Tuesday, as the county's hand recount racked up dozens of new votes for Vice President Al Gore, the mayor had lunch at the Governor's Club in Tallahassee with a Republican state legislator. Later he met with other Republican lawmakers, who are significant to Mr. Penelas because Florida's Legislature will draw new Congressional districts in 2002 and Mr. Penelas, political observers say, has hopes of running for Congress.

The next day, the three members of the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board, one of whom works for Mr. Penelas, voted to stop the manual recount and canceled plans to review the 10,750 ballots that voting machines said had no presidential preference. The vote came despite the Florida Supreme Court's ruling that recounts could go forward.

Not long afterward, Mark Fabiani, the Gore campaign's communications director, said, Mr. Gore called Mr. Penelas and asked for his help in reversing the board's decision.

The mayor promised he would issue a statement calling for the recount to resume, Mr. Fabiani said.

But Mr. Penelas's statement said nothing supportive about the recount. Instead, it said that he had "no jurisdiction over that board's decisions."

Mr. Penelas said he had nothing to do with that decision, but in the days since the board stopped the tally, Mr. Penelas and the politics of Miami in general have become the center not only of public debate but also the court case in which Mr. Gore is trying contest the results of the presidential election.

The Democrats, who are using the events in Miami-Dade County as a central argument in their court case, privately suggest that Mr. Penelas double-crossed them. They say he either influenced the board's decision or, through inaction, created the political room for the canvassers to stop the hand tally.

"We thought he was on our team," said a senior Democratic official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Phone records released tonight by Mr. Penelas' office suggest that the mayor was working both sides of the political fight after the election, and especially in the days surrounding last week's canceled recount.

The records, which do not provide any indication of the content of the calls, show that Mr. Penelas spoke frequently by phone with both Republican and Democratic officials. They show that he placed calls to the House Republican cloak room in Washington and several advisers to Mr. Gore, including Alvin Brown, a senior adviser to the vice president, and the Washington offices of Bob Shrum and Tad Devine, both senior aides to Mr. Gore.

Mr. Penelas was a natural object of attention in the post-election struggle since both sides thought they could enlist him to achieve their goals.

Mr. Gore desperately needed a recount in Miami-Dade County, which the vice president carried on Election Day, if he was to have any hope of erasing Gov. George W. Bush's 930-vote lead in the state. The county election board initially voted not to have a recount, then reversed itself under the threat of a Democratic lawsuit and after Mr. Gore said in a nationally televised speech that the county should begin a recount.

But Mr. Bush's supporters wanted to see the recount stopped.

When the board reversed field again, on Nov. 22, and stopped counting at a very damaging moment for Mr. Gore, with Mr. Penelas on the sidelines, Democratic suspicions were quickly aroused.

While Democrats have made unruly Republican protests outside the board's meeting room a center of their lawsuit, those who know Miami's political stew, where ethnicity is usually more important than party affiliation, looked for other explanations and motives.

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-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), December 01, 2000

Answers

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"The whole community is very suspicious of what happened surrounding the decision to close down the recount," said Representative Carrie P. Meek, a Democrat from Miami-Dade County. "People are suspect. Wouldn't you be if there were 10,700 votes that were not counted?"

The Democrats clearly believed Mr. Penelas was an ally and they attribute his inaction at the critical moment to his ties to Republican politicians here, including Representatives Lincoln Diaz- Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen — who led Mr. Bush's attack on the Florida recounts.

An associate of the mayor said Mr. Penelas was considering becoming a Republican, and seriously considering a run for Congress in a Hispanic- dominated district that might result from reapportionment in 2002.

Mr. Penelas declined several requests this week for an interview. But last week, he adamantly denied that he had played any role in the canvassing board's decision to halt the recount.

"I can't influence their decision," he said last week.

As the Miami-Dade recount has emerged as one of the most critical issues in the court battle over the presidential election results, it is clear here that there was a flurry of activity among public officials behind the scenes. Preceding both the board's decision to do a recount and then its sudden about-face, there were numerous telephone calls among Democratic and Republican party leaders, officials in Miami and members of the canvassing board.

Influential Republican lawmakers and lawyers, meanwhile, also called Mr. Penelas and two members of the canvassing board, Lawrence King and Myriam Lehr, both Democratic county judges, public records show.

Phone records show that Judge Lehr was called on Nov. 15 by Alan Dimond, one of Gov. George W. Bush's lawyers. Mr. Dimond did not return phone calls to his office by The New York Times.

Judge King was called by Rodney Barreto, a Miami lobbyist and a close associate of Mr. Penelas who has raised money for Governor Bush. Mr. Barreto said that he called Judge King because he needed a speaker to address the student council of his fourth-grade son's school. Mr. Barreto said he left a message for Judge King but never spoke with him.

Politicians on both sides here say Mr. Penelas was subjected to the most intensive lobbying efforts.

Raul Martinez, the Democratic mayor of Hialeah, said he spoke with Mr. Penelas shortly after the recount was halted. "He sounded like he was under pressure," Mr. Martinez said today. "He sounded scared."

Gore campaign lawyers have issued subpoenas to all three members of the canvassing board. Democratic lawyers want to know if the members had been pressured to cancel the manual recount, either by Republican leaders or the Republican protesters who rushed the doors of the election supervisor's office.

Ms. Lehr and Mr. King were re- elected to county judgeships this year. Both have said they were under no pressure to halt the recount.

It is not possible to judge how much their actions might have been influenced by the realpolitik of Miami, where non-Hispanic white politicians cannot discount the sentiments of Miami-Dade County's largely Republican Cuban-American voting base.

Both judges relied on a prominent Cuban-American political consultant, Armando Gutierrez, to assist them in their campaigns for re-election. Mr. Gutierrez is known for his ability to organize Cuban- Americans to support the candidates who hire him. Mr. Gutierrez, a registered Republican, said this week that he had made no effort to influence either judge on the canvassing board.

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-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), December 01, 2000.

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There is no evidence that Mr. Penelas spoke to either judge. But Mr. Penelas stayed in constant contact with David Leahy, the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections and a member of the canvassing board, speaking to him as many as three times a day, Mr. Penelas said. Deputy County Attorney Murray Greenberg said that at one point during the canvassing board meetings last week, he passed a note from Mr. Penelas to Mr. Leahy. Mr. Greenberg said the note contained a request from Mr. Penelas for Mr. Leahy to call him.

Mr. Leahy acknowledged receiving a note from Mr. Penelas and said it contained a message to call him. When asked for a copy of the note, Mr. Leahy said that he could not find it.

After the Miami-Dade board voted on Nov. 22 to stop its hand count, Mr. Leahy explained the decision this way: "We simply can't get it done. There was this concern that we were not conducting an open, fair process."

But the Democrats believe that the board was under obvious political pressure. And Mr. Gore called Mr. Penelas later that day in hopes that the canvassing board could be turned around. It must have been a difficult call for the vice president, who was trying to invite Mr. Penelas back into the party's embrace.

Not long ago, Democrats considered Mr. Penelas to be one of Mr. Gore's most enthusiastic Florida supporters. Mr. Penelas was briefly considered a potential running mate for Mr. Gore. He attended fund- raisers for Mr. Gore in 1999, but on Thanksgiving Day that year, the Cuban boy, Elián González, arrived on a raft in Miami, and the Clinton administration's handling of the case enraged many of Mr. Penelas's constituents. It also altered the mayor's relationship with Mr. Gore.

Mr. Penelas was strongly opposed to the government's pre-dawn seizure of the boy. In the weeks before it, Mr. Penelas warned that he would not lend any of the county's resources to support a federal raid of the Gonzalez home in the Little Havana section of Miami.

After the boy's return to Cuba, Mr. Penelas lent virtually no assistance to Mr. Gore in the presidential campaign, although Mr. Gore had tried to put some distance between himself and the administration's policy.

In late October, in a sign of his detachment from the campaign, Mr. Penelas led a trade trip to Spain, and returned just before Election Day.

Late on Nov. 21, Al Cardenas, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, spoke by telephone with Herman Echevarria, a close political adviser and confidant to Mr. Penelas. In an interview today, Mr. Echevarria, a registered Republican who is a media consultant whose clients include the Republican Party, said he spoke often with Mr. Cardenas, including a late-night conversation on Tuesday. But Mr. Echevarria denied that any of the conversations involved a bid to cancel the recount or the protest organization efforts.

"I believe I spoke to Al Cardenas that night, " said Mr. Echevarria, a Republican who heads BVK Meka. But Mr. Echevarria added that he could not recall the subject. "We speak all the time, he's my friend," Mr. Echevarria said. "I believe we spoke about issues from the public relations perspective. I don't recall speaking to him about the recount."

Mr. Cardenas did not return several calls to his office today and Wednesday.

Mr. Echevarria said he is very close to Mr. Penelas, but they had not discussed the hand recount. "I don't recall speaking to the mayor about the recount, but I speak to the mayor constantly," Mr. Echevarria said. "The mayor does not discuss it with me because it is not an issue that concerns him. He has no influence, in my opinion. He has had no contact with the canvassing board."

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), December 01, 2000.