By Dan Christensen and Cassidy Winegarden, FloridaBulldog.org
A political action committee that fundraises for Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava took $100,000 from companies run by the controversial developer of Sweetwater’s now empty Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park. Her PAC accepted the money as she helped the developer obtain $9 million in government funding for his affordable housing project Abner III during her 2024 bid for re-election.
Our Democracy PAC, run by Levine Cava’s top advisor Christian Ulvert, had previously accepted $30,000 from companies owned by developer Raul F. Rodriguez in the two months before she was first elected in November 2020. Over the next two and a half years, the mayor oversaw the awarding of at least $3 million in county funds for Rodriguez’s earlier Abner II affordable housing project.
All $12 million went to CREI Holdings LLC, the development firm Rodriguez leads as chief executive officer.
Election records show the $100,000 contributed to Our Democracy PAC in 2023-2024 was split into two $25,000 contributions from CREI in March and April 2023 and two more $25,000 checks from another Rodriguez company, National Health Transport Inc., in February and June 2024.
Democrat Levine Cava, who made the development of affordable housing a top issue in both her 2020 and 2024 campaigns, runs the county day to day but has no vote on the 13-member Miami-Dade County Commission. In December 2023, however, she recommended the commission approve a $4-million U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant to CREI for its Abner III multi-family rental project and authorize her or her designee to handle the paperwork to make it happen. The commission approved her recommendation.
County records show the commission approved another $5 million for CREI’s Abner III – an $86 million, eight-story affordable workforce housing development with about 328 rental units that’s nearing completion – based on Levine Cava’s recommendation on April 2, 2024. The funding, in the form of a 30-year low interest loan, came from the county’s Documentary Stamp Surtax and State Housing Initiative Partnership (SHIP) program.
Seven weeks earlier, on Feb. 13, Our Democracy PAC accepted a $25,000 contribution from Rodriguez’s National Health Transport, an ambulance company. The same company gave Our Democracy an additional $25,000 two months later, on June 14, bringing the total amount of its total contributions since Levine Cava’s successful 2020 mayoral campaign to $130,000.
Florida Statute 838.016 addresses “Unlawful compensation or reward for official behavior.” It makes it a second-degree felony for a person to knowingly give or for a public servant to accept any unauthorized benefit for past, present, or future performance or influence of their official duties. Unlike the state’s bribery statute, it does not require a quid pro quo.
LEVINE CAVA’S RESPONSE
Raul Rodriguez did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
Mayor Levine Cava would not be interviewed. Her office, however, released a statement Saturday stating that under her leadership, “the county has made historic strides to expand access to housing people can afford and to protect the most vulnerable.” It further noted that Abner II and III “were not initiated by the county, but rather partnership between the city of Sweetwater and the developer.”
The mayor’s office did not respond to Florida Bulldog’s questions as to why Levine Cava did not have Our Democracy PAC return the large contributions from Rodriguez’s companies before she recommended approval of the $5 million Surtax/SHIP loan and the $4 million HUD grant, or why Our Democracy PAC accepted large contributions from the companies shortly after her recommendations benefited CREI Holdings.
Levine Cava’s office, however, noted that the county Surtax dollars “must go through a rigorous competitive process” before they can be approved, and suggested that her detailed recommendation to accept the $4 million HUD grant was a mandatory formality.
“Regarding the HUD grant dollars awarded in 2023, this was federal funding allocated to the project that must be formally accepted by the County pursuant to our legal process. The county did not apply for nor request the awarded funding,” the statement said.
In fact, the $4-million HUD grant was an earmark secured for CREI by U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Miami. The county’s Housing and Community Development (HCD) department, which received and administered the grant, announced in March 2024 that HUD would soon release the funds. Two weeks later, Rodriguez contributed $250,000 to the Mario Diaz-Balart Victory Fund, a joint fundraising political committee run by the congressman, Florida Bulldog reported last month.
[Diaz-Balart’s Republican colleague, former Miami-Dade mayor and now U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, used an earmark to obtain a $6 million HUD grant for Abner III. The Gimenez Victory Fund, another joint fundraising committee, accepted a $150,000 contribution from Rodriguez six weeks after Gimenez wrote his earmark request letter to the House Appropriations Committee. The $6 million award was announced on Feb. 3. It has not yet been received by the county which, as in the case of Diaz-Balart’s earmark, is administered by the county.]
‘PEOPLE ARE LIVING IN THEIR CARS’
Miami-Dade’s “strong” mayor manages all executive branch departments and has the power to appoint – and fire – the directors of each with or without cause. Miami-Dade’s housing department administers Surtax/SHIP funding.
Housing department records state that a total of 29 Surtax/SHIP applications were received in 2024. Rodriguez/Abner III were among a dozen applicants the department found had met its “threshold criteria” for the loan before being ranked and scored by a department selection committee.
The Surtax/Ship program’s loan terms are extremely generous. “The loan will be for a 30-year term with 1% interest only payments from development cash flow, 1% interest accruing and due at maturity. All principal and interest will be due at maturity,” then Miami-Dade housing boss Alex Ballina informed Rodriguez by letter three days after approval.
The county’s April 23, 2024, conditional loan commitment letter, on Mayor Levine Cava’s letterhead, was signed by the mayor’s designee, Cathy Burgos, then chief community services officer.
It is of note that Levine Cava, who declared a county housing affordability crisis in April 2022 and later established the Eviction Diversion Program to provide free legal representation to embattled tenants, had nothing to say publicly about the high-profile plight of thousands of working class and elderly residents forced out of CREI’s Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park last year.
In the Saturday statement, the mayor’s office said, “Our Office of Housing Advocacy worked to connect anyone displaced as a result of the trailer park redevelopment with stable housing.”
Miami attorney David Winker represents about 200 Li’l Abner tenants who sued to fight their evictions. They are currently appealing their loss in Miami-Dade Circuit Court to the Third District Court of Appeal. Most of the residents took modest buyout offers from CREI, which is now moving to develop the now empty 105-acre property as a $4.6 billion master-planned community to be known as Flagler Center.
Winker said he was unaware of any help provided by the mayor’s eviction diversion program to any of the park’s approximately 5,000 residents. He added that the closing of Li’l Abner is having lingering impacts.
“I don’t want to overstate it, but people are living in their cars,” Winker said.
Winker added he was unaware until very recently about the Flagler Center project. “It was kept under wraps,” he said. “This was the government facilitating the eviction of all these people who should have been protected. They were renters who had a statutory right to buy their property and none of that was honored…It’s all political connections. It’s all special deals for special people. I see it as a breakdown of capitalism.”
CREI HOLDING’S RODRIGUEZ GAVE THOUSANDS, GOT MILLIONS
Before Abner III, CREI Holdings built its Abner II affordable housing project at 400 NW 112 Ave. Ground was broken in August 2021. The eight-story apartment house with 244 one-and-two-bedroom units, built for 55+ seniors earning up to 60 percent of the area’s median income, was completed in April 2023.
Two months before, Mayor Levine Cava, Raul Rodriguez and others attended a ribbon cutting to mark the opening of Li’l Abner II and announce how the county “continues to address the affordability crisis by adding more units of housing our seniors can afford.”
Abner II cost about $40 million and was built without any federal taxpayer’s money. It did get significant financial assistance from Miami-Dade County.
Mayor Levine Cava sends quarterly memos to the commission regarding county funded affordable housing activities. Her May 9, 2022 memo about the period from Jan. 1-Mar. 31, 2022 is the first to mention that a $2 million “grant agreement is being developed” for CREI’s Abner II by the county’s housing department. The source of funds was identified as Miami-Dade’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund.
The agreement was finalized and signed on April 27, 2022 by Levine Cava’s designee, then-county CFO Edward Marquez. It appropriated “up to” $2 million for CREI Holdings from the housing department’s previous year Capital Program Funding – money in the trust fund that the commission specifically allowed the department to tap.
Eleven months later, the grant agreement was amended to award another $1 million to CREI from the county’s Development Inflation Adjustment Funds (DIAF). The maximum amount payable under the contract was raised from $2 million to $3 million. Morris Copeland, chief community services officer, signed the amendment as the mayor’s designee in June 2023.
By that time, Li’l Abner developer Rodriguez’s companies had contributed a total of $80,000 to the Our Democracy PAC as it raised funds for Levine Cava.
The mayor’s office did not comment regarding the $3 million in county funds that were provided to Rodriguez’s CREI Holdings at that time or say why the mayor did not return the large contributions it had received from Rodriguez’s companies when her office helped him secure those funds.
‘A RIGOROUS COMPETITIVE PROCESS’
Like Surtax/Ship funds, the county uses a competitive “request for applications” process managed by its housing department to help decide who gets funding from its Affordable Housing Trust Fund, DIAF and other programs. The mayor’s office described the operation as “a rigorous competitive process.”
Ranking and scoring applications is intended to create a transparent, competitive process by companies seeking awards from limited funding pools. But the large sums involved, lax oversight, inflated costs and undisclosed conflicts of interest create opportunities for favoritism and fraud.
A study published last September by Harvard’s Kennedy School of public policy on the effects of municipal campaign contributions by real estate development interests on housing policy examined a dataset of more than three million campaign contributions to city council and mayoral candidates between 1999 and 2022 in 545 U.S. cities.
Harvard Professor Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and University of California/Riverside Assistant Professor Jennifer Gaudette combined that data with data on policy outcomes involving new housing development and found, perhaps not surprisingly, that contributions from “organized interests influence housing policy outcomes at the local level. Specifically, more contributions from real estate development groups lead to increases in permitting of multi-family housing.”
Further, politicians know affordable housing creates construction jobs and stimulates the economy. Developers like the limited risk of affordable housing due to a steady stream of rental income from heavy demand, as well as tax credits and other government incentives to increase the stock.
The Miami Herald’s Doug Hanks reported in February that most of the largest contributions given to the political committees of Mayor Levine Cava and the 13 county commissioners came from developers and county vendors.
Last year alone, Our Democracy PAC raised more than $500,000 for Levine Cava and she’s not running again in 2028 because she’s term limited.
Still, she is actively Our Democracy’s funds to fend off a recall petition drive led by Republicans claiming mismanagement. They must collect 65,680 valid signatures, or four percent of registered voters, by mid-May to force a recall election that would be scheduled within 90 days. A simple majority vote would be needed to remove her from office.
On Friday, Our Democracy PAC filed its contributions and expenditures report for the first quarter of 2026. It reported receiving $442,575 and spending $143,196.
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