By Francisco Alvarado, Floridabulldog.org
Jose Sanchez-Gronlier morphed quickly into a Miami city hall power broker. In three years, the Coral Gables-based attorney went from being Miami City Commissioner Miguel Gabela’s personal lawyer to his District 1 office’s congiliere, earning a taxpayer-funded annual salary of $130,000.
Earlier this year, Sanchez-Gronlier formed Advance Miami, a political action committee that has collected tens of thousands of dollars from individuals and companies with city business being voted on by his boss, Gabela.
Sanchez-Gronlier’s chairmanship of Advance Miami, which has raised more than $500,000, presents an ethical dilemma for himself and Gabela, according to city watchdogs and ethics experts.
“This is a huge conflict of interest,” James Torres, president of the Miami Downtown Neighbors Alliance, told Florida Bulldog. “You have the personal attorney of a sitting commissioner who is now a city employee while chairing a PAC. I hope that raises eyebrows.”
While the First Amendment grants Sanchez-Gronlier the right to engage in political advocacy while he is not on the clock for the city, the optics are bad, noted Robert Jarvis, a Nova Southeastern University law professor.
A reasonable person could conclude that developers, land-use attorneys, and vendors are making donations to Advance Miami to curry favor with Sanchez-Gronlier and get him to influence how Gabela votes on their projects, Jarvis explained.
“If I were advising Sanchez-Gronlier, I would tell him to step down from his position at Advance Miami,” Jarvis said. “And if I were advising Gabela, I would tell him to recuse himself on any vote involving a party that had donated to Advance Miami.”
Gabela did not respond to two requests for an interview sent to his District 1 chief-of-staff Frank Castaneda. Sanchez-Gronlier did not respond to phone messages at his private law practice. He also did not respond to requests for comment sent to his personal Gmail and city email addresses.
FROM RUN-OF-THE-MILL LAWYER TO CITY HALL
Sanchez-Gronlier was toiling away as a lawyer handling personal injury, divorce and eviction cases prior to Gabela’s runoff win against his District 1 predecessor Alex Diaz de la Portilla in November 2023, Miami-Dade court records show. He represented Gabela as a plaintiff and a defendant in several cases.
In 2022, Sanchez-Gronlier filed an eviction lawsuit on Gabela’s behalf against a tenant who stopped paying rent for one of the units at Gabela’s two-story duplex in Allapattah, a Miami neighborhood that makes up a majority of District 1. The same year, Sanchez-Gronlier defended Gabela in a lawsuit brought by TD Bank, which won a summary judgment in 2023 after Gabela stopped making payments on an $8,536 loan.
TD Bank sold the judgment to an entity called Calvary SPV, which filed a 2023 lawsuit against Gabela that was also defended by Sanchez-Gronlier, court records show. That complaint was settled quietly in January of this year.
Shortly after taking office, Gabela hired Sanchez-Gronlier as part of his city hall staff, giving him the title of office counsel. Sanchez-Gronlier’s boss spent his first two years in office primarily battling then-City Commissioner Joe Carollo, the longtime Miami pol who also served a stint as city mayor in the Nineties.
Gabela often criticized the city administration and city attorney’s office for wasting taxpayer dollars defending a mountain of civil lawsuits against Carollo and Miami staffers, including a federal case that ended in 2023 with a $63.5 million jury verdict against Carollo personally. In 2025, Gabela also succeeded in convincing two of his city commission colleagues to join him in voting to remove Carollo as chairman of the city’s semiautonomous Bayfront Park Management Trust, which oversees the waterfront park in downtown Miami. Gabela replaced Carollo as the trust’s chairman.
Since Carollo left city hall in November after finishing fourth in the 2025 Miami mayor’s race, Gabela has transformed from city hall reformer to city hall opportunist, according to critics like James Torres.
Recently, Gabela came under fire for initially pushing the board of the Bayfront Park Management Trust to give another close ally, Raul Miro, the agency’s executive director, a $255,000 salary. After months of criticisms from residents and activists that Miro’s qualification did not justify his high pay, the board in June voted to approve Gabela’s measure to reduce Miro’s salary to $175,000 a year.
A couple of months after the Miami City Commission unanimously voted in April to approve a new 20-year contract with Event Entertainment Group to continue hosting Ultra Music Festival, a three-day electronic music event, at Bayfront Park, Torres started researching political contributions made to city politicians by anyone with ties to Ultra. The Miami Downtown Neighbors Alliance opposed giving Ultra a two-decade run.
An Internet search led him to the campaign finance reports page for political committees on the Miami-Dade County Elections Office website. “That is when I found [Sanchez-Gronlier’s] PAC,” Torres said. “I was able to connect the dots.”
ADVANCE MIAMI’S DONORS
On May 5, a few weeks after the city commission vote, Event Entertainment Group donated $20,000 to Advance Miami. The company’s attorney and lobbyist Sandra York also gave the PAC $30,000 on the same day, campaign finance reports show. The contributions from Ultra were not the only donations coming from people and entities doing business with the city.
Worldwide Amherst Media, which puts up billboards and murals in downtown Miami that require city approval, pitched in $15,000 on May 18, and two days later, Bayside Marketplace, which has a 99-year ground lease at Bayfront Park, gave $30,000. On April 7 and July 9, Miami-based development firm NR Investments made two $10,000 contributions to Advance Miami.
City staff is drafting a request for proposals to redevelop an 18-acre lot that includes a Miami fire station in Allapattah into a mixed-use project that would include new city facilities and up to 2,500 workforce housing apartments. Gabela’s office is going to review the RFP before it is publicly advertised, according to city documents. In 2022, NR Investments had submitted an unsolicited proposal to redevelop the same lot with a workforce housing project that included ground-floor retail, a new fire station, library and 90-space garage. The city rejected NR’s offer.
Another major donor to Advance Miami is an entity managed by Aabad Melwani that gave $25,000 on March 17. Melwani is president of Rickenbacker Marina, which operates a boat dock facility on city-owned land in Virginia Key. In July, Melwani’s company sued the city to block a November referendum asking voters to approve a new long-term lease with a competitor to redevelop the marina.
A month earlier, the city commission voted unanimously to send the measure to voters, but also because a court order forced them to do so. At the time, Gabela said: “I think this is a bad deal for the city.”
It’s unclear if the bulk of the $518,656 Advance Miami has raised will be used to help Gabela win reelection in 2027 since the city commissioner and Sanchez-Gronlier won’t answer Florida Bulldog’s questions. The committee has spent $25,540, including a $14,000 donation to a super PAC supporting the reelection of Republican Congressman Carlos Gimenez and $5,000 payment to the law practice of Hilton Napoleon II.
Napoleon is representing Gabela in a recently filed SLAPP suit against Miami-based independent journalist Elaine de Valle for allegedly defaming the city commissioner.
James Torres told Florida Bulldog he confronted Gabela’s chief of staff Frank Castaneda about Advance Miami during a phone call overheard by Sanchez-Gronlier. “Casteneda had me on speakerphone and Sanchez-Gronlier went off on me,” Torres said. “I told him it was fishy that he opened up a PAC that is accepting donations from Ultra, Bayside and the billboard company. There is no way in hell he would have received that money if Gabela wasn’t chairman of the Bayfront trust.”
ETHICS EXPERTS WEIGH IN
Nova Southeastern’s Jarvis said Sanchez-Gronlier is still required to follow ethics codes for the city, county and state, all of which prohibit government officials from using public resources to engage in political activities. Municipal, county and state employees are also barred from campaigning while they are on the clock.
Sanchez-Gronlier is in the clear if he and his family members are not personally benefitting from contributions to Advance Miami, if he is not promising anything to anyone who donate to Advance Miami and if he has received permission from City Attorney George Wysong.
Wysong did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust told Florida Bulldog that the watchdog agency has not received any requests for ethics opinions from Gabela or anyone in his office.
“Even if these conditions have been met, I think Gabela needs to put the arrangement on the record so that everyone is aware of Sanchez-Gronlier’s activities,” Jarvis said. “But even with the city attorney’s permission and the arrangement on the record, the optics will still be bad.”
Soliciting political contributions is a precarious position for a public employee, added Caroline Klancke, executive director of the Florida Ethics Institute.
“Antibribery provisions prohibit him from soliciting or accepting anything of value to him or others connected to him based on the understanding it would influence his decision-making or judgment,” Klancke said. “He would need to be very careful in policing that activity to make sure there are bright lines between his public capacity as [Gabela’s] office counsel and his private capacity as PAC chairman.”
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