Controversial former Miami city attorney named state’s municipal ‘Attorney of the Year’
A Florida organization honored former Miami City Attorney Victoria Méndez as the state’s best municipal lawyer of 2024 — a year in which the City Commission effectively fired Méndez from her job at City Hall, the Florida Bar continued an investigation into allegations against her and an appeals court denied Méndez’s effort to be dismissed from a lawsuit accusing her of conspiring with her husband to defraud a Little Havana homeowner.
At its annual seminar, held in Naples over the weekend, the Florida Municipal Attorneys Association named Méndez the 2024 Attorney of the Year, an award given to the state’s “most outstanding municipal attorney.” The award recognizes the recipient’s accomplishments “during the previous year, as well as his or her career contributions to date.”
FMAA Executive Secretary Rebecca O’Hara confirmed that Méndez received the award during the three-day event. In a statement to the Miami Herald, O’Hara said that since 2017, Méndez has served on the executive committee of the organization, which has approximately 1,120 members.
“During her time on the Executive Committee, Ms. Mendez provided invaluable guidance to the organization in helping to develop the topics and speakers for our annual continuing legal education seminar, including this year’s Seminar, which was held last week,” O’Hara said, adding that the seminar this year had “record attendance” and included more than 14 hours of continuing legal education.
O’Hara, who is also the deputy general counsel for the Florida League of Cities, said Méndez “routinely encourages other municipal attorneys to participate in the development of the profession through the FMAA,” and has served over the years as a speaker and moderator for the association’s seminars.
According to the FMAA website, the recipient is selected by a nominating committee that consists of the three most recent winners. In response to a request for comment on the decision to award Méndez, 2022 winner Samuel S. Goren pointed the Herald to O’Hara, the executive secretary. 2021 winner Thomas A. Cloud did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment about why the committee selected Méndez. The 2023 winner, James W. Denhardt, was not available for comment, according to a paralegal in his office.
Méndez did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment.
A turbulent year
O’Hara did not directly respond to questions about whether the association factored in the maelstrom of controversies surrounding Méndez, many of which occurred in the past year.
In January, the City Commission voted to extend Méndez’s contract for just five months, effectively ousting her. Then in April, the commission voted to immediately demote Méndez to a transitional role until her last day in June. She retired in June after a 20-year career at City Hall.
Also in April, the Florida Bar ramped up its investigation into Méndez after Miami filmmaker Billy Corben filed a complaint accusing Méndez of “embarrassingly unprofessional antics,” including when she called him a “vile little man” during a City Commission meeting this year. The Herald’s reporting showed that the investigation has been open since at least the spring of 2023 and is probing Méndez’s ties to an alleged house-flipping scheme involving her husband.
A Florida Bar spokesperson said Monday that the case is still open.
Méndez faced another blow in May when a panel of appellate court judges denied a motion to dismiss her from a lawsuit accusing her of using her public position and conspiring with her husband to convince a Little Havana homeowner to sell his property for below-market value.
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In the lawsuit, a man named Jose Alvarez accused Méndez and her husband of orchestrating a “conspiratorial scheme to enrich” themselves. After Méndez’s husband purchased Alvarez’s Little Havana home in 2017, the lawsuit alleges that he then renovated it, mostly without permits, and used his political connections in City Hall to have the code violations — which included over $270,000 in fines — cleared by the city’s code enforcement board. He later flipped the home for a $165,000 profit. According to the lawsuit, Alvarez had initially contacted Méndez to determine how to best address the code violations on his home.
“Under the guise of assisting Jose Alvarez with his desperate situation as a disinterested public official,” the lawsuit says, Méndez referred Alvarez to her husband, who allegedly “represented that the value of the Alvarez Home was substantially diminished.”
In a statement issued last year, Méndez called the lawsuit’s allegations “patently false.”
Méndez has previously sought to link the lawsuit’s motivations to other litigation in the city, including a lawsuit brought by Little Havana businessmen Bill Fuller and Martin Pinilla that resulted in a $63.5 million judgment against Miami City Commissioner Joe Carollo last summer.
Plaintiffs in both cases are represented by attorney Jeff Gutchess, whom Méndez accused during a February hearing of “trying to hurt my family, hurt me, trying to say that I did something wrong.” During the hearing, held virtually over Zoom, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge David C. Miller muted Méndez’s microphone because she spoke over him and made what he called a “political speech.”
Méndez has stood by her decision to have the city pay for outside attorneys to defend Carollo in multiple lawsuits — an the issue that has spurred recent litigation. She is one of several city employees named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit filed in May by the one of the city’s insurers, QBE Specialty Insurance Company, which is arguing that it cannot be held responsible for over $10 million in legal fees for the defense of Carollo in various lawsuits dating back to 2018. The insurer cited allegations that Carollo engaged in “deliberate, willful conduct that was intended to deprive plaintiffs of their property and harm plaintiffs’ reputations to punish and retaliate.”
And last fall, the city faced a potential $56 million shortfall when Méndez ignored warnings from state officials that the city’s plans to approve an increased property tax rate without a unanimous five-person vote could render the budget invalid, jeopardizing millions in funding. (The commission only had four members at the time because of the arrest and suspension of then-City Commissioner Alex Díaz de la Portilla, who faces corruption charges.)
The city also faced other legal challenges that arose during Méndez’s tenure.
In a class-action lawsuit that could cost the city millions, a Miami-Dade Circuit Court ruled in January that the city incorrectly imposed a 15% parking surcharge for years, a case that could lead to refunds for thousands of people. Separately, in April, a federal judge deemed a city-approved voting map unconstitutional due to racial gerrymandering, which undid a 2022 redistricting process.
Before she retired, Méndez cast her City Hall career in a favorable light. During her last meeting in April, she touted several achievements during her tenure, “from taking on FPL, to making sure water quality is safe for the residents and throughout Florida, to saving millions of dollars in potential catastrophic litigation.”
