I took the two photos above yesterday morning when I went to Commissioner Carollo's house to serve him with my Notice of Code Enforcement.  Here is a wider photo that I also took, where you can also see the loose roof tiles visible from the street.

The reason that these photos are important is, that on Wednesday, I had heard that a code enforcement officer had gone to Carollo's house last Friday, and that while she had not been allowed to enter the property, she had written a report of what she had been able to see from the street.

When I heard that information, I immediately sent a public record request to Adele Valencia, the new Director of Code Enforcement, asking for a copy of any report or photographs that the inspector had produced after the inspection.

Yesterday afternoon at 4:28 PM, I received an email from Ms.Valencia that forwarded the report from Code Inspector Genesis Troutman. Here it is:

Now, it's obvious from my photographs and the above report, that Ms. Troutman either didn't look very hard, or that she was specifically instructed only to look for, "evidence of illegal construction, (no debris, construction materials, or workers) or a tree removal."

In other words Troutman is either blind, or she was purposely sent to Carollo's house with a false set of instructions on what to look for, because if you look at the narrative of the allegations that Bill Fuller read at the press conference at City Hall he made NO mention of any sort of current, "construction, construction materials or workers."

Here are the things that he did accuse Carollo of doing:

There is nothing in any of Fuller's complaint about on-going, current construction. What Fuller did claim as his first accusation was that there were loose roof tiles above the entrance gate, which are the same loose tiles that I photographed, and are at the top of this story.

Had this been a real code inspection, the inspector would have been briefed on what Fuller's allegations were, and furthermore, given the wealth of information that Fuller provided in his press packet about the lack of permits and the photographs showing the various stages of the carport construction, that that information would have been enough on it's own - plus the flimsiness of the actual structure - to prompt a closer inspection and to call in assistance if needed to evaluate the carport structure for possible violations.

But for sure, someone sent to do a real inspection - even from the street - would have spotted the loose tiles, and issued a Notice of Violation for that.

Code Inspector Genesis Troutman makes no mention of any of this, and ended her so-called report with the claim that, "I departed at 11:45am with no violations found at the time of my inspection."

Good thing she wasn't sent to a snake farm to see if any snakes were slithering around looking to bite stupid people.

The first and foremost problem with Ms. Troutman's so-called inspection is that she should not have been sent to Carollo's house alone and so badly briefed on what toi look for.  

Sending a single code enforcement officer to an elected official's house after the kinds of allegations that Bill Fuller and his business partner Martin Pinilla made at a press conference in front of City Hall, was either an act of cowardice or an admission of gross ignorance and incompetence by newly appointed Code Compliance Director, Adele Valencia.

What it also shows is that contrary to all the claims about her professionalism, when push came to shove, instead of showing leadership,  Valencia demonstrated that she s just another ass-kisser who would gladly throw one of her employees under the bus by sanctioning a stunt like this.

Valencia, as the Director of Code Compliance, along with her Chief of Code should have been the ones who showed up at Carollo's house, and if denied access, she should have come back to her office and immediately instructed one of her staff to prepare a Notice Of Violation for the loose tiles - you really can't claim not to notice them unless you purposely didn't look - and after that, she should have sent someone from the building department to look at the carports and determine whether they met the city's building code, and then she should have notified the City Attorney's office that they needed to notify the Commissioner that unless he allowed her and her staff to enter his property they were going to issue an Administrative Warrant that would allow them to enter his property, whether he liked it or not.

All of that should have occurred on Friday afternoon.

The thing to remember about all of this is that even if a current owner of a property didn't engage in activities that turn out to be violations of the city code, they are, as the current owners responsible for correcting those violations, and consequently, they have to comply with ALL of the city's rules and regulations as they exist today, something that Carollo denies that he has to do.

In her cover email to me when she sent me Ms. Troutman's so-called report, Valencia claimed that, "The investigation is on-going."

That's not what I've been told, and I believe my sources more than I believe her, because she, along with Colonel Klink - who obviously was the person to whom she turned to for guidance and advice before sending Mr. Troutman on her so-called inspection - both appear, based on the evidence, to be cut from the same weaselly cloth of bureaucratic cover-you-ass material, and no matter what happens from this day forward, she had one chance to demonstrate that she was capable of rising to the level of being a top-flight department director, and she blew it.

Time to go ask Daniela for your old job back, Adele, because you're not ready for prime time!

It's Miami. Bitches!