Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado and his daughter, Miami-Dade School Board member Raquel Regalado, agreed Wednesday to pay fines and penalties of $5,000 each for sloppy campaign bookkeeping during the mayor’s 2009 race.
As campaign treasurer, Raquel Regalado oversaw often-handwritten contribution and expense reports that failed to balance out by as much as $40,000, and at least once were given to the city clerk past deadline.
Still, an investigation the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement concluded the errors, mostly technical, didn’t rise to criminal violations.
“It did look like sloppiness,” said Joe Centorino, executive director of the county’s Commission on Ethics & Public Trust. “They basically relied on close friends to do some of the accounting. And they were going through some personal issues.”
Seven weeks ago the mayor settled a separate issue with the ethics commission by agreeing to a pair of fines totaling $1,000 for not disclosing the value of his Coral Way home on financial disclosure forms. In that instance, the mayor argued a water leak at his home caused so much damage that it was worthless.
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