Meet Mr. Arza

Garcia, now 33 years old, is one of Arza's long-time pals (he was a member of Arza's wedding). Known as Landy to his friends, Garcia is considered by some to be Arza's political strategist and occasional bagman. "The first year [Arza] was in the legislature, he would make everyone go through Landy if they wanted to talk to him," recalls former school board member Manty Morse.

Today Garcia works for the engineering firm Petro Hydro and sits on the oversight board the legislature imposed on the school district after a 2001 scandal over questionable land purchases. He also sits on the City of Miami's Sports and Exhibition Authority.

---

Arza's first shot at a public office came in 1996, when he made an unsuccessful bid for the school board. It was the first time county voters would choose school board members by district, and because the number of board seats would increase from seven to nine, at least two of those new districts would have no incumbent. Arza took aim at an uncontested district that included the Doral neighborhood. He failed to make the cut in a crowded primary, but he found a new home.

"I had decided to run for school board, so I went out to find a house in the district and couldn't afford it," he says. "But there was a person willing to sell a house in Doral at a good price and we moved in, and that's when I met Jesse and all these guys."

Jesse Jones, along with Morgan Levy and other community activists, had filled a power vacuum in the amorphous and fast-growing Doral area. In 1989 the two founded the West Dade Federation of Homeowners Associations in an attempt to control the development feeding frenzy and to block unsavory industries, such as prisons, from coming to their neighborhoods.

The year after Arza moved to Doral, the county commission launched its grand experiment in local zoning: the creation of community councils. Arza decided to run. He tied Pepe Cancio for a seat, an impasse Commissioner Miriam Alonso resolved by convincing Arza to concede, then using one of her two appointments to add him to the council. The council chose him for its chairman.

Jones, 65 years old, saw tremendous potential in Arza. The pair worked out an informal agreement whereby developers who wanted to get anything through the community council had to run it by the West Dade Federation first. "We struck up a good relationship," Jones says. "We worked hard to get schools out there, and a lot of good things."

Jones says Arza the councilman was the kind of politician who, if he believed in something, went after it full bore. "He can be a good consensus builder, and he can be a good foe," he allows. Jones felt his main task was almost that of a father keeping a wild but good-natured teenager in check.

Arza eventually bristled under the constraints: "He didn't trust me. He was unwilling to let go. I said, 'You're telling me it's my car but you won't give me the keys.'" At some point the tension between the two caused a rift. "There was a time for him to go his way and me to go mine," Jones shrugs.

Of course there was a little more to it than that. Some of the friction derived from the fact that the West Dade Federation was controlled largely by Anglos, and Arza wanted to build a Hispanic political base like one of his mentors, Hialeah's Raul Martinez. Political rivalries also increased the tension. Jones was allied with county Commissioner Miriam Alonso on Doral issues, and Alonso soon began to see Arza as a potential rival, especially after he joined league with her arch nemesis, Sweetwater Mayor Pepe Diaz. In fact, after the 2000 U.S. Census, Alonso made sure the boundaries of her newly redrawn district excluded the homes of both Diaz and Arza.

When Alonso was indicted on corruption charges, Governor Bush, with Arza's recommendation, appointed Pepe Cancio to fill her seat until the next election. Soon Cancio managed to have his district's boundary lines tweaked yet again -- this time to include the homes of Diaz and Arza.

While still on the community council, Arza began eyeing a couple of the legislative seats due to come open in the 2000 elections. He resigned from the council and moved his family north of Miami Lakes to run for the House seat left open by Luis Rojas, who was running for the state Senate. He raised more than $150,000, much of it from development-related companies, and swept to victory. He also found time that June to walk Marisleysis Gonzalez, cousin to Elian, into Miami High School and ask the principal to give her a short-term job. The principal complied.