Patricia Mazzei

Hurchalla, 78, could spend her remaining years kayaking here, readily outpacing paddlers less than half her age. Or traveling the country, giving speeches about the legacy of her sister, Janet Reno, the first female attorney general of the United States.

But instead of reveling in her retirement, Hurchalla, who has devoted her life to protecting the untamed Florida wilderness that she loved, has been fighting a public battle with a rock-mining company — and losing.

A jury decided last year that Hurchalla should pay $4.4 million in damages to Lake Point Restoration, a company that has a limestone mining operation in Martin County, along Florida’s Treasure Coast.

Lake Point sued her for interfering with a contract after she emailed Martin County commissioners, urging them to back out of a water deal with the company that had initially been approved as a public-private partnership that could keep polluted water out of a nearby estuary. Hurchalla argued that she had merely exercised her First Amendment rights.

The legal saga involved secret emails, the ownership of Florida’s fresh water, and the constitutional rights to free speech and to petition the government.

Three months ago, a state appeals court upheld the verdict, alarming environmental and free speech organizations that had implored the three-judge panel to consider how profoundly such a precedent could chill citizens’ ability to question their leaders.

Hurchalla appealed again, this time asking for a hearing before the full 4th District Court of Appeal. On Friday, the court denied her request. She could still petition the Florida Supreme Court to consider her case.

She does not have the money to pay the judgment. But Hurchalla does not worry about that.

“What I worry about now,” she said, “is dying before we win.”

She is one of the few remaining voices of a generation that remembers hurricanes before they had names, the last surviving child of a mother who built the family homestead by hand. Her life has spanned much of the state’s modern history, a story of growth inextricable from development.

The sale of 650 acres on the southern tip of Hutchinson Island in 1972 first spurred Hurchalla into activism. She wanted the land protected for conservation. Instead, a developer bought it and built a gated residential community. Hurchalla became Martin County’s first female commissioner in 1974, a liberal Democrat in a town of Republicans.

The commission adopted strict protections for wetlands and a four-story height limit for buildings. Growth happened anyway, but slowly and “sanely,” Hurchalla said, keeping the county green and preserving an Old Florida way of life.

In 1994, she lost reelection to an opponent largely bankrolled by developers. Hurchalla returned to activism. Even now, she says, “I spend too much time at the computer, trying to save the world.”

That is how she got in trouble with Lake Point, which in 2008 bought 2,200 acres of former sugar cane fields in the western fringes of Martin County, near Lake Okeechobee.

Behind Lake Point was George Lindemann Jr., a billionaire real estate investor and heir to a cellphone and cable TV fortune. He served prison time after being convicted in 1995 of paying a man $25,000 to electrocute his horse so Lindemann could collect a $250,000 insurance payout.

Lindemann’s consortium wanted to mine for limestone and use the leftover pits to store lake water and clean its pollution, which would otherwise be flushed down the fragile St. Lucie Estuary, contributing to toxic algae blooms. The South Florida Water Management District and Martin County signed off on the project.

But a few years later, Lake Point partnered with another company to try to sell the water to the city of West Palm Beach, troubling Hurchalla and Martin County officials, who questioned whether the revised plan would really result in environmental benefits. (West Palm Beach ultimately did not buy Lake Point’s water.)

Hurchalla fired off emails to county commissioners encouraging them to get out of the agreement with Lake Point, arguing that it would destroy wetlands and noting that no peer-reviewed study had examined the effects on restoration plans for the downstream Florida Everglades, which are supposed to get water from Lake Okeechobee, near the mine site.

She sent some of the emails to commissioners’ private email addresses. She signed one of them “Deep Rock Pit” — a joke, she said later, alluding to Deep Throat, the secret Washington Post source during the Watergate scandal.

County staff members issued notices of violation against Lake Point.

In 2013, Lake Point sued the county, the water management district and Hurchalla, claiming she waged an unlawful campaign against the company that cost it its plans to make money off its cleaned lake water.

The court agreed: The litigation found that commissioners conducted public business using their private email and delayed production of those emails — or destroyed them altogether — in violation of public records laws. Three commissioners were charged in criminal court. A jury acquitted one of them in April, and the state attorney dropped the charges against the other two last month.

The county and water management district settled with Lake Point for millions of dollars, and the mine continues to operate. But Hurchalla fought on, even after Lake Point offered to drop the case if she publicly apologized.

She had nothing to apologize for, she said: She had engaged her elected leaders. But Lake Point accused her of improperly instructing commissioners through the private emails — and of falsely claiming that the wetlands would be harmed (they were not, the company said) and that no scientific studies had been done (a preliminary review had been conducted). That amounted to malice, the court ruled.

“The First Amendment’s very important, but it has its limits,” said Ethan J. Loeb, the lead lawyer for Lake Point. “You’re not allowed to tell falsehoods. You’re not allowed to lie. That’s not anything that’s new or exotic. And if, in fact, you do not tell the truth, and those falsehoods were designed to injure or harm a business, there’s a consequence for that.”

Any wages Hurchalla makes are subject to garnishment. One of her husband Jim’s retirement accounts was taken over. After the jury ruled against her last year, sheriff’s deputies seized what they could of Hurchalla’s property: two kayaks and a 2004 Toyota Camry — with a faded “Defend Maggy” bumper sticker — that had been owned by her sister.

Lake Point later returned the kayaks and the car. But first, Hurchalla’s neighbors dropped off other kayaks at her home in solidarity.

“Thank you for standing up for our First Amendment rights,” read a handwritten note they left behind.

Richard Grosso, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University who filed amicus briefs on behalf of advocacy groups as part of Hurchalla’s appeal, said he had already heard from other activists who feared that the ruling might hamper their ability to criticize the government.

“I’ve had several clients contact me with deep concern about whether and what they can say about environmental issues,” he said. “Florida is battling global warming and sea-level rise and the loss of biodiversity, so we cannot afford to be quiet.”

Hurchalla, as is her style, put it more bluntly: “I don’t think anybody could safely stand at a podium in the state of Florida.”

One evening in July, Hurchalla, barefoot, with a knife cut on her finger bandaged with duct tape, contemplated the recent events from the screened porch of the home she and Jim built in 1968 after buying a $5,000 lot on the banks of the Indian River. They raised four children there. Two adult grandchildren live nearby.

Her breast cancer is in remission, but she has suffered since 1992 from an autoimmune disorder that requires monthly intravenous transfusions of antibodies.

“I did not expect to be alive at 78,” said Hurchalla, whose sister died of complications from Parkinson’s disease at 78.

But Hurchalla did not dwell on what was to come. Instead, she looked around in wonder. Past the mangroves, mullet jumped in the river.

“Look at what the world has done for me,” she said.

She served crackers and smoked fish dip from barracuda that Jim had caught the night before. Then she planned the next day’s paddle, checking on the high tide.

This article originally appeared in

The Florida Activist Is 78. The Legal Judgment Against Her Is $4 Million.

STUART, Fla. — Maggy Hurchalla’s piece of Florida heaven is a patch of pristine Atlantic shore accessible only by boat in St. Lucie Inlet Preserve State Park. She and her husband nicknamed it the “End of the World” when they first came upon it half a century ago, after paddling south along the barrier island to the water’s end. She still likes to skinny-dip at the beach.

It was fitting that two blocks away, at a church founded by some of Miami’s first Bahamian settlers, Bethel led a frantic effort this week to aid storm victims in the country of his ancestors. Miami was spared the wrath of Hurricane Dorian but the Bahamas suffered a direct hit, one that left the islands in utter devastation.

The ties could not be stronger between Miami and the archipelago less than 200 miles east. Bahamians settled in South Florida decades before Miami was born, building bridges and railroads and raising children who would become some of the region’s most prominent leaders. This week, their descendants, many veterans of devastating hurricanes themselves, gathered across South Florida to lend a hand.

“When we were desperate, people came to our rescue,” said Bethel, 68, a retired state juvenile justice administrator who lost his home in south Miami-Dade County to Hurricane Andrew, another Category 5 storm, in 1992. “The community pulled together. There was no sense of division. Now, we are doing the same.”

Past disasters, both natural and political, have cemented Miami’s identity as a beacon for the region. The city took in Cuban exiles after Fidel Castro seized power. It mobilized to support Haiti after a crippling earthquake. It adopted the cause of Venezuelans after their country was plunged into crisis.

In the case of the Bahamas, Miami owes its very beginnings to residents from there. Bahamian laborers worked in construction and agriculture, creating the city’s infrastructure and teaching white settlers unfamiliar with the tropics how to build with coral rock, till the soil and plant tropical fruit, said Marvin Dunn, a retired college professor who chronicled local history in his book “Black Miami in the Twentieth Century.”

“It’s probably safe to say that Florida would not have evolved as it did without Bahamians in this community,” he said.

Some of the early settlers’ employers paid them with land, allowing black homeownership to flourish. In the 20th century, Bahamian Americans became among South Florida’s most influential civic leaders and civil rights activists.

Bahamians started to arrive in the 1880s, following an economic downturn on the islands, Dunn said. Many went to work in pineapple fields in Key West and then migrated north to Coconut Grove, which they called Kebo. Bahamians also settled in the Miami neighborhood of Overtown and in Carver Ranches, which is now part of the city of West Park, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale.

One of the early figures in Coconut Grove was Bethel’s great-grandmother Mariah Brown, a laundress in Key West who became a Grove innkeeper and built her two-story home on what is now Charles Street.

Brown helped establish the Greater St. Paul AME Church on Thomas Avenue, Bethel said. One of her daughters, Lulu Reddick, Bethel’s grandmother, was a founding member of the nearby Christ Episcopal, on Hibiscus Street, where Bethel is now senior warden, the congregation’s lead layperson.

On Wednesday, volunteers gathered in both houses of worship, dripping with sweat as they sorted through heavy boxes and bags.

Stacks of water bottles. Heaps of diapers. Baby formula. A chain saw. So many donations came in that Christ Episcopal ran out of pallets.

“None of my normal church work is getting done,” the Rev. Jonathan Archer, the church’s rector, said with a chuckle. Archer is from Nassau, the Bahamian capital, and had learned that his relatives there were safe.

“This is in our denominational DNA — we provide relief in times of crisis,” said the Rev. Nathaniel Robinson III, the senior pastor at Greater St. Paul, which was founded in 1896. “While this hurricane in particular affects our parishioners directly, when it was the Haiti earthquake, or the hurricane in Puerto Rico, we did the same thing. Our members do feel this one a bit more personally, but it’s the same effort.”

“It’s too close to home not to react,” said Ligia Crystal, a Colombian-born retired florist who was unloading blankets and pillows from her van at the door of the church. “If someone isn’t helping, what rock are they hiding under?”

Robinson said seven seaplanes lent free of charge by Tropic Ocean Airways in Fort Lauderdale had been pressed into service for the relief effort by the city of Miami and various churches and institutions.

“We do have clearance from the Bahamian government to take medical supplies in today,” he said. “They’ve told us they need to know what’s in each box, so we’ve been filling out a lot of forms.”

In a large hall outside the pastor’s office, a Nassau-born volunteer named Elvern Ross — everyone calls her Mel — said she had heard from her brother in Nassau that their cousins in Marsh Harbour had survived but lost everything in the storm.

“The house is gone,” Ross said. “They were surrounded by water and couldn’t get help. There were six or seven people in the house. It’s a sad thing, you know what I mean?”

Gordon Eric Knowles, president of the Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce, which promotes black-owned businesses, said he still had not heard from a cousin who is a doctor in the Abaco Islands. He saw a photograph of the clinic where she works on CNN but could not manage to get a glimpse of her.

“We’re just praying that she’s OK,” said Knowles, whose great-grandparents first migrated to Fort Pierce, Florida.

The plight of the Bahamas has drawn the attention of public officials, including the state’s Republican senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who asked President Donald Trump to waive or suspend certain visa requirements for Bahamians with relatives in the United States who can take them in temporarily.

Local officials were frustrated that the federal government had not dispatched search-and-rescue teams from Miami-Dade County and the city of Miami to the Bahamas, apparently because they might be needed in Georgia or the Carolinas. The Coast Guard has sent helicopters and boats to perform evacuations on the islands.

Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Democrat representing Miami Gardens, whose mother’s family hailed from Abaco, said she would like to establish a Bahamian heritage museum in Coconut Grove and obtain a formal designation for the area to be called “Little Bahamas.” Commissioner Ken Russell of Miami, who represents the neighborhood, said he won some protection last year for the last remaining wood-frame shotgun houses built by Bahamian settlers in the West Grove.

“There have been more evictions, demolitions and nonrenewals of month-to-month rentals in that part of town than any other part of town because it’s in between fancy Coconut Grove and fancy Coral Gables,” he lamented.

Back at Christ Episcopal, Bethel said he hoped the community’s efforts to help the islands would draw attention to the need for affordable housing in the West Grove, to maintain the neighborhood’s important history.

“If you don’t keep telling your history,” he said, “you lose it.”

Strong Ties to Mainland Sustain Islands Reeling From Storm's Devastation

MIAMI — The home that Charles Bethel’s great-grandmother built in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood in 1890 still stands, with a historical marker commemorating it as one of the first dwellings in the area owned by a settler from the Bahamas.

“It all depends on this dance of the pressure systems around the storm,” said Hugh Willoughby, a meteorologist at Florida International University in Miami.

If the forecast for its strength holds, Dorian would be the first hurricane of Category 4 or higher to make landfall on Florida’s east coast since 1992, when Andrew ripped through the Miami area as a Category 5 storm, causing widespread damage.

“The biggest concern will be Dorian’s slow motion when it is near Florida, placing some areas of the state at an increasing risk of a prolonged, drawn-out event of strong winds, dangerous storm surge, and heavy rainfall,” the National Hurricane Center said in its 5 a.m. Friday briefing.

The Florida National Guard has activated 2,500 members, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday night. The governor had previously extended an emergency declaration to all of the state’s 67 counties.

A strike by Dorian in a densely populated region could be especially dangerous, said W. Craig Fugate, a former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He rattled off a list of Florida cities — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Jacksonville — where, he said, storm surge could be deadly “once you start measuring in feet, not inches.”

“That’s not saying it won’t be devastating wherever it hits the shore,” said Fugate.

Orlando is inland in Central Florida, but if the storm dumps rain for many hours, the city’s lakes could overflow. In North Florida, the St. Johns and Matanzas Rivers have flooded Jacksonville and St. Augustine even when storms have not directly hit the cities, Fugate noted.

Expensive installations around Cape Canaveral could be affected. Fuel shipments could be delayed by any disruptions at major hubs for cargo in Jacksonville or Fort Lauderdale. Powerful waves in Lake Okeechobee, Florida’s largest inland lake, could test its aging dike.

“What we’ve always encouraged in Florida is catastrophic disaster planning,” Fugate said.

Hurricane Dorian Menaces Florida's East Coast

Forecasters expect Hurricane Dorian to arrive somewhere along the east coast of Florida on Monday afternoon. But exactly where is still a mystery, with some prediction models suggesting a direct blow to Central Florida and others projecting the storm to veer north or south.

“I have to admit that that could happen,” Pierluisi said with a chuckle. “But that’s the situation.”

That was on Friday. By Sunday afternoon, Pierluisi had appeared to reverse himself, arguing that the Senate had no say and that the courts would settle the issue. Then a few hours later, he was sued.

Puerto Rico remained Monday where it has been for weeks: in a state of protracted political paralysis that appears not to have been resolved by the installation of Pierluisi, who took over after former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló’s resignation became effective Friday. The territory’s Supreme Court agreed to take up a legal action filed against Pierluisi’s appointment.

Public furor fueled huge demonstrations against Rosselló after leaked private messages showed him and his closest aides insulting Puerto Ricans. Questions over Pierluisi’s legitimacy as governor left open the possibility that protesters would again take to the streets, if they see his installation as evidence of the unpopular political establishment unconstitutionally attempting to perpetuate itself in power.

“This isn’t about whether Mr. Pierluisi is a good candidate, as some people have argued,” said Julio E. Fontanet Maldonado, a constitutional scholar and the dean of the law school at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico. “It’s about defending the rule of law.”

Late Sunday, the Senate president, Thomas Rivera Schatz, asked a lower court in San Juan, the capital, to grant a preliminary injunction ordering Pierluisi to cease functions as governor because he had not previously been confirmed as secretary of state by both chambers of the Legislative Assembly.

The secretary of state is next in line to succeed the governor. The House of Representatives confirmed Pierluisi as secretary of state Friday, but the Senate did not hold a hearing. Even in the case of the House vote, new questions arose Monday as to whether Pierluisi had submitted all the required paperwork before the vote.

“Puerto Rico is living a situation without historical precedent,” wrote Rivera Schatz, who leads the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which Pierluisi and Rosselló also represent.

The Supreme Court said it would take up the Senate’s complaint and asked for written arguments by Tuesday afternoon.

Originally, the Senate had scheduled a confirmation hearing for Pierluisi for Monday morning. But Pierluisi said that as governor, he could no longer be subject to confirmation as secretary of state. The hearing was canceled.

Pierluisi had argued during a news conference Friday that the Senate could “ratify” him as governor. But no legal framework for such a vote appears to exist in Puerto Rican law.

Still, the Senate planned to meet in special session Monday afternoon and possibly vote anyway. Despite his earlier waffling, Pierluisi said Monday that he would abide by the Senate’s decision.

“If the Puerto Rico Senate decides to hold any sort of vote over my incumbency, I will respect the result,” Pierluisi said in a statement. “All I ask of senators before they make their decision is that they listen to the people, to whom we are all indebted.”

A campaign to ask legislators to back Pierluisi has been carried out by his supporters for several days. One local television station sent a crew to interview Puerto Ricans on the street about Pierluisi; the host of the program seemed surprised that most people seemed content with his installation.

A second lawsuit against Pierluisi was filed early Monday by Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz of San Juan, who asked the Supreme Court to declare Pierluisi’s swearing-in illegitimate. Cruz is a 2020 candidate for governor for the opposition Popular Democratic Party, which supports keeping Puerto Rico a United States commonwealth.

She told reporters over the weekend that while she does not support the next New Progressive official in line to be governor — Wanda Vázquez, the secretary of justice — the court must clarify existing law over the constitutional succession.

Outside the Supreme Court on Monday, Frank Torres Viada, a lawyer for the city of San Juan, described the island as being in the middle of a “judicial vacuum.”

“Right now, Puerto Ricans are in a state of uncertainty, unrest and restlessness of spirit,” he said, “because we don’t really know who is governor of Puerto Rico.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/us/puerto-rico-governor.html" id="a81ca505-006b-338b-a136-f704877b9efc">The New York Times</a>.

Puerto Rico Got a New Governor 3 Days Ago. But His Future Is Already in Doubt.

Moments after being sworn in as Puerto Rico’s new governor, Pedro R. Pierluisi pledged in no uncertain terms that he would willingly step down in the coming days if the island’s Senate voted against confirming him — even if that made him one of the shortest-serving governors ever to take office.

But Pierluisi’s path to the governor’s seat is hardly an easy one. He faces serious opposition from some lawmakers, especially in Puerto Rico’s Senate, which could block his confirmation. That would leave the next in line — Wanda Vázquez, secretary of justice — to become governor.

With the vote still uncertain, here is a look at the man who could take charge of the island’s troubled government.

Who is Pedro Pierluisi?

Pierluisi, a 60-year-old lawyer, served as secretary of justice for three years under Rosselló’s father, former Gov. Pedro J. Rosselló. He was elected to represent Puerto Rico in Congress as its nonvoting resident commissioner and served there from 2009 to 2017.

Pierluisi was reelected after his first term even though the governor at the time, Luis G. Fortuño, who was also on the ballot for the New Progressive Party, was not. That popularity made Pierluisi, who comes from a political family, an attractive candidate for governor in 2016.

But he lost the primary that year to the younger Rosselló by about 2 percentage points, or about 10,000 votes. Pierluisi then backed Rosselló, who like him is a Democrat when it comes to national politics, though Puerto Rico’s political parties do not neatly match up with those on the mainland. The New Progressive Party supports statehood for Puerto Rico.

In 1994, while Pierluisi was secretary of justice, his younger brother, José Jaime Pierluisi, a 28-year-old aide to the governor, was fatally shot in a carjacking in San Juan, the capital.

What is Pierluisi’s political standing in Puerto Rico?

Pierluisi is seen as competent and experienced. As resident commissioner, he ensured that Puerto Rico received federal stimulus funds and was covered by the Affordable Care Act. Both were considered important achievements.

But he also faces a serious potential conflict of interest: After leaving office, Pierluisi went to work for O’Neill &amp; Borges, a law firm that does external legal consulting for the federal oversight board appointed by Congress to oversee Puerto Rico’s troubled finances.

Pierluisi took a leave of absence from the firm Tuesday. Yet any connection to the unpopular board — which is led by Pierluisi’s brother-in-law, José B. Carrión III — is problematic in the minds of some lawmakers who will decide whether to confirm him.

In a statement accepting his nomination Wednesday, Pierluisi cast his Washington connections as an advantage.

“It is also crucial to restore the trust of federal authorities and Congress, where I have earned respect,” he said, “and to reestablish a productive relationship with the oversight board, based only on what is good for Puerto Rico and facilitates the end of its mandate.”

Has there been any other controversy?

In 2016, The New York Times found that Pierluisi introduced legislation as resident commissioner that would benefit at least two Wall Street companies that had hired his wife, María Elena Carrión, to advise them. The family’s net worth rose in part thanks to Carrión’s work helping the firms find bargains on distressed financial assets in Puerto Rico.

Both Pierluisi and Carrión, an experienced investment banker, said at the time that nothing he had done was intended to help her financial advisory firm, which she set up 20 days after he was elected in 2008.

Pierluisi and Carrión are now in the process of divorcing, according to the Puerto Rican news media.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/puerto-rico-governor-pedro-pierluisi.html" id="d9ac386e-154a-3a8c-a5f3-cbcc95f1a605">The New York Times</a>.

Who Is Pedro Pierluisi, Who Could Be Puerto Rico's Next Governor?

A week after announcing his imminent resignation, Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló of Puerto Rico nominated a new secretary of state who could succeed him. Pedro R. Pierluisi faces a confirmation hearing in the Legislative Assembly.

Rosselló’s administration was rocked by the publication of a trove of derisive messages sent by the governor and some of his Cabinet members and top aides in a private chat on the messaging app Telegram. The messages mocked political foes and allies alike, often with profanity.

On Saturday, the governor tried to contain the fallout of the rapidly unfolding scandal by announcing that his chief financial officer and secretary of state had stepped down over their participation in the chat. But the high-profile exits proved insufficient to quell the widespread furor on the island that mushroomed in the hours after 889 pages of Telegram messages were published by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism.

Protesters gathered outside the governor’s mansion, La Fortaleza, in San Juan late into the night Saturday and demanded Rosselló’s resignation, less than 18 months before the end of his term.

“Ricky, ¡renuncia!” they chanted.

On Sunday, Rosselló attended services at an evangelical church in Carolina, Puerto Rico, and said he had sought forgiveness.

“I humble myself before you and before the Almighty for the faults I have committed,” he said, according to a report in the El Nuevo Día newspaper. Outside of the governor’s mansion, demonstrators used a previously planned march to insist on Rosselló’s resignation. The protests continued into the afternoon. The authorities deployed police officers in riot gear.

The governor’s office said in a statement Sunday that Rosselló was not resigning, in spite of the recent “difficulties,” and added that he had spent the day holding meetings with agency directors. He plans to announce a government reorganization and anti-corruption measures in the coming days, the statement said.

“We do not give up on the work underway, and today more than ever, many people are counting on my commitment to that work,” Rosselló said in a statement in Spanish.

The messages in the private chat, which Puerto Ricans dubbed #TelegramGate and #RickyLeaks, appeared to unleash anger over grievances against the Rosselló administration that had begun accumulating even before Hurricane Maria decimated the island in 2017.

Puerto Rico’s finances have been controlled by a federal oversight board since 2016, the year Rosselló was elected, limiting his ability to govern and simultaneously making him party to unpopular economic austerity policies. The bankrupt island has been in a recession for 12 years.

But it was Rosselló’s handling of the slow storm recovery, including what many Puerto Ricans viewed as his meek approach toward President Donald Trump, that put him under increased scrutiny. His government took nearly a year to acknowledge that thousands of people had died in Maria’s aftermath. A series of corruption scandals, including the arrests Wednesday of two former Cabinet members, further diminished Rosselló’s power. Still, he had been expected to run for re-election in 2020.

Some of Rosselló’s critics, including Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz of San Juan, a candidate for governor, said on Puerto Rican radio Saturday that the scandal surrounding the governor would only fuel more distrust from Washington, where Trump has made clear that he does not want to send the island more federal aid.

Cruz also said she had filed a police complaint against Rosselló and his former chief financial officer, Christian Sobrino, over a leaked message in which Sobrino had written in Spanish about Cruz: “I am salivating to shoot her.”

“You do me a favor,” Rosselló appeared to respond.

Radio and television stations on the island ran special coverage about the scandal over the weekend, extending their broadcasts into the night much as they had done during Hurricane Maria. Pundits opined that Rosselló’s departure would be imminent, whether he resigned or lawmakers convened to push him out.

Any intended transition was complicated by the departure Saturday of Luis Rivera Marín, Rosselló’s secretary of state and lieutenant governor, who would have assumed the governorship in the event Rosselló chose to resign. The next official in the line of succession is the secretary of justice, Wanda Vázquez Garced.

Rosselló, 40, apologized Thursday after an excerpt from the chat was first published by local media showing he had referred to Melissa Mark-Viverito, the former speaker of the New York City Council, who was born in Puerto Rico, using the Spanish word for “whore.” In English, he also used a profane expression in reference to the oversight board that controls Puerto Rico’s finances, followed by emojis of a raised middle finger.

In a news conference held shortly after he returned from cutting short a family vacation in France, Rosselló insisted late Thursday that he would remain in office.

But on Saturday morning, the Center for Investigative Journalism published the entirety of the leaked chat, which spanned from late 2018 to January and included Rosselló and 11 other men in his close political circle. The cache of messages showed that the governor and his current and former aides had also derided many others, including leaders of their New Progressive Party and the Puerto Rican celebrity Ricky Martin.

By Saturday afternoon, Rep. Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s nonvoting member in Congress and a member of the New Progressive Party, said that Rosselló should not seek reelection in 2020 and the governor should “immediately reflect on his role as governor.”

“I feel ashamed by everything being said in these private communications,” she said. “The people are disgusted, disappointed by this telenovela.”

Puerto Rico’s Senate president and House majority leader, both of whom are members of Rosselló’s party and had been mocked in the chat, also said they had lost faith in the governor. So did Martin, an actor and singer. The trap artist Bad Bunny urged Puerto Ricans to take to the streets.

Rosselló and the other participants also conducted public business on the chat, even though some of the men no longer worked in the administration and should not have been privy to some of the internal details under discussion.

In one exchange, Sobrino, the former chief financial officer who also was the governor’s representative to the oversight board, responded to a question about the budget for forensic pathologists by cracking a joke about the dead bodies accumulating during and after the hurricane at the understaffed morgue.

“Now that we are on the subject, don’t we have some cadavers to feed our crows?” he wrote, apparently referring to the administration’s critics. “Clearly they need attention.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/us/puerto-rico-rossello.html" id="e5f3c177-ad6b-301a-a78e-61a12234cef1">The New York Times</a>.

Puerto Rico Leadership in Turmoil Amid Calls for Ricardo Rosselló to Resign

MIAMI — A political crisis engulfed Puerto Rico over the weekend, prompting the departure of two senior members of the government and threatening Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló, who found himself increasingly isolated in office and no longer supported by leaders of his own party.

Puerto Rico leadership in turmoil amid calls for Ricardo Rosselló to resign

The Justice Department accused Julia Keleher, the former education secretary, and Ángela Ávila Marrero, the former executive director of the Puerto Rico Health Insurance Administration, of unlawfully steering about $15.5 million in federal contracts to politically connected consultants.

The others arrested were Glenda E. Ponce-Mendoza and Mayra Ponce-Mendoza, two sisters who worked as education contractors; Fernando Scherrer Caillet, an executive at the B.D.O. accounting firm; and Alberto Velázquez Piñol, a consultant. The two businessmen face charges of money laundering, among the most serious accusations laid out in the 32-count indictment.

Rosa Emilia Rodríguez Vélez, the U.S. attorney for Puerto Rico, said the men used their political influence to improperly obtain contracts, and then used that money for illegal lobbying.

Neither Keleher nor Ávila personally benefited from the scheme, Rodríguez said. Of the fraudulent contracts, about $13 million were funneled through the Education Department, she said, and about $2.5 million through the Health Insurance Administration. Keleher was friends with the Ponce-Mendoza sisters; Glenda Ponce-Mendoza was her assistant.

Investigators found that government officials and employees used personal email and Telegram, a mobile encrypted messaging app, to conduct government business.

“This type of corruption is particularly egregious because it not only victimizes taxpayers, it victimizes those citizens and students that are in need of education assistance,” said Neil Sanchez, the special agent in charge of the Southern Region of the inspector general’s office at the U.S. Department of Education, which first flagged that something was amiss in Puerto Rico.

Keleher’s arrest was especially notable, following a tumultuous tenure in which she closed hundreds of public schools, citing Puerto Rico’s diminishing population and dwindling resources.

And the arrests come at a delicate time for Puerto Rico’s leaders, who are asking Congress — which earlier this year held up a national disaster aid package over a fight about how much to send to the island — to approve $12 billion for the island’s Medicaid program, which faces a looming funding shortfall.

Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló said he would cut short a family vacation in France to hastily return to Puerto Rico.

“It is time to be present on the island and reiterate the message personally: the agenda of this Government does not stop, despite those who have incorrectly decided to treason the trust of the People,” Rosselló, a Democrat, said in a statement.

The investigation could renew criticism from President Donald Trump, the most prominent skeptic of sending aid to Puerto Rico, who has repeatedly cast the island’s leaders as incompetent.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz. and chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee that has oversight of Puerto Rico, called on the governor to resign in the wake of the arrests.

Rodríguez, the prosecutor, said the governor was not involved in the investigation. She added that the investigation shows that the authorities are doing their job effectively.

“The message this sends is that the system does work,” Rodríguez said at a news conference in San Juan. But she lamented that many similar corruption arrests had been made in Puerto Rico over numerous administrations.

“It’s a shame that we see this type of scheme, one after another,” she said.

Just last month, Ávila traveled to Capitol Hill to warn that a shortfall in September risked the Medicaid health care coverage for about 1.5 million Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens. She resigned five days later, on June 25, after Rosselló’s chief of staff revealed that the governor had spoken to a federal grand jury that was investigating Velázquez, the consultant.

Velázquez was arrested on Wednesday in Greenwich, Connecticut. Keleher, who resigned from her position in April, was arrested in Washington. The other arrests took place in Puerto Rico.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/us/puerto-rico-corruption.html" id="2703e85f-497c-3a4e-a33a-7c315bce64f8">The New York Times</a>.

Puerto Rico ex-officials accused of steering millions to consultants

MIAMI — The federal authorities in Puerto Rico unveiled a sprawling corruption investigation into high levels of the island’s government Wednesday, announcing arrests and criminal charges against six people, including two former agency directors.

The new law requires people with serious criminal histories to fully pay back fines and fees to the courts before they become eligible to vote. In some cases, those costs amount to thousands of dollars.

The ACLU argued that the new limits would unconstitutionally price some people out of the ballot box and undermine the intent of Florida voters, who in November approved a measure to enfranchise up to 1.5 million felons.

“There’s no rational basis for treating somebody who can afford to pay fees any differently than treating anybody who can’t afford to pay them,” said Julie Ebenstein, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “That’s just distinguishing people’s right to vote based on their wealth.”

Nearly 65% of Florida voters backed the measure to enfranchise felons, Amendment 4, which many felt could reshape the electorate of the nation’s largest presidential battleground state. African Americans, who tend to vote Democratic, have been disproportionately disenfranchised, though the majority of those with felony convictions in Florida are white.

State lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Legislature said they were not motivated by politics when they adopted restrictions to Amendment 4 last month. Instead, they said they needed to clarify how the measure would be put into practice. The text of the amendment itself, they argued, required a strict interpretation of what constitutes the completion of a felony sentence — which includes repaying financial obligations, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, to the courts.

DeSantis’ office did not issue a statement explaining his decision to sign the bill. But he had promised to do so, and faced a Saturday deadline.

“The controversy, to me, is not really substantive,” DeSantis told a Miami news station last week. “The people who advocated for this, I mean, they went to the Supreme Court, and they said, ‘Of course, whatever you’re sentenced to, you have to finish — whether that’s incarceration, whether that’s a fine, restitution, probation.’”

Still, the timing of the governor’s action, announced after 6 p.m. on a Friday, seemed intended to draw little attention from Florida voters, more of whom voted for Amendment 4 than for him. Not long afterward, the ACLU filed its lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, joined by the ACLU of Florida, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Groups that helped pass Amendment 4 have continued to hold registration drives, trying to add as many felons to the rolls as possible before the new restrictions become effective Monday. Under Amendment 4, people with felony convictions had been eligible to register as of January. Some of them have already cast ballots in local elections.

Among them was Jeff Gruver, 33, one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit. Gruver, who runs a homeless shelter in Gainesville, Florida, was so eager to vote for the first time in his life that he tried registering right after Election Day in November, only to be rejected because the amendment was not in effect yet. He voted in a mayoral election earlier this year.

“I was so, so excited,” he said. “I went to the polling place, which is right next to my house. I got my ID out and, and I even showed them my registration card. I was like, ‘Look at this!’ and they said, ‘You don’t need to show that.’ I said, ‘No, you don’t understand.’”

Gruver spent about 10 months over several stints in jail for cocaine possession and for violating the terms of his probation. He was addicted to heroin and opiates for about a decade before joining Narcotics Anonymous and getting clean, he said.

Gruver was assessed $801 in court costs in 2008. He said he cannot afford to make a payment like that.

“I have paid for what I’ve done in more ways than one,” he said.

Another plaintiff, Betty Riddle, who works as a communications assistant at the public defender’s office in Sarasota, Florida, regained her voting rights at 61. She completed her prison sentence in 2002 and now deals with others caught in the criminal justice system.

“I was in hog heaven,” she said. “I thought I would never vote.”

She still owes more than $1,000 in court costs and fees, which she said she cannot afford to pay.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” she said. “It is a poll tax to keep us from voting.”

Florida Limits Recently Restored Voting Rights to Ex-Felons, Drawing Lawsuit

MIAMI — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed into law on Friday significant restrictions to the recently restored voting rights of people with felony convictions, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the state hours later.

Florida limits recently restored voting rights to ex-felons, drawing lawsuit

Climate change became a daily reality long ago in Miami, where both rich and poor have been forced to grapple with the compounding effects of warmer temperatures and higher sea levels. The evidence is everywhere of a city under siege by the rising sea.

“Climate change is really the issue that sits on all other issues,” said Rachel Silverstein, executive director of Miami Waterkeeper, an environmental research and activist group. “It affects security. It affects drinking water. It affects tourism. It affects public health. Property values. It’s a part of the discussion of almost any topic that might come up.”

So imminent is the prospect of a warming climate in Florida that the state’s new Republican leadership has acknowledged it and taken some action, even as President Donald Trump and his administration have refused to join international climate treaties and attacked climate science.

No question is of more critical importance to Florida’s future, or to the Democrats’ chance to take the state in next year’s presidential election. It is so important that some activists had hoped that climate change would be the sole focus when 20 Democrats take the debate stage for the first time in this campaign Wednesday and Thursday in downtown Miami.

Climate change is now among the top three 2020 election issues cited by Florida Democrats, according to a new statewide survey.

Some 71% of Florida voters, including 85% of Democrats, support government action to address climate change, according to the survey by Climate Nexus in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, which polled 1,558 registered Florida voters online this month.

“I don’t think the base is going to be satisfied with candidates simply saying, ‘I think climate change is happening; I think it’s because of humans; I’m going to get us back into the Paris agreement,’” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program. “ Now people increasingly want to know, ‘What is your actual plan?’ ”

Not many people have yet connected climate change to their jobs and health care, Leiserowitz said, but the urgency of the climate issue is beginning to take hold in Florida. That is especially true in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, where 49% of respondents, compared to 30% elsewhere in the state, said they have made physical changes to their homes in the past year to protect against sea-level rise, flooding or extreme weather.

MIAMI — New water pumps and tidal valves worth millions of dollars are needed to keep the streets from flooding even on sunny days. Septic tanks compromised by rising groundwater leak unfiltered waste that threatens the water supply. Developers are often buying out residents of established communities, hoping to acquire buildable property on higher ground.

Patricia Mazzei

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