A small-town Florida mayor tried to use 360,000 pennies and nickels to a pay a $4,000 ethics fine.
Instead of accepting the change, the ethics commission doubled the fine for Hernandez, saying he intentionally broke the rules because he knew the panel only accepted checks.
And now the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust is suing the mayor.
The commission ruled in July that Hernandez lied about interest rates he received from a $180,000 loan to Luis Felipe Pérez, a jewelry salesman now jailed for a pyramid scheme in which he swindled $40million from several investors, including the mayor of Hialeah.
He was fined $3,000 and ordered to pay an additional $1,000 to cover the costs of the investigation.
On November 5, the 54-year-old mayor sent a truck loaded with 28 buckets of loose change to the commission headquarters in downtown Miami in a bid to pay his fine.
In a statement released to the Miami Herald following Hernandez’s stunt, the commission said his failed attempt to pay his fine with pennies and nickels was ‘deemed commercially unreasonable and contemptuous by COE staff, and therefore, rejected.’
The commission followed up by filing a small-claims complaint against Hernandez accusing the mayor of non-compliance. A hearing in that case was set for December 9.
Hernandez, a Cuban-American who is married with two children, has served as mayor of Hialeah since May 2011.
He had been elected to the Hialeah City Council in 2005 and later served as council president.
