Richard Lara is the new city commissioner of Coral Gables after defeating opponent Tom Wells in the city's runoff election on Tuesday night.
With all 16 precincts in, Lara earned 55.4% of the vote to Wells' 44.6%. The exact vote total was 4,352 votes for Lara and 3,504 votes for Wells.
Technically, this is the second time Lara defeated Wells for the seat.
Last week in the general election, Lara earned 47% of the vote over Wells with 39% and Claudia Miro with 14% for a seat on the city's commission. However, Coral Gables election rules require a candidate to receive more than half the vote to win outright.
Miro later endorsed Lara after she dropped out of the race. It appears the endorsement gave Lara a bit of a boost on Tuesday.
“Richard Lara is the right person to help lead the Coral Gables Commission into the future,” Miro said on her endorsement. “It’s time to turn the page on the last two years of unnecessary salary increases and decisions that ignored the will of the people—like denying residents the opportunity to vote on having an independent Inspector General in our city."
And after all that, the result was still pretty much status quo.
Lara was also the preferred candidate of Coral Gables Mayor Vinco Lago, who retained his mayorship by crushing City Commissioner Kirk Menendez a week ago. Lago has been the Mayor of Coral Gables since April 2021.
That race also had its fair share of fireworks after Menendez operatives were allegedly passing out fake code violation notices ahead of the election.
In the other Coral Gables City Commissioner race last week, Commissioner Rhonda Anderson received 58% of the vote to beat Felix Pardo with 38% and Laureano Cancio with 4.5%.
