Miami city manager defends purchases from wife’s furniture company but says he will stop

Almost three months after Miami’s city manager said he would publicly refute accusations about a conflict of interest regarding the city purchasing furniture from his wife’s family’s company, Art Noriega on Thursday said that his office would halt all future purchases during his tenure with the city.

“As city manager, I recognize the opportunity for improved transparency and clear boundaries regarding any business conducted within the office of the city manager,” Noriega said at a city commission meeting. He said “the only way to resolve” the question of whether he was involved in the purchases his office made from Pradere Manufacturing — although he said he was not — was to stop those purchases.

Commissioner Manolo Reyes commented during Thursday’s meeting that the whole city should refrain from doing business with Pradere. On Friday, Noriega told the Miami Herald that the city will not purchase from Pradere as long as he is city manager. Asked if there was a memo officially documenting the policy change, Noriega said that the purchasing department, which buys goods on behalf of the city government, is aware of the move.

“It was referenced in the meeting by Commissioner Reyes, and I acknowledged it,” Noriega said. “Not only does staff know, Pradere will not respond to inquiries until I’m no longer City Manager.”

Noriega came under scrutiny after Miami Herald news partner WLRN in January reported that the city had spent more than $440,000 on products from Pradere Manufacturing since Noriega was named city manager in 2020. Noriega, who has repeatedly said he did nothing wrong, pledged to formally respond to any suspicion of impropriety by late January but did not do so until March 18.

On that day, the city sent media outlets a slideshow presentation and three Excel sheets with itemized data on furniture expenditures by the city since 2010. The presentation said that the city spent $228,234 with Pradere from 2020 to 2023, a figure that differed from what WLRN originally reported.

The controversy deepened the next day when Noriega acknowledged that the report and spreadsheets detailing furniture purchases were inaccurate. He canceled an interview he had requested with the Miami Herald on the topic and said he would soon release the correct information.

The information Noriega presented Thursday, which was shared with the Herald Wednesday night — three and a half weeks after the inaccurate data was released — stated that the city spent $354,287 with Pradere between 2020 and 2023, which represented about 16% of the total expenditures on furniture by the city, according to the presentation. But Noriega did not share the raw data on expenditures this time around. City communications director Kenia Fallat said the raw supporting data would not be shared with the city manager’s presentation. Without the accompanying data, the Herald is unable to check the veracity of Noriega’s new numbers.

On Thursday, Noriega said he was not involved in picking the company or the furniture when his office purchased from Pradere.

“I didn’t influence it, but I certainly knew when it happened, right? For obvious reasons, I knew when it happened, but I had no role to play in picking the furniture and picking the furniture vendor,” Noriega said in response to a question from Reyes.

The new numbers provided Wednesday and presented at the meeting Thursday show that the city has spent over $1.1 million with Pradere since 2010. Noriega has repeatedly said he did not personally benefit from the dealings between Pradere and the city, a posture his critics have rejected.

“The manager insults the intelligence of every resident and every city professional by stating that he has not personally benefited financially from over $1 million spent on his wife’s family’s furniture company,” Miami pollster and resident Fernand Amandi said Thursday morning during the public comment portion of the commission meeting.

In the afternoon, during his presentation, Noriega said that his wife, Michelle Pradere, is a salaried employee and that her pay is not affected by sales at the company, which is owned by her parents.

Noriega did not reach out to the Miami-Dade Commission of Ethics and Public Trust about the matter after he became city manager in February 2020. Instead, he sent a memo to commissioners and to Mayor Francis Suarez disclosing that his wife was the chief operating officer at Pradere, “a company that has done business with the city since 2008.” In the letter, distributed in April 2020, he also wrote that he would recuse himself from “any and all involvement/decision making and/or approvals between the City and the company.”

When reached by WLRN for its initial story, Noriega said that he made a “decision of choice” not to seek an Ethics Commission opinion and said he believed the memo was sufficient.

A source familiar with the matter previously confirmed to the Herald that Noriega’s business with the company is under preliminary investigation by the Ethics Commission. Noriega said his office was in the process of arranging an interview with the commission.

“In the end, Ethics is going to get a chance to weigh in on it,” Noriega said. “Whatever the result, we’ll deal with those consequences.”

This story has been updated to reflect Miami City Manager Art Noriega’s statement to the Miami Herald on Friday.