Jesse Scheckner
Coral Gables has a new City Manager — its third in under a year.
On a 3-2 vote, City Commissioners appointed Alberto Parjus to run the municipality’s operations.
He previously served as Assistant City Manager from February 2022 to November 2023, when he was elevated to Deputy City Manager.
Parjus, a 68-year-old Republican, succeeds Amos Rojas Jr., who will step down Jan. 28.
Rojas has served in the role, his first in municipal administration, since last February. He replaced Peter Iglesias, whom Commissioners Melissa Castro, Ariel Fernandez and Kirk Menendez voted to fire the same month.
The trio approved Rojas’ hiring and did the same for Parjus Tuesday. Mayor Vince Lago, whom Menendez is challenging in the city’s April 8 election, and Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson voted “no.”
Abraham Galvan of Miami Today first reported on Parjus’ appointment.
Before Tuesday’s vote, Lago and Anderson advocated for a broader search for Rojas’ replacement. So did other prominent voices in the community, including Miami’s Community News publisher Grant Miller, who said the city should conduct a national search to “find the best person for the job,” but only after the election.
Castro, Fernandez and Menendez disagreed. Castro noted that the city had hired past City Managers, City Clerks and City Attorneys internally, adding that the last time Coral Gables advertised a job nationally, it resulted in the 2014 hiring of Jimmy Beard, who was fired one day after taking the City Manager job amid a wave of legal concerns. Beard, who went on to serve as Chief Financial Officer for the city of Atlanta, is now serving a federal prison sentence for embezzlement, tax evasion and possession of machine guns.
Parjus’ work history includes 36 years with the Miami-Dade County government. His roles there included stints as Assistant Director of the Community Action and Human Services Department and Deputy Director of the Department of Transportation and Public Works.
He also worked for four years as Miami’s Assistant City Manager from 2015 to 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Parjus will take on the City Manager job, which he held briefly last year between Iglesias’ firing and Rojas’ hiring, amid ample discord at City Hall. Lago and Anderson are frequently at odds with Castro and Fernandez, who in 2023 defeated Commission candidates the Mayor supported, and Menendez has often sided with them.
Lago accused Castro and Fernandez of assisting a failed citizen effort in April 2023 to recall him. Two months later, Rojas filed a complaint against Lago alleging the Mayor assaulted him. A state law enforcement probe cleared Lago of wrongdoing in September.
Those and other quarrels followed. In September 2023, Castro, Fernandez and Menendez voted to give themselves, Lago and Anderson big pay raises. Lago and Anderson voted against the move, vowing to refuse anything more than their existing, consumer price index-adjusted pay.
Lago later sued a Spanish-language radio station, alleging the host and Fernandez defamed him for falsely saying Lago was the subject of a Miami-Dade County Ethics Commission investigation.
In fact, Lago was under a since-closed preliminary review by the agency, which is not an investigation.
A Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge dismissed the Mayor’s complaint in August.
