March 4, 2014 – Palmetto Bay Village Council members named Dexter W. Lehtinen, a former U.S. Attorney for South Florida and the husband of Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, as the new Village attorney.
“I’m excited because Dexter Lehtinen has a very broad, a very deep breadth of experience to share with us. And he’s a very dedicated individual with a long history of working in municipal law,” Palmetto Bay Mayor Shelley Stanczyk said after the unanimous vote Monday night. Lehtinen highlighted his and his partners’ decades of experience in land use litigation from zoning, environment laws, comprehensive development, to municipal bonds.
“Our experience is second to none,” he said of his new firm, Lehtinen Schultz Riedi Catalano de la Fuente, PLLC.
He also cited his experience as an adjunct law professor at Florida International University and the University of Miami, teaching Florida Constitutional Law, “significant components of which [regard] the municipal versus state versus county authority conflicts of statutes and ordinances.”
Lehtinen served as both a state senator and representative in the 1980s. Then in 1988, as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, he sued the state for allegedly violating its own water-quality standards. The following year, his office charged Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega with drug trafficking.
Lehtinen beat out five other candidates for the job, including the village’s interim attorney John Herin Jr. of Gray Robinson.
