Week of July 2, 2009
| Miami mayoral candidates have heap of explaining to do By Michael LewisCommentary Voters should dissect four matters just unveiled by Miami Today as they weigh the two leading contenders for Miami mayor. Commissioners Joe Sanchez and Tom·s Regalado both need to explain: •How 14 staffers got no jail and light fines after fanfare about fraud and racketeering charges that carried 23- to 95-year terms. The 14 did private design and construction jobs in city offices while $38.8 million in project delays and overruns swamped a department where most of them worked. •Why the city must pay Washington almost $1 million after it gave federal funds to a nonprofit for apartments for AIDS patients yet a for-profit firm got the apartments and evicted most AIDS patients. •Why the city still hasn't collected $337,000 in impact fees from developers after computing the fees wrong four years ago. Some of those payments now have passed the statute of limitations. •Why the commission isn't questioning the Downtown Development Authority's tax rate. It's the only area of the county where total assessments will rise this year, yet the authority doesn't plan to cut its rate. Mr. Sanchez chairs both the authority and the city commission. The pitfall for the two candidates is that all this bubbled up on their watch, which will culminate in a massive budget crunch due to both the recession and what the commission has or has not done. The four new flashpoints follow a bevy of city hall outrages that the two candidates either acted on or ducked. One was the fire fee scandal. Mayor Manny Diaz and then-City Manager Joe Arriola nearly foxed tens of thousands of taxpayers out of refunds of illegal fire fees by funneling the money to only seven persons in a backroom settlement that the commission OK'd. One matter that the commission ignored was the partnership of Mayor Diaz with a no-bid leaseholder of the Monty's restaurant site, which is city bayfront land. Mr. Diaz was in office for years before exiting that deal, then remained the leaseholder's partner in other deals. A conflict seemed apparent to all but commissioners. Certainly the affordable housing scandal should become an election topic, as should commission inaction when it became public that Mayor Diaz, then-Commissioner Johnny Winton and Mr. Arriola, who worked for both, were partners in a housing investment at the time Mr. Winton engineered a commission-backed raise for Mayor Diaz. Another topic to tiptoe around: How the commission failed to react as developers received city OKs for condo tower after condo tower with seeming disregard for the cumulative impact. Planning for growth escalated only after most permits were issued, at which point Mayor Diaz, formerly King of Development, suddenly became Miami's Green Mayor. Next, the corollary: With development booming, the city counted on ever-growing revenue to fund ever-more spending and ever-larger budgets, triggering liabilities for future generations and the next mayor. That misguided euphoria fueled a mega-plan hatched in Mayor Diaz's office that quickly engulfed county government too. While parts of that deal failed, it has nonetheless saddled the city with the hundreds of millions of bond payments for the county's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. The mega-plan also gave the city's Orange Bowl land to the county for a stadium that baseball team owners will run and profit from for 40 years. The city is to pay well over $100 million toward the stadium and its parking. It even paid to raze the Orange Bowl. The mega-plan also would have forced a city community redevelopment agency to pay off $25 million in privately owed Jungle Island loans until city attorneys ruled that expenditure illegal. Taxpayers never got to vote on the mega-plan's massive giveaways. But at least they won't fund a $200 million streetcar line from downtown to Midtown that's still in the package, because it's all but derailed. Still in the plan: two museum buildings in the city's Bicentennial Park and billion-dollar port truck tunnels on the city's Watson Island. That entire plan, of course, slid through the commission — the baseball stadium giveaway several times. In many of the votes Mr. Sanchez and Mr. Regalado stood on opposite sides. If they dare, they can stand on their records. On other of these issues, they can stand together as having done nothing at all. Meanwhile, Mayor Diaz, still in charge as matters play out, just ended a year-long term heading the US Conference of Mayors, a post he won based on his city stewardship — recalling the adage that an expert is an ordinary guy 100 miles from home. But city voters in these troubled times are entitled to more than an ordinary guy. Voters are entitled to the vision to chart a wise course for the city and the leadership to get others to fix — not just go along with — the city's problems. The candidates need to explain, case by case, not only what they did as scandals mounted but what they did not do, and still are not doing, to end them. |
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