On the Great Miami Chop Shop from gimleteye

Retaining businesses in Miami-Dade County is a foremost goal of the new Beacon Council chairman, Regions Bank executive Angel Medina Jr.

We doubt he is serious.

If he were, he would take prior generations of Beacon Council leadership to task. Never mind the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. Medina might start with his predecessor. That would be the former mayor of Miami Beach, Neisen Kasdan, whose client list includes the Latin Builders Association.

The LBA is the premier lobbying group in south Florida, raising enormous amounts of campaign cash for favored officials and political parties.

Within the LBA, there are plenty of opinionated people, but when it comes development and construction all voices speak the same language: all building and all development is good.

What does this have to do with the Beacon Council?

Smart Beacon Council leaders would have taken the LBA to task long ago, because it is the LBA hegemony of suburban sprawl that driving businesses away from Miami Dade county.

The arithmetic of sprawl subtracts from public funds that would otherwise be available to invest in our cities.

But inner city residents are poor and powerless to complain, and their public officials are mostly happy to cut deals in other districts to ensure their incumbency. Who can begrudge them their claim to a few drops from the titty.

Builders making money on infill development should be crying out against the inequity of using taxpayer dollars to fund the expansion of services in outlying areas that serve only the interests of production home builders.

In Miami Dade, business life is choking to death the same way people are: on too much traffic, on schools that don’t meet the grade, on poorly funded parks and public spaces in neighborhoods where people live.

But don’t expect the Beacon Council to complain about the LBA and don't expect LBA members to ever confess to any kind of development fiasco—even high rises providing shelter for crack addicts in their shadows—until the last drop of profit is wrung from the last buyer.

If buyers were mostly local, Miami could count on some corrective force. But buyers of new construction are often from other places, where the price of making a mistake is usually within the tolerance of currency exchange rates.

In other words, as expensive as Miami seems to most of us, to foreign buyers Miami is cheap. And beneath the glitter and gloss, Miami is cheap.

We’re all for jobs. We’re all for growth. But at some point, you have to wonder whether Miami has turned into a chop shop. Instead of stolen autos, the Great Miami Chop Shop takes apart people’s quality of life and sells the pieces to the highest bidder.

If you want to know who and what business interests like it that way, check out the contributor list to stop voters from recalling the county commissioner, Natacha Seijas.

As Mr. Medina undoubtedly knows, Commissioner Seijas is queen of the Great Miami chop shop.