There is no compass guiding Miami Today's point of view--it is spinning around and around in its own version of the Brickell Avenue Bermuda Triangle.
With this crew, there is no luck. There is a mob of lobbyists swarming thirteen county commissioners who know the game is trading what campaign contributors want in other districts for secure incumbencies in their own.
As a result, this county commission will never act in a way to limit or reform itself.
Ordinary citizens who have tried to fight lobbyists and special interests get the picture in High Definition. We can give you a little taste of it.
In 2006 Joe Martinez, the past chair of the county commission, lead the effort to approve nearly a dozen applications to move the Urban Development Boundary last year, fiercely opposed by a mass of citizens.
The biggest issue of his constituents is traffic.
Poll after poll showed a huge majority of people opposed moving the UDB. Tens of thousands of individual constituent contacts were made to his office, tossed in the circular file.
At the time Mr. Martinez was taking free construction work at his new home from interests who very much wanted the UDB to be moved. He got a free pass from the Miami-Dade Ethics Commission which decided that its charter, also written by the county commission, was too vague to hold him accountable.
So let Mr. Martinez have his wine cellar: what is this county commission doing about traffic? Anything to help existing residents in the Kendall corridor, for instance, or Bird Road, or Coral Way, or SW 8th Street who have to commute downtown to work?
Miami Today concludes, “We can’t let misconception make a bad situation worse.” Worse?
The focus of the county commission is on traffic “improvements” on Krome Avenue or the CSX rail extension toward Metrozoo in order to assure that big campaign contributors who own property out west or down south won’t get their future development plans hung up on state requirements for traffic concurrency.
In our post just yesterday, we discussed how this same motivation is the likely driver of a Hialeah asphalt company to accelerate the widening of US 1 to the Keys.
And what about on water supply? That’s the purview of the de facto chair, Natacha Seijas. In her dim career as a public servant, Ms. Seijas presided over the contamination of our drinking water aquifer with a cancer-causing chemical: benzene. Not only did this county commission fail to protect our wellfield, she and her majority passed measures that allow rock miners to keep polluting with NO PUBLIC HEARING when they go before the county commission to pollute some more!
And the one time that a county department head had the temerity to suggest that the rock miners should pay for the costs of cleaning up their pollution so we don't risk getting cancer or intestinal disease from our drinking water, Ms. Seijas kneecapped him.
Just this week, Ms. Seijas stamped her angry foot on the South Miami Dade Watershed Study. And on the matter of water re-use, she’s not listening either to people worried about “rehydrating” Biscayne Bay with wastewater that’s been polished a little but can still turn male fish into females and the entire bay into a Dead Zone.
Come to think of it: as far as the public interest is concerned, this majority of county commissioners is a Dead Zone.
This week Rebecca Wakefield wrote in the Sun Post. “I almost think we have to hit rock-bottom before a critical mass of people will decide they must take control of, and responsibility for, our government.”
For lots of voters, rock-bottom is pretty damn close to where we live and that’s why—fearmongering by the unions notwithstanding—on Tuesday voters will approve a Strong Mayor for Miami-Dade county.
1 comment:
you are correct, the county commission will never act in a way to limit themselves. they would never vote to change the charter to put on commissioners with a countywide vote, at large. they would never do the right thing. they are too greedy and self serving.
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