We can't help reach the conclusion that in Miami-Dade poor black people just don’t count—not even to their own elected representatives: that is what we read into Debbie Cenziper’s outstanding series in the Miami Herald, ‘House of Lies’.As this scandal unfolds in segment after segment, we keep wondering why the Herald editorial page is silent on who, exactly, is to blame for losing tens of millions of dollars to fraud, waste, and mismanagement on behalf of the poor citizens of Miami Dade County.
It is not enough to get by, saying that the focus of Mayor Carlos Alvarez is correcting the situation with a new management team.
If you are going to tell the story of what happened, you have to say where the buck stops. You have to say who should have been watching the store, while it was plundered and why aren’t they being held to account.
According to the Herald, an audit conducted by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development discloses a level of mismanagement that makes us cringe.
Tens of thousands of poor people in Miami need affordable housing, and the single county agency charged with “managing” their needs is running the operation on Quickbooks: the figures don’t match, nothing is reliable. “In one instance, auditors asked for the countracts behind $7.4 million in payments to 10 different vendors; the agency was unable to provide documents for eight of the deals.”
So here is what we want to know: who supervises the County Housing Agency?
The county manager. Who gives the county manager his marching orders? Over the period of time in question, that would be the county commission.
There is only one conclusion to draw—and we have drawn it in this blog repeatedly: what the scandal shows is that the county commission during the building boom was obsessed with doing the bidding of big developers and their lobbyists, including African American elected representatives who allowed the most important service agency to their constituents to go to weeds.
You can almost hear the Hispanic majority on the county commission telling their black brethren: take care of your own, and we won’t bother you. Well they didn't take care of their own unless it was related to cronysim, and look what it accomplished.
“… the agency’s personnel system included 1,811 empoyees—115 of whom had the Social Security number of dead people—even thought the agency employs only about 690.”
The fact is that nobody cared what happened at the affordable housing agency so long as zoning changes and political contributions flowed in the direction of more tract housing in farmland.
In the same way, no one cared who pillaged contracts at Miami International Airport, so long as everyone got their own turn at the teat.
This is an inescapable view, but it is not a view articulated by any of the mainstream media in Miami. Nor a view advocated by any of leaders, so far as we can tell, of the African American community.
Where, for instance, is Kendrick Meek? Congressman Meek is emerging as one of the most effective African American spokesmen on the national stage, but in his own backyard there is an opportunity for mediation, for leadership, and for involvement. It will be more than a missed opportunity, if Congressman Meek stays on the sidelines. (As for the Miami Times, we couldn’t find ANYTHING on its website.)
In his letter to the editor, yesterday, Charles Elsesser of Florida Legal Services is right: it is time to put citizen advocates for the poor on boards relating to affordable housing.
But most of all, we hope the African American communities will organize and promote credible candidates for public office and resist within their own ranks campaigns based on fear and ignorance and ethnic differences--like the campaign that returned Dorrin Rolle to the county commission--so easily exploited, for so little result.
5 comments:
Why leave it just up to the black community alone to find new leadership? This is a role that like-minded blacks and whites could build a new electorial coalition upon. This is what happened in LA during Tom Bradley's administration (See Politics in Black and White by Ray Sonenshein). The developers have ruled, and badly, lone enough.
kendrick meek is part of the problem. he endorsed Rolle the worst black commissioner. he could have at least remained neutral.
The Black community has to have the courage to "OUT" their own incompetents. They cover too much for the bad apples because they are afraid it will reflect badly on the community. DENIAL has never worked it reflects even worse on the community. The reelection of Rolle is an example of allowing a bad situation to go on. Honesty is honesty in any segment of the population and that is what we must strive for.
This last point is exactly right, and the Miami Herald and African American leaders in the community are simply too timid to articulate it. Arthur Teele still casts a long shadow over these issues: he was the one African American elected official who had the guts to make a run against the political status quo-- if the Herald ever understood Teele, we'd never could tell how except for Defede. Is the Herald too scared to stand up, after wrongly firing Defede--the last writer on the Herald to understand how scores are settled within the ethnic and racial divides, and willing to write about it?
you asked: who supervises the County Housing Agency?
apparently no one.
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