Gersten, Teele, and Seijas by gimleteye

Miami-Dade voters and taxpayers have been punished by government that has become so insulated, so protective of its own dysfunction, that our quality of life and business prospects are badly suffering.

The Miami Herald is not given to such unvarnished views but makes these points its own way on today's editorial page, calling for the county commission to stop obsessing about its own power and get on with governance.

In a separate opinion, former city and county commissioner Maurice Ferre makes an appeal for the commission to endorse real charter reform.

Every generation of the county commission has an alpha male: in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s it was Joe Gersten—who fled to Australia, under a cloud of suspicion—in the 1990’s it was Arthur Teele, who couldn't get out from under his cloud and killed himself in the Miami Herald lobby in 2003, and today, Natacha Seijas—who, according to Miami New Times, has a no-show job at the YMCA and is a virtual shut-in in her Miami Lakes home when she is not running the county commission from the dais. (Maybe the New Times just caught her on a bad week, but we still would like to know if Ms. Seijas is showing up for her YMCA job.)

These alpha leaders set the agenda and tone of the county commission. Of the three, only one attempted to buck the hegemony of the production home builders who control the county commission by virtue of a badly flawed campaign finance system: that was Arthur Teele.

Teele ended his days as a city commissioner, representing (as he had, while county commissioner) a predominantly poor, African American district. The city of Miami was a big step down from the county commission, despite the massive downtown construction and development that began while he was still alive.

Manny Diaz and Joe Arriola, then city manager, detested Teele whose prowess at political intrigue was disproportionate to the mechanics of city council government.

The county and its multi-billion dollar budget was a different story.

The lobbying class didn’t know how to handle Teele, who was slippery as an eel. (One of the top 10 moments of county government history was Teele, in his office, punching out lobbyist Rick Sisser over a vote for a new county manager: we're not sure the whole story has ever been told, but that's the way it is in Miami.) Teele had a fine grasp at forming alliances on the commission consistent only in their changeable nature. As a student of war, he was well versed in keeping his enemies off-guard. Even Seijas was lost in the confusion Teele created. He played so many angles, he got tangled up himself, consumed finally by his own paranoia.

(We may never know the extent to which his opponents at the city fed the flames of his anxieties, but today's front page story on Teele in the Miami Herald—of a court decision overturning his conviction for assaulting a police officer—tells part of the story.)

Today’s alpha on the county commission is Natacha Seijas who is unopposed on the county commission because her base of campaign contributors—who Teele would not bow to--have neutralized African American elected leaders on the commission.

While the housing boom was minting paper millionaires, this formula made business and political sense.

But now that the boom is over, we are left with a county commission that really doesn’t know which way to turn and is as devoid of ideas as production homebuilders are in terms of reviving their markets, except to reinforce its own power.

The county commission doesn’t know how to advance the public interest because it has—for so many years—really served only one master: production home builders and a landscape based on liar loans, subprime mortgages, and as now coming to light: outright mortgage fraud.

Miami Dade county government exists in an atmosphere without light or oxygen, like a dead lake.

In a sense, the position of the Herald is no different that ours, on this blog: until voters understand their complicity in dysfunctional government, all we can do is point out the obvious.
Once again we are in the position of adding unvarnished commentary, but that is OK: we can imagine that the Miami Herald is inching our way and that, someday, you will read a new permanent feature on the Herald page A2 we called for in an earlier post: a box highlighting the number of days the county commission has failed to enact meaningful ethics AND campaign finance reform.

P.S. Genius here: I took this photo of Commissioner Teele right before he died.