For years, county commissioner Joe A. Martinez has done the bidding of his main supporters: production homebuilders who have no market, today, because the housing markets crashed, of their own excesses and greed. Maybe he wants to be the next police officer to rise from the ranks to be a lobbyist and wealthy player.
But reality hasn't caught up to the district commissioner, who received free construction work from a prominent member of the Latin Builders Association, and a great deal from another production home builder for his home lot on which he built his own dream house: all chronicled in The Miami Herald.
The building boom is over. Done. Kaput. It's not coming back in 2008 or in 2009, and if the Wall Street Journal is right, it may never come back. The reason is that Florida has despoiled itself with suburban sprawl which is, exactly, the case in Miami Dade County.
In today's Miami Herald story, Martinez says, "I would appreciate it if the group that has come out against this would just say they don't want it because it's in their backyard," Martinez said. "The railroad tracks were there before they were."
Well, here's some news, Commissioner Martinez: Miami's quality of life was here, before you were.
Martinez' insults and condescending bravura are well known: during the last round of hearings on the Urban Development Boundary, he regularly used the dais to intimidate citizens who disagreed with him, calling them "liars", and used his authority for the county meeting agenda to keep citizens off guard, changing meeting dates, using his power as then chairman of the county commission to thwart the will of people. Tens of thousands of constitutent contacts to his office were disregarded.
And as a result, in part, the county commission voted to fund its own propaganda vehicles, using tax dollars to promote schemes rooted in the dreams of their campaign contributors.
The bright fact is that the CSX rail will be used to justify the state concerns for traffic concurrency, putting more pressure on capable county planners. What people care about is that traffic capacity in the east/west corridor, not north/south and not diagonally across the fringe of the county.
Today the county commission, sitting as the Metropolitan Planning Organization, will take up the highly controversial CSX rail issue. It's clear what Martinez wants to do: override all public objection and give his friends what they believe is their due: the right to sell off land outside the UDB purchased at highly speculative values during the building boom: until zoning changes are in place that land is un-saleable at any price close to its carrying cost.
It's a dream to think any good will come to Miami Dade from this.
There's something about county commissioner Joe A. Martinez that just begs a return to the private sector. Enough, already.
11 comments:
I'm going to the MPO meeting just to see Martinez treat his constituents like shit. I always enjoy a good show.
how come this is tagged with "barreto"? what does he have to do with it?
Well, here's some news, Commissioner Martinez: Miami's quality of life was here, before you were.
Isn't that the truth!
I found it interesting that all the Commissioners wanted to know more about the "preferred alternative" of the CSX, and yet few reacted when Commissioner Katy Sorenson asked that Dr. Eric Prince be recognized by the chair for the year's work he had done on behalf of his fellow residents. Commissioner Joe Martinez arranged for the MPO session today to be closed to public comment, no doubt to muzzle this concerned citizen whose power point presentation would have put a monkey wrench into his prepared sales pitch.
Dr. Prince is a well respected environmental scientist who works at NOAH. The CSX drama came in the middle of his trip to Madrid, where he was presenting a research paper. He actually arranged for an associate to present that paper in order that he might be present to speak at the proceedings. In the past twelve months, he has worked tirelessly analyzing the various transit studies proposed in the Kendall Link Study and talking around town in community outreach. His analysis has been so on-spot that the CSX proposal has been changed at least twice (perhaps more) in rebuttal to his remarks.
Commissioner Martinez stepped down from his exalted chair (never a good sign) to address his fellow Commissioners from the podium below. He thanked the audience for being so involved and then insulted them in the next moment by insinuating that they were NIMBYs. Evidently he did not wish to address the activists and other concerned citizens in the crowd who rallied to support Dr. Prince on behalf of clean water, clean air, and responsible development. The CSX alternative has local environmentalists reeling with its implied connections to development beyond the UDB. Red-shirted citizens squirmed in their seats. Clearly, the hand-waiving thing did not provide sufficient relief of their frustration. At one point, Dr. Prince looked over his right shoulder with that “don’t make me pull this car over” look on his face. I smiled at that.
Each Commissioner was furnished with a glossy, three-color-art booklet detailing the findings of the very expensive Kendall Link Study. The audience sat agape while most Commissioners (with the exception of Sorenson and Gimenez) made one incorrect assumption after another. Eventually Commissioner Gimenenz was able to wrangle his associates to tell them where the dog died. I heard the exhale from an AARP card-carrying resident beside me. “At last, intelligent conversation,” she signed. The whole experience reminded me of “book report day” in the fourth grade. There were always those kids who tried to skate by reading the inside jacket of their book and bluffing their way through the class presentation. Not only was I not impressed, I was horrified to realize that these were the people running my county.
Fortunately, “Engineer Joe” was out-maneuvered in the end with an amendment to the motion on the floor, calling for more study. This time, the scope of the study will include alternatives that will potentially benefit the citizens in addition to alternatives that will benefit the South Florida and Latin American Builders Associations. All-in-all, it was a good day, and we thank you Eric Prince.
Posted on Thu, Oct. 04, 2007
Kendall train plan stirs controversy
BY JOSE PAGLIERY, YUDY PINEIRO AND LARRY LEBOWITZ
Will sleek diesel passenger trains one day shuttle rush-hour commuters through the heart of the West Kendall suburbs on the same quiet corridor that currently supports just one or two slow-moving freight trains?
The Miami-Dade Metropolitan Planning Organization, which sets countywide transportation policy and spending priorities, will grapple with that politically volatile question today.
A large, vocal crew of opponents -- who don't support any more traffic on the CSX Transportation tracks -- is expected to show up.
County Commissioner Joe A. Martinez, who represents much of the area, has pushed for new options along the CSX tracks for more than three years. And while it's dramatically scaled down from his original vision, Martinez thinks the current plan is the least intrusive, quickest and most inexpensive set of traffic solutions for the area.
''I would appreciate it if the group that has come out against this would just say they don't want it because it's in their backyard,'' Martinez said. ``The railroad tracks were there before they were.''
That's not the only argument against the plan. Environmentalists fear Martinez is pushing it to help give commissioners a justification for opening up thousands of acres currently off-limits to high-density development.
''The way that the proposal is designed, it's not serving existing communities, which means its target must be communities that are not already in place,'' said environmentalist Dawn Shirreffs, who works for Cleanwater.org, part of the activist group Hold The Line.
Opponents fear commissioners might make a last-minute ''tweak'' to push the commuter rail plan onto a CSX spur south of Kendall-Tamiami Executive Airport -- beyond the Urban Development Boundary.
MISINFORMATION
Martinez said the UDB rumors are typical of what he called misinformation being spread to hurt the plan.
''I can deal with people saying I don't want it because it's going behind my house,'' Martinez said. ``But all the other stuff that's being put out there is just hurting the county as a whole.''
The MPO is being asked to adopt a series of short- and longer-range projects aimed at broadening the transit options for hundreds of thousands of commuters who live west of Florida's Turnpike.
More than half a million people live in the Kendall area; its population is expected to swell by 73 percent, to 897,000, by 2030.
The plan calls for developing two express bus lines that would operate more like trains running in the center of the road and stopping at miniature ``stations.''
One express line would travel Kendall Drive between Southwest 167th Avenue and the Dadeland North station, serving workers and students headed to Coral Gables and downtown Miami via Metrorail. The other would go along Southwest 137th Avenue from Kendall Drive to a proposed Metrorail line near Florida International University. It would serve commuters going to job hubs and education centers near Doral and industries west of the airport.
It's the plan's call for putting light diesel trains on parts of the CSX rail corridor that has stirred two years of controversy.
Opponents -- led by Eric Prince, Roderick Moffett, Robert Bueso, Barry White and David Lyons -- have convinced two community councils and homeowners' groups representing 200,000 residents to oppose it.
''It has always had [projections of] pitifully low ridership and was always very expensive,'' said Prince, a fisheries scientist. ``We always thought that was the Achilles heel of the project.
The opposition is fueled in part by telephone surveys that Kendall residents have received in recent weeks, asking their views on moving the development boundary, on CSX and on Martinez.
The surveys were paid for by developer Lennar Corp., said FIU political science professor Dario Moreno, who conducted them.
PARKLAND PROJECT
Lennar, along with prominent developer Ed Easton, is proposing a 960-acre, 6,900-home development called Parkland that lies outside the development boundary and would include new train stations along tracks that branch west from the main CSX line.
The Parkland project, west of Country Walk, is a ''development of regional impact'' and requires approval from the South Florida Regional Planning Council. Developers are expected to begin seeking separate county approval sometime later this month.
Lennar spokesman Carlos Gonzalez, president of the Dade County Homebuilders Division, did not return calls seeking comment this week. Developers have insisted that their projects can work with or without mass transit in West Kendall.
For their part, county planners say the transit proposal is not enough to merit moving the development boundary when there are other issues to consider, such as water shortages and a housing surplus.
The plan that goes before the MPO today is dramatically scaled back from an earlier version -- a reflection of how many rounds the citizen opponents have won already.
The current plan calls for a 9.1-mile train to run northeasterly from Metrozoo to Kendall Drive near Southwest 97th Avenue and then east into Dadeland North on tracks that would be embedded into Kendall Drive parallel to the proposed bus line.
The trains proposed are smaller, lighter and supposedly quieter than the Tri-Rail diesels in the original plan.
The CSX portion of the route is 12 miles shorter. Only four major roadway crossings would be affected, down from 14 in earlier incarnations.
Not everyone in West Kendall opposes the idea.
On a good day, Guilene Angrand regularly faces a 90-minute one-way journey via bus, Metrorail and Metromover from her home in Country Walk to her inner city job as a legal secretary.
MPO transit consultant Jeffrey Stiles says light rail could cut her trip to 53 minutes. ''That would be an extra hour a day I can spend with my family,'' Angrand said.
But opponents like Prince say the costs to buy or lease the corridor, upgrade the tracks and buy new trains isn't worth the 1,850 round-trip riders who might use it.
And homeowners close to the tracks fear that commuter trains, running every 20 minutes at peak hours, will hurt property values.
Marlene and Michael Romano and their neighbor, Ada Urruchi -- whose homes back onto the tracks -- plan to take time off from work to protest the plan today. ''I'd like to put a train behind the house of the person who came up with this idea,'' Urruchi said.
© 2007 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com
Krome Gold
All roads lead to Krome! (as we become Rome - caveat emptor!)
Someting is really in the works here. Have any of you driven around east Homestead, or any of the areas east of the turnpike recently? There are vacant developments capable of housing two or three hundred thousand people! It is errie, sort of like being in the outer limits. Thousands and thousands of vacant newly constructed units in new communities, with no one in them. From one street to the other,from one community to the other, no human life.
I don't know where these people are suppose to come from, but when they arrive, it will be hell here. How could the Commission have approved all this new development?
Maybe you are right, all roads lead to Krome!
sounds like the Chernobyl website: Kids of Speed....an eerie empty city...
If the CSX plan is so very bad lets talk of transit alternatives. Are some environmentalists using NIMBYs to stop mass transit? This is very short sighted. The age of the one person, one car, routine commute is over and the the soon the better for all of us here on this flood plane called So.Florida. Letting people live in the delusion that stoping a train is going to allow them to drive to work forever or not have to deal with the effects of living in a big urban city is not a good approach and not in the best interest of the county.
Playing with Fire
Look at the map on post Oct. 5th. Does it look like the CSX is going to get you East West? CSX is down there in our agricultural area...shouldn't we support mass transit where people are -- not where they shouldn't be in sprawl neighborhoods, killing off the viability of our ag land one acre at a time.
Post a Comment