The skeptics' corner, by gimleteye

No more Carnival Center of the Performing Arts, I called Carniverous. So there you have it. No more front page reports of budget deficits until the $30 million gets drawn down. Nearly half is going to pay back the county. So it's $15 million, provided there are no strings attached.

But the gaping hole in the budget was only the outward manifestation of reality that could not find an audience.

And $15 million isn't going to solve that problem. The Performing Arsht Center was built as though traffic considerations were no concern. Actually it is the other way around: because you can't get there and can't park easily, the Performing Arsht Center is of no consideration.

On this point I'll stop being a skeptic, if someone can explain how to get to the PAC from the north or south on game night for the Heat on that crappy little off ramp from 395 that funnels four lanes north and four lanes south on 95 down to two lanes. Throw a museum in, costing another few hundred million. Maybe most of Miami Dade County will just stay home.

But winning me over is going to require even more than fixing parking and traffic. You have to invest in local artists, arts and arts education in order to cultivate an audience for the arts. In this respect, the Performing Arsht Center is mainly good for donation bricks. Don't get me wrong: it's wonderful that the Cleveland Orchestra is in town for a month but filling those halls so that budget deficits aren't a permanent feature of the PAC meant applying a little creative thinking about building the constituency from the ground up.

To get really angry about the absence of creative thinking in Miami, you have to take a boat ride on the Miami River.

The context is the horrendous mess that Miami and elected leaders like Mayor Diaz, city and county commissioners allowed to be made of zoning for condominiums along the river. Jorge Perez, that civic leader, and the recent column by Rebecca Wakefield on Perez' Related Group, published in the Sunpost come to mind.

I hadn't been up the river in the past eighteen months or so until last weekend. What is most striking about the massive development that has occurred in those condos teetering toward foreclosure is the way in which the public space along the river was surrendered to private corporations.

The immediate point of complaint is how developers like Perez succeeded, through their land use lobbyists and attorneys like Greenberg Traurig, in erasing the setback for a public right of way to a strip about as wide as a piece of dental floss.

There is only one feature that separates Miami from Hampton News, Portsmouth, or Port Elizabeth: Biscayne Bay and the Miami River. The way that condo developers and their money have wrecked public access to the Miami River is the worst legacy of the building boom that no longer exists.

Put another way, the footprint of terrible development and zoning decisions will long outlast the current crop of politicians, insiders, and civic leaders. In this respect, the Performing Arsht Center will be a testament to misguided investment priorities for a very, very long time. Perhaps until sea-level rise.

I listened to donor Adrienne Arsht on WLRN last night, in a message to the people that came out garbled, "The next generation may be standing on my shoulders, but what I hope for is that every citizen of Miami Dade will give of their time and energy to the important causes like the arts, or medical issues." She didn't say anything about the environment.

Future generations may have to stand on this generation's shoulders because we have done nothing, really, to stop sea level rise as a result of man-made impacts of global warming.

It is a curious omission that Miami's civic leaders never mention the environment. Or environmental groups, that have been sinking under waves of public indifference in south Florida for a long time.

The Miami Herald writes a good story on Governor Charlie Crist and the environment, in advance of this weekend's Everglades Coalition conference, "the largest meeting of environmentalists in the state".

The comment that stands out belongs to Eric Draper, of Florida Audubon, who for some unfathomable reason is the go-to quote for the state's newspapers: "He's turned out to be way better than we ever thought", said Draper, the environmental leader who also embraced Governor Jeb Bush who in turn embraced Audubon and froze out every other environmental group in the state.

"Crist has opened doors that were shut to conservationists for several years after relations with Gov. Jeb Bush turned nearly as chilly as a Greenland glacier--largely over an overhaul of Everglades pollution standards." Ultimately, Mr. Draper and Audubon signed off on those standards. Is there any political status quo that Audubon will not embrace?

I'm sore on this point for some very good reasons, having to do with the continued rampant pollution of the Everglades and the failure of environmental groups to take a strong enough stand to penetrate the layers of public indifference thick as a tortoise shell.

Just last week, the octogenarian environmental leader Juanita Greene-- retired journalist for the Miami Herald-- addressed the Governing Board of the South Florida Water Management District, and asked the elite group comprised mostly of Jeb Bush appointees if they had heard of the US EPA report on pollution of the Everglades recording pollution levels up to 2006, that was published last summer.

The Governing Board is the final word on the conduct of the state of Florida with respect to the so-called restoration of the Everglades.

Ms. Greene was shocked, that no one on the Governing Board had heard that EPA had analyzed the District's own data on pollution: "During the November 2005 sampling event approximately 27% of the Everglades marsh had a surface water phosphorus concentration greater than 10 parts per billion. However, during 2005 soil phosphorus exceeded 500 milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg), Florida’s definition of "impacted", in 24% of the Everglades, and it exceeded 400 mg/kg, CERP’s restoration goal, in 49% of the Everglades. These proportions are higher than the 16% and 34%, respectively, observed in 1995-1996."

10 parts per billion is, of course, the long fought-over phosphorous standard that Big Sugar fought and fought and fought, finally dragging along Audubon, the Florida legislature, and everyone else in a terrible compromise embraced by Governor Jeb Bush and the 2003 legislature that allowed for "mixing averages" and numerical hocus-pocus to substitute for hard, fast requirements.