More Tax Dollars Flushed Down the Crapper. By Geniusofdespair

In my Top Ten County boondoggles published April 6th 2008, I mentioned: The County buying a people mover train from Sumitomo Corp. in Japan for MIA, that the county had no tracks for. Because of that the county had to pay the Japanese millions to keep the train "exercised" on tracks in Japan ($54,000 a month for 4 years).

Well here is an update from "Miami Today". Now the county doesn't know how to operate and maintain the people mover and the cars are out of warranty (after its 4 years joy ride in Japan) so the county just approved a $33.4 million contract to Crystal Mover Services (Sumitomo Corp.) to operate the damn train.

In April 2008 I reported that Sumitomo's original contract, when it was hired by American Airlines in 2002, was for $86,588,000. It was raised to $114 million in 2007 and was expected to cost an additional $25 million to $35 million. The Japanese must be laughing at us as they deposit wads of Miami Dade money in their bank.

Commissioner Joe Martinez actually was the voice of reason at the County asking: "We knew these trains were coming out of warranty...we could have trained people during that time, why wasn't there forethought and why didn't we train these people four years ago, three years ago, two years ago?" Good question, it would have saved $33.4 million of our tax dollars! Maybe if the County/American Airlines bought in the U.S. it would have cost more but we would have saved with operating costs.