The economic crisis continues. Thousands of families are losing their homes. On 60 Minutes, one municipality in Ohio has taken to tearing down foreclosed and abandoned homes in order to preserve the value of homes in some neighborhoods. If that happened in Miami-Dade, the land would be returned to the same scoundrels who employed lobbyists to create the disasters of our built landscape in the first place. So, while millions of Americans-- perhaps as much as 11 million homeowners-- continue to make good on monthly mortgage payments though their homes are only worth half what they paid, local governments are still at business as usual. City and municipal employees are being asked to take pay cuts, face layoffs, and staff reductions, but the lobbyists?
Their bread and butter business-- zoning changes and permitting to convert farmland and open space to residential and commercial-- is dead in the water. A few are engaged (and more want to be) in moving the Urban Development Boundary to rescue land speculators whose investments are under water, too. The billable hours must be down as hard as home values. So that leaves government to exploit.
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| Ron Book |
Ron Book. Brian Ballard. One of the interesting points raised by the Herald is the insistence that some of the lobbyists are connected with the effort to promote full-scale gambling in Miami-Dade, yet they assured the commissioners that they would not be allowing that issue to interfere with other issues before the county commission.
They say that, with straight faces? Let's see if the commissioners-- who could not agree on cutting out any of their favored few--will be shamed enough by the measures passage to quickly revisit it, or, whether the majority is once again "unreformable" as we have claimed for so many years.
4 comments:
Why blame the lobbyists? They are only doing their jobs! They are doing exactly what they were hired to do.
It is the commissioners who take their money and give away the county to them and their principles that we should concentrate on. Lobbyists have been around for decades and will continue to be there as long as the people we elect feed them what they want.
But think about it. The quality of people we elect, most of them don't even have one iota of government experieance, have little or no capacity to understand real politics and leadership, people from environments where watching the news on cable is their idea of being informed. Is it any wonder they would sell their souls for just a fancy meal at a fancy restaurant with a white table cloth and flowers on the table?
Until we elect people with a conscience and integrity, and with some understanding of leadership, people who know the basic rules of wrong from right, no matter what we do, nothing will change. It is sad to say, but there is not one politician in Dade County that I respect or trust.
Isn't lobbying for the County the job the Miami-Dade legislative delegation is elected to do?
"It is sad to say, but there is not one politician in Dade County that I respect or trust."
For the most part, I do agree, but there are a few local Pol's who are decent and do the right thing, or at least try to.
The other issue is, non politicians who may want to run for office can smell the corruption and will not sell their soul or talk in sound bites to run for office. It's a dirty game down here, and thick skin isn't enough to get one through a campaign.
The lobbyists circle will continue until this County Commission stops "feeding them" (great line whoever wrote that).
They will not be "shamed" by anything. Grass roots activism ceased to be effective years ago. Nothing seems to have any impact but those lobbyists apparently. Not editorials. Not indictments. Not investigative series. Not recall elections. Not charter reform. Unreformable and ungovernable.
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