The news that the federal government is in intensive settlement discussions with Miami-Dade County over a sewage system prone to multi-million gallon leaks is no surprise to the bloggers at Eyeonmiami. We've been tracking the smell of politics ruined by sewage for years and years.
Where to begin? How about with discredited former county commissioner Natacha Seijas and the propensity of county commissioners to give each other high-fives for shifting the costs of needed infrastructure to future generations of taxpayers? Nearly a decade ago, Miami-Dade County was seeking a consumptive use permit from the water district for new water. The result, a consent decree with the district requiring $3 billion in upgrades, has been gradually whittled down far from the sight of the Miami Herald or clueless voters and taxpayers.
Seijas was the key plumber for the special interests -- the builders and developer lobby, including the Latin Builders Association, the South Florida Builders, etc. etc. -- whose brilliant idea was to keep Miami "cheap" for growth, by refusing to invest and denying the need to invest in wastewater infrastructure. That is one reason it is laughable to me that Tea Party infused politicians are now insisting that government must "pay as you go". These are the same politicians who lived and breathed by cutting deals allowing infrastructure deficits to soar. In Miami-Dade, those deficits still total billions of dollars.
Seijas and her unreformable majority screwed the well field, where more than 2 million people get their drinking water every day. They screwed the bay, and they screwed the Everglades. Joe Martinez, Pepe Diaz, Bruno Barreiro: stand up and be counted.
The West Dade well field is directly threatened by rock mining, but the small amount of money rock miners were compelled to pay into a fund to remediate water supply infrastructure for taxpayers went this year -- thanks to the Florida legislature -- into an underground cement wall in northwest Dade to protect against "flooding". Not the new water treatment plant we need. God help us all, in the meantime, and the water managers know exactly what the prayer is for.
A related observation: the legal settlement described in the Miami Herald has occurred without the intervention of environmental groups in South Florida. Back in the 1980's, environmental groups lead the battle to protect Biscayne Bay leading to a similar consent decree with the feds. Environmental groups lead the battle to require FPL, even earlier, to use cooling canals at Turkey Point Nuclear instead of dumping hot water into the bay. Where are the environmental groups (and the young leaders of the environmental movement) today? I ask the question, as president of Friends of the Everglades.
Maybe the Miami Herald or Miami Today in its "Newmaker" section ought to feature some of the environmental leaders in South Florida, just to show young readers and students that there are examples of people who have fought and continue to fight for our natural resources.
(Jim Kunstler has an eye-popping OPED on his blog this week: reprinted, below.)
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/05/still-standing-amid-the-wreckage.html
Still Standing Amid the Wreckage
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 14, 2012 9:17 AM
The New Urbanists held their big annual meet-up for four days last week and I stomped a big carbon footprint flying down to West Palm Beach for the doings. I don't know who exactly picked West Palm, but it was at once peculiar, disheartening, instructive, and exhausting.
The Congress for the New Urbanism has been throwing this yearly fandango since its founding in 1993 as a fire-eating reform movement dedicated to transforming the horrifying and toxic human habitat of America. Hopes were lofty in the early days that the US public would recognize the self-evident benefits of ditching suburban sprawl for walkable towns, but it didn't quite work out that way. The last frantic phase of sprawl-building commenced exactly the same time, jacked on easy lending steroids, and upping the stakes of the battle. That story ended in the baleful collapse of the housing bubble and the sad particulars need not be rehearsed here.
During the boom of the 90s and aughties, about 99.5 percent of the new real estate development was done by the conventional schlock sprawl-builders and the New Urbanists did much of the remaining .5 - which was enough to get their point across. Some of their projects (e.g. Seaside, Fla.) are now iconic examples of excellence in urban design artistry. Many others were botched by compromises made in the planning board battles, and another bunch were either half-assed from the get-go or plain fakes. These traditional neighborhood developments were almost always built on greenfield sites, provoking controversy that could not be briskly dismissed.
At the same time, quite a bit of New Urbanist work was done in re-making existing town centers and in retrofits of sclerotic older suburban parcels, and their influence was later seen in the many big city streetscape redesigns from Times Square to Santa Monica. Their laborious work in reforming the intricate idiocies of zoning law made possible better development outcomes in towns all over the land which adopted so-called Smart Codes.
The housing bubble bust massacred the New Urbanists. Many of the firms had tied their fortunes to the production house builders and the commercial real estate developers doing large projects, often hundreds of acres, and when the market imploded around 2007 their work dried up. Now there is very little new real estate development of any kind going on around the country. Many talents languish while the nation broods over the fate of its obsolete suburban dream and fails to recognize that we have to make drastically new arrangements for inhabiting the landscape.
But the mood at the 2012 CNU was still buoyant, considering. For all their vocational anguish, the New Urbanists are still about the only intellectual cohort in the USA with a coherent vision of what has gone wrong in our society -- our ruinous investments in futureless infrastructure -- and what can be done about it -- the reconstruction of traditional human habitat as the armature for enduring economies. Compared with the brainless religious zealotry and sexual hysteria of the right wing and the ruinous social services pandering of the left, the New Urbanists look like the only organized group of adults in the nation who have not completely lost their minds. So it was a pleasure to spend four days among them. They are a valiant band of cultural warriors.
Events are now in the driver's seat. The long battle against the continuation of suburban sprawl is over, despite the happy-talk noises made by what's left of the real estate industry. Half a decade of absolutely flat oil production -- propaganda to the contrary -- guarantees that the suburban project is finished. We're done building things that way (even if we don't quite realize it yet) so the New Urbanists have won the argument by default.
Quite a few non-New Urbanist "pundits" such as Ed Glaeser, the asinine Joel Kotkin, and dashing Richard Florida predict that the action has shifted to the big cities, and that may appear to be the case for this deceptive moment. But the mega-cities are in for a tsunami of troubles all their own in the form of vanishing wealth, fiscal disorder, sclerotic infrastructure failures, service interruptions, and ethnic turf battles as the effects of the epochal economic contraction bite deeper and harder. The inescapable downscaling of America means that we are heading toward a new disposition of things on the landscape in just the way the New Urbanists have prescribed: a declension of ecologies ranging from dense, walkable human-dominated urban habitats in the form of traditional towns and cities through a range of rural conditions running from farmland to wilderness necessary to support the health of the planet.
Time and nature will help take care of the accumulated suburban dreck on the ground. Humans are very skillful sorters of things and the disassembly of salvaged materials will be a big industry in a world taking a "time out" from industrial progress. The timeless principles that the New Urbanists revived will be the common sense of whatever we build in the future, even when the planning board battles of recent years are long forgotten. We will almost certainly return to social conditions in which nobody will dare put up a building devoid of conscious artistry. There's a lot to like in this quadrant of the long emergency.
The 20th reunion of old CNU friends was a little disenchanted by the conference site. West Palm Beach contains one of their showpiece projects, the nightlife and shopping district called City Place that was created out of a bombed out neighborhood. Casual observers crack on City Place as an "urban mall," but it's really just Rosemary Street rebuilt of new traditionally-scaled buildings with shops and bistros programmed in. A lot of it is generic chain business. Another sad element is the cartoonish, low quality finish of the buildings - sprayed on stucco and ornaments with no conviction. Both of these failures of quality represent the fast buck mentality of the big commercial developers and the larger vulgar so-called consumer culture they served. But City Place does include some pretty well composed public space in the form of a central plaza and a palm court running off it, and it was full of people enjoying themselves in the cafes those nights, and the ensemble managed to incorporate a very nice Beaux Arts church-turned-theater (the Harriet Himmel) in the Spanish neo-classical manner.
The trouble was when you strayed a block off Rosemary Street the fabric of the city fell apart. Some of it was just vacant land. Further east between Olive Street and the intercostal waterway stood a swath of oversized giant condo towers that represented the worst of the lamented housing bubble. Many were "see-through" buildings of empty, unsold units. The streets along these behemoths were as dead as any neighborhood on a Zombie planet, and traversing them to get anywhere was hugely depressing. The convention center, where the CNU meeting actually took place, stood off in its own twilight zone of separation, cut off from the beginning of City Place by the ghastly ten-lane Okeechobee Boulevard. The five-block walk (of very large super-blocks) to and fro from my hotel was like unto reenacting the Bataan Death March under that brutal Floridian sun.
Things are changing fast now though. The New Urbanists still standing are the strongest and most nimble. They are also the ones most deeply engaged in the trenches of architectural education, and they are as certain to win the ideology battles still raging in that realm as they won the battle over suburban sprawl.
Most of all, though, I'm glad to be home in my quiet backwater of this poor floundering nation.
Where to begin? How about with discredited former county commissioner Natacha Seijas and the propensity of county commissioners to give each other high-fives for shifting the costs of needed infrastructure to future generations of taxpayers? Nearly a decade ago, Miami-Dade County was seeking a consumptive use permit from the water district for new water. The result, a consent decree with the district requiring $3 billion in upgrades, has been gradually whittled down far from the sight of the Miami Herald or clueless voters and taxpayers.
Seijas was the key plumber for the special interests -- the builders and developer lobby, including the Latin Builders Association, the South Florida Builders, etc. etc. -- whose brilliant idea was to keep Miami "cheap" for growth, by refusing to invest and denying the need to invest in wastewater infrastructure. That is one reason it is laughable to me that Tea Party infused politicians are now insisting that government must "pay as you go". These are the same politicians who lived and breathed by cutting deals allowing infrastructure deficits to soar. In Miami-Dade, those deficits still total billions of dollars.
Seijas and her unreformable majority screwed the well field, where more than 2 million people get their drinking water every day. They screwed the bay, and they screwed the Everglades. Joe Martinez, Pepe Diaz, Bruno Barreiro: stand up and be counted.
The West Dade well field is directly threatened by rock mining, but the small amount of money rock miners were compelled to pay into a fund to remediate water supply infrastructure for taxpayers went this year -- thanks to the Florida legislature -- into an underground cement wall in northwest Dade to protect against "flooding". Not the new water treatment plant we need. God help us all, in the meantime, and the water managers know exactly what the prayer is for.
A related observation: the legal settlement described in the Miami Herald has occurred without the intervention of environmental groups in South Florida. Back in the 1980's, environmental groups lead the battle to protect Biscayne Bay leading to a similar consent decree with the feds. Environmental groups lead the battle to require FPL, even earlier, to use cooling canals at Turkey Point Nuclear instead of dumping hot water into the bay. Where are the environmental groups (and the young leaders of the environmental movement) today? I ask the question, as president of Friends of the Everglades.
Maybe the Miami Herald or Miami Today in its "Newmaker" section ought to feature some of the environmental leaders in South Florida, just to show young readers and students that there are examples of people who have fought and continue to fight for our natural resources.
(Jim Kunstler has an eye-popping OPED on his blog this week: reprinted, below.)
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/05/still-standing-amid-the-wreckage.html
Still Standing Amid the Wreckage
By James Howard Kunstler
on May 14, 2012 9:17 AM
The New Urbanists held their big annual meet-up for four days last week and I stomped a big carbon footprint flying down to West Palm Beach for the doings. I don't know who exactly picked West Palm, but it was at once peculiar, disheartening, instructive, and exhausting.
The Congress for the New Urbanism has been throwing this yearly fandango since its founding in 1993 as a fire-eating reform movement dedicated to transforming the horrifying and toxic human habitat of America. Hopes were lofty in the early days that the US public would recognize the self-evident benefits of ditching suburban sprawl for walkable towns, but it didn't quite work out that way. The last frantic phase of sprawl-building commenced exactly the same time, jacked on easy lending steroids, and upping the stakes of the battle. That story ended in the baleful collapse of the housing bubble and the sad particulars need not be rehearsed here.
During the boom of the 90s and aughties, about 99.5 percent of the new real estate development was done by the conventional schlock sprawl-builders and the New Urbanists did much of the remaining .5 - which was enough to get their point across. Some of their projects (e.g. Seaside, Fla.) are now iconic examples of excellence in urban design artistry. Many others were botched by compromises made in the planning board battles, and another bunch were either half-assed from the get-go or plain fakes. These traditional neighborhood developments were almost always built on greenfield sites, provoking controversy that could not be briskly dismissed.
At the same time, quite a bit of New Urbanist work was done in re-making existing town centers and in retrofits of sclerotic older suburban parcels, and their influence was later seen in the many big city streetscape redesigns from Times Square to Santa Monica. Their laborious work in reforming the intricate idiocies of zoning law made possible better development outcomes in towns all over the land which adopted so-called Smart Codes.
The housing bubble bust massacred the New Urbanists. Many of the firms had tied their fortunes to the production house builders and the commercial real estate developers doing large projects, often hundreds of acres, and when the market imploded around 2007 their work dried up. Now there is very little new real estate development of any kind going on around the country. Many talents languish while the nation broods over the fate of its obsolete suburban dream and fails to recognize that we have to make drastically new arrangements for inhabiting the landscape.
But the mood at the 2012 CNU was still buoyant, considering. For all their vocational anguish, the New Urbanists are still about the only intellectual cohort in the USA with a coherent vision of what has gone wrong in our society -- our ruinous investments in futureless infrastructure -- and what can be done about it -- the reconstruction of traditional human habitat as the armature for enduring economies. Compared with the brainless religious zealotry and sexual hysteria of the right wing and the ruinous social services pandering of the left, the New Urbanists look like the only organized group of adults in the nation who have not completely lost their minds. So it was a pleasure to spend four days among them. They are a valiant band of cultural warriors.
Events are now in the driver's seat. The long battle against the continuation of suburban sprawl is over, despite the happy-talk noises made by what's left of the real estate industry. Half a decade of absolutely flat oil production -- propaganda to the contrary -- guarantees that the suburban project is finished. We're done building things that way (even if we don't quite realize it yet) so the New Urbanists have won the argument by default.
Quite a few non-New Urbanist "pundits" such as Ed Glaeser, the asinine Joel Kotkin, and dashing Richard Florida predict that the action has shifted to the big cities, and that may appear to be the case for this deceptive moment. But the mega-cities are in for a tsunami of troubles all their own in the form of vanishing wealth, fiscal disorder, sclerotic infrastructure failures, service interruptions, and ethnic turf battles as the effects of the epochal economic contraction bite deeper and harder. The inescapable downscaling of America means that we are heading toward a new disposition of things on the landscape in just the way the New Urbanists have prescribed: a declension of ecologies ranging from dense, walkable human-dominated urban habitats in the form of traditional towns and cities through a range of rural conditions running from farmland to wilderness necessary to support the health of the planet.
Time and nature will help take care of the accumulated suburban dreck on the ground. Humans are very skillful sorters of things and the disassembly of salvaged materials will be a big industry in a world taking a "time out" from industrial progress. The timeless principles that the New Urbanists revived will be the common sense of whatever we build in the future, even when the planning board battles of recent years are long forgotten. We will almost certainly return to social conditions in which nobody will dare put up a building devoid of conscious artistry. There's a lot to like in this quadrant of the long emergency.
The 20th reunion of old CNU friends was a little disenchanted by the conference site. West Palm Beach contains one of their showpiece projects, the nightlife and shopping district called City Place that was created out of a bombed out neighborhood. Casual observers crack on City Place as an "urban mall," but it's really just Rosemary Street rebuilt of new traditionally-scaled buildings with shops and bistros programmed in. A lot of it is generic chain business. Another sad element is the cartoonish, low quality finish of the buildings - sprayed on stucco and ornaments with no conviction. Both of these failures of quality represent the fast buck mentality of the big commercial developers and the larger vulgar so-called consumer culture they served. But City Place does include some pretty well composed public space in the form of a central plaza and a palm court running off it, and it was full of people enjoying themselves in the cafes those nights, and the ensemble managed to incorporate a very nice Beaux Arts church-turned-theater (the Harriet Himmel) in the Spanish neo-classical manner.
The trouble was when you strayed a block off Rosemary Street the fabric of the city fell apart. Some of it was just vacant land. Further east between Olive Street and the intercostal waterway stood a swath of oversized giant condo towers that represented the worst of the lamented housing bubble. Many were "see-through" buildings of empty, unsold units. The streets along these behemoths were as dead as any neighborhood on a Zombie planet, and traversing them to get anywhere was hugely depressing. The convention center, where the CNU meeting actually took place, stood off in its own twilight zone of separation, cut off from the beginning of City Place by the ghastly ten-lane Okeechobee Boulevard. The five-block walk (of very large super-blocks) to and fro from my hotel was like unto reenacting the Bataan Death March under that brutal Floridian sun.
Things are changing fast now though. The New Urbanists still standing are the strongest and most nimble. They are also the ones most deeply engaged in the trenches of architectural education, and they are as certain to win the ideology battles still raging in that realm as they won the battle over suburban sprawl.
Most of all, though, I'm glad to be home in my quiet backwater of this poor floundering nation.
25 comments:
Gross negligence is right. It's yet another example of incompetence by Miami-Dade officials who have never had to experience the inconvenience of a job interview. Water and Sewer Director John Renfrow ($246,578 annual salary) has been with the county for over 25 years. Why has he ignored the EPA for two decades? Why hasn't he put a plan in place to fix the infrastructure?
And deputy director Doug Yoder ($213,164 annual salary) already retired once from the county and he is collecting a big six-digit pension in addition to his big fat salary. Is he planning for anything other than his second pension?
And what about the 300 million gallons of minimally treated sewage that Renfrow and Yoder are dumping off our beaches every day? Do they have any plans to stop that dumping?
Perhaps when the county finally begins hiring county directors and other executives based on merit, it will finally find competent people who are up to the task. That means using job announcements and a competitive recruitment process. Yoder and Renfrow did not have to compete for their jobs. They got their jobs because of who they know, not what they know. (Are you listening Mr. Mayor?)
Watch the video of Renfrow's dumping of sewage into the ocean. He dumped 300 million more gallons of sewage in there today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/14/2799249/miami-dades-leaky-pipes-more-than.html#storylink=cpy
How can you ask managers to be honest when the entire political system favors the skill set shifting accountability far from sight, as a job requirement.
I'm forever stuck on the NW well field contamination, which Renfrow made disappear in our recent history.
We can start looking to get rid of tourism the way we know it and look forward to "resort" casino's; crawling traffic; no more local produce due to no clean water (and rock mining along the everglades) and the "race to the bottom" continues! I'd made a special thank you not to big sugar & the Fanjul's too!
So much for our "world class" city/county or whatever! I'm almost hoping for a speed up of global warming to just sink Dade County because this is just slow torture to me, watching our greatest G-d given gift deteriorate at the hands of so many stupid politicians and their way too smart puppeteers!
Given this report and these comments, please explain how you can support Carlos Gimenez in his bid for re-election?
Many thought that WASD would be his top priority? Why has he done nothing to address these issues?
Why do the large cadre of Director, Deputy Directors, Assistant Directors, Assistants to the Directors (2 different categories!), Chiefs and Managers, remain untouched? What do Renfrow and his group have on Gimenez that he won't touch them?
Even developers should get behind spending on new sewer pipes. Without increased capacity, there should be a moratorium slapped on development- all those new fancy highrises, gambling emporiums, even port of Miami expansion should come to a screeching halt until we get this crap taken care of. Hear that Gimenez and county commissioners?
Haven't you heard?
Renfrow did away with the two Deputy Director positions?
What? He cut two huge salaries and got rid of two people?
No! Don't be silly! He changed their title to "Assistant Directors". Same salary, same benefits as before - but it does make for a good soundbite, doesn't it?
Gimenez says "the last thing we want to do is put any kind of burden on the public." WTF? Who does he think is burdened by raw sewage spilling into the streets and waterways?
The utility belongs to the ratepayers. Of course, the "public" has to underwrite the fix to the system. I do not want some Chinese investors taking control of our environment, and the feds will not bail out a system with the lowest rates in Florida.
Both Gimenez and Martinez are pandering. Martinez wants to have bonds, but does not want to increase property tax. The bonds for water and sewer are underwritten by rate-payers. Neither of these two get it. Someone with integrity and intelligence should enter this mayoral race before we get burdened with four years of weak leadership.
I wouldn't call Gimenez environmentally friendly, being that he's approved rock mining along the Everglades and has almost zero understanding of our Ag industry other than what the Insurance selling Farm Bureau tells him. However, Martinez is certainly worse, but at least he doesn't pretend to give a crap!
Unfortunately, due to no better candidate, I'm still voting for Gimenez, holding my nose and praying he wakes up to what he's helping destroy!
The Water and Sewer Department is spending over a million dollars a year on salaries for people with "Government Affairs," "Intergovernmental Relations," "Legislative Affairs," and "Community Relations" in their job titles. They are just political hacks with jobs arranged by their political godparents.
As long as those unnecessary political hacks remain on the Water and Sewer payroll, I know they have too much of my money.
Please don't suggest that the problem at Water and Sewer is a lack of funding. It wasn't very long ago when the Herald uncovered the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department was paying for 4,200 cell phone accounts. Most of the cell phones were stolen and sold on eBay to lucky users who bought an active phone at no cost. The Water and Sewer Department has so much money coming in, no one noticed.
And what about the Water and Sewer postage scandal in which the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Assistant Director Sharon Mitchell repeatedly gave her mail room clerk checks of $50,000 (totaling $1 million) for unnecessary postage that the clerk promptly embezzled. They have so much money, no one noticed $1 million missing. There were no financial controls. The problem is not a lack of money. It is mismanagement and incompetence at the Water and Sewer Department and in the Budget Department.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/14/2799249/miami-dades-leaky-pipes-more-than.html#storylink=cpy
Add one more: Public Affairs
Please explain to someone new to this blog. What do these "Intergovernmental" etc,. people do since the County has its own "Office of Intergovernmental Affairs" and hires several private firms to do the same?
I love it. Reading the Herald is like watching reporters hold a ladder while the county commission tries to nail jello to the ceiling.
Who are these political hacks? Relatives? Friends? How much are they paid? Where can we find out names?
I thought that the person who wanted a "cheap County" was Norman Braman.
Water and Sewer is a self-supporting department but the sewer pipes situation has reached this alarming level of concern because of two reasons:
1. The top level of administrators don't know what they're doing and worse, DON'T CARE! They don't respond to the citizenry and they laugh at the department's rank and file employees.
2. The department's funds are regularly raided by commissioners for their pet projects.
It WILL hit the fans! And then Renfrow and company will all retire with their hefty pensions (double pension for Doug Yoder), and their golden parachutes.
As long as Gimenez refuses to replace the clowns in the executive offices with professional utility managers, the public will howl about being asked to pay reasonable rates to underwrite the necessary infrastructure investments. Ultimately, it is all about holding the Strong Mayor accountable. If he refused to act, let's get a new Strong Mayor.
The above comment summarizes the situation perfectly!
At the water and sewer department, where does the buck stop? At the Director's office.
At the county, where does the buck stop? At the mayor's office.
Mr Mayor,
Call the W&S Director into your office today. Demand an immediate plan of action. Please report it to your constituents in the next 48 hours. Please stop your campaigning for another term and let the voters know how you plan to address this now, during the current term for which we voted you in as Srong Mayor.
I reported: in 2008:
$5.5 Billion of Unfunded Infrastructure At Water & Sewer: Does Anyone Give a Crap? By Geniusofdespair
Gimenez was not mayor.
He is now. From whom should we expect answers if not from him? From the previous administration? From the next one?
Even when MIami-Dade knows there is negligence they overlook it. Last year I forwarded a report I received to you guys about a Company Raider Environmental that was illegally dumping sludge in Maimi-Dade sewers and damaging the infrastructure. Their violations were continually overlooked and they were allowed to continue Their faulty wastewater cleaning business although they were out of compliance. If they are not going to go after known abusers for damaging the system then I guess they just don't give a shit.
Opa Locka doesn't need clean water I guess.
If you don't want taxes raised and property values are down, how is the Mayor going to address the infrastructure shortfall he inherited only a year ago? Be realistic. The fix should have been budgeted when times were good but we had Steve Shiver and George Burgess then. They are the culprits.
Well, somebody better address it now! Let's see who has the internal fortitude to do it!
Re: the sludge dumping allegation above. There used to be an environmental crime unit at DERM dedicated to investigating just that type of thing. The MDPD took it over and, well, you know how that turned out. Instead of fixing the malfeasance that went on in the MDPD, they disbanded the unit. And now nobody is investigating environmental crime in Dade County. Where’s the EPA and FDEP?
Reasonable people generally will agree that non-toxic drinking water is preferable. Let's not start dragging the Tea Party into this. Its corruption, not ideology, that is poisoning our water.
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