Stunned, absolutely stunned. Last week, at a "lightly attended public meeting" according to the Miami Herald, the director of Miami Dade Water and Sewer John Renfrow provided county commissioners and the mayor with a total cost assessment of $12 billion to repair the county's aging, inadequate water and sewerage infrastructure.
By "stunned", this writer is only kidding. In Miami, infrastructure deficits have been hidden like a pig in a blanket nearly as long as Rip Van Winkle slept under the cliffs of the Hudson River. Civic activists who complained about these costs -- as a way of attempting to divert policy makers from recklessly committing taxpayers to performing arts centers, museums, baseball stadiums, basketball stadiums and so forth -- were routinely ignored, belittled, and marginalized. The Miami Herald never lifted an editorial finger in support of full disclosure at any point in the past, when it was clear our quality of life, environment, and even public health was being used as toilet paper by the Growth Machine. Now we know: $12 billion. Get used to the number, because EOM believes it is vastly understated.
Now the little cat is out of the kitty litter box, The Miami Herald ought to delve into the EPA and county's own reports. $12 billion. Really. The Herald ought to revisit how and why county commissioners deliberately suppressed water and sewerage rates for decades -- particularly during the regime of deposed county commissioner Natacha Seijas -- , despite full knowledge the shit was hitting the fan. But since the Herald won't, we will as we have done for the past five years on this blog.
In Miami, the government agency that handles our water, piss and poo is called the Miami Dade Water and Sewer Department. In its July 2012 report, county government writes, “WASD is among the 10 largest utilities in the nation, the largest in the southeast, and by far the largest in Florida… The Department’s main functions are water production and distribution, as well as wastewater collection, treatment, reuse, and disposal. WASD operates three regional and five smaller water treatment plants, with a total rated capacity of 459 million gallons per day, and three regional wastewater treatment plants with a total treatment capacity of 368 millions gallons daily.”
Water and sewer are the small and large intestines of the same creature who crawls in the morning, walks in the afternoon and bawls like a baby at the end of day. As individual ratepayers, we may diverge in economic standing, religious affiliation, sexual preference, or other metrics. We don’t necessarily focus how we flow the same way. Whatever our tax rate, we all flush the toilet one push at a time. Despite the assorted government agencies have their hands in it, few people spend much time stirring beyond payment of the monthly bill. Our complaints about taxes are nothing compared to the horror we would express if our tap went dry or we shat, flushed, and nothing happened.
At Eye On Miami, both bloggers are connoisseurs of shit. We dove into absentee ballot fraud because we recognize ballot fraud and voter suppression makes tissue paper of democracy. Government is unreformable because it is bound to special interests whose profits (and campaign money) use the Everglades, the environment, and our quality of life as disposable waste. (Who cares about Florida Bay when you can hold your fishing rodeos in the Bahamas?)
Our observations of shit lead us to more: the logic that every form of development and construction increases the tax base and is therefore good. This stinky formula is irrefutable basis of Florida politics: that increased tax base is necessary to cover the costs of services demanded by taxpayers. It sounded good a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, and today; paving the way to the low-cost, race to the bottom that Florida is winning, piling taxpayers into crappy subdivisions in wetlands without a sense of place or value or integrity. Florida has been built to dissolve like suspended solids in a treatment tank
These are acidic observations from a connoisseur of shit. But to really know shit, you have to delve into the literal entity. The analogue to absentee ballot fraud and to voter suppression goes by other names: wastewater management. The same way the simple act of voting contains a world of technical details – from campaign advertisements, mail houses, computer equipment and the staff to maintain their security – wastewater management has its own soup: total suspended solids, return activation sludge, high level disinfection, and complex machinery, equipment, gauges and dials and employees whose purpose is to guard its security.
A network of federal and state laws and requirements to protect the public health, the environment – and ultimately the interest of taxpayers – is meant to organize billions of dollars of infrastructure: water pumps tapping the Everglades, pipes steering water through treatment plants, distribution pipes to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, pipes and collectors routing rainwater to sewers, from millions of toilets into wastewater pipes, collectors, into treatment facilities, settling ponds, skimmers, weirs, sludge, into facilities collecting waste from trucks and septic tanks, and then the final resting place: either sewer outfalls in the ocean or injected through deep wells sunk beneath drinking water aquifers. The handling of water and disposal of waste is by far the largest consumer of electricity in the United States.
In respect to the comingling of Miami-Dade County and federal regulators (that big, bad awful US EPA), the shit has hit the fan. There is no way to put it discretely: our capacity to handle millions of gallons of shit a day is coming unglued.
In its July 2012 “Miami Dade County Water and Sewer Infrastructure Report”, managers identify only $1.1 billion of needed. “As specified … this report discusses those sections of the water and sewer system that are the “most deteriorated and vulnerable” along with the estimated cost to rehabilitate or replace those sections and potential funding sources… All of the projected listed in this report are of equal importance.”
In other words – to interpret -- $1.1 billion buys us repair of the worst, not repairs that will be needed in the future; projects including protecting our drinking water supply from chemical exposure in the rock mining area in West Dade or the entire infrastructure, once the impacts of sea level rise impress upon badly weakened and corroded pipes that somehow enriched contractors long gone from their warranties.
“Growth pays its way” is the popular aphorism. It is false. Your past and present mayors and county commissioners buried the true costs of providing services by failing to fund current infrastructure or adequately plan maintenance and needs of growth. We are not talking millions of dollars. We are not talking tens of millions of dollars. We are not talking hundreds of millions of dollars. We are not talking billions of dollars. We are talking about tens of billions of dollars.
Why did your elected officials keep you in the dark? Because for the most part, they understood their primary goal to be re-elected. They believed, rightly or wrongly, that to get re-elected they had to raise money from insiders and special interests whose profits, one way or another, depend on cheap costs of growth. Keep the costs of infrastructure for housing and commercial real estate low, and more people will buy. The “sensible” use of taxpayer dollars, from that point of view, meant keeping taxes artificially low and also using available tax revenue to do the bare minimum (build a road, build a highway) in order to keep more development flowing. More development means more taxpayers.
To impose this logic on taxpayers required political leaders – in Miami-Dade County for nearly two decades, the leader was county commissioner Natacha Seijas. She maintained the illusion of low infrastructure and low taxes to provide the bare minimum with an iron fist. New residents and businesses would fill in the gap left by yesterday’s imports. Yes it is a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme built on an ocean of shit.
The July 2012 county infrastructure report is an eye-opener in its details, but something like a team defending as though dodging the exposure of violations of federal law. “WASD operates one of the largest wastewater collection transmission, treatment and disposal systems in the nation. The system consists of over 6,000 miles of gravity sewers and force mains, more than 1,000 pump stations, 3 regional wastewater treatment plants with a combined treatment capacity of 368 million gallons per day.” The bare minimum to maintain a system that will be under severe stress from sea level rise in the future—in other words, just meeting current needs, is $195,624,000. $64,260,000 of pump station improvements are needed today, to say nothing of the fact that gravity fed systems will not work at some point in the future. $178,936,000 is needed to rehabilitate “the most deteriorated sections of the north district wastewater Treatment Plant”. The Central District needs $208,046,000. The South District needs $89,220,000.
There is a noteworthy difference between the Miami-Dade County report, detailing the $1.1 billion needed immediately and the EPA notice of violation, that makes visible the manifest breakdown – not of pipes and infrastructure—but of personnel, administration and maintenance. EPA doesn’t venture around the topic, how much money is needed to meet federal requirements. Its report sketches the outlines how the hands-on operation of the Miami-Dade wastewater system is utterly demoralized. Its working atmosphere must resemble a modern version of a 19th century charnal house in central London.
For example, the June 2012 Notice of Violation from EPA to Miami Dade County of its permit to discharge effluent (NPDES). The report is based on two inspections by EPA; in late 2009 and April, 2010. Reading between the lines, one senses the indifference and resignation that permeates the matter of complying with the EPA.
When your job is shoveling shit against the tide, but you keep getting overwhelmed – day after day after day – eventually you just give up. You go through the motions. Walk by the stench. Use duct tape where it can stick. Punch the clock. Go home.
Here’s a section from the June 2012 violation notice that made me reach for the Lysol spray. Here is the exact text, with my interpretation. “The County’s Permitting, Environent and Regulatory Affairs (PERA) Department does require manifests for the haulers with transport permits, but disposal permits are not required for any hauler regardless of pace of business.” The county does not pay attention to specifically who is hauling effluent in trucks to be disposed of in the county’s wastewater treatment facilities.
“Neither PERA nor WASD sample individual hauler trucks to evaluate loads prior to their discharge to into the WWTP.” Interpretation: anyone can dump anything, irrespective of how toxic, and there is no one evaluating what’s in the shit.
“Mr. Walton (county staff) further explained that, following previous findings by the EPA, WASD did meet with PERA to discuss oversight of haulers. PERA relayed that it did not have the resources to perform the oversight for WASD. Mr. Walton did note that he turned a concrete slurry truck away from the headworks the previous day.” Interpretation: there is no money to hire staff to pay attention to what is being dumped into the wastewater treatment system by haulers. A concrete truck filled with wash effluent (presumably) was not allowed to dump into the system its solution filled with solids. Duh.”
“Mr. Walton stated the WASD does sample hauled wastewater for pH and TSS (Total Dissolved Solids), but those samples are from a daily composite of all the tankers that have discharged, and not from individual hauler trucks. Although this methodology is not useful for determining noncompliance with the pretreatment standards by these individual users, the EPA later observed the composite container is not even being handled appropriately to obtain a valid (test result).”
The rest of the EPA report is a catalogue of clogged effluent; syringes, tampons, and plastic trash, attempts by Miami Dade to overwhelm the system with chlorine when fecal counts soar fifty times normal levels, controls put in the wrong places to deliver appropriate measurements, -- you can almost feel the hourly paid operators plummeting through their own despair -- medical waste and sewage lying out in the open, equipment regularly “out of service” in clear violation of an earlier consent agreement between the county and the EPA to “… at all times properly operate and maintain all facilities and systems of treatment and control (and related appurtenances) which are installed or used by the permittee to achieve compliance with the conditions of the permit.”
Want to hear more? “In the final settling tanks/secondary clarifiers, the EPA observed some oily sheen, very large algal columns in the discharge troughs between tanks, both algae and very large floatables/debris (ie. plastic trash, sanitary products) impeding proper weir operation, circumvention of flow around weirs, uneven flow over weirs, unsettled floc, large amounts of pin floc and the effluent’s olive green color.”
Unidentified in any government report executive managers of Miami-Dade county agencies and government who understand that Florida-style growth is a Ponzi scheme, but also understand that power, careers, and advancement depend on playing their roles efficiently. In twenty five years observing local and state government at work, I can only recall a few occasions where managers strayed from the party line, expressing dissent in one forum or another against political “solutions” that buried costs instead of leveling with voters. It is spectacular when it happens and results either in retirement, reassignment, or firing. Most of these managers are picked up by large engineering companies where they fade into one or another office, having done their job despite wandering off the reservation.
Given that these government reports routinely understate the depth of the problem they disclose-- hewing to the near edge of their legal obligations – not an inch before—one can leap with confidence to a not-so-far-fetched image of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure rusting, corroded, malfunctioning, scarcely held together by bits of corroded rebar, a working system in name only.
In the end, the responsible parties are voters. The Miami-Dade County Infrastructure Report dryly notes that substantial federal grants covering 75% of project costs were available to assist local utilities in meeting the requirements of the Clean Water Act. The politicization of federal agency budgets have rendered that particular source of help, moot. It all falls on us, the taxpayers of Miami-Dade County now.
We allowed release, flush, and forget who sits on the public trust. We elect officials who manifestly fail to protect public welfare, health, and safety. Who, among our current county commissioners, has had the courage to stand up and pull the curtain away from the Ponzi schemers hiding behind their lapel pins with American flags?
I’d like to know. Tell me.
By "stunned", this writer is only kidding. In Miami, infrastructure deficits have been hidden like a pig in a blanket nearly as long as Rip Van Winkle slept under the cliffs of the Hudson River. Civic activists who complained about these costs -- as a way of attempting to divert policy makers from recklessly committing taxpayers to performing arts centers, museums, baseball stadiums, basketball stadiums and so forth -- were routinely ignored, belittled, and marginalized. The Miami Herald never lifted an editorial finger in support of full disclosure at any point in the past, when it was clear our quality of life, environment, and even public health was being used as toilet paper by the Growth Machine. Now we know: $12 billion. Get used to the number, because EOM believes it is vastly understated.
Now the little cat is out of the kitty litter box, The Miami Herald ought to delve into the EPA and county's own reports. $12 billion. Really. The Herald ought to revisit how and why county commissioners deliberately suppressed water and sewerage rates for decades -- particularly during the regime of deposed county commissioner Natacha Seijas -- , despite full knowledge the shit was hitting the fan. But since the Herald won't, we will as we have done for the past five years on this blog.
In Miami, the government agency that handles our water, piss and poo is called the Miami Dade Water and Sewer Department. In its July 2012 report, county government writes, “WASD is among the 10 largest utilities in the nation, the largest in the southeast, and by far the largest in Florida… The Department’s main functions are water production and distribution, as well as wastewater collection, treatment, reuse, and disposal. WASD operates three regional and five smaller water treatment plants, with a total rated capacity of 459 million gallons per day, and three regional wastewater treatment plants with a total treatment capacity of 368 millions gallons daily.”
Water and sewer are the small and large intestines of the same creature who crawls in the morning, walks in the afternoon and bawls like a baby at the end of day. As individual ratepayers, we may diverge in economic standing, religious affiliation, sexual preference, or other metrics. We don’t necessarily focus how we flow the same way. Whatever our tax rate, we all flush the toilet one push at a time. Despite the assorted government agencies have their hands in it, few people spend much time stirring beyond payment of the monthly bill. Our complaints about taxes are nothing compared to the horror we would express if our tap went dry or we shat, flushed, and nothing happened.
At Eye On Miami, both bloggers are connoisseurs of shit. We dove into absentee ballot fraud because we recognize ballot fraud and voter suppression makes tissue paper of democracy. Government is unreformable because it is bound to special interests whose profits (and campaign money) use the Everglades, the environment, and our quality of life as disposable waste. (Who cares about Florida Bay when you can hold your fishing rodeos in the Bahamas?)
Our observations of shit lead us to more: the logic that every form of development and construction increases the tax base and is therefore good. This stinky formula is irrefutable basis of Florida politics: that increased tax base is necessary to cover the costs of services demanded by taxpayers. It sounded good a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, and today; paving the way to the low-cost, race to the bottom that Florida is winning, piling taxpayers into crappy subdivisions in wetlands without a sense of place or value or integrity. Florida has been built to dissolve like suspended solids in a treatment tank
These are acidic observations from a connoisseur of shit. But to really know shit, you have to delve into the literal entity. The analogue to absentee ballot fraud and to voter suppression goes by other names: wastewater management. The same way the simple act of voting contains a world of technical details – from campaign advertisements, mail houses, computer equipment and the staff to maintain their security – wastewater management has its own soup: total suspended solids, return activation sludge, high level disinfection, and complex machinery, equipment, gauges and dials and employees whose purpose is to guard its security.
A network of federal and state laws and requirements to protect the public health, the environment – and ultimately the interest of taxpayers – is meant to organize billions of dollars of infrastructure: water pumps tapping the Everglades, pipes steering water through treatment plants, distribution pipes to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, pipes and collectors routing rainwater to sewers, from millions of toilets into wastewater pipes, collectors, into treatment facilities, settling ponds, skimmers, weirs, sludge, into facilities collecting waste from trucks and septic tanks, and then the final resting place: either sewer outfalls in the ocean or injected through deep wells sunk beneath drinking water aquifers. The handling of water and disposal of waste is by far the largest consumer of electricity in the United States.
In respect to the comingling of Miami-Dade County and federal regulators (that big, bad awful US EPA), the shit has hit the fan. There is no way to put it discretely: our capacity to handle millions of gallons of shit a day is coming unglued.
In its July 2012 “Miami Dade County Water and Sewer Infrastructure Report”, managers identify only $1.1 billion of needed. “As specified … this report discusses those sections of the water and sewer system that are the “most deteriorated and vulnerable” along with the estimated cost to rehabilitate or replace those sections and potential funding sources… All of the projected listed in this report are of equal importance.”
In other words – to interpret -- $1.1 billion buys us repair of the worst, not repairs that will be needed in the future; projects including protecting our drinking water supply from chemical exposure in the rock mining area in West Dade or the entire infrastructure, once the impacts of sea level rise impress upon badly weakened and corroded pipes that somehow enriched contractors long gone from their warranties.
“Growth pays its way” is the popular aphorism. It is false. Your past and present mayors and county commissioners buried the true costs of providing services by failing to fund current infrastructure or adequately plan maintenance and needs of growth. We are not talking millions of dollars. We are not talking tens of millions of dollars. We are not talking hundreds of millions of dollars. We are not talking billions of dollars. We are talking about tens of billions of dollars.
Why did your elected officials keep you in the dark? Because for the most part, they understood their primary goal to be re-elected. They believed, rightly or wrongly, that to get re-elected they had to raise money from insiders and special interests whose profits, one way or another, depend on cheap costs of growth. Keep the costs of infrastructure for housing and commercial real estate low, and more people will buy. The “sensible” use of taxpayer dollars, from that point of view, meant keeping taxes artificially low and also using available tax revenue to do the bare minimum (build a road, build a highway) in order to keep more development flowing. More development means more taxpayers.
To impose this logic on taxpayers required political leaders – in Miami-Dade County for nearly two decades, the leader was county commissioner Natacha Seijas. She maintained the illusion of low infrastructure and low taxes to provide the bare minimum with an iron fist. New residents and businesses would fill in the gap left by yesterday’s imports. Yes it is a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme built on an ocean of shit.
The July 2012 county infrastructure report is an eye-opener in its details, but something like a team defending as though dodging the exposure of violations of federal law. “WASD operates one of the largest wastewater collection transmission, treatment and disposal systems in the nation. The system consists of over 6,000 miles of gravity sewers and force mains, more than 1,000 pump stations, 3 regional wastewater treatment plants with a combined treatment capacity of 368 million gallons per day.” The bare minimum to maintain a system that will be under severe stress from sea level rise in the future—in other words, just meeting current needs, is $195,624,000. $64,260,000 of pump station improvements are needed today, to say nothing of the fact that gravity fed systems will not work at some point in the future. $178,936,000 is needed to rehabilitate “the most deteriorated sections of the north district wastewater Treatment Plant”. The Central District needs $208,046,000. The South District needs $89,220,000.
There is a noteworthy difference between the Miami-Dade County report, detailing the $1.1 billion needed immediately and the EPA notice of violation, that makes visible the manifest breakdown – not of pipes and infrastructure—but of personnel, administration and maintenance. EPA doesn’t venture around the topic, how much money is needed to meet federal requirements. Its report sketches the outlines how the hands-on operation of the Miami-Dade wastewater system is utterly demoralized. Its working atmosphere must resemble a modern version of a 19th century charnal house in central London.
For example, the June 2012 Notice of Violation from EPA to Miami Dade County of its permit to discharge effluent (NPDES). The report is based on two inspections by EPA; in late 2009 and April, 2010. Reading between the lines, one senses the indifference and resignation that permeates the matter of complying with the EPA.
When your job is shoveling shit against the tide, but you keep getting overwhelmed – day after day after day – eventually you just give up. You go through the motions. Walk by the stench. Use duct tape where it can stick. Punch the clock. Go home.
Here’s a section from the June 2012 violation notice that made me reach for the Lysol spray. Here is the exact text, with my interpretation. “The County’s Permitting, Environent and Regulatory Affairs (PERA) Department does require manifests for the haulers with transport permits, but disposal permits are not required for any hauler regardless of pace of business.” The county does not pay attention to specifically who is hauling effluent in trucks to be disposed of in the county’s wastewater treatment facilities.
“Neither PERA nor WASD sample individual hauler trucks to evaluate loads prior to their discharge to into the WWTP.” Interpretation: anyone can dump anything, irrespective of how toxic, and there is no one evaluating what’s in the shit.
“Mr. Walton (county staff) further explained that, following previous findings by the EPA, WASD did meet with PERA to discuss oversight of haulers. PERA relayed that it did not have the resources to perform the oversight for WASD. Mr. Walton did note that he turned a concrete slurry truck away from the headworks the previous day.” Interpretation: there is no money to hire staff to pay attention to what is being dumped into the wastewater treatment system by haulers. A concrete truck filled with wash effluent (presumably) was not allowed to dump into the system its solution filled with solids. Duh.”
“Mr. Walton stated the WASD does sample hauled wastewater for pH and TSS (Total Dissolved Solids), but those samples are from a daily composite of all the tankers that have discharged, and not from individual hauler trucks. Although this methodology is not useful for determining noncompliance with the pretreatment standards by these individual users, the EPA later observed the composite container is not even being handled appropriately to obtain a valid (test result).”
The rest of the EPA report is a catalogue of clogged effluent; syringes, tampons, and plastic trash, attempts by Miami Dade to overwhelm the system with chlorine when fecal counts soar fifty times normal levels, controls put in the wrong places to deliver appropriate measurements, -- you can almost feel the hourly paid operators plummeting through their own despair -- medical waste and sewage lying out in the open, equipment regularly “out of service” in clear violation of an earlier consent agreement between the county and the EPA to “… at all times properly operate and maintain all facilities and systems of treatment and control (and related appurtenances) which are installed or used by the permittee to achieve compliance with the conditions of the permit.”
Want to hear more? “In the final settling tanks/secondary clarifiers, the EPA observed some oily sheen, very large algal columns in the discharge troughs between tanks, both algae and very large floatables/debris (ie. plastic trash, sanitary products) impeding proper weir operation, circumvention of flow around weirs, uneven flow over weirs, unsettled floc, large amounts of pin floc and the effluent’s olive green color.”
Unidentified in any government report executive managers of Miami-Dade county agencies and government who understand that Florida-style growth is a Ponzi scheme, but also understand that power, careers, and advancement depend on playing their roles efficiently. In twenty five years observing local and state government at work, I can only recall a few occasions where managers strayed from the party line, expressing dissent in one forum or another against political “solutions” that buried costs instead of leveling with voters. It is spectacular when it happens and results either in retirement, reassignment, or firing. Most of these managers are picked up by large engineering companies where they fade into one or another office, having done their job despite wandering off the reservation.
Given that these government reports routinely understate the depth of the problem they disclose-- hewing to the near edge of their legal obligations – not an inch before—one can leap with confidence to a not-so-far-fetched image of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure rusting, corroded, malfunctioning, scarcely held together by bits of corroded rebar, a working system in name only.
In the end, the responsible parties are voters. The Miami-Dade County Infrastructure Report dryly notes that substantial federal grants covering 75% of project costs were available to assist local utilities in meeting the requirements of the Clean Water Act. The politicization of federal agency budgets have rendered that particular source of help, moot. It all falls on us, the taxpayers of Miami-Dade County now.
We allowed release, flush, and forget who sits on the public trust. We elect officials who manifestly fail to protect public welfare, health, and safety. Who, among our current county commissioners, has had the courage to stand up and pull the curtain away from the Ponzi schemers hiding behind their lapel pins with American flags?
I’d like to know. Tell me.
23 comments:
I applaud your attempts at informing the populace as to the underpinnings of various elected officials and agencies.
Bravo
At least it's now confirmed our cesspool is not limited to our politicians here in Miami Dade! Or, SOME county bureaucrats in charge!
Don't worry. Marco Rubio will come to the rescue.
Mayor Gimenez should hold a press conference this morning convening a blue ribbon panel to deal with this! Appoint the usual suspects.
We really don't need a blue ribbon panel. This issue has been around for a while, just swept under the rug and budget cuts! It's basically time to pay the piper as they say. More debt service for bonds, great! We certainly don't have all that money coming in from the Heat or Marlins now do we? By the way, whatever happened to how the Heat could never on paper appear profitable enough to pay the County?
Don't worry. Marco Rubio will find us an earmark!
Gimlet, the traditional past tense of dive is dived, not dove. A dove is a bird that flies around the sky as a symbol of peace. My 8th grade English teacher would slap you silly!!
This is scandalous.
Building stadiums, museums, and performing arts centers before critical infrastructure requirements. My toilets are backing up and my water stopped running but I'm going to spend the money to fix them on a new flat screen TV.
This is not public administration it is inexcusable, irrational behavior.
Here's the info on the upcoming public meetings on the water/sewer issue. (I would hope the county commissioners also attend the community meetings so they can hear what residents think of all this:
Public Meetings scheduled to discuss and receive community input on the Capital Improvements Plan for Wastewater Projects to be included in a Consent Decree with United states Environmental Protection Agency and Florida Department of Environmental Protects. A draft of the Capital Improvements Plan is available for review on the County's website at www.miamidade.gov/water
The meetings are to be held on the following dates, at the following locations:
7 - 8 p.m., Monday, Sept. 24,
Joseph Caleb Center, Room 110
5400 NW 22nd Ave.
Miami, Florida 33142
7 - 8 p.m. Tuesday, September 25
South Dade Government Center, Room 203
10710 SW 211 St.
Miami, FL 3189
7 - 8 p.m, Thursday, Sept. 27
Miami Dade Water and Sewer Department Douglas Road Office, Room A
3071 SW 38 Ave.
Miami, Florida 33146
http://www.miamidade.gov/water/wastewater-improvement-projects.asp
Negotiate with Genting to take over management and funding of water and sewer if we approve casino gambling. Either that or sell your home now.
"I hoped at one time to become commissioner of sewers for St. Louis County–$300 a month, with the possibility of getting one’s shitty paws deep into a slush fund–and to this end I attended a softball game where such sinecures were assigned to the deserving and the fortunate. Everybody I met said, “Now I’m old So-and-so, running for such and such, and anything you do for me I’ll appreciate.” My boyish dreams fanned by this heady atmosphere and three mint juleps, I saw myself already in possession of the coveted post, which called for a token appearance twice a week to sign a few letters at the Old Court House; while I’m there might as well put it on the sheriff for some marijuana he has confiscated, and he’d better play ball or I will route a sewer through his front yard. And then across the street to the Court House Café for a coffee with some other lazy, worthless bastards in the same line of business, and we wallow in corruption like contented alligators.
…
As commissioner of sewers I would not be called upon to pet babies, make speeches, shake hands, have lunch with the queen; in fact, the fewer voters who knew of my existence, the better. Let kings and Presidents keep the limelight. I prefer a whiff of coal gas as the sewers rupture for miles around–I have made a deal on the piping which has bought me a $30,000 home, and there is talk in the press of sex cults and drug orgies carried out in the stink of what made them possible. Fluttering from the roof of my ranch-style house, over my mint and marijuana, Old Glory floats lazily in the tainted breeze.
But there were sullen mutters of revolt from the peasantry: “My teenage daughters is cunt-deep in shit. Is this the American way of life?” I thought so, and I didn’t want it changed, sitting there in my garden, smoking the sheriff’s reefers, coal gas on the wind sweet in my nostrils as the smell of oil to an oil man or the smell of bullshit to a cattle baron. I sure did a sweet thing with those pipes, and I’m covered, too. What I got on the Governor wouldn’t look good on the front page, would it, now? And I have my special police to deal with vandalism and sabotage, all of them handsome youths, languid and vicious as reptiles, described in the press as no more than minions, lackeys, and bodyguards to His Majesty the Sultan of Sewers."
~William S. Burroughs, Sultan of Sewers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m5ULpmkRrg
You mean exchange one sewer for a bigger one?
I went to the County website and clicked on the document to read more about the "capital improvements" proposed for the water/sewage system. It reads like a who's who/what's what parade of horribles: All full of sewage gases, and floating solids, catastrophic failures and wastewater overflows. Odors, sludge, grease and grit abound. And oh yeah, the employees are at risk of imminent death if some of this stuff goes.
Twenty years ago a grand jury looked into all this and came back with a scathing report. Time again.
See for yourself what $12 billion can buy you:
http://www.miamidade.gov/water/wastewater-improvement-projects.asp
The voters--whomever they are--are not up to this job. They don't have the discipline and education to deal with this.
I find it fantastic that you two bloggers can spend your time and energy looking at our crooked politics and our crooked politicians and getting it all down in writing which NO ONE ELSE will do. Our local newspaper is just as bad as it also wants money from the crooks so it will not publish the bad facts. All this you do without any form of income from it. Please keep on doing it.
Gimleteye documents what happens when a city is "BuilT-Out" meaning that nearly all land designated for residential development is built.
As building continued and waste management infrastructure continued to be underfunded, these issues developed. This is what happens when corruption meets over development.
Just to be clear, the money spent on water and wastewater infrastructure is NOT property tax money. WASD gets its money from its customers based on water and sewage usage, NOT from property owners based on the tax rolls, and not tourist tax dollars based on a bed tax or sales tax. Please don't confuse the sources of revenue, or the purposes for which they can be spent. The money spent on the Marlins Stadium or the PAC could not have been spent on WASD projects.
(And a response to the pedant above, I rather like the use of "dove" over "dived". It is slang that will be standard English soon enough.)
Is it true county commission allowed 25 million a year for past 10 years from water and sewer Dept to be transferred into county's general budget? Before they talk about raising rates 39 percent over next 6 years they need to return all funds taken. Maybe tourist tax money should be used- afterall tourists like clean beach waters, and wouldn't come back to visit us if our beaches are full of sewage.
better vote democrat this year. imagine what a Romney-Ryan budget would have in store for M-D.
I work for the Water and Sewer Department and know that under Natasha Seijas we had an index in place to adjust rates based on the costs to operate utilities. Gimenez, while he was on the commission, put a stop to the indexed rate adjustments. You all hate ol' Natasha so much you can't seem to get your facts straight. Too bad she isn't here to deal with this problem now - she had the balls to get the job done. I miss her.
Then Gimenez needs to be held accountable for this fiasco. Roll the tape on the BCC meeting where Gimenez stopped the index. Let's get an Inspector General investigation to enlighten us.
Just wait until sewage pipes start failing and start backing up into neighborhood houses. You wanna see a mess. Residents, pay attention to this. Work has to get done. If the pipes are rusting, you should not be resting.
Please post this petition:
Please take a moment to read this petition then sign and forward. The Water and Sewer infrastructure problems facing M-DC are of monumental importance; and it affects all of us. The potential impact is not just our water but our children, our health, our property and our economy. By joining together, we can get the County Commissioners to address the critical needs outlined in their July 2012 report.
http://www.change.org/petitions/m-dc-water-and-sewer-infrastructure-problems-are-potentially-catastrophic-according-to-their-own-report
Post a Comment