Understanding the depth of Miami’s problems: dropping a gauge in the cesspool ... by gimleteye

We seem, here at Eye On Miami, to be connoisseurs of effluent. We dove into absentee ballot fraud. Why? Because both bloggers here at EOM believe our representative democracy is stained by ballot fraud and voter suppression. 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 collateral damage. (Who cares about Florida Bay when you can have fishing rodeos in the Bahamas?)

Our observations of excretion lead us to more: the thrice pooped logic that every form of development and construction increases the tax base and is therefore good. The 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.

These are acidic observations from a connoisseur of shit. But to really know shit, you have to delve into the literal sludge.

The Miami Dade Water and Sewer Department is something of a parallel universe to the glitz and glamor of Miami. Water and sewer services 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. We don’t like to be reminded that whatever our tax rate, we all flush the toilet one push at a time. It is a fact few people spend much time considering, even though we pay the monthly bill, compared to the horror we would express if suddenly our tap went dry or we shat, flushed, and nothing happened.

When we expel yesterday's masas puerco, where does it go?

It all used to go into the sea. But with a couple of million people expressing their bowels every day, the business of providing water and disposing of effluent is a major, massive enterprise. It should surprise no one that Miami-Dade is doing it very poorly. So poorly that it has attracted the repeated attention of the US EPA.

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 commingled efflorescene a day is coming unglued.

There is considerable blame to spread around. Call it, untreated fertilizer in the public imagination. The principal culprits are well known. They are your past and present mayors and county commissioners who buried the true costs of providing services by failing to fund infrastructure necessary to clean our waste. 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 as politicians, to be re-elected. They believed, rightly or not, that to get re-elected they had to raise money from insiders and special interests whose profits, in turn and one way or another, depend on cheap costs of growth. Keep housing and commercial real estate low, and people will buy. The “sensible” use of taxpayer dollars, from their 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. Yes it is a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme built on an ocean of shit. It’s what taxpayers do.

The second group of culprits are managers of Miami-Dade county agencies and government who understand that a Ponzi scheme built of taxpayer dollars is going on, but also understand that their own power, careers, and advancement depend on remaining calm while the filth accumulates. 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. It is spectacular when it happens -- like watching Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire hit a towering home run -- 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.

But at the bottom of this crisis is the realization, by EPA, that the hands-on operation of the Miami-Dade wastewater system is a demoralized sewer. That comes through plainly in the documentation as if to say: when your job is shoveling shit against the political 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.

This seems to be what EPA is highlighting in its examination of operational dysfunction at Miami Dade Water and Sewer. (more tomorrow)

In the end, voters really are to blame. We allowed the symptoms to overwhelm our view of the cause. We elected officials who manifestly fail to protect public welfare, health, and safety. Who, among our current county commissioners, has 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.