The Miami Herald endorsed it but it was a wacky endorsement, besides they endorse anything that cost us money, from the Miami Herald:
Skeptics may have doubts. Didn’t we just agree to a huge bond issue for the school district last year? And didn’t we force the mayor to backtrack on a plan to raise property taxes for a good cause (public libraries and an expanded animal shelter) because we couldn’t afford to pay more?
Yes and Yes.
Ideally, another public bond issue could be delayed until the effects of the painful recession are behind us.
That is the only part worth reading of their endorsement.
7 comments:
Vote No. Remember all the other County and City bond issues that got "disappeared".
Occasional we agree - voted no also.
I'm a liberal and I am voting NO!
Remember 2002 and the half penny for transit?
In 2002, voters were promised up to 88.9 miles of new Metrorail lines, stretching to every corner of Miami-Dade County. As it stands, you'll be lucky to get 2.4 miles.
Miami Herald, The (FL) - Sunday, June 8, 2008
"Meanwhile, county managers have decreed that they can spend transit-tax proceeds in hundreds of ways -- buying everything from paper clips and polo shirts to cockroach extermination. The tax even paid for $2 million in office furniture for Transit's new headquarters in Overtown.
Documents and interviews with those who created the campaign for the 0.5 percent sales tax reveal that the effort was doomed from the beginning by parochial politics, power grabs, waste and mismanagement.
At the heart of the matter: The 2002 campaign avoided any mention of chronic financial problems that had plagued the transit agency, and it promised far more improvements than the tax could possibly deliver. "
Déjà vue.
Plus, this just seems to lead to more lucrative contracts for the Mayor's construction firm friends...
From the 1990's - watch history happen again!
3 OFFICIALS: STOP JMH RENOVATIONS
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Miami Herald, The (FL)-October 9, 1991
Readability: 6-8 grade level (Lexile: 1040L)
Author: JACQUEE PETCHEL Herald Staff Writer
Outraged by Jackson Memorial Hospital's plans to spend $250,000 to renovate and furnish a new boardroom, three Metro commissioners have asked hospital administrators to stop the project because it's too costly and "unconscionable."
"This is the biggest waste of money," said Metro Commissioner Sherman Winn. "It's ridiculous. It's nonsense. It's upsetting. It's mind boggling."
The renovation includes the purchase of a $14,000 mahogany table and a set of $28,000 leather-covered chairs. It comes just one month after voters passed a half-cent sales tax to help the hospital provide Dade's poor and sick with prompt and better medical care.
Administrators say the furnishings and expansion are needed to accommodate a larger Public Health Trust, the hospital's governing board. Because of a county ordinance, it will increase from 15 to 21 members next month.
Once the half penny sales tax went to Jackson....Meanwhile, county government has begun raiding Jackson's half-penny kitty - quietly, it took $17 million last year and $30 million this year to pay its own Medicare and Medicaid contributions. "A lot of my time I spend taking hands out of my pocket," Clark says.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-55830648.html
The public trust audit - old news yes, and we are going to pump more money into Jackson?
New Times
An Embarrassment of Audits
Numbers never lie, as further examination of Public Health Trust bookkeeping reveals
By Tristram Korten Thursday, Jan 29 2004
Last month the Public Health Trust released an internal audit disclosing that it was stiffed $25 million by nonresident patients -- the majority of whom the hospital should not have admitted according to its own rules. Many were foreign nationals arriving for elective surgery who either didn't have insurance or whose insurance did not apply here; these patients promised to pay up front but never did.
And while the audit's language was severely self-critical, calling the trust's own collection efforts "ineffective," this was, of course, not the end of the story. The day the PHT released the results of its audit, I wrote about a soon-to-be-released second audit done by Miami-Dade County's Office of the Inspector General ("Doctors and Deadbeats," December 18, 2003), which determined the PHT had accrued $85 million in unpaid nonresident patient bills.
Vote No.
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