Eye On Miami hasn't been shy about disclosing the land speculators, the GOP campaign contributors set to benefit, and the mind-boggling fact that the same forces that plunged the economy into the worst housing crash since the Great Depression are, only a few years later, intent on doing exactly the same through the proposed expansion of State Road 836 into Southwest Miami-Dade.
Last week on NBC, Jeb Bush derided journalists probing for a frisson of competition in his relationship with Senator Marco Rubio as "crack cocaine". It was an odd choice of words.
There
is an analogy with crack cocaine in Florida politics. It associates the addiction to political money with re-zoning land for suburban sprawl. It's where the dealers and the users interconnect, and the clearest place to view it is where the pressure to build more sprawl rises in distant wetlands, open space, and environmentally sensitive lands near the Everglades. In other words, exactly what the Miami-Dade expressway authority is reviewing.
We wrote about this project a year ago, when it first visibly surfaced ... although it has been on the drawing boards for many years.
Before diving into the details of the political crack cocaine addiction, it is worth a review.
The enormous wealth generated through Wall Street finance based on mortgage derivatives depends on volume: volume of mortgages for commercial and residential real estate development. The volume, in south Florida, depends on local legislatures acting to open farmland to platted subdivisions. There is considerable process involved in "shifting the goal posts" in order to misallocate risk; wetlands need to be downgraded and rezoned, open space needs to be committed to bank branches, gas stations, and car dealerships, malls need to be built to service new subdivisions with residents clamoring for cheap services.
When, at some distant point in the future, taxpayers are left scratching their heads -- how did our quality of life get wrecked? -- the addicts point to "process" and "public hearings" and all the accountrements of re-zoning, downgrading, and destroying that decorate the Growth Machine Christmas Tree like decorations carefully packed and re-used as the years unwind.
The mechanics also depend on the illusion of spreading wealth and shifting, or ignoring, growth's true costs.
That's the underlying story of the $1 billion wastewater upgrade that is now resting on the backs of county taxpayers, as a result of decades of inaction -- stretching back to the early 1990's when a federal lawsuit forces Miami-Dade County and the EPA into a settlement agreement that the county proceeded to ignore.
Today, anything that smacks of regulatory authority or environmental enforcement is dismissed as "government over-reaching or overstepping its boundaries". This is commonly attributed to Tea Party enthusiasms, but Jeb! Bush articulate the core principle much earlier than the so-called "revolution" we know, now, to have been orchestrated by billionaire polluters like the Koch Brothers. Jeb!, in his final inaugural address as Florida's governor in 2003, boldly averred:
“There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill."
The crack cocaine dealers need the policemen to vanish from observing their street corner transactions. The Growth Machine needs new markets, free from pesky citizen suits and rancid delay: free for land speculators, cement manufacturers, roadway contractors, housing developers and real estate shills to pack local county boards and legislatures every time there is an effort to insert new zoning or new infrastructure to speed land development toward the Everglades. Boards like the MDX are in place, with characters culled from the Growth Machine, to dot the i's and cross the t's.
"Nothing can stop it!" crowed former WCI chairman Al Hoffman, who was Jeb's! hand-picked leader for the Council of 100 -- the state's top business lobby group -- in 2003. A few years later, the company Hoffman founded -- (Hoffman was also Jeb's and Dubya's campaign finance chair) -- would dissolve in bankruptcy. The point: the mechanics of suburban sprawl and land development are not only still in place, they have become even more frictionless with the decapitation of the single state agency charged with growth management by Gov. Rick Scott, Jeb's! successor.
This is what is unfolding in the corner of Miami-Dade at the western boundary with a plan to extend the SR 836 into farmland purchased at the top of the real estate bubble primarily by top GOP campaign contributors allied with US Century Bank (on US Century, check our archive). It is a tried and true formula for wealth generation: use profits from real estate development to secure political patronage, then use political patronage to stack permitting authorities and local boards to speed the way for new taxpayer investments that will double, triple, quadruple the price of real estate, and -- if you are very very connected -- arrange for highway exits and entrances to be put right where you want them.
Last February, we wrote, "Ajamil Bermello: members of the Growth Machine nomenklatura":
"Nomenklatura: a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in all sphere's of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, engineering and infrastructure development.
In Miami-Dade (and Florida) there is a parallel nomenklatura. Some key members of our own domestic nomenklatura are on parade through the effort to extend the Dolphin Expressway south on the western edge of the county, directly threatening Everglades National Park and benefiting land speculators who purchased property in anticipation of the growth of suburban sprawl: they are also key members of the nomenklatura and include Rodney Barreto, Ramon Rasco, Ed Easton and Sergio Pino.
This week, the board of the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority (MDX) unanimously approved adding the extension of the SR 836. Nearly 200 people voiced opposition to the project. Although it is not a done deal, changes to state law and agencies under Gov. Rick Scott and the anti-environmental GOP Florida legislature are going to make it quite difficult for citizens to stop the expansion that will expose many thousands acres of farmland to development pressure.
The local engineering firm, Ajamil Bermello, has put its shoulder to this wheels of progress.
Ajamil Bermello's Tere Garcia is providing public relations support for the MDX board. In response to opponents, she wrote recently in the professional, neutral tone that masks the frenetic investments of political energy to plow more highway in service of sprawl: "The extension of SR 836 is envisioned as a multimodal facility, used also by express transit buses, that would address the existing transportation needs of a vast community of thousands of existing residents living in the southwestern areas of Miami-Dade County west of the Turnpike. There will be no recommendation on MDX's behalf to move the Urban Development Boundary Line. Any alternative to be identified as part of the study must be evaluated considering all environmental requirements, sound engineering practices, be financially feasible and enjoy the support of those served."
Bermello Ajamil is part of the nomenclature that Occupy Miami and the rest of the Occupy movement ought to study. It takes a village to raise a child and confident engineers to wreck the village.
Willy Bermello, a founding partner of the engineering firm, famously tooted the housing boom in the Miami Herald in May 2005 at just about the same time much of the land in question in the SR 836 expansion was being purchased by nomenklatura friends: "This bubble is not latex," he wrote, "but stainless steel." The Herald provided no opportunity for rebuttal, showing its publisher also knew his place.
The point is that the worst economy since the Great Depression have not thwarted, changed, or modified the goals of the nomenklatura in Miami-Dade in the slightest. Ms. Garcia notes that the initial planning for the extension of SR 836 began in 2007: indeed, all that shows is that the nomenklatura have been intent-- from the start-- to build sprawl to the edge of the Everglades just like Broward."
It is worth tracking back to EOM posts on the land ownership patterns around the SR 836 planned extension. The only news in the Miami Herald report, below, is that commuters, through tolls, have funded a $6.9 million study that will no doubt reach the conclusion that the highway extension is a great public benefit.
The only reason it hasn't rolled out faster is that the real estate downturn turned all the assets in land into big craters on bank balance sheets. Some of these banks, like US Century, have struggled to keep their doors open and to maintain at least the figment of equity. (We still haven't heard all the details of who, exactly, was able to keep mortgages for large land holdings without being required to pay interest or principal while others were shut down and taken over.)
While small, individual homeowners found themselves forced to ruin by the downturn, big and politically connected land owners were protected by the banks that could not afford to "mark-to-market" the loans and so left them alone, once it became clear that federal banking authorities would do nothing to set the record straight.
These are hidden stories that sometimes emerge on 60 Minutes but otherwise stay mostly out of sight.
Take a good look at the owners of the property bordering the proposed MDX Expressway. Interpretation, to come.
New expressway idea for Southwest Miami-Dade draws fire
