The Miami Herald Left it to Eye on Miami to Fill the Saturday Editorial Gap...
26 PAGE ITINERARY FOR THE MIAMI DADE COUNTY PARIS AIR SHOW TRIP, 21 PEOPLE ARE GOING INCLUDING LOBBYISTS:
There will be plenty of time for Gimenez to butter-up Monestime (they are both going). To hell with Sunshine. This is disturbing to me. I can just see the ooze of love and manipulation over poor Jean. Don't buy it Jean, it is just bullshit. You are going to be played on the OOH LA LA Trip.
We wrote eloquently about Audrey Edmonson's power grab at the County Commission in "We Didn't Elect a Queen" on May 20th.
Unfortunately for us, Michael Lewis of Miami Today wrote even more eloquently on the same subject:
When our commissioners battle parochially, it’s not good guys vs. bad guys. Because each wins office via geographic voting, they face a dysfunctional dilemma about how to serve the public.
Assuming that they’re trying to do their best, commissioners elected from single-member districts face four possible choices:
• Act for my district.
• Act for the people who helped elect me.
• Act for the whole community.
• Act as my brain and conscience dictate.
All of these are valid ways of looking at how to serve, write legislation and vote. But some, to corrupt a line from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” are far more valid than others.
Representative government works best when elected officials trust their conscience on what will best serve the whole community. It stumbles when they divvy up the pie so that each district’s share is equal, regardless of whether that is the smartest use of limited resources.
And it works absolutely worst when commissioners not only divvy up the pie by district but then try to erect walls around their districts and take control of whatever goes on inside those walls, telling other commissioners: keep out, this is mine.
That’s when commissioners on the dais talk about being collegial – a code word for keeping out of someone else’s territory and splitting the pot of resources equally rather than intelligently.
When commissioners are at their most parochial, they say they were elected to look out for their district, that that’s what the voters had in mind when they went to the polls – as though commissioners could read minds.
While all this sounds theoretical, it plays out poorly in practice.
As county commissioners last week discussed raising fees to use land beside American Airlines Arena that serves Miami Heat entities, Commissioner Audrey Edmonson, whose district bulges out to encompass the site, said that the plan sponsored by Juan Zapata would impact county property within her district and she should get deference to decide because it’s a local matter, not countywide.
“If this goes through,” she said, “then I think each one of us will now have to worry about each other crossing the lines and coming in and just doing what they want to do in everybody’s district. This is disrespectful.”
Out of respect for district lines or for whatever reason, commissioners did not raise the Miami Heat’s bill.
