Was Dade transit overcharged? Audit still a secret
Thirty months after it began, an audit on Metrorail's security billing is still pending.
"Auditor Cathy Jackson sent those findings -- which suggest the security firm may have overbilled the county -- to Wackenhut that month. They were never publicly released. Nineteen months later, the audit hasn't come out, the impact of the draft remains unclear and Jackson could face jail because she won't discuss it. Jackson's report, begun some 30 months ago, is at the center of an unusual lawsuit that accuses Wackenhut of widespread fraud for allegedly overbilling Miami-Dade millions of dollars for unguarded ''ghost posts'' on the transit system and at the Juvenile Assessment Center."
What disturbs me about this article, the tight lips of Burgess and Alvarez - they should be as outraged as we citizens are:
"County Mayor Carlos Alvarez and Manager George Burgess also refused to discuss the audit, the contempt charges, suit or criminal investigation."
Read our article on the subject:
Miami Dade County Sues Itself.
On another digusting note,
MIA train's cost taking off. According to the article in today's Miami Herald:
"The multimillion-dollar automated people mover, exercised in Japan for use at Miami International Airport's North Terminal, will cost tens of millions more.
The people mover's 20 cars, each 40 feet long, will travel by ship from Japan to Miami, and should arrive next month, said airport spokesman Greg Chin. About half of the track is in place at the North Terminal. Meanwhile, the project's costs keep mounting.
Sumitomo's original contract, when it was hired by American Airlines in 2002, was for $86,588,000. It was raised to $114 million last year and is expected to cost an additional $25 million to $35 million, Cosper said." And,
"Miami-Dade County commissioners will be asked Tuesday to approve a 57 percent increase for consultants Lea + Elliot, from $11.2 million to $17.6 million. The funds will be used to extend the contract, because of North Terminal construction delays."
And some of you annoying comment posters will try to tell us that MIA's "escalated cost from $500 million at its inception in 1993 to $2.853 billion today" does not come out of our tax money it comes out of fees charged at the airport. My answer is: You always pay in the end. Whether it is higher airfare or subsidies to cover short-falls because our airport fees are too high and non-competitive: We pay...big time...all the time!
6 comments:
You are absolutley right on who pays for this expensive boondoggle. Every traveler using MIA for decades to come will pay big-time for this horrible botched-up project through higher ticket prices, concession prices, wireless fees, you name it.
The airport has tremendous bond debt and interest payments that will cause it to increase per passenger costs into the $30+ range if not the $40+ range. MIA's high costs have kept low-cost airlines from serving MIA and now nearby Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport is chock full of them because their costs are 1/4th of what MIA's are and 1/7 to 1/9th of what MIA's will be in the future.
And where should we lay the blame? On two groups:
1. the high priced lobbyists that American Airlines hired to convince the county commissioners to allow American to manage the North Terminal Project,
2. the county commissioners who went along with the lobbyists and voted to allow American to manage the North Terminal project instead of the airport's own staff. Vile Natacha voted in favor of it as I recall. Are you surprised? This was the first time the county ever allowed an airline to manage a massive construction project using airport money.
American pledged that allowing them to manage the project would ensure that it would be built on time and within budget. Of course neither of that happened and they went back before the commission time and time again for more airport money because of repeated cost overruns.
Even with substantial additional funding to cover the repeated cost overruns, the project came to a standstill and the airport was forced to take the project back and award it to another contractor after bidding it out again.
The airport is trying to keep cost overruns down by eliminating certain things in the project, like escalators and other niceties, plus they've closed down Concourse A to remove it from being an airside project where construction workers have to pass background checks to work on an airfield and have ID cards to enter the airfield.
One has to wonder if American will even be around in its current form by the time the new terminal will open due to the escalating aviation fuel costs and AA's labor groups clamoring for raises to make up for their wage givebacks when AA almost declared bankrupty several years ago. American has a huge fleet of MD-80 fuel-inefficient aircraft that will need to be replaced but it'll be years before that happens.
If American goes bankrupt what happens to all the existing contracts and commitments that they have with the county concerning their use of the North Terminal? I suspect the contracts will be null and void. Can they reduce the number of daily flights that were guaranteed to be operated in order to help pay for the bond debt incurred by the airport? I suspect they can.
We need some investigative reporting on these issues. How screwed over will MIA and the county be if AA should falter in the future? I suggest very screwed over but I don't know for sure.
say Hoss...I like you.
Doesn't anybody find it ironic that AA was given the project because all the conservative spin says that corporate America can do this better than government? Cheaper faster better and all that?
"run government like a businesses" is all you hear to this day. So we should pay top administrators 400x what the grunts make, still let them tank the business and retire to the islands in style as multimillionaires?
WorldCom, Enron, Bear Stearns, practically every airline in the business, Home Depot, Adelphia, Chrysler (twice!), the list is infuriatingly long.
We seem to get the sharp end no matter what around here.
I like you too Genius, especially what you have to say on this blog and I'm a big fan.
Did anyone notice that the Herald deleted a bunch of comments that people left under the story on the North Terminal train costs escalating? There was a similar comment about American Airlines, commissioners and the lobbyists on there and it's gone forever.
Anonymous: excellent point on biz versus government. In this case the airport could have gotten the project done years and hundreds of millions, if not a billion or more, cheaper than going the AA route only to see it fail and then have to restart it after rebidding it.
It is the cuban mafia that ran the airport into the ground, before the take-off in housing it was Sergio Pino's power base. Rather than running it with Singapore like efficiency they mismanaged it and the whole economy of SoFl pays the price. IF these people, Pino-Rubio jeb etc.. want to bring us extreme right wing policies the least they could do is bring them from Asia and not Latin America, at least then we would get a better return on our property taxes.
Why do you think they had to get Angela out of the way? She is a straight shooter who would not go along with the LBA. That's why we don't have many honest administrators.
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