Teele, Little Haiti Park, and the dark stain of names ... by gimleteye

Fred Grimm is emerging in The Miami Herald as the sharper edged local editorial writer, filling where Jim Defede wrote. I am glad for that. But I have a more nuanced view of, "Names of the disgraced stain our landscape" (May 6, 2008) in which Arthur Teele is penned with inglorious former public servants whose names grace our public buildings.

Yesterday, Miami commissioners formally approved the naming of a yet-to-be-built community center at Little Haiti Park after former Miami-Dade and Miami Commissioner Arthur E. Teele Jr.

In his editorial, Grimm writes, "Teele's 2005 suicide preempted a tidal wave of state and federal corruption charges, laden with fraud and kickbacks. No matter. The Miami Herald's Michael Vasquez reported last week that the City Commission seems hellbent on saddling Little Haiti with that tainted name."

Ah, how strange why names get tainted, or, not-- in Miami. Every time I walk into County Chambers, I am reminded as are, no doubt, countless others that Stephen Clark, for whom the imposing cement building is named, was legendary for taking money on the side and rewarded in ways that are still percolating to the surface.

Don't think for a second, that some in the unreformable majority of sitting county commissioners aren't reminded, too, every time they park by the day care center and enter County Hall from behind that their own ideas of free enterprise are supported by the unwritten example of the late Mayor Clark.

Arthur Teele was driven mad partly, I imagine, by his obsession with the double-standard that gives the Hispanic majority in power the opportunity to victimize African American leaders. He was cut from a different order of cloth, or Dashiki, from the current crop of county commissioners: Audrey Edmunson, Dorrin Rolle, and Barbara Jordan-- who seem perfectly satisfied to horse-trade zoning votes for their small piece of the pie. (Yesterday, eyeonmiami took a look at Edmunson's campaign contribution list to fill in the details. It is not the same list of contributors who would have shown up on Teele's reports.)

So I think it is wrong to be glib about the stains on Miami's landscape, because the stains are so much a part of the landscape that their pattern forms a cultural Rorsach test. In the same B section of The Herald, in which the Teele naming was mentioned, I noticed two more that Arthur would have complained bitterly about were he alive to do so.

The first has to do with the lawsuit brought by Norman Braman against the Global Agreement devised, largely in secret, by Mayor Manny Diaz. Braman is challenging the agreement on many fronts, but the one most resonant with Teele is the decision to use Community Redevelopment Agencies-- "special funds that require new property-tax money in blighted areas to be used for neighbhorhood improvements"--in the pool of money to support the arts center debt and other aspects of the multibillion dollar project.

Teele made Diaz and his consigliere furious with the way that he held control of the Community Redevelopment Agencies and property owned by the CRAs in his district. They were his "bargaining chips" in what he believed to be the inevitable greed of developers to spring into Overtown and Liberty City: he wanted the deal to be the one that he brokered, not the Hispanic business and political elite.

In order to maintain control, or the semblance of control, Teele made everything incredibly complex -- in the end, he was defeated by all the angles and his own complexities. I suppose, part of Teele's paranoia was that people in power who detested him also were hardly impartial in their own judgments how law enforcement should be applied in investigations of public corruption.

I don't condone anything illegal that Teele may have done in his career; his suicide ended a long, painful run-up to criminal charges.

But there are plenty of other county and city commissioners, like Stephen Clark in the past or some sitting commissioners today, who could never withstsand the full weight of criminal investigation unless they played along. You see, it is not as clear as Grimm would have it-- the indignation that the names of corrupt or immoral public servants stains our landscape.

Symbolism counts in more discrete ways that do add up and point to the selective enforcement of the law. There is the story of Miami Police Chief John Timoney in the Herald, just under the Braman lawsuit against the claim of unlawful use of CRA funds, whose 2007 annual report includes a big page advertisement from Lexus of Kendall, that seems a direct slap against those appalled that Miami's top law enforcement officer took a free, extended use of a Lexus from Kendall.

Maybe it's a minor point. Maybe what the chief of police did in Miami doesn't amount to taking cash in a brown paper sack. Maybe the great Global Agreement and its string of long string of payoffs doesn't match up to Art Teele's husbanding of the CRA's, but I will bet if you ask the people of Little Haiti what they want-- they would say, just give us the damn park with Teele's name on it.

Let us play our games, while you play yours.

During his life Arthur Teele prodded and pressed for a park in Little Haiti. He knew perfectly well that other county and city commissioners get theirs, for their own, and that the large Haitian population, children, adults, and all their families deserved more.

I am glad Teele's name will be on that park. It reminds me how our politics contribute to humiliations that make us all poorer.