On tonight’s big budget night, which everyone has been anticipating, commissioners are flying blind. Pretty much just 
like the rest of us.
That’s because the last minute about-face made by Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez — who first proposed a small tax increase to maintain services and then switched to a more politically convenient (really? how’s that working out for ya?) zero tax increase that drastically cut library and fire rescue services — hasn’t been caught up to on paper.
That’s right, commissioners are still working off the old books.
“The budget book they gave me is based on a budget that no longer exists,” Commissioner Juan Zapata told me on Sunday, as he worked on an estimate for a re-roofing (his real job).
“These are the numbers from before the mayor changed from the tax increase to a flat tax” Zapata added. “We ask for more information and they play with numbers and give us some updated stuff here and there, but I operate half blind because you never know the whole truth. Nobody in the county gives you 100 percent of the information.
“I don’t get a lot of details,” he said. And here I thought it was just us, Joe Q. Public, who was kept in the dark.
“Making decisions on half the information is a very poor way to govern and who has the information? The administration,” said Zapata, who said he doesn’t understand why the commission does not have its own budget director, something he said he got used to in Tallahassee as a state rep.
“Someone who can sit down and give us the numbers,” he said. What about Budget Director Jennifer Moon?
Apparently, Zapata doesn’t trust her either.
“Jennifer is very good at shifting numbers and moving dollars out of UMSA and into other areas, like cultural affairs,” Zapata said, adding that at a recent meeting with Moon and two or three other budget officers — and he questioned the need for so many people at that meeting — he made a couple of suggestions to save millions of dollars.
“Someone said, ‘You make a good point.’ And I said, ‘Is it going to change?’ And they said, ‘We’ll see,'” Zapata told me.
“They answer when they want to answer.”
So, it’s not just me. It’s not just you, dear reader. Whew.
It’s not just Zapata, either. Commissioner Xavier “Mayor Sir” Suarez is another one who thinks that the numbers — which can change, depending on $52 million typos here and there — are unknown and/or unreliable.
“I don’t have any real numbers to go on,” Suarez told me at lunch a couple of weeks ago. “I’m still waiting for the updated budget and it’s useless to work with these.”
Maybe that is the whole idea — to render them useless.
When I complained to each of them in recent days about not understanding the budget and believing that the county does it that way on purpose so that the general public doesn’t even want to try to get their arms around it, they agreed. They even agreed with my comparison to a shell game — you know, the kind con artists on the boardwalk use?
“It is a shell game,” Zapata said. “What I’ve seen is a shell game. We rob Peter to pay Paul and in there you hide a lot of inefficiencies and stuff like that.”
And it’s true. Because while the mayor is fond of saying that the budgets are all separate and they can’t be intertwined, he has no problem raiding the piggy banks of the library budget and the fire rescue district budget to fill in the holes of his reserve funds. Maybe it is so he can keep going to Europe and D.C. while his high paid staff of five deputy mayors and his well-compensated administrative cabinet do all the real work.
Which, apparently, includes not “playing” with the numbers and providing half the information.
Tonight’s budget hearing is a big deal. The county is expecting overflow audience into a side room where the meeting will be televised. This is the last chance, we keep hearing over and over again, for the commission to change its mind and set a slightly increased tax rate — at a cost of less than $50 a year for the average household to keep all services in tact — that will keep libraries open full time and paramedics on the job and save little kitties and puppies, too.
Like that could possibly happen.
Yeah, I know, I know. It could technically happen. Commissioners could vote to up the tax rate and spend another unbudgeted $700,000 to resend bill estimates to property owners. Nobody ever remembers that being done before.
And it won’t be done now either. And anyone remotely pitching that is wasting their breath and our time.
We need to focus, instead, on searching for those “shifting” numbers and moving the priorities back to where they ought to be.
Of course, for that, commissioners would need to have some real numbers.
Numbers, schnumbers: Commissioners fly blind on budget added by Ladra on
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