The topic of last night was the county budget, but a couple of Miami-Dade Commissioners decided to take the opportunity to criticize the elephant in the room: a recall effort against one of their colleagues.
Commissioners Dennis Moss, Bruno Barreiro and Audrey Edmonson each said that the recall — announced last week when Vice Mayor Lynda Bell‘s name was pulled out of a hat — was counterproductive.
“We don’t need to operate Miami-Dade County via threat of recall. We just went through that with Braman, said Moss, referring to auto mogul Norman Braman, who financed the recall of former Mayor Carlos Alvarez and former Commissioner Natacha Seijas and threatened a few more, including Barreiro and Edmonson. He apparently has not relationship to this recall effort, spearheaded by the Pets’ Trust people and the Miami Economic Sustainability Alliance.
“We clearly hear your concerns,” Moss said. “But I just ask that you rescind this whole recall effort. This is not the right way to go.”
It’s how he finished his statements and how Edmonson began hers.
“Just about every vote up here is controversial. Your’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” Edmonson said. “It’s just ironic, we had a mayor and we had a commissioner that was recalled because they voted to increase taxes. I and four of my colleagues, we were targeted by a billionaire and a small group for the same reason…they didn’t like the vote.”
And they may not have liked her vote had she been there instead of at a reunion with her sorority sisters when the commission voted on the flat tax rate.
“I would have voted to raise the taxes and then there would have been people who had gotten angry with me,” Edmonson said. “She voted the opposite of what I would have voted, but that’s what she thought was best.
“We cannot continue as commissioners to be governed by the threat of recall. I am going to stand behind her. I feel, I have to stand behind her for that reason. We have different philosophies but I have to stand with her and I think we all should stand with her.”
Barreiro mentioned his brush with the recall also. “Been there, gone through the whole process and it definitely does not help the community in any way,” said the one of the four other targeted commissioners who came close, reportedly within a few signed petitions, to being in the recall vote.
“First of all, government has to be stable for people to get behind a government and support it and if you take away the stability then forget about ever getting anything done because then it just goes down hill.
Bell chimed in, too, saying she was “not going to change, not even under threat of recall.” But then she said she would continue to support the pet people and Ladra was under the impression she was being recalled in part because she had voted against the pet people. Oh, semantics are a bitch.
And so are costs, which was the focus of this meeting. So Bell turned it back that.
“How much does a recall cost the taxpayers plus then the special election should it be successful,” she asked the mayor, possibly knowing it should be budgeted in for this year.
Mayor Carlos Gimenez told her each election, because it was limited to one district, would cost about $400,000.
Before the vote to go another way, orchestrated by the mayor and Chairwoman Rebeca Sosa who preferred a one-time raid of the reserves than to resend trim notices to keep libraries open, Edmonson was contemplating voting no on keeping the tax rate flat.
“I hope somebody don’t try to recall me for voting no,” she said.
Commissioners rebuff Lynda Bell recall at budget hearing added by Ladra on
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