On the same day, in the same meeting, in the same room where the Miami-Dade Commission voted Tuesday to keep
taking 5% from 25,000 or so county employees contributing to a group healthcare subsidy fund that they were promised would end in January, the county gave $3 million away to NCL Cruise Lines.
All while Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez says “we have to roll up our sleeves,” and Chairwoman Rebeca Sosa says “everybody has to make a sacrifice.”
Guess she doesn’t really mean everybody.
Not her staff, which got a 3% raise this year.
And not billion-dollar industry giants like NCL Cruises, for whom Sosa actually sponsored the resolution to give $3 million in “marketing incentive payments” for them to increase the number of passengers it brings to Miami-Dade, which it will inevitably do anyway.
Really? Really?
Are we in the business of providing “marketing incentive payments” to local businesses for doing what they should do anyway for their own success?
Or is that a kickback for contributions? Is that a payoff? What the hell is that? Because it makes no sense.
In this gloom and doom scenario the mayor keeps painting where the sky will fall if he has to find $56 million in his obviously bloated $4.4 billion budget — “the County’s expenses are rising faster than its recovery,” he said at the impasse hearing Dec. 5 — can we afford to give $3 million to a profitable cruise company so that they are encouraged to sell more tickets?
Really?
That $3 million would almost take care of the 1,800 employees in the county Water and Sewer Department, which, by the way, is a money-making department that should be able to sustain this cost if the county weren’t using it’s funds to subsidize other things.
Are there more “marketing incentive payments” and could they, possibly, add up to $56 million? I asked the mayor’s office and was referred to the Port of Miami spokeswoman. Do we only give away these “marketing incentives” at the port?
Many of us believe that there is money hidden here and there in the budget. These “marketing incentive payments” (no matter how many times I say it, it still don’t sound right) are not the only waste, says Emilio Azoy, president of the AFSCME local that represents the WASA workers.
His department alone, he says, has spent at least $410 million on consultants since 2007, much of it “on projects that will never be built.” During the same five year span, the department’s engineering staff has reduced by almost half, from 112 to 66 employees.
Really? That is yet to be confirmed — and Ladra has asked for some details from the county staff. But how many times has the commission approved “studies,” for example, that ended up on the shelf or having to be “re-studied” years later when things change?
Azoy cites a recent audit of a professional agreement with Hayzen & Sawyer Professional Service which criticized, among other things, a $1.8 million expenditure for 29,605 hours of “non professional” secretarial and clerical services, averaging at about $62 an hour, after applying a 2.85 multiplier reserved for “professional skills.”
So, at the same time as the county is trying to, rightfully perhaps, do away with “multipliers” among its own workers, this administration seems to embrace them when paying outside vendors, which may or may not be campaign contributors.
“The ‘Summary of Questionable Charges’ on this Agreement alone was $3,538,682, which exceeds the amount necessary for the return of this unit’s health insurance contribution for the fiscal year,” Azoy said in a letter to Gimenez Dec. 14, after he heard of the veto the day before.
The union leader also says that the audit he mentioned above cited the department’s failure to use its multi-million dollar Project Control and Tracking System to monitor, track and record project expenditures, including consultants fees.
Really? Does that smack of the transparency you promised, Mr. Mayor?
No, it does not.
Ladra has also asked the mayor’s office about this tracking system and why it is not working, if that is the case. I was referred to the Water and Sewer Department and will get the answer to you as soon as I get it.
But there is something wrong with this shell game presented as a normal budget by this administration. And Azoy said he is going to ask the Inspector General to investigate some of these “wasteful practices” and seemingly bogus consultant contracts that he says is where the money is being diverted.
Because he has brought these issues to the attention of the mayor during the negotiations, and all the suggestions the union has identified for savings have fallen on deaf ears.
It’s not that the mayor doesn’t want to give back the workers’ 5% — which, by the way, is on top of 11% in other concessions they have been making since 2009. It’s that he doesn’t want to take money away from all the consultants and “professional services” to do it.
Oooohhh. Now I get it.
So do the employees. And you know where.
Budget score: County labor 0, NCL/consultants $413 million+ added by Ladra on
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