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But there are zero from the county attorney’s office, which a Miami Herald story recently found to be the area with the most bloated salaries. Ladra is told that the mayor cannot make any layoff or salary cuts there. That is set entirely by the commission. But the mayor has recommended a 5% cut. Oh, and commissioners keep all their staff and the mayor keeps all but two of his staff. He’s lost two communications staffers but keeps two, because he once had four in his budget.
Gimenez complains that cops are paid too much, and the Miami Herald told us that attorneys are paid too much. But one quick look in a couple of hours through the transparency salary search on the county’s website indicates that there are many high salaries that the mayor and his supporters do not criticize as much as they do cops and firefighters and librarians.
The director of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens makes $160,500 a year. He gets an $6,175 paycheck every two weeks. The same department has a director of advancement who makes $115,000 a year — you know, because the director himself can’t do that. We have a park planner that makes $105,000 and an architect in parks and recreation who makes $126,200 and a transportation systems manager who makes $123,000 — but doesn’t work in transit. He’s in the Metropolitan Planning Organization (the director of which makes $190,000) in one of several positions that look, on the surface, like they overlap with other county positions. Do we really need so many high priced executives to do basically the same thing?
We still remember when we paid two Port of Miami directors at the same time, and that one of them got a raise from $120,000 to $290,000 so he wouldn’t leave to Jacksonville when the other one left to the Beacon Council. We got to keep Juan Kuryla, for an $11,150 paycheck every two weeks. Oh, and wait, we also got to keep Bill Johnson, who never went to the Beacon Council, and is still paid $275,000 now to head the Water and Sewer department. That’s a $10,600 paycheck home every two weeks.
Why hasn’t the Inspector General, who makes $206,000 a year and has multiple staffers who make six figures, caught on to this?
Even within his own office, the mayor has some hefty salaries that don’t seem to be touched by his budget cut measures. Sure, he self-imposed a pay cut when he first took office that means his measly biweekly paycheck is just $5,770. El pobrecito. But each of his five deputy mayors make more for a combined $1.2 million. And there are six assistants to the five deputy mayors that make between $87,000 and $109,000 a year. Then there’s his chief of staff, Lisa Martinez, who makes $180,000 a year — a nice bump from the $130,000 she made just last year as his senior policy aide — and his legislative and policy aide, Inson Kim, who makes $105,000 a year, which is a pretty good raise from the $62,000 salary she made when she was Gimenez’s commission aide in 2010.
Nice work, if you can get it… or, stomach it, rather.
There were more than 700 layoffs last year, too. But while 717 positions were eliminated, 391 were added for a net reduction 326. The year before that, there were 728 positions eliminated and 133 added for a net reduction of 595. But neither one of those years compare to Gimenez’s first in office, the one with the massive tax cut after the mayor was elected. The 2011-2012 budget adjusted to the new reality saw the elimination of 1,398 positions and addition of 259 for a net loss of 1,139 jobs.
And people wonder why there is so much overtime in police and fire. This is why, folks.
There has to be a point at which this is not sustainable. Gimenez has already reduced the workforce by more than 2,000 people — albeit maybe not the right people — in the interest of holding the line on an artificial tax rate and utilizing a rob-peter-to-pay-paul policy that is unsustainable.
He drained the library reserves by shifting its millage to the general fund — in other words, lowering the library millage rate to raise the millage rate for the general fund, defacto raising the tax rate without taxpayers noticing — and now wants to dip into $3 million of the fire department’s reserves to subsidize the library fund he raided. This is the same fire department that faced layoffs and eliminated units — rescue trucks, fire ladders, etc — last year.
Apparently, Gimenez likes to pass the buck — or the pea, as it were, since he does often look like a magician performing a shell game, trying to pass the pea from under one shell to the the other without anyone noticing the slight of hand. That is why we will be paying more to the Miami Heat in subsidies in 2030 and the “up to” $5 million a year payments from tourist taxes to the Miami Dolphins — for events they would have anyway — starting 10 years from now. By then, Gimenez will be safely out of office and have sold his million dollar Coconut Grove home so he could move to Broward, where his golden parachute pension from his city of Miami days will stretch further.
But this passing the buck is not sustainable in the long run for the rest of us who plan to stick around or are left behind.
In 2011, just three years ago and less than three weeks after he was elected in that post-recall craziness, Gimenez cut taxes by an irresponsible 12 percent — or $130 for every $100,000 of taxable property. He did that because he promised, in the recall campaign and the mayoral campaign that followed, to undo the tax increase (which was 13%) approved under the reign of former recalled Mayor Carlos Alvarez.
But what Gimenez still fails to understand (or wants us to believe he doesn’t understand) isn’t that the voters recalled Alvarez on the tax hike per se. It’s that he had the gall to float that tax hike while he rewarded his cronies with big, fat raises and gave away the bank to the Miami Marlins and others (because Ladra is sure there were other sweetheart deals back then, too).
Gimenez keeps saying that he knows the public doesn’t want to pay more taxes for more services, when we’ve all heard just the opposite in the community. Wait, didn’t the Pet’s Trust initiative get a 64% vote from a public willing to tax itself more for a no-kill shelter with a spay and neuter program that would actually make a difference (more on that later)? But he’s been able to ignore that and say the people will not support a tax increase to fund better services or even keep them intact?
What the public doesn’t want is to pay more taxes so that millions can be given away to museums and sports teams and cruise companies and the businesses that employ the mayor’s children in what some people call his “circles of love” and Ladra calls the Friends and Family Plan.
Are these five things all you have to know about the Miami-Dade 2014-15 budget? Not. Even. Close. We are talking about a 600-page-plus document that some believe is intentionally made unnecessarily complicated so that people (read: taxpayers, voters, you) are intimidated and prevented from asking questions. It even scares Ladra.
But it’s a good start on Day One to have some history and a different perspective. And perhaps these 5 things to know about the budget can lead to some hard questions and review of the decisions that are made by this administration.
The mayor insists people do not support a tax increase — no way, no how. “I’m not deaf,” he told the Miami Herald.
Ladra would say he is deaf, blind, dumb and unable to smell something fishy.
Or he thinks we are.
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