Carlos Gimenez's virtual town hall - a mayoral pep rally

Perhaps we should have expected it, but the virtual town hall meeting with Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos “Good to Go” Gimenez on Facebook today was a real publicity coup and lovefest — with himself.

It will be fun to watch him do that tap dance in the in-person meetings throughout the month.

While Ladra was kind of thrilled that she actually got two questions read by Gimenez spokesman Michael “The Filter” Hernandez — especially since the mayor couldn’t answer either — the bulk of the queries tossed at the mayor were soft balls.

And a lot of the rest of the time was eaten up by what we in the media business call “filler.” Feel-good filler, to be exact.

Gimenez wants to start an anti-poverty initiative next year and partner with South Florida WorkForce to train residents “for jobs in the boom we’re about to have in construction.” He said the county was “leveraging” it’s own dollars as well as federal and state funds with private monies to create affordable housing projects. He boasted about the county being named an “innovation center” and said he aimed to make Miami-Dade the “Tech Beach” counterpart to Silicon Valley.

It was more pep rally than town hall, scheduled immediately after the launch of Capt. Jack Garcia‘s emotionally-laden recall effort, which Ladra hears the mayor is taking pretty seriously.

It was also a media consultant’s dream, fulfilling the whole purpose of these kinds of “face-to-face” meetings. People who do media training and crisis management have a formula: Q = A + M. That means every question equals an answer plus one of your main messages. Every subject comes to the table or a platform — TV show, radio appearance, virtual town hall — with three to five key messages that can be hammered on several different ways.

And this was his own platform, so he could go on about the M part of the formula forever if he wanted to. And he did.

He also announced that he was not raising Special Transportation Services fees, only bus fares. And he said that employees under his purview, about 400, continued to pay the concessions that everybody else got back with the override of his veto earlier this year. And then he sort of complained about the unions — which has become his mantra. When he was at the city of Miami 100 years ago, there were only four unions in the city, while the county has 10.

“It makes it complicated when we re negotiating with each one because they are always looking at each other,” Gimenez said.

I know! Don’t you feel bad for the poor mayor having to do all this hard work? Yeah, me neither.

He said that there would be absolutely no impact on police services or response times from the layoff of 238 officers, which is ludicrous. And even at best, the response times on following up or closing cases will definitely suffer. What he didn’t say is that the patrols will be spread out among a force that is already so shortstaffed it has to pay huge amounts of overtime, which is part of the problem.

There were harder questions posted on Facebook for Hernandez to choose from. One of my own was why is it more important to fund the Perez Art Museum Miami to the tune of $4 million instead of police and fire services? That question did not get picked.

Even the two of Ladra’s questions he did answer were half-a… half-answered. I asked why the surplus dollars from the seaport and airport, our main economic machines and taxpayer assets, couldn’t be used in the general fund. And he said no, flat out. He said the county has gotten in trouble for it before when the FAA found it used aviation dollars elsewhere. But he never touched on the follow up or part II of the question, which is that couldn’t the commission — if it has the will to do so — can change the charter or create whatever mechanism there is to unlock these “lockbox” funds? I mean, it’s a pretty sure bet we can find a better use for the $3 million we gave Carnival Cruise Lines as a “marketing incentive.”

Ladra repeatedly hears that the answer could have been yes, and that’s why he avoided it. But I think the commission should put the task to the overpaid county attorney.

The second question was one he couldn’t answer: What specific cuts has he proposed in other departments that are non resident services related — IT, attorneys office, internal services, etc. — other than police, fire, corrections and libraries. He couldn’t say. Really. He didn’t know.

“I don’t have a detail on that. But everybody has had to take a cut,” said Gimenez, by now a master of redirection. “I’ve had to lead by example. There’s a 20% reduction in my department alone.”

There’s that M for message again.

It’s no wonder the mayor loved the experience — it was a filtered, scripted “exchange” if even that. And guess what? We’ll get more of these self-promotional vignettes which cost the time of six staffers at least.

“Usually when you get to see me, it’s a 20-second soundbite or a line in a newspaper. This is a good way to talk about things that take a little more time to explain,” Gimenez said with a straight face.

“We’re going to do this more often,” he finished.

Well, lucky us.

budget cuts, Carlos Gimenez, labor issues, Miami-Dade budget

Carlos Gimenez’s virtual town hall — a mayoral pep rally added by Ladra on August 14, 2014
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