It seemed for a while that Miami-Dade Commissioner “Mayor Sir” Xavier Suarez had gone soft on 
the county mayor and was biting his articulately critical tongue for one reason or another. Some speculate he wants his way on the proposed Museum Park underpass. Others say he’s seeking support on some future transportation initiatives or his favorite pet cause, the Coconut Grove Playhouse.
Ladra worried he had crossed over to the dark side and I missed his biting criticism of Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos “Cry Wolf” Gimenez.
It seemed for a while that Suarez might not challenge Gimenez and would just sit by and let Miami-Dade School Board Member Raquel Regalado
get all the potential contender attention.
But look again.
Suarez snapped out of what Ladra calls a political coma Wednesday with a renewed zest to criticize the Gimenez way and a tangible attack: a petition drive for a referendum that would force the county to cap employee salaries at $162,200. Currently, 120 employees, or about one percent of the county workforce, earn a salary greater than that.
The commissioner talked about these “one percenters” at a hastily-called press conference that sounded much like a campaign speech.
“Everybody wants to talk about the one percent in the private sector. Well, somebody has to tell Mr. Gimenez that the folks out here aren’t happy with the 1 percenters in government,” Suarez said. Notice he calls Gimenez mister and not mayor.
He told Political Cortadito that he’s not worried about losing top people like veteran administrator Bill Johnson, most recently head of the Water and Sewer Department, who has taken a job with the state’s corporate recruiting arm.
Read related story: Bill Johnson leaves county nest just as billions get ready to fly
“They’re all nice people,” Suarez told Ladra. “But I can replace any of them, including the attorneys.
“These folks make 13 times what the typical resident makes. It doesn’t make any sense,” Suarez later told Ladra. “There is no one that I know with the qualifications that a typical county manager has that thinks they can make $162,000 in the private sector,” he said, correcting himself immediately. “Well, only one. Jennifer Glazer-Moon,” he said about our budget director, who makes about $218,400 a year.
And he seems to be taking aim at the attorneys more than anybody else. “When I am walking into chambers on a meeting day, you literally cannot get through the hallway — there are so many attorneys. They’re all nice people. They’re all good lawyers. But there’s too many of them,” Suarez said.
But the salary cap — for which he would have to collect 52,000 signatures, a major feat to undertake without financing — is only one front on Suarez’s renewed attack on the mayor.
“We went from 4,400 to 4,500 administrators in three years, even while the rank and file went down from 22,000 to 19,000. No wonder we don’t have anyone to cut the grass. No wonder we don’t have librarians. No wonder we don’t have hydraulic engineers and are spending hundreds of millions on consultants when we gotta do this stuff in house,” Suarez said.
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