Pets’ Trust goes statewide to force county’s 2012 referendum

• Tweet
• Sumo

• Tweet

It’s been more than two years since almost half a million Miami-Dade voters approved a referendum that would fund a no-kill animal services climate and program at the county.

Now the advocates who took that initiative to the ballot are pushing for statewide legislation that would force the county to respect that November 2012 vote where 65% of the people agreed to pay additional taxes, about $15 per average home, to create a dedicate source of revenue for this endeavor.

It was non-binding. But the numbers are also overwhelmingly a mandate.

And Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and the county commission have had the gall to pose with puppies at practically useless adopt-a-pet events while they continued to ignore that mandate for two annual budget cycles. They have money to give away in subsidies for friendly billionaire sports team owners and millionaire developers — Gimenez funding priorities that the people never got a chance to vote on, by the way.

Michael Rosenberg and Rita Schwartz, who are the Pets’ Trust organizers, have been fighting to get the 2012 referendum respected. They went to county municipalities and had the councils and commissions pass resolutions urging the county commission to approve the funding and the program. Now, they have taken that battle statewide with a bill that would force the county to respect the referendum and make it binding.

State Rep. Barbara Watson and State Sen. Dwight Bullard have sponsored corresponding bills which would allow citizen petitioners in Florida’s 67 counties to tax themselves to fund improvements in animal services. It is mirrored after the Children’s Trust initiative. The Pet’s Trust initiative was only non binding because the law prohibits self-taxation for those reasons. This bill would allow citizens, like us, to tax ourselves for such programs.

“We are spending millions of dollars to kill animals when we could be spending those same resources to save them,” Watson told Ladra. Somewhere around 60,000 people in her district voted in favor of the tax. For Bullard, whose district is larger, the number is probably higher.

And their law would be retroactive five years — which means that the 2012 referendum on the Pets’ Trust initiative would have to be respected and the county would have to fund a $20 million program aimed at decreasing the population of feral cats and stray or unwanted dogs through spay and neutering as well as education.

But first, it has to get through three committees. The Pets’ Trust advocates have been sending out email blasts urging people to call Representative Debbie Mayfield (772-778-5077) and ask her to put House bill 207 on her March 3 committee agenda and Sen. Wilton Simpson (850-487-5018) to ask him to put Senate Bill 670 on his March 4th agenda.

Rosenberg said that the calls must be made by today, Wednesday, in order for the bill to be placed on the agendas.

“When this passes, all counties, if they desire, would be allowed to have a vote to create their own Pets’ Trust, and the vote would be binding,” said Rosenberg, adding that 800 animals are killed each day in Florida at a cost of about $200,000 a day.

“This has gone on for decades. We’ve become complacent. But we can solve it,” he wrote in the email blast. “We don’t have high powered lobbyist fighting for this.  We don’t have developers seeking their own self interests.  We are not a corporation looking for selfish tax breaks.  But rather, we have you…and only you.”

Time and again the mayor and others who voted against giving the Pets’ Trust Initiative its funding have said that the people “didn’t know what they were voting for.” What people? I knew what I was voting for. So did a majority of the people that Ladra has spoken to about this. Does the mayor get to pick and choose when the people knew what they were voting for? Because he apparently thinks they knew they were voting for a $9 million subsidy when they approved the use of Miami city waterfront property for some preposterous “privately-funded” tourist attraction that is going to mar our skyline.

They approved an additional $4 million in funding to animal services, but those monies have largely gone to an increase in staff and have not addressed the issue of misspending at animal services.

An online petition started two years ago to have the county approve the Pets’ Trust Initiative — “support the will of the people and fund the entire amount that was voted for” — has collected more than 7,000 signatures. The Pets’ Trust people are getting handwritten signatures from people demanding that their vote be honored. So far, they have collected about 1,000, Rosenberg said.

“After the election, Mayor Gimenez said he would ‘support the will of the people’ and fund the entire amount they voted for. He even included the amount in his initial budget proposal,” Rosenberg reminded Ladra this week. “After saying this repeatedly for months and months, the Mayor decided that the people ‘really didn’t know what they were voting for,’ and killed the Pets’ Trust.

“He took it upon himself to cast aside almost a half million votes,” Rosenberg said.

Now, let’s hope the state takes it out of his hands.