That was it?
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez finished his State of the County address just a 
couple hours ago, reading 46 pages worth of words in large font size and all caps without saying much — a feat in and of itself — leaving folks sorta looking left and right for something, well, something more.
Because at the end of the half-hour song and tapdance, there were more questions than answers. Like where’s the beef? This speech was all garnish.
The main question people in the audience and watching at home were asking was how is the mayor going to pay for any of the few important projects he remembers to mention? Gimenez talked about BayLink and other transit fixes and becoming a no-kill county at our animal shelter. He talked about his ballyhooed Employ Miami Dade initiative. But he identified no funding sources for any of these. Well, except $46,000 from his own office budget and a $10,000 contribution from the private sector.
“That’s one job,” tweeted Commissioner Mayor Sir Xavier Suarez, who may be a mayoral challenger in 2016.
“I didn’t hear any urgency. And it was totally devoid of any particulars,” Suarez later told Ladra about the speech. “On BayLink, it was the same statements he’s been saying. There was no concrete funding source identified for anything.”
Suarez was also surprised the mayor did not mention the other linkage projects, only 27th Avenue, but not Homestead or the branches going west. “That’s an integral part of what we all thing we should be doing,” Suarez said.
Another likely challenger, Miami-Dade School Board Member Raquel Regalado, agreed that the speech was all sparkle and no substance. My words, not hers. Hers are these.
“The mayor said we’ve turned the corner, but he didn’t give us any idea about what direction we’re going in,” Regalado told Ladra, shortly after the speech ended and she gave rebuttal interviews to Spanish-language news cameras.
“It was not a candid analysis of how we’re doing. He didn’t mention that the last budget ate up our library reserves. What are we going to do this year? He didn’t mention anything else about police, only body cameras. Aren’t we hiring more officers?”
In fact, Gimenez’s SOTC speech may be more telling in what he didn’t talk about: Nothing on Jackson Memorial Hospital (not even recognition of CEO Carlos Migoya, who was sitting there right in front of him), which is odd since it’s one of the county departments doing rather well and on the verge of announcing even more bond spending. Nothing on education. Nothing on the value adjustment board issues and how the problems there are taking hundreds of millions out of our county coffers. Nothing on the civil courthouse that is falling apart and for which he recommended a $400-million tax to relocate.
Don’t we still need a new courthouse? Is that not a priority anymore?
There was no mention of the game-changers, like the SkyRise Miami project to which he has pledged $9 million of our money, or the proposal to let Donald Trump take over our public golf course on Key Biscayne, or any future soccer stadium whether waterfront or landlocked, or how the renovations that have started or not started at the Miami Dolphins’ SunLife Stadium — in exchange for millions in county subsidies — are going to lift that neighborhood up.
In fact, and amazingly, there were no sports mentioned at all.
But then again, Gimenez didn’t write this State of the County speech. 
His spin doctors, led by Communications Director Michael “The Mouthpiece” Hernandez, wrote it.
Sorry, Monique Galvao, if you thought he really meant what he said when he thanked you for singing the National Anthem. I know he said it was beautiful, and it was. But those words were written for him, probably before you uttered a single note.
Gimenez doesn’t have a sincere bone in his body. Everything is scripted. Down to every single last “brief pause” — and one has to wonder if Hernandez was trying to script the applause, too.
Even the lame Obama joke that looked ad-lib is not the mayor’s own joke.
There were a few improvised moments, however. At one point, Gimenez stopped to ask if the speech writer had gotten his age correctly at 61. “Is that right?”
Because apparently, the mayor needs lots of direction on his talking points — even when it comes to his age.
Carlos Gimenez’s Miami-Dade SOTC: Much ado about nada added by Ladra on
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