Miami-Dade to pay $10 mil for transit grants, firing

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It’s not bad enough that Miami-Dade got caught lying to the federal government to get somewhere around $6 million in transit grants that we apparently didn’t use right and now Uncle Sam is demanding we pay back.

It gets worse: Some honcho at County Hall had the gall to fire the eagle eye employee who caught this fraud and brought it to someone’s attention.

Now, she or he is going to get $3 million — $1.3 mil for acting as “relator” to the U.S. government and $1.6 for wrongful firing. Furthermore, the employees attorneys fees will be paid by the county, to the tune of $2.25 million.

The county totals a settlement before the commission on Tuesday at just under $10 million. But Ladra’s math has it at just over $11 million — almost half of which is due to what looks obviously like a retaliatory firing.

And, yes, I am curious to see how the Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos “Not A Magician” Gimenez explains getting the monies from “future savings” as well as an insurance pot for lawsuits that may or may not cover fraudulent use of federal grant monies.

The settlement stems from audits conducted on federal grant monies that the county got between 2004 and 2010. It came with conditions. We had to use certain language in the awarding of contracts. And it looks like the federal government’s requirements competed with our county’s own requirements to hire locally and a certain number of minority firms. So, someone apparently chose our own rules over theirs.

So, maybe the fraudulent use of those federal funds was really a mistake. An expensive mistake that may have cost us about $43 million in federal transit funds that were originally frozen before we got the tap turned back on. That is certainly possible.

But the firing of the employee, identified as Marjan Mazza, was not a mistake. That was intentional. That was retaliatory. And now it’s going to cost the county $5.25 million — or almost as much as what we have to reimburse the feds.

Ladra would say it should also cost someone their job. But the former transit director who fired Mazza, Harpal Kapoor, is no longer there. He left his $140,000-a-year job in 2011.

Is there nobody up the chain of command who shares responsibility? Who was minding the store at Human Resources when this came over the counter? Is there a deputy mayor that approved the termination?

And, more importantly, what can the county do about a climate in which it is a-ok to fire a whistleblower?

  Carlos Gimenez, transit