It’s very nice that Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez is putting $5 million more into our public 
parks and $2 million more into animal services and $1 million aside for a summer jobs program for needy youth.
What Gimenez didn’t say at his big reveal of the 2015-16 budget Tuesday is that he also wants to spend $14 million more in the Information Technology Department, where the budget is proposed to go up to $153 million.
That’s more than the parks department gets, more than the public housing department gets and more than the county allocates for the department of community action and human services. It’s almost twice the $80 million budget for PortMiami. It’s more than the budgets for juvenile services, libraries, cultural affair and county court services combined.
Read related story: Carlos Gimenez saves us — from himself
And for what? How can the IT department possibly cost $153.2 million to operate? 
If you divide that by the 26,000 county employees — even though certainly some use more IT than others — the cost is almost $6,000 per worker, per year. On IT.
So what exactly are we paying for at a tune of $153.2 million a year To put that in context, the parks department gets $144 million. Public housing gets $133 million. Juvenile services gets a paltry $11.5 million.
Commissioner Xavier Suarez, who thought the department was already over budget, is going to have an issue with this.
“It’s a department that didn’t need to exist 30 years ago,” Suarez said, again, this week. “And our systems and the way we deliver services have not really changed that much since then.”
Sure, there’s a website we didn’t have 30 years ago and you need to be constantly feeding it content. But that’s why you have communications people. And one, okay, maybe two webmasters. There are emails to organize and sort and route, but that shouldn’t take 656 employees to take care of that.
And that was for 2015. Next year, the staff increases by 81 people to 737 and salaries increase from $66.8 million to $74.7 million, about half of the department’s budget. Fringe benefits go up from $16.7 to $20.3 million. So salaries and benefits go up almost $12 million but operating costs only go up by $2 million or so.
Um, commissioners? This looks like the next place to have an audit.
Miami-Dade spends more on IT than parks or courts added by Ladra on
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