County Denver trip foreshadows big transportation project

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, Commissioner Esteban Bovo, Bruno Barreiro, Dennis Moss and Jean Monestime, plus at least seven other county officials, including Deputy Mayor Ed Marquez and the newly-appointed Transit Director Alice Bravo (more on her later), are heading to Denver next week for a three-day transportation field trip. They will meet with local political and business leaders, attend briefings on financing and delivery mechanisms for Denver’s ballyhooed FasTracks mass transit projects — with an emphasis on private public partnerships — and get tours of at least three of the projects that have made the Colorado city a model road map of sorts for urban transit development.

The purpose of the “fly-in,” according to an announcement from the Miami Downtown Development Authority, will be to “learn first-hand how the area has been successful in implementing their transportation vision — the Denver FastTracks Program. FastTracks include 122 miles of new commuter rail and light rail and 18 miles of bus rapid transit implemented through innovative joint development and public private partnerships.”

That’s what makes Denver’s example so special — because it happened through pioneer private-public partnerships that have traditionally been a difficult sell on mass transit projects. There were also multiple obscure federal and state grants that were dug out, targeted and cobbled together.

But those monies were leveraged and/or matched with public funds through a half-penny sales tax that raised $600 million over 10 years for light rail, rapid bus lines and transportation infrastructure — a high profile ballot tax referendum that passed in 2004 and that Denver is using for the projects it told voters it would fund, unlike Miami-Dade, which has squandered millions of our own half penny tax increase from 2002.

Now, Gimenez has not said the words transportation tax. And Ladra does not think he would do something as foolish as that. He is in a hotly contested re-election next year. The referendum would likely be on the same ballot as his job. Increased taxes were the least acceptable financing methods for transportation projects in a recent Bendixen Amandi voter poll for the Miami Herald. And Gimenez is running as the man who has brought down or, at least held the line on taxes. Even though some property owners pay more today than when he was elected, that is either because of increased property values or because someone screwed up the special taxing district numbers and the taxpayer had been underpaying for years. The point is that Gimenez is running practically exclusively on his no new taxes message and he’s not about to pull an about face on that, especially after announcing earlier this month that his staff has identified about $2 billion that the county will be able to apply to transportation projects over the next 30 years.

“Those dollars may be used to issue debt and leverage additional federal and state dollars,” Gimenez said, adding that it could balloon up to $5 or $6 billion.

A tax is not completely out of the question, however, if any Destination Denver delegates come back convinced that a dedicated public funding source must be part of the formula and someone other than Gimenez (read: any one of the lobbyists who stand to make millions off greasing those wheels) champions it, so the mayor can keep a distance. The problem with that is voter’s haven’t forgotten the broken promises from when we approved our own half penny sales tax increase for public transportation improvements in 2002.

Had the mayor and commissioners not stolen our hard earned tax dollars, we, too, would have a new glistening train to carry us from Miami Beach to Kendall and from Aventura to Florida City. — Had the mayor and commissioners not stolen our hard earned tax dollars, we, too, would have a new glistening train like this one in Denver to carry us from Miami Beach to Kendall and from Aventura to Florida City.

Those funds were supposed to be dedicated to expansion of public transit, including new Metrorail lines to the western suburbs and another one North up 27th Avenue to the county line and new rapid lane busways or municipal circulators to feed those train stations. Monies were used, instead, to offset operating costs in the transit department and, 13 years later, only a 2 1/2-mile Metrorail extension to Miami International Airport has been completed.

In any case, the trip to Denver seems like another junket, just like the Paris adventure last month. Timed, by no coincidence, to escape the August heat of Miami. There is nothing that the mayor and Bovo and the others can learn in Denver that they couldn’t learn online and in telephone conference calls. They already have a relationship with Philip Washington, general manager of the Denver Regional Transportation District, who was invited to the county’s transportation summit in January. “At that summit Mr. Washington invited Mayor and BCC to visit Denver to see how they have done their transportation planning and building of new transit options over the last ten years,” said a statement from the mayor’s office.

But let’s say, for a moment, that it’s a good idea for the mayor and the very green transit director and, okay, even Bovo, as chairman of the Transportation and Mobility Committee, to see first hand and experience Denver’s system. Ladra can buy that — especially if they ride the bus and talk to mass transit users about what works and what doesn’t, which is not on their itinerary. Neither is a session on how to stop yourself from misspending transit tax dollars.

But do 40 people need to go? Absolutely not. In addition to the county electeds and staffers, there are real estate executives and representatives from Florida East Coast Industries and All Aboard Florida, which has been talking about building a station downtown, paying their own way on the field trip. The DDA is sending people, as is the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce and the Citizens Independent Transportation Trust (CITT).

Also attending: Miami City Commissioners Francis Suarez and Marc Sarnoff, who is termed out in three months, and Miami Beach Assistant City Manager Kathy Brooks. Those cities are not sending 12 people each.

Because is there really a reason for the mayor’s Chief of Staff Alex Ferro to be there? Most of the mayor’s staff will stay in Miami, won’t they? Monestime’s chief of staff is also on the list of delegates. Is he carrying the chairman’s coat and briefcase? And Ladra can’t fathom why Marquez and Bravo and Intergovernmental Affairs Director Joe Rasco and MPO Director Jesus Guerra and CITT Executive Director Charles Scurr would all have to go and bear witness to the same briefings and the same tours. Don’t they all report to the mayor? Doesn’t anybody have a camera?

And do lobbyists have to go? God, no. But Mitchel Bierman, Niesen Kasdin and Jose “El Chino” Fuentes are all on the journey. Sure, they may be paying their own way. But it’s a good investment. They smell blood in the water, er, I mean a project in the near future. And they want to be able to tell would-be bidders and contractors that they have an inside track to sweetheart deals through future transportation BIDs.

“I was just in Denver with the mayor,” they’ll say. There’s a value to that. It jacks up their retainer price, which, in turn, comes out of our pockets when its worked into the total cost of the proposal.

But these lobbyists are smart. They must know this one thing: Within the year, the county is going to have a big press conference to announce a major transportation project.

They have to. It’s getting close to election time, in an electorate where the number two issue is transportation, according to a recent poll. Upon being named chair of the transportation committee, Bovo said that if he can’t get a project off the ground in two years, his entire term will be a failure. In his annual budget announcement, Gimenez also said he was making transportation solutions a priority.

“I am well aware that Miami-Dade has a traffic and a transit challenge,” Gimenez said at the public unveiling of the budget. “The time our residents spend in their vehicles commuting to their jobs is time they are not with their families and that is one of the main reasons why my administration is committed to improving our transit system.”

And they can get one. The climate for a major transit project has never been better. Perhaps every commissioner is behind the concept of ‘Let’s just do anything because we are desperate for something.’ Someone could propose a drone-operated, elevated or zip-line electric trolley system and it could possibly get serious consideration, even a sponsored ordinance for a study. I mean if they’re looking at reversible lanes that go in one direction half the day and another the other half — which is thousands of accidents waiting to happen — they will look at anything.

Nevermind that we need at least six projects in the county. Nevermind that the mayor’s office has been reportedly dragging its feet on conversations about the Bay Link connection to Miami Beach. Nevermind that the Northbound 27th rapid bus lines project, fully funded and ready to go, was sidelined and paired with an East/West and Southbound connectors that have not gotten off the ground.

Nevermind that part of the reason that Denver is so successful is that when they passed their bond referendum to dedicate pubic funds to transit solutions, that city actually dedicated the funds and didn’t steal the money for something else. They — get this — used the funds for what they were intended and promised. They went out and sought the partnerships needed to build the buildings and develop the connectors that Denver needed. And they did such a good job that now half of Miami is going to Denver to see how it was done.

The problem is we already had a dedicated tax and the money was diverted from transportation projects to other things in order to balance the budget while the political and business leaders in Denver didn’t do that.

Maybe they can squeeze in a session or briefing on that next week.

Carlos Gimenez, transit

County Denver trip foreshadows big transportation project added by Ladra on July 29, 2015
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