Carlos Gimenez: Same ol', same ol' at SOTC (enter year here)

Wednesday morning, some of us heard another State of the County address that sounded a lot like the last State of the County address a year ago. Maybe that’s why there were almost more people outside protesting the mayor (more on that later) than inside listening to him talk and talk and talk.

It’s almost formulaic. Talk about breaking records, again, at the airport. Check. Talk about the seaport. Check. Animal Services? Check. Transit? Check. Make sure to mention the police body cameras again. Check. Don’t believe me? Have a look at the archive of SOTC addresses of the past.

How many times are we going to hear the same old song? How many times is he going to take credit for the economic upturn? How long will we have to hear about what he did in 2011? When is it safe to assume that we will continue to have growth at the airport and seaport? And how many corners do we have to turn — or State of the County addresses do we have to endure — before things truly get better?

Carlos Gimenez loves to say he hasn’t raised taxes. He loves to say he’s created jobs. He loves to say that he’s doing more with less. But he can’t fool us. There is no carefully-worded, feel-good speech of polled positions and half truths that can cover up the reality we live with every day.

We see the increases in our tax bills. And he knows it. What he hasn’t raised is the “tax rate”. And he’s been lucky. Because rising property values, all by themselves, have brought in more tax revenue. Elected officials know that in order to truly keep taxes down, they have to roll the tax rate back to what is called the “roll back rate” — and Gimenez hasn’t done that. We are paying more in taxes today than we were five years ago. Period.

By the way, we are also paying more in fees. Park fees. Garbage fees. Permit fees.

But — and here’s the problem, folks — we are also getting less in services. The average homeowner is paying more in property taxes than they were in 2011 and we have less police coverage, fewer park programs, library branches that are closed on weekdays, community based organizations that are losing the funding they use to fill in the gaps of cut government services.

How is that efficient management?

Our county budget has increased from $6.173 billion in 2011, Carlos Gimenez’s first year as mayor, to $6.794 billion this year. That’s not doing more with less. That’s an increase of more than $600 million. We are doing less with more.

Because the money is not invested back into our communities – in our police, libraries, parks and neighborhoods. Instead, it goes to special interests with secret, backroom deals and a top heavy administration with no fewer than five deputy mayors that make these game-changing deals happen for a combined $1.5 million in salaries.

Carlos Gimenez loves to say he has reduced government, but that’s not necessarily true. He has reduced the number of departments, sure. He consolidated them under several roofs and the careful eyes of Crony A (read: Internal Services Director Lester Sola) and Crony B (read: newly appointed Transit Director Alicia Bravo).

Some of our dollars have gone to incentives or subsidies for private corporations, like cruise lines and the Miami Heat and private developers building office towers or parking garages, or institutions like museums. We always have money for that.

The mayor also loves to say how Miami-Dade is leading the state in job growth. But what he doesn’t say is that most of that growth, according to the numbers from the Beacon Council, is in hospitality jobs and retail, some of which might be seasonal and/or part time – not the professional jobs we need and deserve.

Meanwhile, we are losing opportunities like the global Hertz headquarters with 700 jobs that just opened last week in Estero. And the 2,600 jobs poised to go to Maitland for an ADP regional headquarters. Of those, almost 500 are high-wage positions of $48,000 or more. These companies should be coming to Miami-Dade.

United Data Technologies should be staying in Miami-Dade. But the company went to Miramar this week with the proposal to build a 60,000-square-foot office building there for its 125 employees. This is because our mayor is not engaged. He is too busy providing incentives to companies that are already here. He is too busy flying to France – not once, but twice — with some cockamany story about an air show in the Everglades that never materialized for obvious reasons.

He is too busy putting out fires that he created, the latest of which is the Patricia and Robert Frost Museum of Science, which is facing a construction shortfall that Gimenez is only too happy to bail them out of (more on that later).

Carlos Gimenez loves to talk about transportation being his priority. But in the past five years he has raided the People’s Transportation Plan funds for operational expenses and to balance his budget, which looks more like a shell game than a long-term financial plan. He has failed to deliver promises to the outreaches of this great and expansive county. His biggest claim to improving the paralyzing traffic on our streets are those long mega buses that now ride three quarters empty on the busway to South Dade — wouldn’t smaller and more frequent shuttles be better — and using Uber to fill our public transportation gaps.

Everyone loves Uber. Well, everyone but the taxi drivers protesting with the cops and the Pets’ Trust people and the and owners. But a private ride sharing company shouldn’t be part of our master public transit plan.

Carlos Gimenez loves to talk about adding 100 or 125 police officers at the end of the year, but we are losing at least 137 officers to the Deferred Retirement Option Plan this summer alone, for a net loss of at least 12. That doesn’t count the officers we lose every month to other agencies because of the way that Gimenez has dismantled our police department and allowed staffing to get dangerously low.

We are bleeding police officers. And he has ignored this problem for five years as a mayor — and seven prior as commissioner.

Carlos Gimenez loves to talk about MIA and PortMiami and how those successes are growing. Can we just assume now that we are going to break last year’s record every single year? But he also ties up those funds in proprietary accounts that do not benefit the rest of the county. Why aren’t the county’s two biggest economic engines putting a percentage of their surplus into the general fund? The mayor and the commission could change this. They are the only ones who can.

But there is no vision for the county. No leadership. Just a lot of the same formula: Seaport + Jobs – Taxes = State of the County. Which could be a lot better.

At the end of all the blah, blah, blah Wednesday morning, all we really get from the rosy, feel-good but painful-to-watch speech is the impression that Carlos Gimenez sounds like a broken record of exaggerated successes, carefully edited praise and outright lies.

The only good news is that this could, and should, be the last time we have to hear it.

Carlos Gimenez

Carlos Gimenez: Same ol’, same ol’ at SOTC (enter year here) added by Ladra on January 27, 2016
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