Expect to hear about transit, jobs and public safety
To the victor go the spoils, don’t they? To the victor, also goes the spin.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez will do what he does best at this year’s 
State of the County address Wednesday: Pat his own back.
Sure, he’ll provide shout-outs to his apologists and allies — especially Chairman Esteban Bovo, who many say he is grooming as his chosen replacement for 2020 — and largely ignore or smugly chide his critics and naysayers. He’ll thank former Chairman Jean Monestime for his service the last two years. And he might have a person (read: prop) or two in the audience to serve as an example of something great he’s done. Probably a young person who is working thanks to the great efforts the mayor has made.
But be sure that Gimenez will be the star of the show. It will sound a lot like the last address, which sounded the same as the last and so on, and so on. He’s in love with himself.
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He will take credit for the smooth election in Miami-Dade as well as the economic turnaround and the successes at Miami International Airport and the seaport, which is woefully under achieving in cargo sales compared to even Port Everglades (that won’t be in the speech, though) because it is not open 24 hours a day. He will take credit for the new animal shelter, even though it was a mandate from the people and approved in a bond referendum more than a decade ago. He will talk about all the great things he’s done — Gimenez never misses a chance to repeat how he delivered the biggest tax break ever — and all the great things he’s going do do in the next four years. After all, he is sure to remind us, these are his last.
After reviewing past addresses, the things he said after his re-election and the speech he gave at Bovo’s swearing in earlier this month — and talking to several sources inside County Hall and insiders outside County Hall — Ladra has a pretty good guess of at least some of the issues or projects that are most likely to be in Wednesday’s speech. And it’s no surprise that it is the three main issues of the mayoral campaign which he also told reporters would be his priorities after he beat School Board Member Raquel Regalado in November: transit, economic development and public safety in the light of the gun violence plaguing some of our neigborhoods.
Transit will be center stage. Many longtime county observers and insiders say Gimenez will use this speech to lay out his transportation plans. That will likely take up a good part of the first half of his monologue. You know, after he 
acknowledges his family and talks about leaving the county better for his grandchildren blah blah blah. He hinted in November toward a major announcement soon. Maybe this is soon enough. He will talk about finally making some headway in finishing the six famous corridors that closely match what was promised to voters — except they won’t all be rail (some people will have to compromise for rapid busways). He won’t talk about how he has misspent some of the People’s Transportation Tax dollars so that he could give us that tax break he loves to remind us about, but he may announce which of the six corridors goes first. Spoiler alert: It’s either the South Dade corridor to Homestead or the 27th Avenue corridor to Miami Gardens. He won’t tell people that he increased the transit payroll by $1 million in 2015 with five other six-figure salaries for people to babysit new director Alice Bravo.
He may also talk about his recent trip to Las Vegas, where he attended the AT&T Smart Cities conference and how he himself was the one who made Miami one of the cities tapped for their initiative and get one of the first Smart Cities operation centers, which are supposed to help governments see community conditions — traffic flow, lighting and public safety operartions — in real time and present solutions immediately. Let’s hope he explains what that means exactly and let’s hope it’s not just another layer of beaurocracy that sounds good because it has the word smart in it. Let’s also hope he doesn’t make a lame joke about what happens in Vegas coming to Miami.
Wait a minute. Didn’t the Denver trip last year promise to bring us some transit solutions?
Economic development and jobs will also be highlighted. He will talk about the number of jobs he created, again without going into the details about the type of jobs (low paying and temporary) that most are. He may even say “a 
job is a job” again, which is easy to say when you are drawing from three pensions and you make $150,000 a year. But now he will talk more about diversification of the economy (almost like he learned from Regalado during the campaign). He will talk about the upcoming projects that are going to bring new jobs, like the megamall planned for Northwest Dade just north of Hialeah — which is coming before the commission next week — and the Miami Wilds theme park planned for the property next to the zoo, which has been broken up into two phases to make it more palatable and easy to get each piece through despite the objections of environmentalists (more on that later). He will talk about smaller projects brought through incentives and public private partnerships and, perhaps, moving forward with the privatization of Vizcaya (more on that later), though he won’t call it that. He will call it a pathway to preservation, or some such nonsense. No, he hasn’t given up on that plan. He just put it on the shelf until after the election. And he will talk about expanding his own legacy program, Employ Miami-Dade, which I suspect is just a feel-good program with a subsidy replacement check instead of a real job and someone ought to investigate how many of those people are still employed afterwards.
He may also talk about soccer. He sorta has to. Everybody wants to know what is going on with that.
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And even though he doesn’t want to, Gimenez will have to talk about the gun violence that has claimed the lives of so many 
children and young people all over the county, from Miami Gardens to Homestead. The speech was probably edited this week to include a mention of the people injured when shots were fired at the Martin Luther King Jr. Festival Monday. But Ladra hopes he talks about more than just us policing ourselves. And I hope he doesn’t talk about expanding his living room cops again. Taking officers off the street and putting them into the homes of at-risk kids — his brilliant idea last year — is not just a band-aid, it’s a cheap generic band-aid from the dollar store that doesn’t really stick and is falling off five minutes after you put it on. Unless Gimenez restores some of the specialized units he dismantled in 2014 — because he would rather make cuts than fill vacancies — hoods with guns will play across our county. It was reported yesterday that the shooting was perpetrated by rival gangs. And it is time Gimenez wake up to the fact that gang activity has increased since he dismantled the very specialized unit that investigated them and stopped these shootings before they happened.
But that will be one of the many things he doesn’t say.
Like the fact that after the speech Wednesday, the mayor and his lobbyist son are flying to D.C. for the inauguration of president-elect Donald Trump, who he tried so desperately to distance himself from during the election.
Is it too much to hope that Regalado — or someone — will have a response to his address again this year?
Ladra previews Carlos Gimenez’s State of the County spin added by Ladra on
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