There are two ways the Miami-Dade Commission could go Tuesday with the District 8 vacancy. One would be to stick with their misguided first decision to appoint someone from the tight field of candidates who are already raising money for the 2022 race. The other is to call for a special election.
Commissioners Rene Garcia and Joe Martinez have asked for the latter. Of course, they were on the losing side of the 7-5 vote Nov. 19 that ended in favor of a two-year appointment to avoid the expense of an election.
That’s as long as a full congressional or state House term.
It’s also a long held belief by many that the commission is not only going to pick heir apparent Danielle Cohen Higgins for the seat, but that it was the plan all along. She is the least experienced and comes out of nowhere, but she’s got the same campaign consultant as newly-elected Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. La Alcaldesa could have avoided this mess if she had made her resignation effective sooner so that the race for her replacement would be on the Nov. 3 ballot with everybody else. So, this has been in the works even before the rumored chairmanship deal with Jose “Pepe” Diaz.
But why should this Higgins get preferential treatment not afforded to the other Higgins (no relation), who had to run in a special election? Nobody appointed Commissioner Eileen Higgins to be Bruno Barreiro‘s replacement when he left to run for Congress.
Read related: Miami-Dade Commissioners likely to appoint Danielle Cohen Higgins to D8
The commissioners said times are different. They don’t want to spend up to $1.2 million (if it goes to a runoff) on something as frivolous as an election right now while COVID-19 ravages our community both physically and economically. We have to be frugal. November is coming.
But they can spend almost $1 million for a brand new Office of Policy and Budgetary Affairs, created by Jennifer Moon, who is bringing her Deputy Budget Director Barbara Galvez and a couple of other staffers. This is also something commissioners could decide Tuesday. Not sure if it’s before or after they appoint someone to D8 so they don’t have to pay for an election.
These are some of the same people, as Doug Hanks at the Miami Herald pointed out, who took $3 million from the $9 billion budget to subsidize the Orange Bowl football game and another $1 million for the Orange Blossom Classic game and band competition at the Hard Rock Stadium.
The classic and band competition costs as much as a special election, in case you didn’t catch that. The Orange Bowl gets three times as much.
Moon told Ladra that the commission has up to $8 million in discretionary funds — about $2 million of which is rolled over from last year. Well, it’s $7 million now, after the $970,000 is budgeted for the new Moon wing.
How is it they don’t have money for an election that the people very obviously want? Didn’t they see the lines people stood in to vote? Didn’t they see the record number of ballots cast?
What it looks more like is that they have made backroom deals with each other so that Cohen Higgins can be a pocket vote. For who? Who knows? For everybody. Which is why she, or anyone who is handed that seat, can never be truly trusted. She would be beholden to the commissioners who
Maybe we can have both, a commission office of policy and budgetary affairs (whew) and an election. The latter is a one-time cost, by the way. The Office of Policy and Budgetary Affairs — let’s just call it OPA or OBA from now on, because OPBA is too hard to say — is a recurring expense.
Maybe what commissioners should be asking, in the wake of possible revenue shortages and continued extra expenses from the COVID-19 fallout, is if we should commit to any new bureaucratic layer of additional government that’s going to cost about $1 million — increasing annually, like everything else — every single year.
If commissioners make an appointment to the District 8 seat Tuesday, they need to come clean: It’s not because they can’t afford it.
In Miami-Dade, a brand new $1 mil policy office trumps a special election? added by Ladra on
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