The city of Miami may get cut off by Miami-Dade when it comes to transportation funds because of bad accounting.
According to the latest audit available from last year, the city has not been able to show how it has allocated almost $20 million in transportation surtax funds from the half-penny People’s Transportation Plan sales tax. Another $20 or $30 million has been spent on items the county auditor says are ineligible for surtax funding.
The Citizens Independent Transportation Trust, which monitors how those funds are spent, could decide Thursday to turn off the spigot. That recommendation from the auditor and CITT Executive Director Javier Betancourt is on the agenda.
When the People’s Transportation Plan was passed by voters in 2002, it said that 20% of the funds would be distributed to municipalities for their own micro local transit projects. Much of that has been used for trolleys.
The city of Miami is the largest of the 37 municipalities in Miami-Dade, so it gets the largest share of any municipality. The city had unspent funds of $47.4 million as of September 30, 2019, but only reported cash and investments of $27.8 million in its Transportation and Transit Special Revenue and Capital Projects Funds.
“This $19.6 million shortfall is excessive and should be replenished immediately,” reads a February 2021 memo from Cathy Jackson, director of the county’s audit and management services division. She’s actually recommended suspending surtax payments to the city since 2011.
The county could withhold payments until the city can provide a proper accounting of the funds and, if (read: when) that doesn’t happen, they can recapture the funds until the city pays back whatever it “owes.”
Read related: Missing Miami COVID relief gift cards to be audited by city’s inspector general
The city contends that some of the unspent surtax money is the “disallowance of debt service payments from prior years,” but the county says that is not an approved use, Jackson wrote. They can’t bank the monies indefinitely because they are intended to get transit projects going.
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Remember, this is the same city that can’t account for a bunch of COVID relief gift cards funded with federal monies (more on that later).
City officials also say that if they are cut off, they will have to cut off their trolley services. But that’s not true since they have bunch of unused surtax money in the bank, according to the statements that the auditor got.
This is likely to end up in court like the Silver Bluff street closures (more on that later) and will only further strain the tenuous county-city relationship.
The CITT meeting begins at 5 p.m. in commission chambers at County Hall, 111 NW First St., and can also be watched on the county’s webcasting page.
Miami-Dade Auditor on city of Miami PTP surtax spending by Political Cortadito on Scribd
Miami-Dade may cut off Miami transit funds for unspent, misspent millions added by Ladra on
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