County’s clumsy structural elephants walked out on parade

A breath of fresh air: Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez outlined last week why Miami-Dade’s structure needs a full review and upgrade to meet current challenges.

Band-aids, as his message made clear, won’t work because the big issues – the elephants in the room – are in a single herd that tromps on our future. Not acting on the challenges he threw down limits effectiveness.

The big concerns begin with deciding whether every speck of our county should be within a city. Miami Today has aired the issue for a decade, but last week commissioners heard the issues laid out by one of their own members, who gave a history lesson on how we got here and what might overcome hurdles. 

Mr. Bermudez’ call for a holistic approach to multiple problems came in weighing incorporation of cities in a county where only about 60% of people live in cities, towns or villages that handle hyper-local issues and the county does that job for the other 40%. That hybrid government sprawls into all sorts of challenges.

“The time has come to take a very, very close look at what type of structure we want to have in this county, and in order to do that we need to figure out exactly what is coming and what is going,” Mr. Bermudez said.

In his history lesson on forming cities, Mr. Bermudez noted that before Miami-Dade received a special home rule charter in the late 1950s that made us different from the other 66 counties in Florida, one of the last cities to be formed was Virginia Gardens, in 1947, “because they couldn’t park their horses in the circle in Miami Springs.” It was the horse-and-buggy era of local government.

Our charter was indeed special. Its bedrock was that every bit of what was then called Dade County was going to have a local town hall to handle local matters. 

The county, on the other hand, was going to be a metropolitan government, or metro, that would handle only regional issues, from transportation to health to environment to zoning – all the big challenges that cross city lines. It would also deal with water and sewers, airports, the seaport and major infrastructure. 

It was a great concept that, like Metrorail, was only half finished. After 1949, the first incorporation in the county under the new charter was Key Biscayne in 1991 – 42 years later. Eight more came after that, the last being Cutler Bay in 2005. Since then, a two-decade gap.

So today, commissions deal with the biggest issues and, for 40% of the county, the smallest too. That’s inefficient at best.

“We’re going to have to ask ourselves the question: what is going to be the form of county government in the future?” Mr. Bermudez said. “There have been some serious changes, and we need to figure out what is the structure of Miami-Dade County, whether it’s going to be regional only [or] regional-local.”

Commissioners last week voted 11-1 not to deal now with incorporations or annexations to existing cities, imposing a two-year moratorium on incorporations and four on annexations. That left the big questions on the table unanswered.

“We’re going to eventually determine what type of county we want to be structured as,” Mr. Bermudez cautioned. “In the 1960s it was a metro form of government because that was what was happening across the country [Dade was a model as one of the first two] and all of the land including many in the districts … were strawberry fields, were a bunch of other things.”  

“We need to really sit down as to what is going to be our future,” he said. “This would be step 1 … can we actually take a look at the form of government and the structure of government that we want to move forward with?”

Among issues of structure that Miami Today often raises are whether commissioners should again be elected from districts by votes from all county residents as we started with to limit parochialism, whether the county should return to a professional manager separate from the mayor so that the manager can be an impartial administrator, and whether commissioners should leave contracts to a manager rather than vote on many themselves. 

Those questions can be answered via charter changes that the commission should initiate right now. But all are related to the elephant of incorporation.

“If the best way forward is ‘let’s incorporate the whole county like Broward County did,’ then maybe that’s what we need to do,” Mr. Bermudez said. “We’d still have a county government because there’s no way the cities are going to be able to carry out some of the things that a county government’s able to do, so that’s a discussion that we’re going to have to have some day. I forewarn you that this is step number 1.”

Frankly, step 2 can’t come soon enough. 

As Mr. Bermudez noted, every day that passes fails to meet expanding needs. That’s not because of who is sitting in officials’ chairs, it’s because of the way the chairs are arranged. It’s like building a stadium where half the seats look away from the action. 

It’s a structural issue. Time to fix it.

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