This makes me wonder if the recent renewal of interest in breaking up the school district into many smaller bureaucracies might be motivated in part by this westward-at-all-costs notion

By Rebecca Wakefield

There is, or rather, was, a small sign behind the bar at the Chamber Lounge, a non-descript dive sunk several feet below 30th Street, just off Collins Avenue. “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”

The Chamber Lounge was an icon of mid-Beach slumming for some 50 years until 5 a.m. Nov. 21, when the proprietor took a buzz saw to the bar. The building it was in is being converted to condos because that’s exactly what Miami Beach needs more of. The Chamber was characterized by a pool table, a decent juke box, and the subtle perfume of smoke, liquor, and fluids best not imagined. It was like Club Deuce, except not quite as classy.

There was no sage and succinct advice posted in the second-floor chambers of the Miami-Dade County Commission later that morning. Had I thought, I would have grabbed the Chamber sign on my way out because its message would have applied to the spectacle of sweatiness and pettiness on public display.

The chambers were awash in an unusually alert citizenry, clad in bright green “Hold the Line” or white “Say Yes to the American Dream” T-shirts. The greens were there to ask the commission not to approve nine applications that would bust the urban development boundary previous commissioners had set in order to buffer the Everglades and farmlands from suburban sprawl. The white shirts were undoubtedly bused in to provide a bit of cover for those commissioners who have every intention of moving the UDB.

Some of the commissioners have most likely already promised their votes to a legion of lobbyists and developers, possibly in exchange for funding the war chest some of them wanted to use to fight with Mayor Carlos Alvarez. Alvarez declared war on the commission by proposing to transfer some of its power to his office. He tried to do this by voter referendum, but ultimately failed to get the signatures required to put the question on a ballot.

The money involved in this development issue must be astounding. It is why you have people – such as former Beach mayor Neisen Kasdin and venerable former Congresswoman Carrie Meek – who advocated for Eastward Ho and urban infill as public officials, now seduced into shilling for boundary expansion. That is not to say that every single application is bad, or that there aren’t ways to integrate the raw profit motive of developers with good public policy (by making them pay the real cost of the impact to roads, schools and other service infrastructure). But the commission isn’t even trying. After a daylong hearing, the commission postponed any decisions to Nov. 30.

School board member Evelyn Greer made the point that the school district cannot afford to build and staff the schools that must accommodate such rapid growth, certainly not without condemning schools in the rest of the county to chronic underfunding. Well, more chronic underfunding, anyway.

This makes me wonder if the recent renewal of interest in breaking up the school district into many smaller bureaucracies might be motivated in part by this westward-at-all-costs notion. Fueling my irresponsible speculation is the fact that State Rep. Ralph Arza (whose campaigns have consistently been fueled by West Dade development interests) is clearly involved in a proposed constitutional amendment to let voters decide whether school districts with more than 45,000 students should be broken into much smaller ones. This would really only affect a handful of counties, including Broward and Miami-Dade.

The proposal was made by State Rep. Frederick Brummer of Orange County (with a similar bill filed in the Senate by Jacksonville Sen. Stephen Wise), but often the way things work in Tallahassee is that legislators do favors for each other. A recent article in El Nuevo Herald indicated that school board chairman Frank Bolaños, a close Arza ally with very similar campaign contributors, believes this proposal deserves serious consideration because smaller districts could be more accountable than the one he currently heads. I haven’t parsed out all the motivations behind that yet. School district politics are always complicated. The threat of breaking up could also simply be a point of leverage against superintendent Rudy Crew.

Imagine the scenario of an expanded county with parking lots for roads, glorified day care for schools, and escalating millage rates to keep public services running. Now imagine the already-thin Miami Herald trying to cover any of this. The Herald is shrinking again, probably to make itself more attractive to a potential buyer. Recently, management decided to shrink the size of the metro section and to do away with the state edition. An internal survey revealed that the previous bottom of employee sentiment has dropped yet again. Who will be watching out for the public?

Here at least, there is some hope. Former Herald columnist Jim DeFede is negotiating a deal with the local CBS affiliate to become a commentator. “I want to take the columns I would have written for the Herald and bring them to television,” he says. “They would have that same sort of feel, a mix of some reported and some humorous.”

DeFede has also been heard on 940-AM, the local Air America affiliate, doing a three-hour show one Saturday and another on a Sunday. Is he going to become a local radio talk show host as well? DeFede was mum on that point. We’ll have to wait and hear.