The Miami Circle of Life
When It Comes to Miami, the More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

It wasn’t too long ago that Johnny Winton contributed funds to Abolish Miami.

 There has been an overall sense that the city administration has asked the public to take a lot on faith: Nothing to see here, we’ve got it all under control.

By Rebecca Wakefield

Someone asked me the other day what keeps me in Miami, given the fact that the print journalism landscape here is so precarious these days – what with the Miami Herald about to be bought and downsized into further irrelevancy, and the New Times corporate chain busily building its expanding brand (Village Voice et al.) into a sellable asset.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess I feel like as frustrating as Miami often is, it is still one of the best places on the planet for pure theater. There’s energy here, like something’s always about to happen. I wanna be here to watch Miami grow up.”

“Honey,” my lunch companion deadpanned, “I’ve felt like that for 25 years. It’s never going to happen.”

I thought about this while watching the entirely preventable fiasco of the fire fee lawsuit unfold. The subject has captivated even non-news junkies because it has all the elements of a good telenovela (improbable plot lines, lies, betrayal, amnesia). Miami is an angry place and we like it that way. If it’s not something you can get really upset about, who cares?

One reader from Miami sent an e-mail about the column I wrote last week on former NET administrator Ricardo Gonzalez being fired for getting on the wrong side of a commissioner. The reader’s sentiment was echoed by a number of other e-mailers who see in current city management an almost neocolonial arrogance and lack of accountability to the people. “How long [can] these people go on running the city this way?” she wondered. “Is there no recourse? Part of me feels that if given enough rope, they will hang themselves, but at what price to our city, the neighborhoods, the people?”

Steve Hagen, a gadfly’s gadfly when it comes to the lack of adequate parkland in the city, recently helped form a group called Citizens Against Everything Bad. Hagen explains in e-mails that C.A.E.B. formed “because it is rumored that some people at Miami City Hall use C.A.E. or Citizens Against Everything to describe residents who speak out on Miami issues, but only if opinions differ from the leadership.”

There are good reasons why Miamians are not particularly faithful. Look back just a decade to the era of former city manager Cesar Odio. He had questionable educational and business credentials, yet managed to hold on to his position for ten years. During that time, the city went nearly bankrupt with an almost $70 million debt. Bribery and cronyism were not just ignored, but encouraged. Odio went down in the Operation Greenpalm corruption case of 1996, along with Commissioner Miller Dawkins and other officials.

He was followed a bit later by former police chief Donald Warshaw, who seemed like such a sane, professional fellow – until he was found to have stolen money from a kid’s charity called Do The Right Thing. Our mayors during this time had cute nicknames like Mayor Loco and Crazy Joe.

This state of affairs eventually annoyed enough people that even the business crowd got involved. Commissioner Johnny Winton actually began his political career as an activist so pissed off by municipal stupidity that he lent thousands of dollars to Abolish Miami, a 1997 movement to unincorporate the city. In 1999, he was widely viewed as a welcome replacement for J.L. Plummer, an inveterate glad-hander who had held the seat for nearly 30 years.

But Winton’s tough-talking, sometimes foul-mouthed, brand of populism has worn thin in recent years, at least in the view of critics who feel that his real constituency has turned out to be the downtown development interests from which he sprang. Some of that comes from his alignment with Mayor Manny Diaz, who shares a similar vision of Miami’s future. That vision includes a lot of different aspects, but the main thrust seems to be that development will salve the cracks in Miami’s urban landscape.

In some senses, that’s right. We have benefited in the short term from the condo boom, and the redevelopment of old neighborhoods. But a lot of that boom was nothing more than hype. What happens when the market declines, as it is beginning to now? Eventually, even the European and South American speculators will realize they can’t flip any more units. We will be left with a concrete jungle that echoes with empty promises.

The cycle will of course begin again, as it has since the ’20s. The telenovela will run on, as Miami efficiently recycles its players. But we’ve done nothing significant to shrink the social gap between affluence and poverty here. If we don’t tackle that, we will be revisiting some of the more interesting bonfires of the ’80s.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.