By Rebecca Wakefield 

I almost think we have to hit rock-bottom before a critical mass of people will decide they must take control of, and responsibility for, our government.

Likely the strong-mayor referendum will pass this Tuesday, Jan. 23. But whether it does or not, very little will change in county government in the immediate future. Mayor Carlos Alvarez will face a legal challenge, after which, he will slowly start to tinker with appointments and figure out whether he can keep County Manager George Burgess or not. The commissioners will decide which fiefdoms they can protect and which not, as a whole new set of power brokers emerges.

But for 99 percent of Miami-Dade’s 2.5 million residents, not much will change on the streets, where it matters. Because at the end of the day, a lot of this is a simple power struggle among a handful of people. The rest of us are noncombatants. And that’s a problem.

The problem with county government is us. We the people elected everybody up there now, and this track record does not give me enormous confidence in our future decisions, at least in the near term.

What we really need is both a strong mayor (not necessarily in the exact form proposed by Alvarez’s unidentified brain trust) — and — a strong, well-informed, occasionally cantankerous electorate. That, and a partial dismantlement of single-member districts, to include three or four county commissioners elected by all Miami-Dade voters.

I have very mixed feelings about this referendum. I support it, just barely, because the County Commission as a whole sucks and the structure of the government itself is clearly not primarily geared to intelligent, ethical and humane public service. Just destabilizing the cronyism and crookedness that go on there might be worth it. It’ll take a couple of weeks before the rats figure out how to get the cheese again. There’s a slim window of hope that good things could happen in the interim.

I support it because I’d like to see what a George Burgess facial expression might look like if he’d stop injecting himself with Botox before every public meeting. A pro-referendum observer told me watching Burgess perform under the current structure is like watching “a freckled marionette,” a Howdy Doody character whose strings are pulled from behind the scenes by hands we don’t see. All the public does is watch the puppet do a crazy dance.

I support it because I almost think we have to hit rock-bottom before a critical mass of people will decide they must take control of, and responsibility for, our government. We had a moment like that at the school district, after a spectacular era of failure, corruption and mismanagement finally came to a head in the mealy-mouthed tenure of Superintendent Roger Cuevas.

Rather than do the usual sham of a national search, followed by appointing the local guy with the greatest ability to convince School Board members that all their whims would continue to be catered to, the board, in a rare fit of shame, hired former County Manager Merrett Stierheim. His job, as most of them saw it, was to swoop in and make board members look good, fix a couple of glaring problems and get the hell out.

Stierheim, although a competent and ethical manager, was not the right guy for the superintendent’s job. He didn’t have the right feel, an interior constituency or any experience in educational bureaucracies, which are very different beasts than municipal ones. He did manage to do a few positive things, but that great morass swallowed and ultimately defeated him.

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