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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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