SunPostWeekly Words

By Xavier L. Suarez

Winston Churchill once described the effect of bringing together all of the best and brightest from the various branches of the military. Instead of creativity, cross-fertilization of concepts, or animated discussion of divergent viewpoints, he concluded that what one obtained from this sort of august gathering of talented people, when forced to share a closed and intimate forum, was “the sum of all their fears.”

After six months in office, I have concluded that the same is happening in Miami-Dade County.

Two major projects illustrate the problem. In each case, despite a great deal of energy and risk-taking on our part, what we have encountered is what someone famously labeled, “paralysis by analysis.”

I will take each project in turn.

FIRST PROJECT: THE COCONUT GROVE PLAYHOUSE

It all went relatively smoothly while we were negotiating with outsiders. It was actually easier than expected, for a project that had been essentially dormant for six years, plagued with debt and dissension and discordant personalities.

The approach we took was classic Game Theory: You analyze the scenarios that may result and calmly explain to each stakeholder what can happen if all the interested parties don’t cooperate. You also use your biggest weakness as your strength: in this case, the fact that the county didn’t even own the reverter rights to the facility and that the State of Florida, led by its youthful majority leader (Representative Carlos Lopez-Cantera) was in the process of taking back the property from the non-profit operator, functioning as an “LLC” (limited liability corporation). Soon, and thanks to the efforts of attorney Jorge Luis Lopez, the LLC had come to understand that to save the baby, the umbilical cord had to be severed, otherwise the state would abort the baby forever.

Working with the various public officials from the city, state and county, plus the LLC leaders, the threat of a reverter suit was never actualized and the property was tendered back to the county, with the State of Florida as midwife in the proposed delivery.

In the meantime, we were engaging in furious negotiations with two entities that had claims to the use of all or part of the actual playhouse property.

Here, again, a little bit of Game Theory was used: Each entity was offered the same alternative pay-outs for their development rights or liens. The alternatives consisted of cash or property exchange. Expectedly, each chose the one best calculated to advance their interests, and that way we minimized the cash component of the proposed pay-out, by maximizing the benefit from a simple property swap that benefited both parties..

The deals were reduced to tentative agreements and presented to the mayor for completion of “due diligence” and presentation to the board of county commissioners.

I mention “due diligence” because that was the term constantly invoked by the mayor in the various meetings.

I assumed, when Mayor Gimenez used that term, that due diligence meant the review of possible liens or other costly consequences of taking over the playhouse property from the State of Florida (once the state had obtained it from the LLC).

In that vein, I had obtained a complete title search by updating (pro bono) the one that the county attorney had done about a year ago.

I had also negotiated with the two potential lienholders, and was ready to present to the county commission agreements that would effectuate a transfer of the property, free and clear, with a minimum outlay of cash compensation to the putative lienholders.

At various meetings with county officials (including the mayor), I had reported on the proposed agreements intended to accomplish that goal.

Everyone was on board as to the terms. All the county attorney needed to do was give it legal form.

That was that status quo on the day before Thanksgiving.

That is still the status quo, more than a month later.
It will be the status quo on January 24, when it is scheduled to be discussed at the commission meeting, with a resolution in line to be approved.

And now my reader will ask: In light of the fact that two months will have elapsed since I negotiated tentative agreements with the putative lienholders, what exactly does the resolution say – what will the county commission approve on January 24, 2012, that might advance the cause of re-opening the theatre? 

Well, I am sorry to disappoint all of you who have a lively interest in the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

The resolution prepared by the mayor’s office for discussion on January 24 says nothing beyond the simple, evident, well-known and well-publicized fact that I and my staff (along with various public officials from other jurisdictions and a host of private individuals acting pro bono) have been negotiating to re-start the playhouse and refurbish it with no less than TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS in general obligation bonds approved more than seven years ago.

What good is a resolution that says nothing new? Well, I suppose the simple answer is that it avoids turf wars.

But what turf wars need to be avoided? We have, after all, the city, the state and the county working together with a number of “interested” and “disintested” private parties, all of whom have reached consensus on the basic terms.

Shouldn’t the next step be to discuss publicly those tentative agreements and obtain formal approval for them from the agency with authority?

That’s certainly what I think.

Apparently, that is too aggressive an approach in today’s bureaucratic climate. Here in the county, we need to get permission to seek provisional approval of even the most tentative, non-binding agreements.

Before anything concrete is done, we need to ease the fears of hosts of bureaucrats. 

As Winston said, what we see here is “the sum of all their fears.”

And it gets worse, when you see what they have done with a FORTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLAR clean-up effort for the Virginia Key Landfill.

Editor’s Note: This article was written on January 3, 2012.  The Miami-Dade County Commission approved a resolution directing the Mayor to negotiate and present agreements to the Board for its approval transferring title of the Coconut Grove Playhouse property to the County and eliminating all liens and encumbrances thereon.  http://www.miamidade.gov/govaction/matter.asp?matter=112624&file=true&yearFolder=Y2011

SECOND PROJECT: THE VIRGINIA KEY LANDFILL CLEAN-UP.

As far as I can tell, the worst fear that the bureaucrats have in relation to getting this project started is the fear of the unknown. There is no other way to characterize the various unsuccessful attempts I have made to get this project off the ground (if you will excuse the pun).

Let me tell you a little bit about the project.

In what is perhaps the most precious ecological treasure on the Eastern side of our land holdings, we have in Virginia Key (on land owned by the City of Miami) well over 100 acres of contaminated soil that resulted from use as a landfill.

Buttressed by streams of revenues that flow from agreement with over twenty cities (each of which call for the payment to the county of around $60/ton for waste disposal of the various municipalities’ refuse), the county has issued bonds (borrowed money from banks and individuals) adding up to most of the forty-five million dollars needed to complete the clean-up.

The money is in the bank. The need for the clean-up to begin is clear and compelling. So what is the hold-up?

The hold-up is that the county wants the City of Miami to extend its current contract for waste disposal (the “interlocal agreement”) well beyond its current expiration date of 2015.

It wants, before releasing the money, to extend the Miami contract perhaps as far into the future as the ones that bind a couple of other, much smaller cities – some of which end after 2015. 

At the beginning of the process, the administration indicated that the county wanted a new contract that would extend a total of twenty years.

That was about three months ago, and I started discussions with city officials on that basis.

At one point, I managed to get the city mayor (Tomas Regalado) to meet with the county mayor for a few precious minutes here at county hall.

In that brief encounter, I mentioned to both that perhaps a ten-year extension, with a renewability provision that allowed another ten-year extension (premised on the county being competitive with surrounding counties – and defining “competitive” as within 10% of their rates).

Before putting my proposed agreement in writing, I discussed it with Mayor Gimenez a second time. This time, he expressed some concern about giving a fixed price to our largest provider of solid waste.

This concern, of course, is well founded. We do not know, twenty years into the future, if we can lock in the price of solid waste disposal that far into the future.

For one thing, we do not know what new federal or state regulations will bind us, and make waste disposal that much more onerous. We don’t know what population trends will change, or what environmental problems will surface.

And we certainly don’t know what new technology will bring.

All the more reason to have some flexibility in the long-term agreement.

So, I asked the administration, what is your minimum number of years? Can we go with ten? Can we go with ten, plus a renewal option that includes some competitive escape clause?

The answer was: Let’s have a meeting with everyone present.

(I should clarify that to the bureaucrats, “everyone” means all of our own people, from deputy mayors to department heads to technical analysts. There is no meeting in this county with less than five or six administrative staff.)

I was not about to have yet another meeting. By that time, about six weeks had elapsed since I had made my recommendations, supported by schedules of bonds outstanding and of municipalities under contract.

The memorandum in question was submitted to the mayor on November 7, 2011.

It was clear to me, as explained in the memorandum, that extending Miami’s contract to ten-plus-ten years, would strengthen the bonds already outstanding and make easier any future bond issues.

Having another ten/twenty years of Miami’s business, instead of just 3.5 more years left in the existing contract should reassure bondholders, rather than worry them.

But I did not count on the raw fact that change is scary to the bureaucracy. 

So instead of a green light to move ahead and finalize negotiations, I got a lengthy memo back from the mayor. It did not contradict any of my observations or conclusions. It merely added more verbiage.

Now, it is almost two months since my November 7 memorandum and nothing has happened.

The bureaucrats are still afraid of jeopardizing bonds supported by a contract that ends in a little more than three years.

They don’t seem satisfied with the idea that they can get an extension totaling ten years, with another ten negotiated based on being within 10% of the competition – defined narrowly as Broward and Monroe counties.

Once again, as with the playhouse, what we have is the sum of all their fears.

And we don’t get to apply $65 million dollars that the voters have entrusted to us for improvement of their environment and their arts.

(Not to mention the jobs that go with that massive expenditure, in a community that has seen its construction labor force shrink from 65,000 to 30,000 since the recession began.)

Winston was right.

 As always.

By Xavier L. Suarez

One of the criticisms of charter schools is that they cater to a specialized class of students who are not representative of the student body of a typical public school. Based on that notion, the argument is often heard that charter schools extract the best and the brightest from the public schools, while leaving at-risk students to fend for themselves and fail for themselves.

A recent visit to North Park High School revealed how wrong that impression is. This jewel of a school is by no means ensconced in a suburban setting. The students are not dropped off by upper-income parents driving BMW’s or Mercedes Benz SUV’s. They are classic, inner-city students. They are almost all minorities.

In the case of North Park High, located in the midst of Opa-locka, the student body is 98% African-American. They are also, by definition, at-risk students, which means basically that they were not performing at the required level in the public school where they were previously enrolled.

In effect, the students at North Park High are there by personal choice. No one forces them to change schools. They are not disciplinary transfers, mandated to attend an alternative school. Instead, they are the beneficiaries of a new, semi-private, semi-public experiment in education that is catching fire throughout the nation.

As soon as one walks into North Park High, there is an ambience of quiet, technological learning. The hallways are so quiet that they resemble something akin to the intensive care unit in a hospital.

But it is more than that. And that becomes evident when we are allowed into a classroom.

What you see on entering a classroom is students at individual work stations, totally absorbed in the learning process. The teacher is not in the front facing an audience of students; this is more like a laboratory, in which each student is individually experimenting in learning, while the teacher walks from work station to work station monitoring, suggesting, correcting, encouraging, mentoring.

Everything is done in whispering tones. Perhaps because of this, there is no evidence of any student being distracted from his or her work. The interaction between teacher and student reminds me of what happens in my household when I myself can’t figure out my personal computer and my wife (herself a public school teacher) or one of my kids stands behind me and coaches me through my difficulty.

While at North Park High, we were introduced to one student who exemplifies extraordinary success. She is scoring well into the 90% range in a battery of exams already taken in her very first semester at North Park.

As she showed us her scores, the pride of being an “A” student was evident in her beaming face. She reminded me of an actress in the movie “Stand and Deliver,” who achieves academic success against all odds, including poverty and the chaos of life in her East L.A. neighborhood.

I am told that each morning the teachers and administrators, led by the principal (who reminds me of Edward James Olmos in the mentioned movie), line up on both sides of the hallway and greet each student by name, as they head to their respective classrooms in what becomes an inspirational parade. The psychological boost thus imparted seems to proclaim: “We are with you; we know you can succeed; we are here to make sure that you do!”

At the end of our impromptu visit, we huddled with the principal and consultants to the school, as well as the director of security. The group was quite representative of the diversity that is our county. And they seem to all be imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit – almost as if the advancement of the school they operate was directly linked to their compensation.

Perhaps it is.

All that I know is that this school is special. It represents the culmination of state-of-the-art technology, combined with the human touch – the teacher as mentor, the Internet as the chosen medium for interactive learning and the student as the center of the academic universe.

As I leave North Park High, it strikes me that I have seen no sign and heard no mention of extra-curricular activities. I cannot help but conclude that in this particular kind of charter school, it is the curriculum that counts.

 

 

By Xavier L. Suarez, County Commissioner from District 7

The county and its ten unions have been negotiating now for about five months on contracts that reduce substantially the payroll of the county’s workforce.

About half of the unions are under contract, and the rest are about 75% in agreement.

That was the status quo last Thursday, when, under the collective bargaining laws, the parties (meaning the mayor on one side and the unions on the other) brought to the commission what is called an “impasse” or stalemate in negotiations, meaning in this case that the parties were deadlocked on one issue, but in agreement on the bulk of the agreement.

In the case of the PBA (Police Benevolent Association), the remaining issue was whether the county would force a union that represents almost 7,000 police and corrections officers to accept an additional 5% salary cut (on top of the prior year’s 5% cut and the state-imposed 3% cut for pension contribution) to help defray the cost of health-care insurance. In simple math terms, the PBA was being asked to impose on its members, at all levels, a 13% reduction in compensation over the short span of 18 months.

That was the bad news.

The good news was that the union had accepted a total of $56 million in concessions, when compared to the prior year’s contract. And that agreement had been ratified (signed, sealed and delivered) by the union members in an overwhelmingly favorable vote of the membership.

We were separated from wholesale agreement (and the all-important harmony that is so crucial in labor negotiations – particularly in difficult economic times and particularly as regards the public safety employees) by a mere 18 million dollars, in an operating budget of $4.4 billion.

That is not much more than one-third of one percent of our operating budget.

We agonized over the decision, with the administration saying it could not yield one inch and the union saying that the administration had failed to look for savings and efficiencies in all kinds of other areas, including the fraudulent filing of homestead tax applications. Acting as the body charged by law to resolve the impasse, we took the side of the PBA. In effect, we instructed the mayor to make the cuts in other areas of the budget.

What happened next was a lesson in how not to solve an impasse.

For some reason, Mayor Gimenez felt compelled to attack the motives of the commission, using terms like “disgusting” and “irresponsible.”

The Mayor followed that by threatening to veto the commission vote; this stratagem is of doubtful legal validity, since the county commission is charged by law to resolve the impasse by simple majority. It really makes no sense for one of the parties to a collective bargaining agreement, once they have declared an impasse and left to the commission to rule for one or the other, to then be able to overturn the decision of the body charged by law with resolving the impasse.

In the meantime, the transport workers union, whose leaders had reached agreement with the administration, failed to ratify that agreement. They will now – understandably – want to be exempted at the very least from the imposition of a 5% reduction in salary to pay for health insurance that they have always received gratis.

It is really not a tough nut to crack. Looking at it in perspective, we have managed to reduce taxes in the county back to 2009 levels; we have managed to reduce the budget by over 400 million dollars and to obtain employee concessions for sixty percent of that reduction, or about $240 million, minus only about $60 million in cuts that would create a financial hardship for many employees whose compensation has already been reduced by 8% in the last 18 months.

As one member of the commission, I have submitted memoranda showing how the PBA can be spared the final 5% reductions and how the county, in the long run, can save about 10% of its entire budget by serious streamlining measures, including sale of unneeded facilities and capping compensation at $150,000/year.

Now the mayor is saying he will veto the commission decision. However, using a mayoral veto of doubtful legality to override commission action at this stage is self-defeating. The commission will simply reply in kind and override the mayor.

Therefore, it behooves all of us to ratchet down the rhetoric, stop questioning motives, and simply apply ourselves to the task of finding efficiencies that will complete the process of balancing the budget, reducing taxes, and distributing fairly the pain that comes from imposing some discipline on a process that clearly got out of hand over the last two decades.

Let’s get down to work and finish a job that has been essentially well done up to now by all sides.

By Commissioner Xavier L. Suarez, District 7

The most extreme example of an opaque budget item – one calculated to confound and confuse all but the smallest inner circle – was the Manhattan Project. In that case, President Franklin Roosevelt managed to authorize, appropriate and spend the tidy sum of a billion dollars without so much as a budget code, a budget description or even a footnote in the overall federal budget, which wpas then around eight billion dollars.

No one was heard to complain about the lack of transparency when the billion dollar expenditure was revealed, in all its macabre splendor, as the fund for research and development of an atomic bomb capable of bringing down what was then an evil empire whose monarch truly envisioned himself as being god-like, if not actually divine.

In those times, the issue of transparency took a back seat to the issue of survival.

We live in a “brave new world” in which transparency is as much a priority as survival. We live in a world in which the smallest member of society, the blogger with only a handful of subscribers, the one activist with leisure time to file a Public Records search has the right to know how every government dollar is spent.

But our brave new technological world has been infected by another macabre extreme in the battle for transparency. It is called complexity. Or perhaps, because it is a combination of chaos and complexity, we should call it “chaoplexity.” (That term is applied to natural wonders whose complexity is so rich and diverse, so full of multiple interacting components, that scientists combine the two terms to describe a phenomenon that cannot be fully measured or predicted, such as weather patterns.)

Complexity was bound to come with modernity. But no one would have predicted what would happen when modern systems met the modern bureaucrat. The combination has been truly devastating to any notion of transparency, as the bureaucrats have cranked up the complexity in the budget to the point that it is totally incomprehensible and indigestible by anyone but the budget bureaucrats themselves. You are looking at it through a transparent computer lens, but you cannot understand what the computer is showing you.

You ask: How complex has the budget process been made? Well, would you believe the county budget has more distinct budget categories, more different budget codes, than it has employees? Would you believe 33,000 budget codes, as against merely 27,000 employees?

The consequences of this unnecessary complexity are obvious. There is no transparency because there is no lens readily available to the average citizen (or for that matter, the average commissioner) capable of prying into and making sense of the myriad expenditures listed in the various department budgets, in order to root out the waste and corruption.

The second consequence is just as problematic. This one is the excessively high number of bureaucrats needed for data storage and retrieval, data processing and analysis, data bundling and un-bundling. You ask how big a computer department is needed for all that complexity? Good question.

I asked at the last committee meeting.

Would you believe a department that gobbles up more than sixty million of your tax dollars every year? Would you believe a department with 550 employees?

Give any of us 550 clerical employees, a fresh new start, and the right number of police officers on the beat; firefighters; solid waste employees; building and zoning reviewers of plans presented by the private builders; parks employees; transportation employees of the kind who actually operate buses and fix metrocars; and the county enterprises (airport, seaport, WASA and Jackson Memorial, which are self-sufficient, except for a nice check to JMH for indigent care), and we should be well able to provide the basic county services.

But, of course, we would have to eliminate the great majority of the 33,000 budget codes and (more importantly) the plethora of expenditures that they represent.

And I expect we would begin the task by eliminating all budgetary codes that deal with car allowances. That is what the private sector did about twenty-five years ago.