Coral Gables Environment, Politics and Government
October 31, 2009 Leave a comment
You will be when you open your 2009 Combined Tax Memorandum Notice and you see what you are paying for a over staffed, over paid, marginally competent city government in Coral Gables, FL. Don’t forget to add in the fire fee and trash pick costs. It will be interesting to observe how apathetic voters will be in the coming months.
October 29, 2009 Leave a comment
As far as I know the city commission goes through a silly exercise in which it compares last year’s proposed budget (let’s say 200-2009) with this year’s new proposed budget 2009-2010). Then at some point we get a formal accounting report on the results of the year’s spending. But (again, as far as I know) the city never publishes the 2008-2009 final spending and income results in comparison with the line items of the original approved budget. Thus the city manager and commission may have been moving monies around from one category to another, from one department to another and from one activity to another. Thus we never know where the monies may be redirected within a given budget period, and those changes are not known by the community.
October 29, 2009 Leave a comment
We have taken note of a number of subsidies supplied to residents and nonresidents.
Recently, we are told that the city is trying out subsidies for taxi rides of local residents (supposedly those who might need it by some standard set by the city).
We have learned in recent days that the government had been under-budgeting (doesn’t that mean “hiding) the costs of the famous trolley by about $200,000 annually. (This sounds like another Kerdyk Tax to me.)
The city is subsidizing the construction of a new museum and certainly will have to subsidize its operating costs in the future–it will not be self-financing since there do not exist self-financing museums that I am aware of.
The city subsidizes the cost of trash removal by between 30% to 50% of the costs.
We have the following questions to the city manager and commissioners:
October 22, 2009 1 Comment
It has become common culture among national, state and local governments, executives, legislators and, generally, all politicians of providing misinformation to the public on a wide gamut of community problems.
Much has been written about this in relationship to the Iraq war in which the political and military authorities give false information to protect themselves from public rebuke and to protect the highest government authorities from prosecution for carrying out certain illegal acts.
One may read THE LIMITS OF POWER: the End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich ( Henry Holt and Co, 2008) in which the author recounts the national political culture of overstating the power and the competency of the U.S. government and military to police the world and impose its own world view on other countries.
In “Real Men Tax Gas” (column by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, September 20, 2009) the writer shows the inherent inability of national politicians to take a rather simple step of imposing a national gas tax of $1 that would produce billions of dollars that can be used to pay off our federal deficit, finance health care and ameliorate the impact of the same tax on the poor.
How does this apply to Coral Gables where the size and complexity of the administrative decisions are trivial compared to wars, economic recovery programs, energy programs and the national budget?
They apply to a similar culture of denying problems until they strike you in the face (e.g., budget shortfalls in late 2008 and early 2009), until the crisis is upon the city (with huge pension liabilities) and the processes that got the city into the mess, especially accommodating to short-term demands of labor unions, real estate and local development interests. The city commission as a whole ignored their financial fiduciary responsibility by letting a city manager and a city budget go completely out of control.
Coral Gables Watch 