Kick Ass (37 page)

Tax Dollars at Work

Dade taking furniture flap sitting down

January 27, 1986

A true news item: In only five months, Dade County Manager Merrett Stierheim and his successor, Sergio Pereira, spent $63,674 furnishing the same office twice.

Harry Hassock, Dade County’s newly appointed Curator of Fine Furniture, was steamed.

“Why do you people keep picking on us?” he screeched, waving the newspaper.

I could barely see the man over his teakwood desk, which was nine feet high and tastefully trimmed with polished emeralds.

“Mr. Hassock, we’re not picking on anyone,” I shouted up to him. “It’s just that the taxpayers are getting upset. They see Mr. Pereira running all over town preaching for a sales tax hike and warning that Metro is going broke. It’s hard to take him too seriously after he spends $9,000 on a sofa.”

“The man needs a place to nap!” Harry said, peremptorily.

“But for that kind of money you could feed and house a homeless child for a year.”

Harry Hassock winced. “Please, we’re talking leather here. The finest leather from the finest cows in Argentina. And get your notebook off of therethat’s a $9,999 coffee table!”

In exasperation I said, “One more time, explain to me why Sergio needed to buy an expensive round desk instead of keeping Merrett’s expensive rectangular one.”

“Because there was chewing gum stuck under all the drawers,” Harry said. “Besides, Sergio is a round thinker. You can’t put a round thinker at a rectangular deskit would be disaster. Hey, what’s that crud in my ashtray?”

“Looks like ashes,” I said.

“Ashes! Who’d dump ashes in a beveled diamond ashtray? Have you any idea what that ashtray cost?”

“Probably $9,999.”

Harry Hassock eyed me suspiciously. “How did you know?”

“Wild guess,” I replied. “Sergio’s desk set cost nine grand. So did his credenza. All this stuff seems to run about nine grand. Why is that?”

“Because,” Harry said, dropping his voice to a sly whisper, “if it cost any more, the Metro Commission would have to vote on it. In public, for God’s sakecan you imagine?”

“Talk about problems.”

“You bet your burlwood bookcase,” Harry said. “To dodge that silly $10,000 rule, I advise county bigwigs to buy their fine furniture in $9,000 pieces. In fact, we have a little saying around here: Nine is fine, ten is trouble.”

“Seems pretty sneaky,” I said.

Harry Hassock rolled his eyes. “Next thing, you’ll be asking why Sergio doesn’t pay for this stuff out of his own pocket.”

“Why not? He makes $99,500 a year.”

Harry sighed impatiently. “What the public fails to understand is that in order for government to function smoothly, it must function in comfort. Comfort requires fine furniture.”

Harry climbed off his desk, descended a rosewood stepladder and sat next to me on a $9,999 ottoman. “The more comfortable your government is, the more efficient it will be,” he said earnestly. “Simply stated: Government needs a soft place to put its tush.”

Somewhere on his colossal desk a magnesium telephone began to ring. Harry scrambled up and answered it.

“Curator of Fine Furniture,” he said. “Yesoh hello, Mr. Manager. Thanks, I knew you’d like it. What! Who said that? Well, it’s not Day-Glo marble and you tell ‘em that’s not the least bit funny.”

As Harry spoke, he expertly squirted a can of Lemon Pledge at a thumb smudge on his mink-lined credenza.

“But, Sergio, what’s wrong with the desk chair you’ve got? Hmmmm. I see.” Harry cupped a hand over the phone and asked me to step out of the office. “Just for a second,” he whispered, “and try not to drag your shoes on the Burmese carpet.”

Harry Hassock went back to his phone call. “A throne?” I heard him say. “What kind of throne are we talking about, Sergio?”

Metromover’s new legs would be very shaky

July 2, 1986

The same wizards who gave us Metrorail now want to spend $240 million to expand the peoplemover to both ends of downtown Miami.

They foresee a day when the cute little tram is packed to the gills with commuters and shoppers. They foresee a time in the next century when future Dade Countians will look back and marvel at what visionaries we were.

More probably, they will look back and wonder: What kind of mushrooms were those folks eating?

The logic of taking an underutilized rail system and making it bigger is baffling, to put it kindly. Since the collective memory of the political establishment seems so short, let’s re-examine Dade’s sterling record of mass transit (using the term loosely).

Born of the best intentions, Metrorail is a proven Megaturkey. “The laughingstock of the nation,” says Harvard transportation expert Jose Gomez-Ibanez. Building it cost $250 million more than promised; operating it now threatens to break the county budget. The ridership, though improving, remains a pitiful one-seventh of projections.

It’s a clean, fast system butfor a variety of reasonscommuters avoid it in droves. This year taxpayers spent $32 million running a train for a measly 14,000 daily two-way riders.

If Metrorail were a horse, it would be shot.

Enter the Metromover, inaugurated to run a loop through downtown Miami and boost (we were promised) Metrorail’s popularity. It’s an adorable toy, except for one problem: Only 4,500 of 60,000 downtown workers are riding the darn thing.

You’d think we’d learn our lesson. Think again. Rep. William Lehman (normally a rational man), the Metro commission and downtown property owners (surprise!) love the idea of extending the Metromover south to Brickell Avenue and north to the Omni Mall.

What we now have is a government fully mobilized to turn disaster into catastrophe.

If you were a merchant and somebody offered to run a spiffy tram to your doorstep, wouldn’t you say yes? Of course you would, especially if the state, the city and the feds were sucking up 90 percent of the tab. What’s another $240 million when we’ve already spent four times that much on Metrorail?

Forget the fact that our buses are falling to pieces. Forget the fact that routes from needy neighborhoods have been cut back, thanks partly to Metrorail’s huge deficits.

The trouble with the Metromover is that it benefits the downtown lunch crowd more than the people who truly need mass transit. It will make it convenient for some of us to hop a tram from the office to the Tofutti parlor, but meanwhile thousands need reliable transportation from their neighborhoods to their jobs.

In a strategic move to derail the Metromover expansion, the head of the U.S. Urban Mass Transit Administration, Ralph Stanley, said last week he would be willing to let Dade County spend its Metromover funds on buses.

It’s an unprecedented offer, and a smart one. Buses are the first crucial link of any urban transit system; almost seven times as many people ride them as ride Metrorail. The $102 million already set aside for the Metromover extension is enough for 728 buses, a whole new fleet. This would be a radical step in the county’s transportation sagaspending money on something people would actually use.

In defense of the dream, Metromover’s proponents say the new downtown legs are necessary to meet the needs of future growth. Planners predict 25,000 peoplemover riders by the year 2000.

Only two things are certain about such predictions: If it’s the cost, they underestimate. If it’s the ridership, they overestimate.

They’ve never been right. They’ve never even been close.

But let’s say this time they are. Twenty-five thousand riders for $240 millionthis is a bargain? Maybe so, if you own a bank on Brickell Avenue; maybe not, if you’re standing on a hot street corner, hoping for a bus, any bus, that runs on time.

Paint Rosario nattily naive, fiscally fickle

February 2, 1987

This week’s Most Frighteningly Dumb True Quote conies from Miami City Commissioner Rosario Kennedy, when informed that it had cost $111,549.71 to renovate her office at City Hall:

“Nobody told me anything about a budget. I was not involved in it at all. I was involved in the colors.”

Now, then, isn’t this the kind of eagle-eyed public servant you want playing with your tax dollars? Where did Mrs. Kennedy think the money for the new furniture was coming from, Publisher’s Clearing House?

It’s quite a feat to out-Sergio our county manager and his $9,000 desk, so let’s look at some of the goodies in Mrs. Kennedy’s den.

You’ve got your pewter-gray light fixtures ($2,144), your striped pumice-colored lounge chair for $1,056 (and don’t ask me what “pumice” looks like), your three gray desks ($3,625) and your 257 yards of wallpaper ($2,380). Then you’ve got your striped bench seat for $1,134, your six slabs of marble for $320 and your dove-colored carpet for $1,958.16 (and no, I don’t have the faintest idea whether dove goes with pumice).

Add to that your six pieces of framed artwork ($959.24), your three dove-gray file cabinets for $2,299 (I wonder what the regular gray would have cost), and your standard Vegas-style mirrored wall for $505.

The Rosario hit parade continues with air-conditioning at $4,769.68. That’s for one office, folks. You can install central air in a nice-sized house for about half as much. Are we talking solid-gold thermostats or what?

Then there’s the little matter of “parts” for $6,602.24 (probably truckloads of Windex for all the mirrors).

And let’s not forget labor: $63,401.74 worth, all performed by faithful city employees who have nothing better to do, since the rest of Miami is in such tip-top shape.

It all adds up to more than $111,500a mere five times what the city’s crack fiscal wizards estimated it would cost. This might seem incredible to you and me, but none of our highly paid government watchdogs at City Hall is the least bit concerned.

City Manager Cesar Odio, for instance, said he wasn’t aware of how much was spent on Commissioner Kennedy’s new office. But when told (and this is our Second Most Frighteningly Dumb True Quote of the Week), the city manager replied: “I think that’s an acceptable figure

I don’t know much about costs.”

EARTH TO CESAR: That’s your job, buster.

While some of the commissioners are more prudent about office expenses than others, the obscene profligacy at City Hall is not Mrs. Kennedy’s alone. The city paid an interior decorator $4,000 to pick out the colors (red and gray) for Miller Dawkins’ office, and to design a clever mural made out of travel posters. I know a high-school art class that would have done it for free.

By contrast, it’s more amusing than infuriating that Joe Carollo spent $92.70 on a security door chime that alerts him whenever someone walks into his office. The purpose, we can only surmise, is to give the commissioner that vital extra half-second to dive for his Uzi, if necessary.

Conveniently most of the commissioners’ pillaging of city coffers is never discussed at public meetings. See, the city has this nifty little deal where purchase orders for less than $4,500 don’t need the approval of the full commission. That way commissioners can submit reams of invoices for $4,499 and get instant approvalwithout clogging up the city’s very important public agenda.

It’s true that Miami City Hall is a creaky old dump in need of repair and renovation, and it’s also true that city commissioners deserve offices that are decent and attractive. The sum of $111,549 is neither. It seems beyond belief that careless nitwits could spend this kind of dough and claim not to know about it.

From now on, if any commissioner demands to sit on pumice, let it be the real thing.

For city execs, all work, no play pays off

April 10, 1987

The hottest vacation package in Florida is being offered by the city of Miami, which is paying its top brass big bucks to stay in town.

It’s such a good deal that you wonder why every little kid doesn’t want to grow up and be a faithful public servant.

The trick is to store up as much “accrued vacation time” as possible. The longer you do this, the more money you get at retirement. Why? Because the city, in all its fiscal wisdom, will pay you for any unused vacation hours at your current top salary scale.

It doesn’t matter if you piled up the time 10 years ago while making $10 an hour. If you’re now earning $20 an hour, that’s the rate at which you get reimbursed.

How big-hearted can a bureaucracy be! This vacation gig is better than an IRA account.Throw in pensions and sick time and you’ve got yourself a healthy nest egg.

With this kind of incentive, it’s no surprise that so many city executives claim they go for years without taking time off. You’ve got to feel sorry for these tireless souls, toiling at their desks day after day while each summer their pals trundle off to Disney World or Six Flags or Knott’s Berry Farm.

As a matter of fact, it might be instructive to locate and publish the time sheets of these working-class heroesnot to test their memories, mind you, but merely to give inspiration to new employees.

The all-work, no-play mentality is so pervasive at City Hall that Miami now has $9.5 million of accrued vacation time on its payroll. Alarmed, the city manager wants to pay some of this in lump sums now, instead of letting the money build up until workers reach retirement.

Under this voluntary payback program, the city has already delivered some handsome checks. Assistant budget director Frank May got $25,085 for 894 hours of unused vacationno days, 109 nights in beautiful Miami.

Deputy City Attorney Robert Clark cashed in 100 hours at more than $45 an hour. Finance director Carlos Garcia collected 263.5 hours at more than $36 an hour. And budget director Manohar Surana got about $42 an hour for 286 hours of unused vacation. (His $87,000-plus salary is almost as high as that of his New York City counterpart.)

One of the biggest winners was internal audit director Sujan Chhabra. For 18 weeks of vacation time he received nearly $30,000, which, city officials say, he needed for a new house.

Interestingly, only Miami’s highest-paid honchos are eligible for this exciting program. City sanitation workers are limited to 100 hours of accrued vacation while many other general employees are allowed no more than 180 hours.