County restructuring: Start at the top and with vacancies

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Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez doesn’t only have his much-talked about five deputy mayors who, combined, make more than $1 million a year. He’s also got 12 aides, six secretaries, three assistants, three media people and one senior advisor who I think is now his chief of staff.

Oh, and two student interns.

No wonder Gimenez has time to visit the White House, hobnob with David Beckham and jet set with lobbyist pal Jorge Luis Lopez to Europe to see the Pope before or after the Paris Air Show.

As the mayor starts to more seriously take on the restructuring of the county, meeting with department directors about “their high-level view of their initiatives,” according to one of those aforementioned media people, many hope that he looks within his own house for some housecleaning — especially as the cuts promised as a result of the 5% pay restoration to employees looms like a vulture.

While last week’s meeting of department heads was not specific to the 5%, said Gimenez spokesman Fernando Figueredo, a memo sent to the directors by the mayor after his veto on the pay restoration was overridden reminds them that those cost efficiencies he was already looking for have become more important.

“The Mayor has been saying for a long time that we needed to have a structurally balanced government that was responsible in providing service while living within its means.  So the Mayor is using this as an opportunity to move forward with the structural changes to our county organization needed to establish the structurally balanced organization he has pushed for,” Figueredo said.

Several people have expressed the desire for that structural overhaul to start at the top. And they don’t mean the mini changes that Gimenez announced last week, shuffling the chess pieces around after Ruben Arias left the office to become Commissioner Lynda Bell‘s chief of staff and Lisa Martinez was named chief of staff. Her first task will be to restructure the county departments and many hope she begins at home.

The mayor’s office has a $5.5 million budget, of which nearly $3.5 million goes to salaries for 45 people. No doubt very smart people, very capable people. Ladra knows some of them. They are professional and hardworking, polite and helpful, if sometimes understandably defensive. But does Gimenez need three separate media people devoted solely to him if the county has a whole department for that already? Do commissioners, for that matter? Seems self serving to me and while I can see why the mayor might want three different spin doctors, it seems like too many.

The mayor’s personnel budget, first exposed last week on the Eye On Miami blog, has raised many eyebrows, though some county commissioners — principally Commissioners Xavier “Mayor Sir” Suarez and Juan “El Zorro” Zapata, who has already defied the mayor with the deciding veto override vote — had been planning on raising the issue anyway.

“I’m astounded,” said Suarez said about the 12 aides. He said he will “absolutely” ask that the mayor’s restructuring take a hard look at his own office. “If you eliminate positions at the top, you don’t affect services,” Suarez said, adding that nobody should make over $150,000 a year other than the mayor, the county attorney and maybe two or three others. More than 2,500 employees make six figure salaries at the county, he said. Suarez is also willing to have that look go into commissioners’ offices, who he said could share more staff and cut their $814,000 annual office budget. Other places where Suarez sees potential cuts/savings:.

• The budget office, which has 47 staffers. “Jennifer Moon is very capable. Why does she need so many people,” Suarez asks.
• The IT department. “It didn’t exist 30 years ago and now it’s this monster and yet no services have changed in parks, solid waste, etc.”
• Reducing the number of county light fleet vehicles, right now at 7,000.
• Selling some of the county’s 4,500 properties
• Consolidating the uses in the county’s 18 administration buildings.

Ladra would add reducing the number of outside consultants the county hires to produce millions of dollars worth of studies that are then shelved and never used — or deemed out of date when it comes time to consider them, after which they county requests new studies of the same or different consultants.

Zapata also has issues with the fleet vehicles and IT, which he thinks can be consolidated further and to which he pointed as an example of a county culture with which the former state rep is growing increasingly frustrated.

He recently asked about eliminated positions at the $17 million department and was told that six positions were taken out of the budget. Then he asked how many of those eliminated positions were already vacant and was told that three were. Then he asked what happened to the other three people and he was told they were just moved to a different job.

“That’s not consolidating and eliminating,” Zap told Ladra. “We have to get a lot better about right sizing our workforce,” Zapata said, adding that he also wants to look into outsourcing some “functions” as a way to do that.

Zapata also and says that the county may be able to save on its health insurance — if it could obtain information from the provider about uses and trends. “One of the ways of saving is looking at utilization rates. But the health insurance company told us that information was proprietary. How can it be proprietary if it’s ours? It blows my mind that somehow the county can’t get its own information to better manage the plan.”

Zapata also has issues with the way the county purchases things and stores them away. Storage costs money he says. “Why not buy things as we need them?” He has heard the same stories as Ladra has about warehouses of materials that must be thrown out because they have been stored too long.

And he says purchases are sometimes more expensive than they need be. One small example is the TV in his office. When he went to replace it, he found the one he wanted at Amazon.com. But the county said it couldn’t buy it there, having to go to one of its “approved vendors” instead. For $100-something more, Zapata said.

“I was told ‘That’s the way we do things around here,'” said Zapata, who ended up buying it myself with his own money out of protest.

He also had a staffer using a 2005 Prius for three months and his office was charged $7,400 by General Services Administration. “I couldn’t believe it. That’s how much the car is worth,” Zapata said.

“GSA is this black hole we need to get into. It’s this internal taxing mechanism that sucks money out of every department. They charge the fire department rent,” he added. “Where does that money go?”

There are hardworking professionals all around the county that are right now shaking in their work boots or pumps — because they feel no job security — and wondering the same thing. They shouldn’t be worried. Not with 588 vacancies still reflected in the salaries in the $4.4 billion budget. These are budgeted positions for which a paycheck is never issued. Why? Where does that money go at the end?

Hopefully, these ghost employees will be the first to get the pink slips the mayor threatened would come as a result of the 5% pay restoration given to employees by a commission that overrode his veto. And maybe some of those positions never have to come back… they’re vacant and the county is still humming along.

Some people say that Gimenez is a vengeful sort. The kind who wants to see heads roll because things didn’t go his way. After all, he desperately tried to keep imposing a 5% “group healthcare fund” forced contribution (read: county subsidy) without laying out a long-term solution to the fact that he was balancing his budget on the backs of our employees. Some people say Gimenez is going to make those employees pay another way.

I’m going to give the magician inside the mayor the benefit of the doubt. Our mayor has pulled a rabbit — or a library or a fire station — out of a hat before. Ladra will bet that he finds the $3.5 million needed to make the employees whole without hurting them in the process or cutting services to all of us.

Let’s believe that the restructuring is real. That Mayor Gimenez is going to do this the right way and the smart way by consolidating duties and breaking down the bureaucracy that exists now. That he is going to look at the many administration buildings and hundreds of properties to see how best to use our assets. That he is going to look at ordering fewer materials that need to be stored. That he is going to start at the top and work his way down.

There are efficiencies to be had, Mr. Mayor. You just have to look a little harder.

And maybe a little closer.

Don’t leave it up to your aides and your student interns as you fly off somewhere else or hang out with your buddy Beckham.

  Carlos Gimenez, Juan Zapata, labor issues, Miami-Dade budget, Xavier Suarez