Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s dual role on MDX board hasn’t panned out

When Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and Commissioner Audrey Edmonson made themselves members of the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority early last year — convincing colleagues to appoint them rather than citizens, as they had traditionally done — there was talk about making MDX toll funds available to build rail for the SMART plan.

That was the whole idea, wasn’t it? That’s what Gimenez campaigned on in 2016.

Instead, all he’s done is get his daughter-in-law work and promote the construction of 14 new miles of highway.

That’s not what we were expecting.

“Miami-Dade mayor takes a seat on MDX toll board and eyes money for rail projects,” read the Feb. 7, 2017 headline in the Miami Herald.

“County preparing to spend $3.6B on rapid transit,” reads another headline, Feb. 16, 2017, in The Next Miami. “Mayor Carlos Gimenez and another county commissioner recently appointed themselves to the MDX board with the intention of taking MDX funds for rail,” the story said.

The mayor himself, at his first MDX meeting, said they agency had to be about more than highways.

“What the commission did in putting myself in and the vice chair is a clear indication that we consider MDX to be part of the solution and that we need to work together because its about mobility, its about getting around” Gimenez told the board at his introduction meeting.

“MDX is about maybe expressways. Maybe it should be more than that,” he said. “How we get around in the very near future is going to be quite different than how we get around today.”

What happened to all the promises?

By July of last year, after he was made chairman of the board at MDX, Gimenez was already saying rail wasn’t going to happen. He called it old fashioned. “So 19th century,” he told the Miami Herald’s editorial board. And, instead, he proposes the modern, 21st century solution: More buses.

Now his role on MDX is to promote the Kendall Parkway, a highway to nowhere over endangered wetlands and across the Urban Boundary Development line that everybody in the world knows will just become gridlocked as soon as it opens and that most Miami-Dade residents — and all environmentalists — don’t want.

Gimenez has become the lead advocate for the proposed $1 billion extension of the 836 expressway. Last month, before the county commission voted to approve the highway to nowhere, he actually said that 5,000 postcards received from residents in favor of the Parkway — which is perfectly named because it will become a parking lot — proved support for the project.

What he didn’t say was that there were really 150,000 cards sent out by MDX before the first vote in June — at a cost of $125,000 (which seems inflated) — and that they did not have an option to mark if you were against the new 14 miles of highway. Ladra can’t help but wonder if Gimenez, who was made chairman of the MDX board this past summer, approved that.

He also forgot to mention that MDX spent at least $400,000 on PR for the Kendall Parkway vote, including $60,000 that went to the company the mayor’s daughter-in-law works for.

On Monday, the Herald’s Doug Hanks wrote that two environmental groups filed separate lawsuits to block the construction of the Kendall Parkway, saying that the public was misled about the details and that what the commission approved was different than what was advertised.

Today, Tuesday, Gimenez will hold court at MDX, 3790 NW 21st St., where the board meets at 4 p.m. On the agenda: an update on the Kendall Parkway and a $2.6 million contract for “Construction Engineering and Inspection (CE&I) Services” on a number of projects, including the addition of a continuous westbound lane and interchange improvements at 57th and 17th avenues, the addition of a continuous eastbound lane from west of the LeJeune exit to 27th Avenue with interchange improvements, and replacing some tolling location points.

Not on the agenda: Rail.

Carlos Gimenez, Kendall Parkway, MDX, traffic, transit

Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s dual role on MDX board hasn’t panned out added by Ladra on October 30, 2018
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