Miami-Dade budget: Library taxes up; police and fire, down

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Rivera made it seem that it was very unlikely there would be a resolution in the negotiations between Gimenez and the PBA, which could stretch into an impasse after the final budget is approved. “I have a mandate from our members. They want the administration to honor the contract,” he said, referring to the snap backs that will cost the county $40 million, according to Gimenez (yeah, $40 million they’ve been saving for three years). “They’ve been honoring their end of the agreement.”

Public employees can’t be happy, since they got blamed for the shortfall and the budget woes in the county, which is really the fault of a wasteful administration more intent on giving millions away to private companies and cruise lines and billionaire owners of sports teams. But, of course, that’s not how Gimenez sees it.

“That’s not the budget I will be fighting for,” the mayor said, adding that he wants the “best scenario budget,” in which the labor unions bend over and give up everything they’ve worked for, continuing concessions that Gimenez said would end this year, perhaps in continuum forever.

“The best case scenario calls for a continuation of those concessions. It does not call for any additional concessions,” he said, in the usual doubletalk he uses when he tries to make a bad situation look better. So what that it doesn’t call for additional concessions. That would just be un descaro at that point. Like when he said that the employees had gotten a raise when they were given back the 4% they were giving to health care last year and 5% giving to a health care trust fund — which we now know was a lie, because they were just balancing the budget — that the employees got back this year after an overturned veto.

“The employees have obviously had pay increases — more money in their pocket — than the last year,” Gimenez said. How cynical can you be. That was money you had taken out of their pocket the year before, saying you would give it back — not pay it back during the time they lost it, but just give it back — at a certain day.

“We need to continue the concessions. We don’t need to add anymore concessions. We just need to continue,” he said. Which makes Ladra think that he thinks we’re stupid. Because who on Earth would believe anything he says about concessions now?

The $40 mil added to another $18 million estimated to be saved through a 15% reduction in the cost of healthcare — though Ladra still doesn’t know how those savings can be so immediate as to start this year — will not save every job, said the mayor, who last week was considering giving $62 million in Building Better Communities bond monies, including $5 million to serial campaign donor Wayne Rosen. Gimenez said he would still have to fire up to 150 people.

Ladra actually thinks there could be savings found in the healthcare, which apparently hasn’t gone to bid for seven or eight years. I’m not so sure that a redesign of benefits is the way to go, but the mayor — who was conspicuously absent during public comments and visibly tense as he was questioned and criticized by the commission — is already offering a third plan that includes about 70 percent of the employees’ current providers but will still be a savings.

AFSCME President Andy Madtes — who is the real leader on the healthcare reform at the county level — said that he had already identified a way to save $5 million by switching radiology providers. He’s meeting with the mayor in the next few days to show him how, Madtes told Ladra. And he believes that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Madtes also said that there were likely things that his membership would not budge on — particularly the holiday and furlough days. But that there may be room for negotiating. “I have to go back to the members and see what they want to do,” Madtes said. “We want to avoid an impasse with the commission, but I don’t know. Our folks don’t want to hear it. They say, “Let him lay us off.'”

Commissioners can’t be happy. The mayor put the onus of a tax increase, no matter how small, on them. And rather than turn the tables — by calling his bluff, increasing the tax rates and putting the onus on him to find more savings — they buckled under pressure and, in the process, jeopardizing public safety even further. Suarez and Diaz can’t be happy that their motions failed. Vice Chair Lynda Bell can’t be happy that she voted for a tax increase.

Taxpayers can’t be happy since we still get whittled down services and less police protection but the same level of zero accountability for the extra tax dollars they have to pay — for less. One woman complained of waiting three hours for an officer to show up for a burglar alarm. Said Rivera: “We are and will be the only county where one can call a pizzeria and 911 at the same time and the pizza arrives first.”

Jeffery Dorsett said it for a lot of us: “You all got money for soccer stadiums but you take money away from the things that are important to us.”

Gimenez maybe saw that some commissioners wanted to give themselves the wiggle room, rather than box themselves in and tie their hands like they did last year by setting the ceiling rate too low. It’s been the buzz for days — that there were definitely the votes for a library increase, maybe a tentative increase to see what happened with negotiations with police. But he warned commissioners that giving themselves any wiggle room would simply play into the hands of employee unions who, by the way, simply want him to honor the promise the administration made — with the commission’s vote of approval — to return some, not all, of the concessions they made in 2011, when they were facing another $200 million shortfall (more on that later). They just want to stop making the sacrifices they were asked to make for only three years. Those sacrifices are scheduled to end October 1. It is Gimenez who wants to extend them. The unions are not asking for anything extra.

“If you raise taxes, then it sends a signal to the unions saying there is no reason to negotiate because we have the money,” Gimenez so cynically told them. Well, conversely Mr. Mayor, wouldn’t voting for your flat tax send the signal that there is no reason to negotiate because you’ve got no reason to give them anything?

So they played right into his hands.

Commissioners still believe, bless their souls, that the mayor won’t fire anyone if they now take a surgical knife to the budget and find $58 million that the unions have been forced to give up — or lose jobs.

“If we approve this today, we can look for savings like we did last year to make sure that no stations close,” said Commission Chair Rebeca Sosa, referring to concerns raised that the Midwest Station would be closed under the mayor’s “worst case scenario” — another hint that he ain’t really negotiating with the unions. Because there’s a “best case scenario” and a “worst case scenario” and nothing in between.

The black caucus — Commissioners Audrey Edmonson, Barbara Jordon, Jean Monestime and Dennis Moss — were pretty consistent with what was expected of them. They wanted the wiggle room.

“What we are actually doing is setting a ceiling,” Edmonson reminded her collagues on the dais. “I still have a problem with us lowering the millage rate, when we can keep it flat.”

But despite the fact that many observers felt the commission had political cover to raise the tax rate — at least until they could figure out what they could cut instead of police jobs, making the next two months of the budget process more meaningful — they failed to muster the leadership that they needed to make it happen.