Miami-Dade County commissioners authorized the county on Thursday to take out a $100 million loan so its embattled mass-transit agency can keep construction projects moving ahead.
The loan will provide the money to continue construction of Metrorail’s elevated link between Miami International Airport and the Earlington Heights Station and provide some cash toward the purchase of new rail cars.
The move came amid a wide-ranging meeting at which the newly installed mayor, Carlos Gimenez, signaled he will play a much more hands-on role than his predecessor, Carlos Alvarez, who was ousted in an historic recall in March.
Gimenez — a former county commissioner who, unlike Alvarez, said he plans to attend and participate in commission meetings —emphasized he will provide the panel, which he served on until April, with a lot more information than the prior administration did.
“This board for too long has really been flying blind,’’ said Gimenez, drawing a warm response from the commission, including Chairman Joe Martinez, who is likely to face off against Gimenez in the 2012 mayoral race.
“I’m so glad you’re going to be providing more information,’’ Martinez responded. “It’s something I’ve been fighting for for a long time.’’
In other matters, the commission, in a bid to give a bit more autonomy to the new governing board of Jackson Health Systems, changed the rules so that the commission must muster a two-thirds vote instead of a simple majority to overrule an action taken by the board.
In other action, the commission agreed to allow a swap of a patch of land outside the county’s Urban Development Boundary near Homestead Miami Speedway for an equivalent swath of land inside the line to allow for expanded seating at the racetrack. And it also authorized a $42 million bond sale, the final financing piece for the new Florida Marlins ballpark in Little Havana.
The interim transit loan approved Thursday will provide the Miami-Dade transportation agency with the capital it needs until it resolves federal regulators’ concerns and the county can sell bonds to pay for construction projects, as it normally would have done. With the transit agency’s finances under a cloud because of an ongoing federal investigation, the county had postponed a $550 million bond offering it had planned for this summer, because the interest rate would have been unacceptably high.
In addition to concerns raised during several Federal Transit Administration audits of Miami-Dade Transit, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a criminal investigation of the transit agency, although details of that probe aren’t clear.
Commissioners had earlier failed to adopt the measure allowing the county to take out the $100 million loan from Citibank. The vote on the loan at a June 21 meeting was a 6-6 tie, with several commissioners explaining that county officials hadn’t given them enough information to decide on such major borrowing.
The FTA, which administers federal grants, recently agreed to release $62.5 million of some $184 million in federal grant money it has been withholding amid concerns about financial mismanagement at the county transit agency. County officials say the easing by the feds means the county won’t have to consider service cuts because of its federal funding crunch. The county has been tapping into its general fund to cover the shortfall from the suspension of federal grant money that has dragged on since last November
