Despite steep spending cuts and looming layoffs, Miami-Dade County commissioners continue to stockpile cash that they spend with few restrictions and scant oversight.
Commissioner Sally Heyman is sitting on $804,000 in unspent money, Jose “Pepe” Diaz controls $461,000, Bruno Barreiro has $361,000 and Dennis Moss $354,000. Taken together, commissioners have more than $3 million in surplus taxpayer funds set aside for their personal spending whims.
The money comes from the commissioners’ individual office budgets, which are $814,000 each per year, but aren’t required to be used solely for office expenses such as staff salaries or paper and pens. Instead, the funds are regularly doled out by individual commissioners to favored groups within their districts with virtually no checks or balances; allocations are subject to a perfunctory vote at the end of commission meetings and are rarely denied.
Critics deride the money as slush funds, a stash of political pork that commissioners pass out to curry favor with constituents. Commissioners defend the practice, declaring they best know how money should be spent in their district, and that the funds support good causes.
“If that’s not illegal, it should be,’’ said Dominic Calabro, president and CEO of Florida Tax Watch, a Tallahassee-based government watchdog group, who called the free spending “ripe for mischief” and “blatantly wrong.”
In recent years, commissioners made sure they kept firm control of the taxpayer-funded bounty: They passed an ordinance in 2007 mandating that each commissioner gets to carry over unspent funds at the end of the year, even as they are given a fresh, fully funded office budget for the new fiscal year. The ability to roll over surplus money allows commissioners to build a mountain of cash that can be handed out before an upcoming election.
Now, recently elected Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez — who, as a commissioner, defended the use of discretionary dollars — is saying he will put an end to the practice.
‘NEEDS TO STOP’
In September, when commissioners pass a new budget for the coming year, Gimenez said he will ask for a law change to stop commissioners from spending office funds on nonoffice uses, and eliminate their ability to carry over unspent funds into a new year.
“The practice of discretionary funding, it needs to stop,” Gimenez said. “You can fund services through a normal budget process.”
Two years ago, a Palm Beach County grand jury — charged with addressing a “crisis of trust in public governance” after a string of public corruption convictions — called for a slate of reforms. Topping the list: ending county commissioners’ discretionary funds.
The report said most of the money went to laudable efforts, including worthwhile community groups and nonprofits, but the process of commissioners individually handing out the funds smacked of unseemly political patronage that “at a minimum, politicized the manner of funding” and created a negative effect “in both fact and perception.”
The issue is not necessarily who the money is given to, but how it is given out, said Calabro of Florida Tax Watch. “It should be part of a competitive, transparent, accountable funding process that is reviewed by all commissioners,” he said.
Miami-Dade commissioners’ giveaway money targeted - Miami-Dade - MiamiHerald.com
