Expect to hear about transit, jobs and public safety

To the victor go the spoils, don’t they? To the victor, also goes the spin.

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez will do what he does best at this year’s State of the County address Wednesday: Pat his own back.

Sure, he’ll provide shout-outs to his apologists and allies — especially Chairman Esteban Bovo, who many say he is grooming as his chosen replacement for 2020 — and largely ignore or smugly chide his critics and naysayers. He’ll thank former Chairman Jean Monestime for his service the last two years. And he might have a person (read: prop) or two in the audience to serve as an example of something great he’s done. Probably a young person who is working thanks to the great efforts the mayor has made.

But be sure that Gimenez will be the star of the show. It will sound a lot like the last address, which sounded the same as the last and so on, and so on. He’s in love with himself.

Read related story: Carlos Gimenez gets a ‘C’ on State of the County speech

He will take credit for the smooth election in Miami-Dade as well as the economic turnaround and the successes at Miami International Airport and the seaport, which is woefully under achieving in cargo sales compared to even Port Everglades (that won’t be in the speech, though) because it is not open 24 hours a day. He will take credit for the new animal shelter, even though it was a mandate from the people and approved in a bond referendum more than a decade ago. He will talk about all the great things he’s done — Gimenez never misses a chance to repeat how he delivered the biggest tax break ever — and all the great things he’s going do do in the next four years. After all, he is sure to remind us, these are his last.

After reviewing past addresses, the things he said after his re-election and the speech he gave at Bovo’s swearing in earlier this month — and talking to several sources inside County Hall and insiders outside County Hall — Ladra has a pretty good guess of at least some of the issues or projects that are most likely to be in Wednesday’s speech. And it’s no surprise that it is the three main issues of the mayoral campaign which he also told reporters would be his priorities after he beat School Board Member Raquel Regalado in November: transit, economic development and public safety in the light of the gun violence plaguing some of our neigborhoods.

Transit will be center stage. Many longtime county observers and insiders say Gimenez will use this speech to lay out his transportation plans. That will likely take up a good part of the first half of his monologue. You know, after he acknowledges his family and talks about leaving the county better for his grandchildren blah blah blah. He hinted in November toward a major announcement soon. Maybe this is soon enough. He will talk about finally making some headway in finishing the six famous corridors that closely match what was promised to voters — except they won’t all be rail (some people will have to compromise for rapid busways). He won’t talk about how he has misspent some of the People’s Transportation Tax dollars so that he could give us that tax break he loves to remind us about, but he may announce which of the six corridors goes first. Spoiler alert: It’s either the South Dade corridor to Homestead or the 27th Avenue corridor to Miami Gardens. He won’t tell people that he increased the transit payroll by $1 million in 2015 with five other six-figure salaries for people to babysit new director Alice Bravo.

He may also talk about his recent trip to Las Vegas, where he attended the AT&T Smart Cities conference and how he himself was the one who made Miami one of the cities tapped for their initiative and get one of the first Smart Cities operation centers, which are supposed to help governments see community conditions — traffic flow, lighting and public safety operartions — in real time and present solutions immediately. Let’s hope he explains what that means exactly and let’s hope it’s not just another layer of beaurocracy that sounds good because it has the word smart in it. Let’s also hope he doesn’t make a lame joke about what happens in Vegas coming to Miami.

Wait a minute. Didn’t the Denver trip last year promise to bring us some transit solutions?

Economic development and jobs will also be highlighted. He will talk about the number of jobs he created, again without going into the details about the type of jobs (low paying and temporary) that most are. He may even say “a job is a job” again, which is easy to say when you are drawing from three pensions and you make $150,000 a year. But now he will talk more about diversification of the economy (almost like he learned from Regalado during the campaign). He will talk about the upcoming projects that are going to bring new jobs, like the megamall planned for Northwest Dade just north of Hialeah — which is coming before the commission next week — and the Miami Wilds theme park planned for the property next to the zoo, which has been broken up into two phases to make it more palatable and easy to get each piece through despite the objections of environmentalists (more on that later). He will talk about smaller projects brought through incentives and public private partnerships and, perhaps, moving forward with the privatization of Vizcaya (more on that later), though he won’t call it that. He will call it a pathway to preservation, or some such nonsense. No, he hasn’t given up on that plan. He just put it on the shelf until after the election. And he will talk about expanding his own legacy program, Employ Miami-Dade, which I suspect is just a feel-good program with a subsidy replacement check instead of a real job and someone ought to investigate how many of those people are still employed afterwards.

He may also talk about soccer. He sorta has to. Everybody wants to know what is going on with that.

Read related story: Miami-Dade Police cuts by Carlos Gimenez cause concern

And even though he doesn’t want to, Gimenez will have to talk about the gun violence that has claimed the lives of so many children and young people all over the county, from Miami Gardens to Homestead. The speech was probably edited this week to include a mention of the people injured when shots were fired at the Martin Luther King Jr. Festival Monday. But Ladra hopes he talks about more than just us policing ourselves. And I hope he doesn’t talk about expanding his living room cops again. Taking officers off the street and putting them into the homes of at-risk kids — his brilliant idea last year — is not just a band-aid, it’s a cheap generic band-aid from the dollar store that doesn’t really stick and is falling off five minutes after you put it on. Unless Gimenez restores some of the specialized units he dismantled in 2014 — because he would rather make cuts than fill vacancies — hoods with guns will play across our county. It was reported yesterday that the shooting was perpetrated by rival gangs. And it is time Gimenez wake up to the fact that gang activity has increased since he dismantled the very specialized unit that investigated them and stopped these shootings before they happened.

But that will be one of the many things he doesn’t say.

Like the fact that after the speech Wednesday, the mayor and his lobbyist son are flying to D.C. for the inauguration of president-elect Donald Trump, who he tried so desperately to distance himself from during the election.

Is it too much to hope that Regalado — or someone — will have a response to his address again this year?

County Hall is abuzz with speculation about who will become the chair of the Miami-Dade Commission for the next two years. But the only thing that is certain right now is that it won’t be unanimous, like it was in 2014 when the commission showed a unified body behind today’s Chairman Jean Monestime.

In a very important decision that could set the tone for the next two years, commissioners will elect the chair and vice chair on Tuesday. But while the two frontrunners couldn’t be any more different, both Xavier Suarez and the current vice chair Esteban Bovo Jr., were elected in the 2011 after-the-recall races and both are possible candidates for county mayor in 2020.

And, yes, it is a heated election for the chairmanship. Just because you can’t see all the behind-the-scenes campaigning, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Bovo and/or his people are telling everyone that he has the seven votes he needs. In fact, Back to the Future Commissioner Joe Martinez — whose people reportedly reached out for the public safety committee chairmanship — was told that Bovo doesn’t need his vote and that Sally Heyman had already been promised that committee.

In addition to Commissioner Heyman, apparently in a trade for the public safety committee, Bovo can probably count on his own vote and the votes of:

• Former chair Rebeca Sosa — because Bovo’s wife works for Sen. Marco Rubio, who is Sosa’s unofficial adopted son. She has been actively campaiging for Stevie.
• Javier Souto — because Esteban Bovo Sr. is a Brigade 2506 veteran and Bovo sponsored the ordinance that would ban the county from doing business with companies that did business in Cuba.
• Jose “Pepe” Diaz — because he is the mayor’s yes man and the mayor wants Bovo.

That’s five and he needs two more. Apparently, the rumor — that his camp has intentionally spread — is that he has the votes from Commissioner Audrey Edmonson and the current chair, Monestime.

But Ladra thinks Bovo is taking Edmonson for granted. Because, like, why? More likely, he may have the support of Commissioner Bruno Barreiro, because both of them served in the Florida House of Representatives even though at separate times. But that still makes only six. Because Monestime seems more ideologically and philosophically aligned with Suarez, who chairs his precious prosperity committee.

In addition to Monestime’s and his own vote, Ladra strongly believes Suarez will get support from Martinez and Commissioners Barbara Jordan, Daniella Levine Cava and Dennis Moss, just because they seem to be on the same side of most commission votes. He only needs one more. Will it be Edmonson or Barreiro?

Those two are arguably the only potential undecideds. And that is precisely why Bovo is spreading unsubstantiated and premature rumors about his alleged seven votes in the bag — to sway the undecideds. Or the soft leaning votes even. Because everyone wants to be with the winner.

Suarez has long indicated he wanted this position and has been campaigning longer. Some County Hall insiders think that he withdrew from this year’s mayoral race so that Mayor Carlos Gimenez would back him. Ladra believed them, especially when X seemed to ease off the pressure he had put on the mayor during previous years.

But no. Apparently, he was (1) refocusing his efforts to the chairmanship and (2) just being his collegial self.

It makes much more sense that Gimenez would campaign for Bovo because the compliant commissioner, who campaigned and raised money for the mayor’s re-election bid, would be a puppet for him ready with a rubber stamp to make the Gimenez agenda a reality. Bovo has already come out very supportive of the American Dream mega mall that many of his constituents in Palm Springs North and Miami Lakes do not want. In fact, the mayor and Bovo share many of the same, um, benefactors. The mayor can count on Bovo to move items to the agenda without going through the committee process and to get all kinds of contracts pushed through for his friends and family plan. We’ll see a new, sudden “backlog of contracts” that needs to bypass committee discussion and be pushed through.

After all, Gimenez has about $8 million of I.O.U.s out that he needs to start making good on.

There are several reasons the commission should choose X Tuesday instead of Bovo.

Suarez is a brilliant and persuasive speaker with a track record of proven leadership not only in his district but countywide. He is a charming, disarming modern Renaissance Man with a knack for bringing people together who gets along with almost everybody, including people from both sides of the aisle. An independent or no party affiliation voter, he has supported both Democrats and Republicans in state elections and has close friends and advisors from both the blue and the red teams. And he believes that light rail, not bus rapid transit, is what must happen for South Dade and that all the corridor mass transit projects can be sought simultaneously and paid for without more taxes. He has helped identify funding and it looks like he has come up with more initiatives and plans to get projects off the ground than anyone.

Bovo, meanwhile, is a GOP loyalist with absolutely no friends on the other side and such an integral part of that Hialeah absentee ballot machinery that his district office became a drop-off point for fraudulent votes in the 2012 election. He won his seat by stabbing his predecessor, former Commissioner Natacha Seijas, in the back, campaigning for her recall so he could take her place. Later, his chief of staff, who was moonlighting as a lobbyist, was busted in the same federal bribery case that took down former Sweetwater Mayor Manny Maroño. He has had some good days since, Ladra admits, but he is not known for building consensus, hires questionable staffers and is extremely disrespectful to the labor unions and employees, who generally dislike him. He supported Gimenez’s proposal to close libraries, saying they could be housed in park buildings. And he’s an early and consistent proponent of rapid bus rather than rail who also wants to pay for mass transit improvements with additional tax dollars by creating one or more special taxing districts in the areas it would serve.

But the biggest reason why we should want X as chair instead of Stevie is because Suarez is a stickler for process with a higher regard for transparency who will hold the mayor’s feet to the fire and represent the commission on the dais and in his office, while Bovo is a Gimenez apologist and pocket commissioner who will be looking out for the 29th floor and let the mayor control the agenda.

You know what? It should be unanimous.

Call your commissioner (phone numbers are on this website) and tell them that you want Xavier Suarez to be the chair. This is even more important if you live in District 3 (Edmonson’s office number downtown is 305-375-5393) or District 5 (Barreiro’s office number is 305-643-8525). Hurry up. The meeting starts at 9:30 Tuesday.