The elected property appraisers in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties came together this week to write an op-ed piece about Amendment 2, urging voters to vote yes to keep an annual 10 percent cap on the increase in non-homestead property values — and make it permanent.
This includes apartment buildings and duplexes where owners generally pass the increase in taxes to their tenants and charge higher rents, which could exacerbate the affordable housing crisis we have now. And if at first it seems smart to raise taxes on commercial properties to raise the funds we need for education, climate change resiliency, Everglades restoration and other state and local needs, these property appraisers warn that — if amendment 2 does not pass and the cap is not extended — there would be a trickle down effect that could cause a significant raise in the price of products and services. 
Here, in it’s entirety, is the op-ed piece written by Miami-Dade Property Appraiser Pedro Garcia (photo), Broward County Property Appraiser Marty Kiar and Palm Beach Property Appraiser Dorothy Jacks.
“As the Property Appraisers for Florida’s three largest counties, we urge all voters to pay close attention to Amendment 2 on the upcoming November ballot.
The amendment asks voters whether to make permanent a 10 percent limit on the annual increase in assessed value of a non-homestead property. A “yes” vote will avert a sudden and largely unexpected tax crisis for more than 530,000 residential and business property owners in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
Most residential property owners in Florida enjoy the tax savings afforded by two $25,000 homestead exemptions. Business owners, rental property owners, second homeowners and part-time retirees whose permanent residence is in another state are not eligible for those exemptions. For them, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2008 that placed a 10 percent limit on the annual increase in assessed value of a non-homestead property. Over the past 10 years, these property owners have enjoyed significant tax savings because of this cap.
What many people do not know is that the 10 percent cap on non-homestead property is set to expire at the end of 2018. If Amendment 2 does not pass, more than a half-million residential and commercial property owners in South Florida will shoulder a total tax increase of $422 million effective Jan. 1, 2019. In Palm Beach County alone, 134,592 property owners will share the cost of an additional $66.3 million in taxes. In Broward County, 170,000 property owners share the cost of an additional $88.5 million in taxes and in Miami-Dade County, 227,680 property owners share the cost of an additional $267.5 million in taxes.
For many high-value commercial property owners, the prospect of such an increase may be barely noticeable. However, please do not think that this is a problem for someone else who can easily afford it. Consider the ripple effect of a repeal of the 10 percent cap. Think about the rental property owner who raises rent to make ends meet or the small-business owner – your favorite produce stand, car repair shop or family-owned restaurant – who raises prices to cover the additional cost.
The owner of a duplex in a south Florida community forgot that the 10 percent cap was temporary and was surprised to learn that without it, the assessed value of his property will increase by 21 percent on January 1, 2019. In addition, his tax payment, compared to last year, will increase by 13.7 percent, or $654, rather than the $300 to $400 annual increases he has experienced from year to year with the cap in place. He prides himself on keeping the rental rates below average for the area so he can maintain good tenants, but admits that his ability to
continue doing that will be hampered, if Amendment 2 does not pass.
Finally, consider Florida’s part-time retirees, many of whom are on fixed incomes, whose contribution to our local economy benefits us all year long. Can South Florida continue to attract part-time retirees, if the cap expires?
What is perhaps most concerning about the cap’s looming deadline is that many of the people whom it will directly affect are unaware of the cap and/or its expiration date. We encourage all voters to talk to friends, family, local business owners and the part-time retirees in your neighborhood about the importance of this amendment.
If you are the owner of a non-homestead property, we welcome you to call our offices to find out how the repeal of the 10 percent cap will affect your property.
The numbers are 305-375-4712 in Miami-Dade, (954) 357-6830 in Broward and (561) 996-4890 in Palm Beach County.

Read Full Story

People watching the City of Miami meeting last week were surprised when Commissioner Joe Carollo went with the majority and voted against the very contract he helped negotiate with Ultra Music Festival organizers, even after getting everything he demanded.
The three-day electronic music event was kicked out of Bayfront Park, its home the past 18 years, when commissioners voted Sept. 27 unanimously not to renew their contract for next year. They cited the noise and traffic bothering downtown residents as their prime concerns.
But in reality Carollo is just trying to trade in one noise and traffic nightmare for another: Formula One racing. He thinks that if he can appease the downtown residents on Ultra — there, I did that for you — then it will be easier to sell the Miami Grand Prix.
Read related: Joe Carollo files late campaign report, with $60K to mayor’s daughter-in-law
And he’s doing it for his new BFF, lobbyist CJ Gimenez, son of Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez. CJ represents Formula One racing interests.
But what people need to know is that its not apples for oranges.
Yes, the Formula 1 racing would likely not extend into the wee hours of the morning like Ultra does. But the noise is arguably worse and the traffic is still going to be a nightmare. And the agreement negotiated so far with the city manager provides far less rent to the city than Ultra, whose organizers had agreed to pay $2 million annually to the city for the three day use of the park, a demand Carollo had made.
Read related: Why is Joe Carollo on Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s camp’s payroll
But Carollo and the Gimenez clan have a very special relationship. It’s a relationship where Mayor Gimenez was paying him $6,000 a month through his political action committee — for what? nobody knows — and where Crazy Joe paid the mayor’s daughter-in-law Tania Cruz, an attorney, almost $60,000 for mailers and campaign work. Both CJ and Tania, photographed right at a 2017 campaign event, were very present during Carollo’s commission contest and Cruz helped represent him after Alfie Leon challenged his residency.
Yes, it was an anonymous vote to deny Ultra another year. But Carollo was the one who negotiated and brought the contract to the table. Was it sabotage? Did he bring a poison pill?
Why wouldn’t he make it easier for his pal CJ to get Formula One passed? Todo en familia.

Read Full Story

Congressman Carlos Curbelo has made a big deal of the contributions collected by his first viable challenge since he beat former Congressman Joe Garcia in 2014. But his own money ain’t so clean.
Curbelo has taken at least $5,400 — $2,700 in 2016 and $2,700 again this past June — from billionaire conspiracy theorist Rex Sinquefield, who once said public schools were the product of the KKK while he worked to support private school vouchers, champion charter schools, and to bring an end to teacher tenure.
“A long time ago, decades ago, the Ku Klux Klan got together and said: ‘How can we really hurt the African American children permanently? How can we ruin their lives?’ And what they designed was the public school system,” Sinquefield said in a 2012 speech at a university in Missouri, where he is actively working to undermine the public school system.
It became quite a controversy and drew outrage from most if not all public officials and educators. Sinquefield is known as the equivalent of the Koch Brothers in Missouri, personally contributing more than $10 million to state and federal legislators that support his agenda.
Read related: Carlos Curbelo legacy in first term: Nod to cruise industry
Curbelo got money from another foe of public schools: Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos contributed $1,000 to Curbelo when he ran for the Miami-Dade School Board.
This begs the question: Does Carlos Curbelo share the same disdain for public schools that they have?
Probably.
In 2014, when he was running against former Garcia in the primary, Curbelo bragged in a debate about cutting 1,000 jobs from our school district. In 2011, as a school board member, he voted on a budget that cut 280 jobs, including guidance counselors and college advisors.
Read related: Attack on Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is Carlos Curbelo being a hypocrite
There is a reason why the United Teachers of Dade have endorsed Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in the race for congressional district 26.
“We believe Debbie will make a difference in Congress by fully funding our public schools, supporting educational policies that put our students first and working to improve the lives of working people,” said UTD president Karla Hernandez-Mats.
“Every day, our teachers are working to improve the lives of over 350,000 children in Miami-Dade County. They deserve a representative who will fight for better schools and to ensure every student has a chance to fulfill their potential.”
That ain’t Carlos Curbelo.

Read Full Story

As Amazon continues to look at Miami-Dade as a possible home for its second headquarters, our region got a B+ ranking last month among the 20 cities being considered and county Mayor Carlos Gimenez went on Bloomberg TV Wednesday to make our case.
Unfortunately, he had to lie.
“Well, I really think Miami-Dade is the city of the future. We are building it right before your eyes,” he said on Bloomberg Markets TV’s “Mini Moment” feature, sounding very much like a used car salesman.
Even though Miami-Dade is a county. Maybe he feels he is already the city of Miami mayor.
“Our technology sector here has grown by 40 percent in the last six years,” he said, and I don’t know what that base was because it doesn’t seem like we’ve gotten that much more techy. Can anyone confirm this?
“We are a top ten college town. We have great weather. We have, uh, a great infrastructure,” he continued, because, yes, it’s hard for even him to say with a straight face.
Read related: Carlos Gimenez lies and cheats to keep control of billions
Sure, if you only count our airport and seaport, which have had billions of dollars of investments because they are proprietary funds, paid by user fees rather than tax dollars. But if you look at the county infrastructure paid for by taxpayers? Transit infrastructure? Woeful.
And aren’t we still under a federal consent decree or order to upgrade our wastewater collection and treatment system? Why, yes, we are mandated to make $13 billion in improvements by 2028 after the county was sued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for violations to the clean water act.
And what have we done to make us more resilient to sea level rise, besides talk about it an awful lot?
“And we have great talent. What better example of this than Mr. Bezos came from here and maybe that’s a little bit of a home court advantage but we have so much more to offer.”
Like what? The high cost of housing? Almost half of our residents pay 40% or more of their income toward their mortgage or rent. There is a dire need for affordable or workforce housing, but that’s not on the mayor’s agenda.
We also have a higher number of foreclosures than the national average, and they are still increasing, with 30% more foreclosures in July than the same month last year.
And while we have our first A-rating and no “F” schools for the second consecutive year, our public schools are suffering because our legislators keep siphoning funds from them to put into the charter school industry that contributes to their campaigns.
Oh, and the corruption. Not just in Miami-Dade, where the mayor has given jobs to his best friend and his daughter-in-law and no-bid contracts to his friends and contributors. Have you heard of Hialeah? Sweetwater? Opa-Locka? Google it.
Read related: MDX spent $400K on PR, including $60K for mayor’s daughter-in-law
Even Commission Chairman Esteban “Steve” Bovo agrees.
“It ain’t gonna happen. We’re not equipped for it,” he said at a commission meeting last year when Amazon first floated Miami as a possibility.  “We’re not equipped to draw 50,000 new jobs in here because we don’t have the ability to let those people move around in our community.”
And the B+ rating that CNBC gave us in August — based mostly on South Florida’s lack of technological workers — is pretty good, but not great. Austin and Dallas were both given an A.
A surprising part of the Bloomberg interview was that Gimenez doesn’t even know if or when Bezos has been back in town. You’d think he would have reached out for a meeting.
“Frankly if he comes back, and if he’s visited, he will notice that Miami and Miami Dade County is not the same place that he left some years ago,” Gimenez said.
Read related: Carlos Gimenez taps commissioner to block return of the 1/2 penny funds
Well, except MetroRail, Jeff. MetroRail is exactly the same. Not a single mile of rail has been added since it was built and opened in 1984, even though voters here approved a half penny tax in 2002 to expand the line. Gimenez has been using that money to balance the budget, paying for operations instead of improvements. That’s how he balances the budget.
Oh, and they don’t really listen to voters here. That’s typical. They steal the half penny tax that we approved specifically for expanded MetroRail and they also failed to initiate the Pets’ Trust program that voters approved by 65% in 2012.
But they didn’t mention that on the Bloomberg show. A reporter did ask Gimenez “What new debt are you taking on? New P3 projects to make sure Miami’s infrastructure is up to par?”
Rather than answer her questions, the mayor went into a state-of-the-county-like speech.
“We’ve already invested heavily into our airport. It is our leading economic generator so we’ve spent well over $3 billion over the last 10 years. We basically have a brand new airport there,” Gimenez said. “We invested over a billion in our seaport. We dredged it so it would be Panamax ready. That means we can accept the large cargo ships that are able to traverse the Panama Canal.”
Then came the hard part.
“W are investing millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in our transportation infrastructure. We just uh,  improved, or we, oh, um, uh, approved some new highway projects to make our transit, uh, even better.”
Read related: No-brainer Miami-Dade Commission approves Kendall Parkway despite so much
Really? How is the Kendall Parkway, completed in four or five years if there are no delays, going to make our transit — which by then will be far worse — even better? The pressure valve will be at the very western end of the county, going south, after you’ve traveled more than an hour from downtown.
“We compare pretty favorably with our competitors in terms of commute times.”
That made Ladra laugh out loud.
“We are also really well connected to our neighbors. We just have a brand new rail line and passenger service to Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach…all those things are infrastructure improvements that we are working on,” he said, but forgot to add “when I figure out how my kids and friends can get in on it.”
The mayor ended the interview thumping his chest when the reporter asked him about the last budget approved.
“We didn’t have to raise taxes. As a matter of fact, we lowered our taxes 11 years ago. I mean, when I became the mayor we had the biggest tax cut in Miami-Dade history. We’ve kept those tax rates flat during my administration. We haven’t had to raise any taxes.
Then the doozy: “We are providing the same or better services than we provided back in 2011 without raising taxes because we tightened our belts.”
You closed libraries — hours are still reduced at some branches — and had rolling blackouts at fire-rescue stations, remember? You are still cutting bus routes every year.
Read related: On library shortfall, Miami-Dade’s Carlos Gimenez falls short
You’ve also balanced the budget with stolen half-penny sales tax funding from the People’s Transportation Plan for the past ten years, seven of them with you at the helm, Gimenez. Bet you haven’t told Jeff Bezos that!
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love for Amazon to make its second home here. Not just for the jobs and economic impact but for the cache que te da to have been chosen over Denver and Atlanta.
But I don’t want to reward Gimenez and his pals on the commission for their bad behavior. If Amazon comes, they’ll pat themselves on the back and tell us how right they were and how we were wrong to demand rail. Or, worse, that we don’t need it.
That would just be another lie.

Read Full Story

Of all the Florida constitutional amendments on the ballot — and there are 13 of them — Miami-Dade voters should be the most excited about Amendment 10, which gives us the chance to have an elected sheriff and tax collector and supervisor of elections.
And maybe end the series of abuses of power by a mayor who thinks he is all of these things.
That’s exactly the type of tyrannical dictatorship that Ladra’s parents fled when they left Cuba, a government without checks and balances where the leader appoints everyone and did whatever he wanted because he was the big boss of everybody.
Don’t think this is an exaggeration.
Read related: Carlos Gimenez abuses power in election interference for lobbyist son
It was less than two months ago that Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez actually declared himself supervisor of elections — saying he only gives Christina White permission to act in the role for him — so that he could give his lobbyist son a week’s extension to write language for a ballot question. If that’s not an abuse of power Ladra doesn’t know what is.
And maybe he wouldn’t need or be able to justify his $100,000 raise if he wasn’t trying to do everybody’s job.
“I’m the supervisor of elections,” was his direct and arrogant quote to the Miami Herald, almost incredulous that anyone would even raise an eyebrow. “I delegate that power to Christina White.”
He delegates that power? Are you kidding me? That power should not be delegated and then taken away whenever the mayor gets a political whim.
If we had an elected Supervisor of Elections, that definitely wouldn’t have happened. If the mayor had called on a Sunday morning to see if an elected supervisor of elections could change her mind about a deadline she told another mayor was hard and fast, an elected SOE could have sent him to hell in a hand basket or somewhere less polite.
It also might have been more difficult for Gimenez to swoop in after hours, just before 11 p.m. on the eve of qualifying in the 2016 election with a replacement check — because the first one was invalid. An elected SOE would likely tell him to come by in the morning, like everyone else.
Read related: Carlos Gimenez submits late night campaign check
The measure on the ballot would make the five local constitutional offices — sheriff, tax collector, supervisor of elections, clerk of the court and property appraiser — mandatory and require elections for the offices in all 67 counties. It would also prohibit charter counties who opted out of these elected seats, like Miami-Dade, from abolishing or modifying those offices.
We already have an elected property appraiser and an elected clerk of courts. And if we need an elected clerk of freaking courts we certainly need an elected sheriff, who would have independence to run police operations without political interference — and investigate whatever elected official needs investigating.
If we had an elected sheriff, then Gimenez wouldn’t have any authority over the police chief. Everybody knows Police Director Juan Perez (in the photo, right) doesn’t take a pee without asking Gimenez for permission. And the mayor wouldn’t have been able to completely eliminate the public corruption unit in 2014, after they found absentee ballot fraud in his Hialeah campaign.
Maybe if we had an elected sheriff, he wouldn’t have gotten away with the AB fraud to begin with.
An elected sheriff who did not have to answer to the mayor could more easily investigate corruption without fear that his or her boss would fire him. Because his or her boss would be us, not the mayor. These positions are too important to be handled just like department heads that can be hired and fired by the mayor, who could use such power to do, well, whatever he wants.
Why do you think the county sued to get this amendment off the ballot? Because Gimenez doesn’t want to lose that kind of power. Luckily, the Florida Supreme Court saw right through his agenda and refused to take the question off the ballot.
There were also challenges because of four linked items on what some call a clustered amendment. One would move up the state’s legislative session to January rather than March in even-numbered years. Another that would create a counter-terrorism office. And a third would make the existing state veterans affairs department constitutionally required.
All these are good things. But none are as good as having an independent elected sheriff in Miami-Dade. There is a reason why all other 66 counties all have an elected sheriff. Why do we think we’re so special? Because Miami-Dade is so morally superior? Riiiiiight!
It is true that Miami-Dade voters themselves did away with the sheriff’s office decades ago. But look at what’s happened! We have a mayor who eliminated the public corruption unit after they found AB fraud in his campaign! It wasn’t a good idea and we have a chance to fix it and we may not have another chance to fix it for another 20 years.
These should be independently elected offices accountable to the people. And if there is one place that ought to have an elected sheriff, it is right here.
Vote yes on Amendment 10.

Read Full Story