Being cheap can be very costly to Miami-Dade taxpayers

What fulltime job pays only 22% of Florida’s minimum wage yet controls the spending of more than $9 billion a year?

If you know the answer, you recognize the dangers in not raising that pay level.

The job is Miami-Dade County commissioner. 

The 13 commissioners not only control how Miami-Dade spends $9 billion but set policy on housing, transportation, environment, water and sewer, parks, air and sea ports and far more. They also control who gets billions in contracts.

Those massive responsibilities demand at minimum multiple commission meetings, study of documents and individual discussions with the public. We pay $6,000 a year and expect all that. 

Only four kinds of people can live on $6,000 for a job that Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, when she was a commissioner, estimated at 70 to 80 hours a week.

The first category is true public servants who don’t happen to need the money at all. How many of us fit into that category?

The second group of commissioners have outside jobs that cover living needs but eat into the time they should be spending on the business for which they were elected. 

The third kind get paid for no-show outside jobs, raising the serious question of what employers get in return for paying a commissioner to do nothing on their payroll.

The fourth type – we’ve seen these, too – are elected with little in the bank and no real job but through public “service” manage to leave office well-to-do. 

Those groups include good, so-so and unacceptable commissioners. Who they don’t include, however, is the vast majority of Miami-Dade residents, who could never serve because they can’t figure out how to feed a family on $6,000 a year.

You can’t have real democracy if most people are economically barred from elected office. Economic barriers tilt the playing field.

Moreover, even for commissioners who get by economically, it’s blatantly unfair to pay them 22% of the minimum wage. A private enterprise with that pay level would face trouble with the law. In government, we just accept it.

Why do we shrug it off?

“The public has not felt the commissioners merited the increased salary,” Ms. Levine Cava told commissioners in a December 2017 hearing when she served with them. 

Maybe you’d agree, maybe not. 

But one thing is certain: we’re cheating not just commissioners, we’re also cheating ourselves by making most hold outside jobs when they should be doing what they were elected to do. Not understanding a contract could cost taxpayers millions – but we save a few thousand on commission pay to make up for it.

Commissioners seldom cite the pay issue as the mayor did in 2017. But it did surface last month as Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez reviewed a list of potential changes that could improve county functions.

“There are many inequitable things in this process,” Mr. Bermudez said. “Among them, that because we’re the only true charter county, we get paid less than everybody else of equal or even a little less population in the rest of the state.”

Understanding that takes a bit of history. 

In the 1950s, what was then Dade County won from the state the right to draw its own charter, which is like a constitution, instead of having the legislature set the rules locally as it does in the smaller 66 counties.

When voters did enact a charter, in 1957, they decided that commissioners would get only $6,000 a year and be part time because the charter anticipated that every bit of the county would be in a city to handle purely local issues, leaving the county just broad policy votes. That never happened.

But, there was that $6,000 engraved in the charter as population more than tripled and the problems commissioners would handle became increasingly complex. That salary was never increased.

Meanwhile, commissioners in the other 66 counties are paid on a state scale that rises with population and increases yearly with cost of living.

The result: this year’s state pay for the commissioners of the six largest counties (including Miami-Dade, if it chose to pay on that scale) is $123,781. We opt instead to pay $6,000.

Miami-Dade has nearly 2.8 million people. The smallest county in the state, Liberty (which most of us have never heard of), has 7,977 people. Yet Liberty commissioners get $31,339 per year – more than five times what we pay our commissioners.

Florida’s minimum full-time wage is above $27,000. Our commissioners get $6,000. And for sure nobody at minimum wage is handling $9 billion of your tax dollars. 

The only way to raise commission pay to an equitable level or to use the state pay scale is via a charter amendment that the public votes on. A public process to put an amendment on the ballot is difficult. But a commission vote could also put it on the ballot.

Mr. Bermudez is correct that the commission should act on revisions in county processes. Some are complex and require debate. But paying fairly is a no-brainer that could be fast, starting with a commission vote.

We’ve been saying for decades that the present commission pay level is more costly to the public than paying fairly. It’s an easy case to make, but it takes a commission vote. Why not now?