Everywhere a city? Charter review could begin the change

A watershed debate of the ground rules of Miami-Dade County governance is finally on the calendar, beginning the first week in June. It’s about time.

That’s the week when county commission Chairman Anthony Rodriguez has decided a full-blown review of the county’s charter – a local version of a constitution – is to begin.

The call is better later than never. Under our overarching charter, a review is required every five years. The last review was in 2017, so this one is to start work three years late.

But while the charter requires the commission to call a review every five years and name a team to do it, no penalty is assessed for delinquency. Commissioners don’t like teams looking at how they may function, so only their collective conscience can assure that a review ever does take place.

This time around one commissioner, Juan Carlos Bermudez, has voiced significant concerns about bedrock county functioning. In a February meeting, he challenged fellow commissioners to “determine what type of county we want to be structured as… Can we actually take a look at the form of government and the structure of government that we want to move forward with?”

While Mr. Bermudez may have several issues in mind, the big question is certainly whether every scrap of the county must be incorporated into smaller local governments as the charter creators intended in the 1950s. “We’d still have a county government because there’s no way the cities are going to be able to carry out some of the things that a county government’s able to do, so that’s a discussion that we’re going to have to have,” he stated.

The charter review is a proper forum for that discussion, because change can only come by amending the charter. If a review team calls for such a change – which could happen – and the commission is willing to put it on the ballot, voters in 2026 could revamp the entire county.

That’s not a wild card: neighboring Broward County did it, and local governments blanket Broward. On the other hand, only about 60% of Miami-Dade has localized control. Everywhere else, the county commission also acts like a local city hall.

It makes great sense to let the county focus on big regional concerns and opportunities and have a local council worry about neighborhood issues that you see in each of Miami-Dade’s 34 existing municipalities.

We believe that government closest to the governed is best, though that depends on how well each local government is actually run, and there’s no guarantee for that.

We also believe that our county government could better focus its time and energy on big regional issues like transportation, infrastructure and economic development, where problems are large, complex and pressing. 

Whether the charter review task force will seriously look at this major structural issue depends on what the 16 appointees view as their role.

Even if they do recommend major structural changes, nothing they recommend is likely to reach the ballot for voters to decide unless commissioners vote to put it there. The charter doesn’t require a commission approval to put charter questions on the ballot, but for decades commissioners have been gatekeepers. They have voted a majority of charter review recommendations into oblivion, claiming that commissioners alone are knowledgeable enough to decide what choices voters can get.

How the commission this year will review charter recommendations that are due in late November is only a guess in an environment of change. At least three of the present 13 commissioners are likely to be gone by then. 

The senior commissioner, Eileen Higgins, says she plans to run for mayor of the City of Miami. If she does run, she must resign her commission seat.

Another commissioner, René García, is seeking to become the mayor of the county’s second-largest city, Hialeah. If so, he too will be gone.

A certain departure is Kevin Marino Cabrera, whose appointment as US ambassador to Panama was confirmed last week by the US Senate. He cannot become ambassador until he resigns from the commission.    

So, votes of new commissioners may be pivotal in what charter review recommendations can ever reach the voters.

We’ve listed in the past multiple challenges with which a charter review could well grapple, including the equity of paying 13 commissioners only $6,000 per year and the question of whether the county should return to electing commissioners from their own districts but by countywide voting to reduce parochialism. We have also questioned whether the mayor and manager ought to be two different people. All of these and more are significant.

But Commissioner Bermudez was correct in starting with whether the entire county should have two tiers of government, one local and close to voters and one countywide for regional concerns. The answer to that question would influence almost everything else.

Unless commissioners misguidedly hamstring appointees in ways to limit the charter review, it could be a pivotal six months for Miami-Dade’s future.