Charter changes set stage for Fisher Island oil soap opera

It’ll be easy to blame officials for the catastrophe if the Port of Miami loses its sole fuel source next year. But blame also attaches to changes to government.

I’m not letting anyone off the hook for failing to secure the fuel that keeps our cruise and cargo business flowing. For decades a fuel cutoff danger was clear and nobody handed out life preservers.

But two changes that voters made in the county charter long ago contributed to letting fueling slip away due to inattention. Without those changes, we’d have had a far better chance of fixing the problem before it became a front-page story.

The changes were pivotal. In 2010 voters scuttled the county manager as of 2012, rolling the chief executive’s role into the mayor’s political job. And in 2012, voters limited commissioners’ tenure to two four-year terms, effective in 2020.

Both changes had the best of intentions. But the unintended consequences contributed to – maybe caused – the peril that’s now consuming county hall.

Let’s start with term limits. The aim was to make sure nobody stayed forever in office. But that brought two unintended negatives.

One is that valuable memory of past perils and solutions slips away with the outgoing elected officials who dealt with them.

In the case of the Fisher Island fuel depot danger, commissioners saw it long ago – but every last one of them is long gone from office, by design. There’s no crusty old-timer to point out pitfalls the county has seen before, so commissioners were blindsided last year when they learned too late that some of the most valuable land in this county would be used for condos for the ultra-wealthy instead of fuel storage. Term limits had forced from office six years ago the last of those who had dealt with the issue.

A second problem in term limits: no commissioner will be around to take longer-term consequences of either bad decisions or total inaction when action was vital. They let subsequent commissioners deal with the mess.

Commissioners often lament what predecessors did or didn’t do and say pointedly on camera that they themselves aren’t to blame. No doubt their successors will do the same when referring to what the current crop is leaving behind – like a Fisher Island fueling site acquisition at an exorbitant price because all other options had been precluded by earlier inactions.

Just last week, Juan Carlos Bermudez pointed to a baseball stadium debt that has 23 more years to run and limits current spending – perhaps including for a seaport fuel site. Mr. Bermudez pointed out that the vote for that debt was by his predecessor, not himself.

It’s not that we want commissioners to hang around for decades, although that was the case before term limits. But with the knowledge that they have at most eight years, commissioners avoid future accountability for present actions. They often let someone else clean up after them.

In the other charter change, voters deleted as of 2012 a professional manager whose role was to keep the county on course – the last one was Alina Hudak, who is now making the local FIFA World Cup host committee operate.

Voters wrapped into one job an impartial professional manager with a very partial elected political leader, the mayor, whose position thus became more powerful but less focused on pure administration and certainly less impartial.

The professional manager’s job included a focus on future needs. Those would have included what the seaport – and all county operations – would need in the years ahead. A parallel might be a chief operating officer in a corporation.

The county manager reported to two bosses. One was the commission, like a board of directors. The other was the mayor, who was the CEO. The manager served both equally but actually helmed county operations from the bridge.

The current structure puts the mayor in charge – except that she also follows commission orders. That’s almost untenable, because the mayor is also a professional politician looking to the voters for a next job. The county manager was both unelected and, by design, unpolitical.

So while trying to improve government, voters a decade and a half ago also removed the manager who was looking out for long-term seaport needs as well as all elected commissioners who could remember that they had been warned years ago that Fisher Island had been transformed from a waste island in the 1970s to the wealthiest ZIP code in the nation. How long was a fuel depot going to sit beside condo mansions?

None of that excuses officials who didn’t warn the port director who didn’t ask the mayor who didn’t tell the commission that the port should buy the fuel depot when it came up for sale for $200 million in 2024. Nor does it excuse aides or the mayor for not buying the land last year for $400 million. Nor does it exonerate commissioners who at first delayed eminent domain to take the land.

But a long-term commissioner’s memory of the past coupled with a county manager’s planning could have averted this soap opera pitting our wealthiest residents against a top economic engine. It all should have happened years ago, and it never would have hit the front pages.

Next time we tinker with the charter, just think how impactful changes can be.