If everything is your priority, your priority becomes nothing

Each year commissioners list for Tallahassee the county’s 10 state legislative priorities. For 2027 they targeted a whopping 63 pages – and then they added on.

What could they be thinking?

Dictionaries tell us a priority is a goal or concern of greater value than competing matters. Sixty-three pages of so-called priorities means there’s no ranking at all, because nothing is greater than anything else. It’s throwing everything up against the wall to see what sticks.

Granted, everybody on the commission and in the administration is then included in the package. They can show constituents that they got their pet issues onto the priority list.

Except it’s not a priority list. At 63 pages, it’s a wish book that nobody but the county’s lobbyists will ever study. Miami-Dade’s state representatives in Tallahassee can’t take it seriously because county commissioners didn’t do the hard work of picking out what they think the legislature might actually do.

Commissioners back in 2013 recognized the futility of sending to Tallahassee a laundry list of wishes. They voted unanimously to create two lists, a 10-item list of real priorities and another very long list of everything they would like. The 10-item list went to legislators. Both that and the far longer list went to our paid lobbyists to work on. Only the top 10 were true priorities.

That has been the practice ever since: commissioners did the hard work of prioritizing 10 of the many wishes they had. They did the same for aims in Washington, prioritizing 10 or fewer to focus on that the county ranked as most important.

But last week commissioners voted to go back to their old ways of throwing it all against the wall, claiming everything has equal priority. But it doesn’t.

Kids can do that on a Christmas list for Santa, asking for the moon, but parents with limited budgets have to prioritize what actually will show up under the tree on Dec. 25. Parents will read the whole wish list, but legislators won’t.

Vicki Lopez, who left the legislature last November for a commission appointment, tried to explain last week the futility of sending a Santa Claus list to local state legislators as an action guide.

“I’m just going to caution both the commission and I’m going to caution the administration: if you think for a moment the Florida House is going to look at 63 pages of priorities you are painfully wrong,” Ms. Lopez said. “I would suggest that you go back to your ordinance that says you should have your top 10 priorities. If you can’t decide on the top 10, probably none of them are going to happen.”

Ms. Lopez also introduced the radical idea that the county should carefully tailor its priority list to things that “the legislature has an appetite for,” things legislators might actually want to help the county with.
“It likes to help us with water projects, infrastructure. It takes us seriously when we say we have a problem that we believe impacts the state in a very big way,” she said, speaking of the contents of the 63-page wish list presented as priorities. “If you look at some of this, they will dismiss it.”

Nobody got into the weeds of what’s on the 63-page list. Commission Chairman Anthony Rodriguez noted “this started at well over 100 pages, by the way.” But a lot of what was left doesn’t look much like a true priority list.

Left in the 63 pages were the list’s top three items, all minor commission resolutions. They urge the legislature to convey state-owned property in the city of Opa-Locka to the county for redevelopment, to require gas stations to display both cash and credit price options, and to designate the American Flamingo as the official Florida state bird.

I am not making this up. Those are indeed the top items on a 63-page list of so-called Miami-Dade County priorities.

If you were an elected legislator in Florida, would you read much farther?

I like flamingos as much as most folks do, and I’d like to see clear gas prices at the pump. I don’t see that redeveloping state land in Opa-Locka could do much harm, either.

But telling me that these are among Miami-Dade’s priorities for action by the Florida Legislature – indeed, the very top of the list – is worse than laughable, it’s frightening.

The problem is not that these items might not get much attention, but that 10 real priorities are buried somewhere in those 63-plus pages (the “plus” is because during the discussion that created this monster list the commission added a half-dozen more items). Who is actually going to find the 10 true priorities and then do something about them? Nobody.

Among secondary aims they’d have to sort through is to require autonomous cars to have Florida license plates, resurface roadways in the South Dade agricultural area, require use of wetland mitigation bank credits within a wetland bank’s service area, improve the sustainability of fishing practices, fund landfill gas capture, establish state funding to collect batteries and electronic vaping devices, and fund $90,000 for Project Lazarus Specialized Outreach.

Nothing wrong with the aims, but they wouldn’t make Santa’s top 10 list – or top 100.
“This is the most ineffective tool I have ever seen, and if I were still in the legislature, I would dismiss it,” Ms. Lopez said, adding that it would be “Mission Impossible” for county lobbyists to get serious consideration of the list.

If commissioners want to be truly effective, they’ll go back and pick their top 10 for the legislature. Hidden in the 63 pages are things like funding the county’s planned mass transit lines, issues with the Live Local Act in housing, sargassum removal and other significant opportunities. They should have no trouble pinpointing 10 issues of this magnitude as true priorities.

In 2013, commissioners limited the list to 10 targets because, they said, the county was seeking too much and long agendas might be “distracting focus” from the biggest issues.

That 2013 choice to target the big-ticket items was front-page news in Miami Today, under the headline “In lobbying, county says less is more.” Today’s headline is “If everything is your priority, your priority becomes nothing.”