A new sheriff in town will spotlight unfair county pay scales

Miami Today long has pushed for county hall pay equity. New law now spotlights that vital need.

Exactly 20 years ago, when the fourth Miami-Dade commissioner in five years met corruption charges, we said taxpayers helped foster the scandal by paying a pittance for a powerful full-time job. Today we pay commissioners exactly as little as we did in 1957: $6,000 – less than $3 an hour.

Fourteen times calls to change the charter to raise that blatantly unfair pay failed, as disgusted voters decided $6,000 was plenty. That in turn deterred good potential officeholders who could be lured by public service and a fair salary, and we got just what we paid for – a few rotten apples who abused power and thrived on $6,000 and all they could steal.

As we wrote in 2002, “If we don’t raise the pay – and we haven’t for decades – the value of $6,000 will keep shrinking, and our expectations of elected officials will keep shrinking right alone with it. So will the value of our commission.”

Fortunately, the commission’s true worth has actually risen in 20 years, but no thanks to voters who refused to pay anything near what is fair. 

Still, we remain intensely concerned that rotten apples could appear any day because we pay far too little to attract the best candidates.

But while nothing has changed in commission pay, a state constitutional change soon will underscore what pay imbalances can do.

That amendment forces Miami-Dade to elect its tax collector, elections supervisor and sheriff. Every other Florida county was already electing those posts. Starting in 2024, Miami-Dade must follow suit.

While we today appoint a tax collector and an elections supervisor, Miami-Dade abolished a corrupt sheriff’s office in 1966. Our police director runs the biggest law enforcement agency in Florida, but he’s appointed. Technically, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is our sheriff, but that’s about to change. 

How does this tie into terribly unfair commission pay? Because, throughout Florida the pay of all five constitutional officers – sheriff, elections supervisor, tax collector, clerk of court and property appraiser – is not only set by state law based on county population but increases with cost of living. 

On that scale, an elected Miami-Dade sheriff would receive $216,628 today, and more when a sheriff is elected.

So you can bet that the first elected sheriff will be a former county commissioner who has left a $6,000 job and gets well over $217,000. 

Taxpayers then can wonder how a person they paid $6,000 suddenly gained hundreds of thousands of dollars in value. The sheriff won’t suddenly morph from a low-value hack to a very qualified public servant. It’s just that pay scales are so out of whack.

Take another measure of value. Our commissioners serve more than 2.8 million people, more land than 60-some nations and a budget of about $9 billion. Yet fast-food chains now pay burger-flippers up to $15 an hour. How equitable is $3 a hour for the commission’s responsibilities?

Or take another gauge: what do other Florida commissioners get paid? In the four other most populous counties, they get $106,176, rising with inflation. In Miami-Dade, whose population is at least 900,000 larger than any of the others, they get $6,000.

Or you can compare Miami-Dade with the least populous county, Liberty, with 8,575 people, whose commissioners get $27,305 for very part-time work. Our commissioners get $6,000 for full-time work, and Liberty’s 8,575 people would be just a rounding error here.

The blessing of Miami-Dade’s home rule charter is that while smaller counties are under the thumb of the state, our taxpayers are free to set some of our own rules. The curse is that, given the power to set our own pay scales, we didn’t have the sense to pay fairly – far from it.

Left unchanged, those pay scales will see our elected top cop – a job that today reports to county hall – in 2024 receive almost triple individually what our entire 13-member county governing commission receives collectively, which is just $78,000 a year.

For years Miami Today has asked who will step up to seek proper commission pay.

It sure hasn’t been commissioners themselves, who would face far more competition if more people could afford to run. It hasn’t been the mayor, who says it’s the commission’s move, not hers. It hasn’t been the civic community, which largely ignored inequities – and may continue to do so until iniquities and corruption make the issue too big to ignore, at which time the public would have no appetite for raising anyone’s pay.

Unless an organized petition drive seeks a county charter change, which is the only way to pay commissioners fairly, we remain in danger of at any moment seeing the corruption of 20 years ago reappear. Be fair with the commission before it is unfair to all of us.