$78,000 travesty of a raise allegedly came out of nowhere

If you’re not outraged by the way Miami-Dade commissioners surreptitiously more than doubled their compensation last week, maybe you don’t know the details.

In case you missed it, seven commissioners voted to put into the budget that starts next week an increase in their annual compensation from $60,000 to $138,000. As some of the seven who voted for the huge gain said, commissioners years ago didn’t have the political courage to build in raises for successors and with inflation they deserve it. So, they gave themselves a great big gift.

They have one thing right: they are vastly underpaid. But they have one thing very wrong: they just took the money in a stealth raid without having the guts to tell anyone in advance – including some commissioners.

Very politely they were chided about that by Commissioner Eileen Higgins, one of the five who voted against the legal pocketing of tax money with nobody’s permission but their own.

“This was not introduced in a transparent fashion and that makes me quite upset,” she told commissioners last week after a preface that they do have a fulltime job to do without fair pay.

She related that she’d had multiple budget briefings and nobody mentioned a word about any compensation increase for commissioners.
Then she went on:

“But then you might ask yourself, ‘Didn’t you read the 800 pages of the physical document, which is where you would have found on page 472 of the document this little graft,’ except for the fact that four years ago I basically” decided to save all those trees by reading county documents digitally – which is the way that the public also sees county documents, since very few of us can get the documents in print.

But guess what? As Commissioner Higgins told it, the attachment with the raise mysteriously was not part of the digital budget document. “That was unfair.” As she told the commission, nobody told her about the stealth raise and she couldn’t have found it if she had read every word of the 800-page digital budget because it wasn’t there.

So how did she learn about the raise? “I found out from the press.”

It’s even a secret about who put the huge raise into the budget. Commissioners say they didn’t. The mayor says she didn’t, but she does say that it came from the commissioners’ budget aides. Nobody is taking the blame, or the credit. It just got put into the budget by someone and the text never got into the digital format somehow – but the mystery compensation package that was never discussed in public until it somehow wound up in the budget got a narrow majority of votes, and you and I will be paying it.

Even commission Vice Chairman Oliver Gilbert, who voted for the bonanza, noted that the package was never discussed. “It was read on a second reading on a voice motion, meaning that nobody even had an opportunity to speak on it,” he said.

Raquel Regalado, who voted against the stealth package, said she’d like to discuss the only formal pay that commissioners get in that package – $6,000 a year. That’s what commissioners were paid in 1957 when the county charter was approved, and that ridiculously low pay has never been raised. But only the voters get to do that, so commissioners did an end run and instead gave themselves $132,000 a year in benefits that now include $61,000 in retirement funds to go along with the tiny pay.

“We should put it on the ballot,” Commissioner Regalado said. She is right. Instead of taking the money out of the county coffers, commissioners from the start needed the guts to ask their bosses, the taxpayers, for a raise. We hope she will follow up on that.

As we noted two weeks ago, the other 66 Florida counties pay commissioners under a mandatory state formula based on county population. The state updates that pay every year with a cost-of-living increase. Very fair. Those officials never have to put their hands into the cookie jar to get a fair salary, nor can they by law.

Unfortunately, Miami-Dade opted out of that in its charter. All it would take is a simple vote by the public one time to put commissioners on that schedule, which today pays commissioners of Florida’s big counties $106,176 a year.

If Ms. Regalado and her colleagues have the courage to let voters decide on that raise, we will support it for commissioners of the future – despite the outrage of seven who just took what they think they deserve rather than asking their bosses, the voters, for the money.

As we have argued for years, we need to pay commissioners decently so they can work full time – Ms. Higgins noted pointedly that some commissioners have outside jobs and don’t properly do the people’s work, like reading legislation before they vote on it. Note this: they control $10 billion in annual spending.

We seldom get more than we pay for, nor should we expect to. But it’s outrageous for our elected officials to just take what they want without even asking.

Commissioners who voted for this travesty said they were simply raising expense money to adjust for inflation, yet most of the raise is a $49,500 increase in retirement benefits. Would that fictitious labeling hold up in court?

As one elected official asked me, how do they think they’re going to get away with this?