Five vital county charter changes may stand a slim chance

A required review of Miami-Dade’s charter – the rules under which the county operates – may never touch on five vital points it should face up to.

That’s because the inmates will be running the asylum: elected officials will decide who can determine their future powers and they will later filter out any vital changes that might sneak through a charter review before voters can act on them.

That stacks the deck against thoughtful consideration of five ways to vastly improve the effectiveness of county government and its ability to better serve us all.

Those questions go to the heart of everything elected officials most covet, which is control and power. Their motivation might be to help this community and its people, but they want to be in charge of making that happen under their control and their own rules.

Periodic charter reviews are broad but usually tiptoe around anything that commissioners see as their purview. Technical changes have a chance to reach voters, but commissioners censor big-picture proposals.

Beyond changes required because some new positions are being elected, what a county charter review really should focus on is:

■Should every bit of this county be within a city, town or village that handles local matters, leaving county hall to focus on regional assets and broad concerns and issues – in other words, the big picture? That was the vision in 1957 when what then was named Dade County persuaded the state to give us extraordinary powers under a charter of our own.

■Should the mayor’s job be separated from a hired professional manager? That’s how we used to do it. That let the mayor be a powerful community force while a county manager reported to both the mayor and the commission to carry out policy. The mayor now does both, so she gets frequent commission orders that she must follow as manager, which makes her a subordinate.

■Do we need 13 district commissioners? We used to have just nine, all of whom were elected from districts but faced countywide voting, which forced them to be less parochial. Should some or all now again be elected countywide? 

■Should we remove control of contracts that total billions from the commission? Congress doesn’t vote on who gets federal contracts. The Florida Legislature doesn’t decide who gets state contracts. But large county contracts face a vote. Federal and state procurement officials get us the best prices, but we grill county procurement people when favored contractors don’t get on the gravy train and the commission often forces a change. Again, billions are at stake.        

■What if instead of commissioners weighing in on contracts we just gave them a long-overdue raise, which would be far less costly than contract manipulation? In 1957 when the county got added power we paid commissioners $6,000 a year. Today we pay them $6,000 a year. The other 66 counties pay their commissioners based on a state scale that rises with inflation. The smallest county, Lafayette, with 7,808 people, pays $30,288. Miami-Dade by scale would pay $120,164 but the charter lets us ignore the scale, and we do.

We might disagree on solutions, but these five elephants in the tent are far too large to simply ignore. Instead, we have been kicking these five cans down the road for years with scarcely a nod to their impact and importance.

In fact, we have kicked the necessary review of the charter down the road again and again. 

The charter, which is our equivalent of a constitution, requires little of elected officials, but it does order that a panel every five years review what changes the charter needs, just as many states require a periodic convention to review possible changes in state constitutions.

But while that requirement exists in the charter, it leaves open how a review must be done or by whom, just as it doesn’t say whether review suggestions must ever reach the voters, who are the only ones who can change the charter.

Commissioners often ignore their only requirement, which is a review of some sort every five years. 

The commission received the last review in 2017, and five years later it hadn’t ordered another. Now, seven years later, it’s ordering the five-year review, but not to begin until 2025 or be finished until 2026. Proposals couldn’t get to voters until 2027 or 2028, when most current officeholders would be gone so changes couldn’t affect them.

While that can-kicking year upon year is shameful, it has one possible benefit. When commissioners realize that they’re safe, they might appoint review team members who would be more concerned about doing the right thing than protecting the commissioners who chose them. 

That’s a faint hope, but when the mayor and commissioners appoint 14 or 15 members of a 15-member review team the deck is indeed stacked if panelists are named for the wrong reasons and commissioners are screening what leaks out.

If commissioners, who are all good people, have nothing personal to lose, the public stands a chance.