Charter review should move fast, put pivotal issues on table

The county charter, the rulebook that governs Miami-Dade, requires that its details be nitpicked at least every five years to let voters make needed changes. Last week the new county commission chairman vowed to get that review moving very fast.

The speed that Anthony Rodriguez seeks is welcome, because multiple alterations are overdue after a state constitutional amendment reinvented the county’s structure and pulled control of five large divisions away from the mayor and commission. The rulebook must take those changes and their impacts into account but still doesn’t.

Far more charter change is needed than just accepting what has already affected our equivalent of a constitution. We could get improvements, which are to be suggested by a periodic review task force – a review that the charter requires every five years. Even if Mr. Rodriguez gets the speed he seeks, the review won’t be done until 2026, eight years after the last report in 2018.

Last week three commissioners named their representatives on the 15-member task force. Once all are named, they’ll deliberate for months, listening to experts, studying issues, and seeing if structural changes would benefit the county. If so, they’ll recommend changes. Only if commissioners agree will the voters get a chance to decide what changes will really be made.

That’s a lot of steps, a lot of screening. Changing a charter isn’t easy, and it shouldn’t be. A charter review and voters should move carefully. But they should move. There is plenty of need. 

Beyond dealing with the state mandate that we elect a sheriff for the first time since the 1960s rather than keep a police department, the charter must formally structure for the requirement that the head of elections, the tax collector and the property appraiser all must be independent of the mayor and commission, and that the elected clerk is now also the county’s finance head. Those changes all will ripple through the charter’s requirements.

But beyond them await upgrade opportunities, improvements based not on who is in office today but on how things might run better in the future regardless of who we elect.

Miami Today has long suggested five charter changes. As the 15 members of the team are named, they should dig into these pivotal issues: 

■Should every inch 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 – the big picture? That was the vision in 1957 when the county persuaded the state to give us extraordinary powers under a charter of our own, but in much of the county all of that is still done at county hall. 

■Should the elected mayor’s job be separated from a hired manager? That’s how the county formerly let the mayor be a powerful visible leader while a manager reported to both the mayor and the commission to carry out policy. The mayor now does both jobs, so she must follow frequent commission orders as manager, which makes her a subordinate when she should be in charge. 

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

■Should we rip control of contracts that total billions away from the commission? Commissioner Eileen Higgins last week decried the red tape that forces time-consuming commission approvals on routine contract OKs that the county administration should be dealing with as annual county spending rises far about $10 billion. 

Congress doesn’t vote on who gets federal contracts. The Florida Legislature doesn’t decide who gets state contracts. But large county contracts all face a vote. Federal and state procurement officials find the best deals, but commissioners grill county procurement experts when favored contractors don’t get on the gravy train and sometimes force a change. That’s not smart governance. 

■What if commissioners got a raise? In 1957, when the county first got a home rule charter, we paid commissioners $6,000 a year. Today, as the commissioners’ jobs have grown, we still pay $6,000. The other 66 counties must pay 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, which we do to our detriment. 

We might disagree on solutions, but these five issues are too big to simply ignore. We have been kicking them down the road for years with scarcely a nod to their importance to our future. A charter review is the place to debate them fully and send recommendations to the county commission.

Then would come the willingness of commissioners to let voters weigh in on what a charter review recommends. Past charter reviews got fewer than half of recommendations past commissioners and to voters – and voters rejected some of those. Those that voters approve could take effect at the earliest in 2027.

Changing a charter, as noted, shouldn’t be easy. But it only becomes possible if a review is held as the charter requires. Kudos to Mr. Rodriguez for pushing it forward fast.