No caviar or chips, commissioners: feed county what’s vital

Miami-Dade’s budget battle that will capture headlines over the next two weeks of pressure to restore spending cuts has less to do with current finances than the difficulty of sticking to what county government actually must do.

As commissioners debate the budget, they face an unending flood of priorities from both government bodies and the public seeking to tap the county’s purse, which can never grow as fast as desires. 

The thirteen commissioners all have desires, as do the mayor and administration and now five constitutional offices that function apart from central control for the first time. 

Throw in the wants of 2.8 million residents who ask government to do more and more but want to pay less in taxes to get it. Everyone wants things from government without paying because, hey, we pay taxes, don’t we? What, charge us to ride Metromover? It should be free.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava presented a balanced budget that cut into some sacred cows like arts and culture and community-based organizations and didn’t provide everything that the sheriff wanted. Most of her cuts have been restored and the sheriff got most of what she wanted, but folks, there is no free lunch, and nobody in the county is printing money. That money came from some other uses – just uses that are less vocal about what they want.

So while a budget will be agreed upon that will have no deficits (deficit spending is reserved for Washington, which does print money) the county at the end of the budget fight will not do what is needed most: decide on what county government actually must do.

“We need to identify the difference between necessities and things that are nice to have,” Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez correctly pointed out during a budget workshop last month.

I’d put it more bluntly: the county needs to decide what its mission truly is and spend its limited money to achieve that mission. Everyone wants everything from government, but what is it that the county has to do? Public safety, sure, but what else?

I won’t pretend to answer that question, but the mayor and commissioners sure should.

People don’t understand the budget, Commissioner Oliver Gilbert III told that workshop session. “They elected us to understand that.” 

True enough, but I guarantee that the 13 commissioners and the mayor have exactly 14 definitions of what ought to go into that budget, and why. Without a common direction, government will yield to pressure groups and special interests and political supporters on what they want, because with no roadmap for where the county must go, any old road is good enough.

“We have to work within the context that this body has to provide for everybody,” Mr. Gilbert told fellow commissioners.

Yes, but should government do everything for everybody? Clearly not. So, what must county government do for all as opposed to what does everybody want government to do for them?

In the process of answering that watershed question, officials also need to determine how much money the county is going to have to fuel five new constitutional offices plus the core county government and its operations. 

Each year costs of operations rise but county government is pressured to cut taxes, or at worst leave them the same. People can’t afford more, elected officials say. But the level of taxes needs to be based not on what people want to pay or think they should pay but what is vital for the county to do core duties that are absolutely necessary – whatever those duties are agreed to be. 

It’s akin to going to a grocery store with a shopping list and deciding in advance not to pay more than you paid last year for those items – and maybe adding a few goodies from aisle 5. You know what you want to pay, but if you don’t leave out something you’re going to pay more than last year.

Government is like that: a great big supermarket full of things you’d love to put in your shopping cart but not enough more money than last year to pay for them all. So, how much snack food do we need to jettison? And what?

In other words, what should government not do for us that would be nice but isn’t its core mission of feeding the Miami-Dade County family this year? We’d all like a steak, too, but maybe we really need hamburgers instead. Steak, cavier and chips may not be the role of government.

“The most important thing that I do as mayor is produce a proposed budget to you for your consideration, a balanced budget,” Mayor Levine Cava told commissioners at the workshop. She confessed that in doing so she’d had cut out or scale back programs “near and dear to my heart.”

That’s what commissioners need to do: take a hard look at programs near and dear to their hearts and be willing to say which ones aren’t truly vital to meet the core mission of county government – after, that is, they decide what that mission actually is.