Be fair to voters: get commissioners above minimum wage

This week a team tasked with suggesting changes to Miami-Dade’s charter plans to probe a dangerous inequity that we’ve ignored for more than half a century: we don’t pay our county commissioners fairly.

Not being fair by being cheap can be very costly.

Our commissioners today control how the county spends $12.76 billion. For that, we pay $6,000 and expect work that can’t be done part time. To do it well takes far more than 40 hours a week – full commitment to the job. 

We as taxpayers should be grateful that we’re getting more careful attention from commissioners than we’re willing to pay for. It’s a great bargain basement buy, getting 13 people who for one reason or another are serving us pretty well for $6,000.

At the end of this month, Florida’s minimum wage rises to $15 an hour. If our commissioners work 40 hours a week in their public roles, they’ll be getting $3 an hour. The dangers of that should be more than obvious.

Yet nothing has been done to close the growing gap between what we pay and what we need.

In the 1950s, when Miami-Dade approved a charter that allowed it function with more independence than Florida’s other 66 counties, it had a far smaller role, far fewer people and a vastly smaller budget, and the charter set $6,000 a year pay for commissioners to meet part time. A full-time professional manager for decades oversaw spending.

As the years passed, all that changed – except the $6,000. 

The charter review is looking to bring that up to date, talking of asking commissioners to put on the ballot for public approval a commission salary level “in accordance with state law as it is for other elected officials,” said task force Chairman Dennis Kerbel.

That change wouldn’t be minor.

Everywhere in Florida except here commissioners are paid on a scale that’s updated each year for cost of living and population. Miami-Dade opted out of that when it created its own charter almost 70 years ago and set a $6,000 pay that never changed as population and responsibilities and living costs soared.

The state sets pay grades for commissioners based on population.

This year, Liberty County, Florida’s smallest by population at 7,977 people, pays commissioners $31,339 a year, the state’s lowest – except, of course, for Miami-Dade’s $6,000.

At the other end of the scale are the six largest counties, including Broward, Palm Beach, Orange, Duval and Hillsborough and Miami-Dade. The state scale for these six is $123,781 per commissioner per year – except that Miami-Dade opts out and pays $6,000.

If Mr. Kerbel and the charter team shift to the state pay scale, commissioners put it on the ballot and voters approve, we’d pay $123,781 plus cost of living increases.

If that seems too high, reflect that if commissioners paying closer attention are able to save just $2 million on a single $10 million-plus contract like those they vote on at most meetings, they’ll more than cover extra pay that could allow just one person to spend a little more analyzing a single deal.

That’s not farfetched. From time to time commissioners exit a meeting early, saying they have to get to the “real” job that pays their expenses. How costly could that loss of attention to the people’s business be in a spending world of $12.75 billion?

For multiple decades the gulf between what we pay and what we should receive in return has been obvious. After four of the 13 commissioners faced charges of financial improprieties with the public’s money in a five-year period, this column observed in 2002:

“We all talk about corruption. It’s why voters have refused to pay our county commissioners more than $6,000 a year.

“But very few of us talk about a major cause of that corruption. It’s because we refuse to pay our county commissioners more than $6,000 a year.

“What could we expect for $6,000? We give them a full-time workload, tremendous power over land use and purchasing and billion-dollar deals and then ask them to live on $6,000 and all they can steal.”   

One of our current commissioners was appointed by the governor after his predecessor was ousted on a charge of accepting $15,000 for political favors when he was desperate for money. Could fair pay have kept a long-serving commissioner honest? We’ll never know.

But we do know, virtually every one of us, that $3 an hour isn’t fair pay to play with billions of dollars and stay honest. 

Raising commission pay has been brought up many times and gone nowhere. Voters have so little respect for sitting commissioners that they won’t pay them more.

We believe that our commissioners are underrated. They actually are trying to do the right thing and generally do a good job at it. 

But if you distrust them, you’re stuck with them unless people who you like and trust more run for the office – and how many qualified candidates can you find who will live on $6,000 a year? You’d find a lot more good candidates at $123,781, wouldn’t you?

Mr. Kerbel has another answer to your concerns: start the new pay level only when new commissioners enter in office. Then there’d be no claim that commissioners put a higher pay level on the ballot as a charter change just to enrich themselves. They’d just be paying their successors fairly – at long last.