So guess who fell off the truth-telling bandwagon and got back to his familiar logrolling ways in the Miami Herald? Yes, Maurice Ferre of the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority; FL state Rep. Jeanette Nuñez is 100% correct -the MDX is overstepping its boundaries. Facts show they are arrogant and territorial as hell, and it's clear they want to expand their fiefdom!

View Larger Map

So guess who fell off the truth-telling bandwagon and got back to his familiar logrolling ways in the Miami Herald? Yes, Maurice Ferre of the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority; FL state Rep. Jeanette Nuñez is 100% correct -the MDX is overstepping its boundaries. Facts show they are arrogant and territorial as hell, and it's clear they want to expand their fiefdom!

My comments are after the spin.

Miami Herald

Letter to the Editor

MDX is doing its job

July 7, 2013

Re state Rep. Jeanette Nuñez’s June 30 letter, MDX is overstepping its boundaries:

The Miami-Dade Expressway Authority (MDX) was created by the Florida Legislature and the Miami-Dade County Commission in 1994 as an agency of the state. Seven of MDX’s board of 13 members are appointed by county commissioners and six by the governor. 

On March 19 and June 18, 2013, MDX held public hearings on the rate issue for State Road 836. The MDX Board voted 7-5 in favor of the 70-cent option over the one for 60 cents. This new rate starts the summer of 2014. 

The toll policy and new toll rate were studied, discussed, debated and publicly aired for several years. We are no more a monopoly than the Florida Department of Transportation or Florida’s Turnpike. MDX staff and I, as chair, visited every county commissioner and as many city mayors as would see us to review plans. We were before several editorial boards, on radio and TV talk shows. The Miami Herald covered the toll issues amply and fairly. 

In the six advertised public meetings, two webinars and two public hearings, there was minimal participation. In the last public hearing MDX received the objection and concerns of seven legislators and five mayors preferring 60 cents rather than the 70-cent toll rate per mainline gantry. 

In the same Miami Herald edition, there were other articles on government expenditures for Jackson Health System’s $830 million “wish list” and the county water and sewer department’s pipe plan. Florida’s Turnpike implemented a $12 million-a-year toll hike recently. 

Freedom is not free, and progress has a cost. Americans, and Miamians, well understand that our infrastructure needs drastic repairs. As painful as toll increases are, doing less than our best would be more painful to travelers. 

MDX gets no money from Washington, Tallahassee or Miami-Dade County. If any of these governments wants to help MDX financially, we would gladly review our decisions. 

For seven years Congress has failed to adequately fund the U.S. transportation needs. Bridges are failing everywhere, even, unfortunately, our own Bear Cut Bridge in Key Biscayne. Many local cities, like the growing Doral, are concerned that traffic pains will slow growth and affect quality of life. 

Good public policy requires difficult decisions for all of us. MDX is not overreaching. MDX is doing its job. 

Maurice Ferre, chair, MDX, Miami

A few weeks ago Ferre seemed to be trying to play the all-too-rare voice of reason in Miami-Dade County by opposing fare hikes of this stealthy body most people in M-D not only DON'T understand, but instinctively hate -for good reason.

Unfortunately for both residents and common sense, that was all a mirage, since he's now back to playing the role of sycophant to the hilt that's been his designated role since he's fallen to the outer fringes of relevant politics and public policy.

It's really great that the Herald's feeble-minded Editorial Board is so bereft of any common sense that despite this being known as one of THE most apathetic and least civic-minded regions in the entire country, they run this piece without any mention whatsoever that Ferre is the former mayor of Miami -and wannabe mayor of M-D County- so that all the legions of 

know-it-alls from Aventura to Florida City who moved down here since Hurricane Andrew hit, and as we know, think they know everything -many of them, Jets fans, of course- can have some useful context to better understand a pol calling for more money for his latest crew of insiders.

Naturally, to make the whole log-rolling effort complete, Ferre compliments the Herald.

How did I know THAT was coming?

Experience!

The original Letter to the Editor that Ferre's spin exercise was trying to undo was this bit of spot-on truth-telling:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/29/3475954/mdx-is-overstepping-its-boundaries.html

Miami Herald

Letter to the Editor

MDX is overstepping its boundaries

June 29, 2013

Miami-Dade County commissioners created the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority (MDX) in 1994 to ease traffic congestion and establish local control of toll revenues. Two years later MDX took over the five busiest roadways in the county — the Airport, Dolphin, Don Shula, Gratigny and Snapper Creek expressways. While its foundation and the original intentions of MDX were necessary at the time, in recent months, MDX has overstepped its boundaries and taken advantage of its de facto monopoly over Miami-Dade’s major roadways. 

MDX originally approved a fixed toll rate of 70 cents for the Dolphin Expressway in March, and after a 60-cent alternative was introduced, it called for a public hearing where community members and elected officials could voice their opinions on the matter. On June 19, voice them they did. 

In fact, I and several colleagues from the Miami-Dade legislative delegation attended and condemned the toll increase at an MDX board meeting. We asked the board to pass the less costly alternative, a 60-cent toll per gantry. Nonetheless, the motion for the lower toll failed on a 7-5 vote, even in the face of widespread public opposition. 

Therefore, the MDX board went about its business — not the people’s business — and passed the resolution increasing tolls to 70 cents per mainline gantry and 30 cents per ramp gantry. Before this change, the roundtrip tolls from my district in southwest Miami to downtown were $2.50. If the new tolls are implemented, the cost would rise to $4.20. Commuters who use the expressway will see an increase in what they spend on tolls when the new charges begin next summer. 

MDX has vastly overreached its boundaries as a quasi-governmental body and I hope to remedy the situation for my constituents legislatively before the charges come into effect in June 2014. To borrow the term coined by Roll Back Tolls, MDX is practicing “tollation” — tolling without representation. 

Even though MDX is a state-sanctioned agency, there are systemic inadequacies within its structure. I’m worried that MDX is not held properly accountable for its decisions because there are no elected officials sitting on the board and it has not prudently explored other options to finance future projects. I’m also worried about MDX’s apparent monopoly over tolls in Miami-Dade County and its inability to engage in active listening with the public. 

This decision to raise tolls portrays MDX as having little concern for the economic well-being of the resident, and I will remain adamant in supporting my constituency on this controversial issue. 

Jeanette Nuñez, state representative, Miami

-----
As always, you can read much more analysis on other problems associated with the arrogant folks at MDX at Transit Miami, where they've been hip to what MDX has been doing for as long as I've been -expanding their fiefdom.
http://www.transitmiami.com/

Transit Miami @transitmiami https://twitter.com/transitmiami
"Transit Miami is an online web journal dedicated to advancing smart growth oriented land use policies, and mutlimodal transportation in South Florida."

Jeanette Nuñez's profile on the Florida legislature's website:
http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Representatives/details.aspx?MemberId=4524

Poor Maurice Ferre - He never imagined his political career would end with him losing to the likes of a no-talent like Kendrick Meek; The lasting ethical lessons of the late Bill Sadowski, the FL pol who might've fundamentally changed FL for the better if he'd ever been elected Governor

Above, August 24, 2010 photo of Maurice Ferre for U.S. Senate poster on A1A in Hollywood, FL by South Beach Hoosier.At some point over the past three days, Maurice Ferre must've surely wondered to himself: "How did it happen that my political career ended losing to the likes of a no-talent like Kendrick Meek?"

How could he not?

Once upon a time, if you has asked "the experts" around the Sunshine State which Hispanic-surnamed Florida politician was most-likely to get elected to the U.S. Senate first, the vast majority of them would have said Maurice Ferre, hands down, even if they didn't like that prospect personally.

Mel Martinez?
Who the hell is that?

But fate, circumstances and reality intervene and... well, things don't always work out the way you thought they would, and many people who thought it would happen for Ferre at least twenty-five years ago now see it will never happen.

I got to wondering about that not long after I'd voted on Tuesday in the Florida Democratic primary over at the Hallandale Beach Cultural Center, and was on my way up to Hollywood to see what was going on up at Hollywood Beach, since it was so dead outside the polls in HB.

In a just a few minutes I was up at the Hollywood Cultural and Community Center on State RoadA1A/South Ocean Drive and Azalea Terrace, which is connected to a Broward County Library Reading Room, un mignon of a library.
(Extra credit if you're reading this now and recall that "Mignon" was the name of Lisa Douglas's dog the first year she and Oliver lived in Hooterville in the fabulous "Green Acres," one of my all-time favorite TV shows.)

It was while walking around the center and looking for something interesting to shoot besides the sweating campaign workers milling around that I first spotted the Maurice Ferre campaign sign taped to a post, the first time I'd seen one anywhere in Southeast Broward County.
Which is telling of how things have gone.

And it was then and there that it hit me how Ferre must feel after all his years in politics and that famous line of T.S. Elliot finally crashing down upon him: Not with a bang but a whimper.


All August 24th, 2010 photos below by South Beach Hoosier.









Sometimes, when I see how clueless everyone in Tallahassee seems to be to the reality of the bleak economic circumstances of this state and the lack of strong articulate leadership, some of it a direct result of their ill-informed and backwards policies, I think about what if... Bill Sadowski hadn't died in that plane crash in 1992, and was governor now?

Instead, we have in Gov. Charlie Crist, the most self-involved and selfish governor since my family moved to this state in 1968, a person for whom ambition is, for now, a substitute for a well-developed personality, though in that regard, as we all know to our regret, he has much in common with far too many elected officials in South Florida, who long ago gave up the ghost for serving others before themselves, as well as many who now seek to gain office locally.

The myopic political hacks with their palms out-stretched who are like kudzu to our civic dreams and responsibilities, forever getting themselves entwined in places they don't belong.
In my mind, none of Crist's wannabe replacements are half the caliber of a Bill Sadowski.
Instead, we have myopic, self-involved, genuflecting, flawed mental midgets as far as the eye can see.
Quel dommage!

St. Petersburg Times
The legacy of Bill Sadowski
By Martin Dyckman
March 21, 2004

TALLAHASSEE - Whenever someone writes about how much lobbyists spend to influence the Legislature - as my colleague Lucy Morgan did this month - the winers and diners plaintively insist that they don't discuss actual legislation over good food and drink. It's only about getting to know one another, they say.

That's probably true. But it misses the point.

As the lobbyist and legislator perfect their friendship, it's awfully easy for both of them to forget who's not at the table. You have to suspend belief in human nature to accept the notion that this doesn't matter when the time comes to vote.

Not a workday goes by during a session without at least one major lobby hosting a luncheon, cocktail reception or dinner. The biggest by far is the grand garden party Associated Industries stages at its palace just a few doors from the governor's mansion on the evening before the Legislature convenes. Thousands of people go to see and be seen, and to take note of which lobbies are paying for it.

The late Frank Trippett, this newspaper's first bureau chief in Tallahassee, captured the significance in his 1967 book, The States: United They Fell:

"By providing and financing lavish entertainment (liquor, women, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, banquets, balls) the true constituency establishes itself as the host at the state Capitol. It dramatizes its position as the well-spring of bounty and power and affluence, and by casting the Legislature in the role of guest it dramatizes through the social charade the command which it exercises over the Legislature in other substantial ways . . . By accepting the role of guest the Legislature similarly dramatizes its actual role as an intimate and affectionately subservient adjunct of the true constituency."

Once in a while there are legislators who don't play the role. One of the best of them was Bill Sadowski of Miami, who served in the House from 1976 to 1982, when he chose to leave so that he could watch his children grow up, and who died in a plane crash in 1992 while serving as Gov. Lawton Chiles' secretary of community affairs. He was only 48.

He had never allowed the lobbyists to buy him meals or drinks, but that didn't mean he disrespected them. To the contrary, he wrote a 16-point creed for legislative service in which respect for the right to lobby was high on the list.

Lobbyists were perfectly welcome in his office but he thought it was better for everyone if they kept the relationship at arm's length. He brought his family to Tallahassee every session and went home to them instead of to the party circuit. Invited to the home of an old friend who had become a lobbyist, he refused to go until his wife, Jean, persuaded him that taking a bottle of Grand Marnier would set it right.

"He felt like there's a place for lobbyists, but you don't have to do wining and dining," she explained the other day.

If you were to ask the veteran lobbyists, I think they'd tell you they never met a legislator they respected more than Bill Sadowski.

And here's an encouraging sign about the future of your Florida House of Representatives. On the second day of the session, Majority Leader Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, put on every member's desk a copy of the 16 principles that Bill wrote in 1982 for freshman members of the Miami-Dade delegation.

These are some of them: "Always respect another person's right to hold their own views . . . Avoid taking a position on an issue until you have talked to persons on both sides of the issue . . . Do not rely on others to adequately educate you on an issue. They will frequently have a bias . . . Public office is a public trust, both legally and conceptually. Never violate that trust . . . Your family is a source of strength and a point of real world contact. Preserve and protect that strength at all costs . . . You have two constituencies: one that elects you and one that you serve. The one that you serve consists of all the citizens of Florida . . . You are a politician in a democracy. Take pride in that. Use your office to generate public debate on important issues of the day."

Rubio, who never met Sadowski, said he was impressed by the creed because "They're great ideas." This matters because Rubio, 34, is in line to be House speaker for the two years beginning November 2007. He couldn't find better advice on how to use that power.

Though he supports term limits, he acknowledges that "one of the things you lose is access to mentors . . . to individuals who are grounded in the system." He particularly regrets that few legislators seem to take the time to know each other as people before they find themselves doing battle across a committee table. Sadowski's creed speaks to all that.

Because of term limits, there are no House members and only four senators who were here when Florida's affordable housing act was named for him, posthumously, in honor of his efforts to enact it. Let's hope his creed guides them as they vote on whether to let the governor kill the trust fund and siphon off the money.