So here I am standing at the kitchen sink this morning washing dishes when I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye.  I instinctively look down and right there on the counter under my face is one of those big fat, ugly, disgusting palmetto bugs that made South Florida famous.  You know, the ones the size of small helicopters that aim right for your head if you’re unlucky enough to be in their flight path.  Normally I just nonchalantly walk away and load my shotgun…  KIDDING!  They sure would be great for target practice, anyway.  But, this morning it caught me completely by surprise and I dropped the plate and screamed like a girl.

My husband came running, thinking I got electrocuted or burned myself trying to boil water again (kids, don’t try this at home), and when he saw it was just a palmetto bug he promptly killed it.  My hero!

Now our cats usually take care of this problem before I run into any of those damn bugs.  The deceptively sweet faced Little Girl is actually our best critter hunter.

For some reason, I’ve been seeing quite a few palmettos scurrying around and I told my husband that the hunting cats haven’t been on the job lately.  He said to me with a straight face, “They heard you want to cut their pensions.”

In case there’s anyone in North Miami Beach who doesn’t know it, the City has been entrenched in a major Budget Battle.  The city’s proposed 2011/2012 Budget, Check Register, Comprehensive Financial Report and more are online for the whole world to see.  The proposed 2011/2012 Budget for the Water Department also was posted online over the weekend.  If you’re so inclined, you can even find out the salaries and compensation packages of practically every single employee of the City of North Miami Beach.  Let’s just say, Transparency R Us.

For those of you who haven’t been following the saga of the NMB Police Department, the City Manager Lyndon Bonner directed the police department to slash $4 million from its current budget of approximately $22,000,000.00.  Despite what you may be hearing, it was not the City Manager who directed the Police Chief to specifically cut 24 police officers and 13 civilians.  He told the department to make cuts, the department decided to slash jobs.

The police and their UNION will tell you they have no choice.  But, as Mayor George Vallejo stated in an interview last night on Radio 1700 (https://www.votersopinion.com/?p=518), these are what he terms “False Choices.”  The UNION has already prepared and circulated the now infamous “List of 24,” which targets specific officers for layoffs.  The UNION prepared this list in accordance with Article 24 of its contract with the city.  Item 3 of that Article reads, “Whenever it becomes necessary to reduce the number of employees in a given Civil Service class, for any of the foregoing reasons, seniority within that particular classification shall govern the order of layoffs.”

As the Mayor stated in his interview last night, the UNION could ostensibly change its policy by amending the contract if it wanted to in the event layoffs really were inevitable.  For example, (and this is Stephanie speaking, not the Mayor), if the UNION were inclined, it could choose to suggest the retirement of any of the long time employees, some of whom are either ready to retire anyway.  (Even if they’re don’t think they’re ready, some of them probably should be retired.)  This would make room for the younger and more physically fit officers, which would allow them to keep their jobs and move up the ranks of seniority.  It would also help cut the budget because by not having to pay those top notch salaries to the long time veteran cops, it can “spread the wealth” to the younger officers who make much less.  The city might even have enough left over to hire more cops, which is what EVERYBODY wants!

Right now, as Mayor Vallejo stated, “we are one emergency away from a bankruptcy.”  For example, we are now under a tropical storm warning, which might be that “emergency.”  He went on to confirm that the water department has absolutely NO MONEY in reserve, because the previous administration literally took all the reserves to “balance” the budget.

But the most eye opening comment the Mayor said was the fact that we are SEVENTY MILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT for the pension payments owed to police officers who have already earned that money.  This does not even include the pension of future contracts for work that has not even been performed yet, but for which pensions have been promised.  The INTEREST ALONE on this debt costs the city FIVE MILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR!  The Mayor went on to state that the residents have to vote on municipal bonds for capital improvement and the like, but “no one ever asked the voters if they wanted to assume this debt.”  He ended this discussion by stating that this problem has been brewing for many years, through many administrations, and that “It’s time to talk about it openly and honestly and figure out how to pay it back.

Even more startling is the fact that this SEVENTY MILLION DOLLAR DEBT is just on PENSION ALONE!  It doesn’t even begin to include all the other debt the city has racked up over the years.

In case any of you out there still have doubts that cities can run out of money, a city in Rhode Island just filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy yesterday (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-rhodeisland-centralfalls-idUSTRE7703ID20110801).  This article stated that Central Falls, RI “grappled with an $80 million unfunded pension and retiree health benefit liability that is nearly quadruple its annual budget of $17 million.  Granted it’s a small city and the ratio of $80 million pension debt to a $17 million budget a huge hole.

But, our proposed budget of approximately $49 million with a $70 million unfunded pension liability is still nothing to sneeze at.  To bring this into perspective, this is like saying you earn $49,000.00 a year and you owe credit card companies a total of $70,000.00, on which you are paying $5,000.00 in interest alone a year.  How on earth do you expect to pay that back?  And that’s not including your mortgage or your car payments.  This is just one category of your debt, i.e., your credit cards.  I don’t know about you, folks, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I were in that position.  No wonder all hell is breaking loose at City Hall!

For the past few weeks, the Council and the residents have been on the receiving end of much intimidation and nastiness by some of the police officers who are understandably in fear of losing their jobs.  While this would be unfortunate, and while no one likes seeing more people lose their jobs, the fact is that something must be done before the City of North Miami Beach does have to declare bankruptcy.

The cops have been throwing lots of red herrings (or, as a friend of mine put it, “blue” herrings) out there to try and distract us from the fact that we have no money.  The biggest herring is the one claiming that the city does have money but that it’s being hidden.  Although there is nothing laughable about the state of our city’s finances, the “funny” thing is that this is the first time in probably our city’s history that absolutely nothing is being hidden!  To go even further with that, it is precisely because our severe financial condition was hidden for so long that we’re in the mess we’re in now.

Another red herring the cops are throwing at me is the fact that my husband is a UNION member <gasp> and that he gets a pension <gasp>!  What they don’t want to hear is that my husband’s pension, which is with the Florida Retirement System, is FULLY FUNDED.  Unlike NMB’s UNFUNDED pension liability of SEVENTY MILLION DOLLARS for which it is paying FIVE MILLION DOLLARS in interest per year, this means that no one – not the fire department, nor the County, nor the State – is paying any interest whatsoever on the pension money in that system.  This is not even an issue.  Hence, a red herring.

Yet another red herring they’re trying to hit me with is that I only paid a small amount of property taxes, yet I expect all the “top notch services” I’m getting.  (More about our “top notch services” later in this column.)  To detract from the problem, they are trying to “punish” me for having bought my house in 1989 when the taxes were really low (and also because I live in what one of them called an “unappealing” part of town, i.e., not Eastern Shores), and that by law my taxes cannot go up more than 3% per year.  As if this has anything to do with anything at all.  Again, a red herring.

Other red herrings being put out there are (a) you don’t understand how tough our job is, (b) you’ll have more crime if any of us are fired, (c) this is a management conspiracy, and my personal favorite, (d) you get what you pay for.  All of these are irrelevant topics designed to divert attention from the original issues, which is WE ARE BROKE!

Ironically, they might be sorry they even brought up (d) above because this argument just might backfire on them.  I’m beginning to wonder if we are, in fact, getting what we pay for.  After diligent worm digging, I received some very interesting statistics for 13 police departments from Miami-Dade and Broward Counties and compared them to those of the North Miami Beach Police Department.  For example, at 1 cop for every 367 residents ours is the fourth lowest ratio, South Miami being the lowest at 1 per 237 residents, and Cutler Bay being the highest at 1 per 789 residents.  As to the total budgeted cost per police officer, at $193,630 per officer, ours is third on the list with Miami Beach’s $240,326 being the highest, and Hialeah’s cost of $111,553 per officer being the lowest. 

Download the data here as a Microsoft Word file

Download the data here as a PDF file

But the most interesting statistic on the list is that out of a violent crime rating from 1 to 10, ten being the highest, North Miami Beach rates a nine, and is tied for the number 2 spot on the list with North Miami, behind Miami Gardens and Opa Locka, who are both tied for the number 1 spot with a rating of 10.

Despite all the red herrings, or blue herrings as it were, that are being thrown at us, the real question is are we really getting what we pay for?  The cops are going around the city scaring residents into believing that crime will be even worse if the “List of 24” end up getting fired.  I’m thinking that for one of the most expensive police departments in South Florida, we should have at least one of the lowest crime rates.  As it stands, with a Crime Rating of 9 out of 10 on the Crime “Richter Scale,” it hardly appears it could get much worse.

I’m thinking that asking us if we’re getting what we’re paying for is not just a “blue” herring, but one they probably should have thrown back into the water.  Or at least tossed it to the Hunting Cat Extraordinaire, Little Girl.

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”