While Opa-locka’s current financial crisis was inevitable, Mayor “Lady” Myra Taylor‘s outburst at the November 12, 2015 commission meeting was a complete shocker.

In Mayor blasts manager in latest Opa-locka meltdown, the Miami Herald quoted some of her more incendiary remarks:

• “I am the mayor of this city and I will get my respect.”
• “The mayor is the only female on this dais. One would think her male counterparts would look out for her and protect her. It’s done in the animal kingdom, but not in here.”
• “The word will get out that it took this white man to come in and straighten out black folks.”

Taylor uttered that last, and extremely racist, comment while chastising City Manager Steve Shiver for “leaking embarrassing information about the city’s budget woes to the media.”

In response, Shiver told the Herald, “I’ve never experienced a display like that.  I don’t know what to think. I’m shocked that a mayor would make those kinds of comments publicly.”

Unfortunately, such overt racism exhibited by public officials is becoming more commonplace.

Although she’s not the mayor, a Lauderdale Lakes official blurted out a similar comment at one of that city’s recent meetings.  During discussions about finding a new city manager, Commissioner Gloria Lewis publicly stated from the dais, “I’m a commissioner.  I’m for the people.  I’m not going outside to hire a consultant who’s not my color.”

Ironically, Lauderdale Lakes went on to hire Steve Shiver’s predecessor, former Opa-locka City Manager Kelvin Baker.

This disturbing trend of blatant – and very public – racism has sparked little outrage until now.  Two former Opa-locka employees, who have been on the receiving end of this hate speech, however, are bringing the issue to the forefront.

While he may have escaped with his job intact after the November 12th meeting, Steve Shiver was eventually fired as City Manager during a Special Commission Meeting held November 24, 2015.

As reported by the Herald, Mayor Taylor threw yet another tantrum in chambers because the City Manager dared to publicize their financial situation.  She exclaimed, “Mr. Shiver wanted to be in charge.  It seems he wanted to expose everything we did wrong.”

Obviously unclear on the concept of her own city’s commission-manager form of government, in which the city manager actually IS in charge, Mayor Myra Taylor is also painfully ignorant of the fact that government records are public  records.

Worse, her doltish statement that Mr. Shiver “wanted to expose everything we did wrong” is, well, just wrong on so many levels.

In a statement to the Herald, Shiver promised, “In short order, you will understand what I’ve been put through by this mayor.”

We can only imagine!

As noted in an earlier Miami Herald article, Miami-Dade cuts off Opa-locka’s money lifeline over misspending, the county had already “stopped funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars for critical road repairs and other services.”  An audit revealed that the city had misappropriated surtax funds slated for upgrading “the city’s aging streets, sidewalks and other amenities.”  Instead, that money was used “to fill budget gaps and other basic costs.”

Obviously, it did not sit well with the Mayor when Steve Shiver and his newly hired Assistant City Manager Tom Marko discovered those discrepancies and, as required by law, reported them to the state.

As such, Tom Marko felt compelled to resign on November 25, 2015, the day after Shiver was fired.

Marko’s frustration over, among other things, Taylor’s speech “filled with “racial remarks” that “shocked her counterparts and attendees” in the audience,” became apparent in his resignation letter to Interim City Manager.  In that memo he wrote:

I’m still shaking my head in disbelief!

When Tom Marko accepted the position on September 21, 2015, he left his budget analyst job at Miami-Dade County “because he was ready for challenges and to help one of the county’s poorest cities,” according to the Miami Herald’s latest article about Opa-locka on November 27, 2015.

In Second ousted official says Opa-locka ‘all but bankrupt,’  Marko claimed he wanted to “help an impoverished community,” but soon discovered that city officials had been illegally using “surtax and police forfeiture funds to pay its bills” for years.

When Marko started examining the city’s audited reports for the past five years (as long as Myra Taylor has been in office), he “found troubling discrepancies.”  According to the Herald, “The audits showed the city had plenty of money in some funds, but when Marko looked at the budgets, they were frequently depleted.  As revenues dwindled, city officials began tapping into water and sewer funds — traditional profit generators — so frequently the accounts were losing money each year, he said.  City officials also began turning to other sources to pay for bills at a time when the city’s revenues were plunging.”

Because Tom Marko blew the whistle on what was in essence a ponzi scheme, he was forced to resign on Wednesday, within a day after his boss, Steve Shiver, was fired.

Tom Marko might have been shocked to discover such chicanery going on, but avid Opa-locka watchers knew it was just a matter of time before it all hit the fan.

Not surprisingly, during the last three of those five years, the city was run by a man who did exactly the same thing in North Miami Beach before he was fired in 2010.

After former City Manager Kelvin Baker’s departure from North Miami Beach, it was discovered that he used the water department reserves to balance the budget, depleting it to the point where the utility’s Fitch Rating was downgraded.  Opa-locka was forewarned, but hired Baker anyway.  He kept up his juggling act for three years until he resigned in June, probably coming to the realization he had tapped every last resource to keep the city afloat and that it was all about to come crashing down.

But by then, the damage was already done.

It was during Kelvin Baker’s tenure that Opa-locka misappropriated the half-penny surtax funds slated for “road repairs and other services,” which led to its suspension from the county’s program and cut off from future funding of approximately $700,000.00 a year.

The November 19, 2015 Herald article also noted that an audit revealed “questions over the whereabouts of at least $200,000 in federal forfeiture money that was only supposed to be spent for police cars, vests, and other law enforcement purposes.  So far they can’t determine where the money went.”

As City Manager, Kelvin Baker should have known that Florida laws governing police forfeiture funds (LETF) are stringent.  It was under his watch that those funds were misappropriated as well.  I imagine it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. Department of Justice comes looking for their money.

Adding to Opa-locka’s woes, there is currently a federal investigation into accusations of a demand for kickbacks from a city vendor.  (Fortunately for Kelvin Baker, this scandal began brewing after he resigned.)

If all those problems weren’t bad enough, before he resigned Tom Marko discovered municipal debts of over $8 million, half of which were owed to the county “mostly in water and sewer fees, including hundreds of thousands already collected from taxpayers but never passed on to the county.”

Marko correctly noted that the main problem was Mayor Myra Taylor, who rules Opa-locka with an iron fist.  She was furious that Shiver and Marko contacted the state about Opa-locka’s budget crisis “without first consulting her and the commissioners.”

Mayor Taylor and two of her colleagues are obviously under the mistaken impression that what happens in Opa-locka stays in Opa-locka.

In a 3-1 vote (the article doesn’t specify which official did not cast the fifth vote, and the most current commission meeting minutes posted on the city’s website are from August 27, 2015), Taylor led the charge to fire Steve Shiver over his divulging the “details of the city’s questionable financial practices.”

Vice Mayor Timothy Holmes, who voted to fire the city manager, was also more concerned about appearances than the dire straits of Opa-locka’s looming budgetary disaster.  “I’m not going to sit here and let my city go through turmoil like this,” Holmes said, referring to the ongoing battle between Taylor and Shiver that “had spilled out into the public domain.”

Opa-locka’s dirty little secrets, including and especially its unchecked racism, have been broadcast to anyone who has read the Miami Herald over the last couple of months.  “Lady” Myra Taylor will be hard pressed to put that genie back in the bottle.

The sordid tale of this city’s gross mismanagement and (possibly criminal) negligence is destined to become legendary in the history of South Florida’s already tainted reputation for unethical governance.  Opa-locka’s long downhill slide into fiscal catastrophe is a direct result of a community that has historically elected incompetent, and even felonious (see Terence Pinder), leadership to run their local government.  Elections really do have consequences.

The Mayor’s ignorance about municipal finances, state laws and government in the sunshine, is just as egregious as her acting as if the City of Opa-locka is her own personal fiefdom.

But most revealing of all is that the Mayor Taylor has absolutely no qualms about judging others by the color of their skin.

More than anything else, that speaks volumes about the content of her character.

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”