By George Volsky
georgevolsky@aol.com

Goodbye 2009 - and good riddance.

Yet forgetting 2009 won’t be easy. It was the year of near financial and real estate meltdown. In the last 12 months, residents who own their dwellings outright saw their assets diminished by at least 30 percent and their municipal taxes raised by half of that percentage.

Those who have mortgages are now much, much worse.\Most Coral Gables residents believe that 2009 was the worst since Mayor Don Slesnick and his colleagues came to City Hall in April 2001. To borrow one part of Dickens’ famous phrase, 2009 was “the worst of times.”

Time and again  we were galled by a seemingly unending series of City Hall  errors and scandals,  without parallel  in the last 50 years of Coral Gables’ history.  As 2009 is ending, frustrated  residents face the future with a sense of foreboding. And no one is more apprehensive than the hard working city employees.

The  City Commission doesn’t seem to have wakened up by the cataract of  failures, for which heavy forfeits are now being paid, and will be paid for decades by city taxpayers. Most of the failures and problems are of the commission’s own making: its lack of vigilance  and interest in finding out what’s wrong in the city.

The commissioners seem to be living in the cocoon of hyperthymia.  They don’t perceive the deep distrusts that their actions and pronouncements  have engendered among the people they pretend to represent. This, as a result, has unfortunately produced a general propensity to believe every unsavory rumor of alleged shenanigans in City Hall.

The commissioners, many people believe, seem innocent of any sense of responsibility. Like before, in 2009 they closed ranks in the ill-conceived custom of collegiality. They turned their backs on reality, oblivious of the truism that those who forget history are destined to repeat it.  

In a truly democratic government, the head of the ruling structure – in our case the mayor – would be the first to admit openly at least some of the culpability for the series of calamities that shook the city in 2009, and his colleagues  would also join in “mea culpa.”

That didn’t happen. The mayor, displaying what many view as  crass political solecism, clings to the illusory hope that people will forget who is really responsible for most of the problems, and that something will turn up to distract public opinion, enabling him to muddle through and run for reelection.   

The commission seldom – if ever - discusses serious issues facing the city today and even graver ones that will confront us in the years to come.  And Slesnick sets the tone for zero transparency.  Rather than asking probing questions, and preaching  openness,  with the ever-ready assistance from the city attorney, he does his bureaucratic utmost to prevent the public from learning the unvarnished truth.   Earlier this month, for example, he displayed total disinterest in finding out why the disgraced former city manager David Brown had been for years buying gasoline and diesel fuel at higher prices from a  company that hadn’t gone through the obligatory public bid process, which has cost taxpayers probably $1.5 million.

(Public documents released by the city after Slesnick refused to investigate the gas-diesel caper, indicate that the mayor must have known for years how Brown had been purchasing fuel.  The documents also showed the mayor’s less than edifying way of mixing his city functions with private family business, which - as multiple comments have urged - should be looked into by the Miami-Dade Ethics Commission.

Subsequently, City Hall sources have confirmed that a search of Brown’s  fuel purchase files  has failed to discover a contract between the city and the fuel vendor, nor it could  ascertain if the vendor delivered the mid-grade gasoline the city had been paid for. Several legal experts believe that the city should explore whether Brown’s deeds are actionable, as their statute of limitation has not expired.)   

It is understandable, therefore, that city residents and employees are looking toward 2010 with trepidation.  Coral Gables budgetary obligations in the coming year are going to be more onerous than in 2009, while revenues could be much lower than anticipated because of a reduced income base.  That could mean a new round of cost and personnel cutting and, later, higher property taxes.

Thus many people in the city sustain that our present non-partisan municipal system is inoperative, if not seriously damaged. One remedy, which requires a special election, would be that the mayor, the four commissioners and the city attorney be elected on a party slate and platform. Such process, including primary elections, would make it easier for candidates with limited financial resources to participate; and it would certainly increase voter involvement.

More important, the members of the commission would be subject to some degree of scrutiny by the  Republican or Democratic parties on the county, state and national levels.  No less important, the city attorney would become an independent official working for the residents and not for the  commission as is the case today.