Jun 6, 2008 10:54 pm US/Eastern
Were Miami-Dade Taxpayers Railroaded?
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
Nearly six years ago, Miami-Dade voters were asked to approve a half-penny sales tax hike. They did, with the expectation that there would be a dramatic difference in the way South Florida commutes.
CBS4's news partners at The Miami Herald have learned little has changed.
It was called the People's Transportation Plan. Millions of dollars were to be used to create new MetroRail and bus systems. In fact, the plan was to create some 88 miles of new Metrorail lines. As The Herald's Larry Lebowitz learned, six years later, the County is lucky if it gets more than two miles. That's because the money has apparently gone elsewhere.
"This is cause for outrage in the community," said Lebowitz.
The Miami Herald's investigation centered on a 2002 Miami-Dade sales tax hike, a tax hike of a half-penny that would have changed the landscape of the County's public transportation system.
The Herald found those promises, made by the 2002 County mayoral campaign and then-candidate Alex Penelas, were left largely unfulfilled.
Marc Buoniconti is a member of the Citizen's Independent Transit Trust, which was supposed to be a watchdog group overseeing the Transit system. Instead, he told the
CBS4 I-Team that the group has been left essentially powerless, and that the problems in the system come down to poor planning and execution.
"I'm occasionally embarrassed to see that transit is mismanaging that money," said Buoniconti.
Instead of the money being used to create new transportation systems, The Herald found that in many cases, it's being used for operational costs. In one extreme case, The Herald says, more than $2 million was used to purchase new furniture at the Transit system's headquarters in Downtown Miami. The money was also apparently used to pay for a percentage of the rent in the office building, along with a quarter of everyday items like paper clips, pest control, and even chlorine tablets for fountains at Metro Transit buildings.
"This isn't one of those scandals, where the money never got spent on anything, like in the affordable housing scandal," said Lebowitz. "This one's more like, the money went everywhere."The original plan didn't call for money to be spent on maintaining old systems, but as the folks at the Citizen's Independent Transit Trust told the
CBS4 I-Team, if that sales tax money wasn't used for operational costs, the system might have completely shut down.
(© MMIX CBS Television Stations. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. CBS4 news partner The Miami Herald contributed material for this report)
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