Stories About Us

Two Taxes Vastly Different in Trust Factor

BY JACKIE BUENO SOUSA
Published in The Miami Herald

This is a tale of two trusts -- one broken, one not.

In 2002, Miami-Dade residents, feeling particularly trusting, voted to do something they declined to do several times before: tax themselves to fund mass-transit expansion and, separately, children's services. The first led to the People's Transportation Plan; the latter to The Children's Trust. That's where the similarities end.

The half-cent sales tax for transit has become mired in controversy because county officials have not spent the money as promised -- to build miles of new Metrorail lines -- and instead put the money toward bloated salaries, hiring friends and relatives, and maintaining existing services.

Public outrage is so great that County Commissioner Carlos Gimenez has proposed giving voters a chance to kill the tax, a measure the commission is scheduled to consider Tuesday. The proposal is justified, if not realistic.

ODDS LOOK BAD

''If I were a betting man, I'd say it will die in first reading,'' Gimenez acknowledged to me last week, adding that he's prepared to get the issue before voters one way or another.

But critics of Gimenez's proposal have a legitimate concern: The money is now so entrenched, accounting for about a third of transit funds, that undoing it would be catastrophic to our public transportation services. Furthermore, it ignores the reason the tax was approved in the first place: the public wants an effective mass-transit system.

Instead of undoing the tax, voters should be given the option of doing it right: putting the money in the hands of an independent authority free of the county's political meddling. That was supposed to be the role of the Citizens Independent Transportation Trust before county officials stripped it of any real power. The move wouldn't address a need for additional funds, but creating a well-managed program, where decisions are made free of political influence, is the only hope for getting voters to approve additional money in the future.

For guidance, we need not look far: The Children's Trust.

Well aware that a new pot of money might be too much for some county officials to resist, founders of the Children's Trust structured the program so that it would be outside of the county's purview, setting it up as an independent taxing authority and not answerable to the county commission.

''It's all about trust. It's also about independence,'' says Dave Lawrence, a former Miami Herald publisher who led the creation of The Children's Trust, where he is the former board chair.

PUBLIC CONFIDENCE

Just how seriously do they regard public confidence? About two years ago, Children's Trust executives discovered that their volunteer shirts were being sold at a Little Havana dollar store, where a front-window display promoted ''Sale, Limited Quantities: $1.'' The red shirts had been given to volunteers individually, which meant that the batch likely had been stolen. They quickly notified the authorities, and police seized the shirts.

The problem wasn't the relatively small dollar value of the items, but that it threatened the organization's reputation for being a careful steward of its resources.

``If there is any misappropriation of the public dollars entrusted to us, CEO Modesto Abety wrote in an e-mail to authorities at the time, ``we want it stopped and the people involved brought to justice.''

It's not always a matter of justice; sometimes simple accountability will do.