The Village, As I See It. How We Get There.

We need two things: enthusiasm/commitment/engagement, and money.

We had enthusiasm, commitment, and engagement from our neighbors.  We have simply beaten it down over the past few years.  As I see it, it should not be hard to get it back.  Neighbors who do not knuckle under to pedagogy, pedantry, and pandering should not be called liars.  I personally have been called a liar repeatedly, in public, once in a long letter to the Biscayne Times, by one of our neighbors, because I do not accede to whatever he says, and I challenge him when I think he's wrong.  This is not a way to deal with your neighbors.

It seems painfully simple, but if Commission meetings were about the Village, and not about the Commissioners, they would be shorter meetings, they would be goal-directed, and neighbors would attend them, as they did just a few years ago.  And again, if Commissioners did not make the mistake of imagining that they were somehow exalted, and that the purpose of Village government was to showcase them, if they had respect for our neighbors and our neighbors' dedication, if they understood that in very many cases, Board members are more knowledgeable and more experienced in the areas in question than the Commissioners are, Commissioners would accept and welcome input from and conclusions of the Boards, and residents would increase their own commitments.  The point is we were there, and we can get back there.  It's not a new invention.  We don't need R&D.  Just a little respect and deference.  Maybe a bit of humility.

Ah, money.  Isn't it always the way?  Here are our choices: 1) Don't get the money, keep doing what we're doing, and fail when the time comes.  It's close already.  2) Hope someone else will support us, rely on "the kindness of strangers," pursue "grants."  Sure, they come along from time to time, about one kind of project or another, but they're small, they're unreliable, they typically require us to "match" them, and they do not support normal operations of a municipality.  They are no way to live.  You're not likely to win the lottery, but if you do, you get a ton of money, and you never have to work again.  Not so with grants.  You have to work for them, they're specific in what you can use them for, you're not very likely to get them, and they're not much money.  And since our alleged grant expert won't help us, his suggestion is that we hire someone else to do it.  Not a good strategy.

3) Economize.  Done.  We had too much fat before Ana Garcia got here, and now we're pretty much bare bones.  Could someone find just a couple more dollars?  Yeah, probably.  But there's no real percentage there.  It's diminishing returns, at best.  At worst, it's strangling ourselves more than we're already choked.

4) Raise taxes.  Yes, we have the highest millage in the county.  Property values fell, they were comparatively low to begin with, the homestead exemption was increased, and we have no commercial pockets to pick, as almost all municipalities do.  So we support ourselves through a combination of ad valorem taxes (property taxes) and non-ad valorem taxes (utility taxes).  It's about 55/45.  Most properties here (about 80%) have homestead exemptions, and their assessments can only increase by a maximum of 3% a year.  Costs increase faster than that.  Here's an example of this problem.  At the end of 2007, the economy crashed, and with it, property values.  I bought my house in 2005, near the height of the market.  My assessment dropped dramatically with the crash, and I wound up paying half the property tax one year than I did the year before.  But some homeowners I know, who had lived here for a long time, had assessments that were so low, because of homestead protection, that in the year my tax dropped by half, their tax went up.  That's how far behind reality they were.  And we depend on them to support us.  You can see that it doesn't work very well.  So we need to raise our taxes, because we are in a unique situation.  Unless we change our situation, which will be point 5).  Let's look at the implications of raising taxes.  For the coming year, our millage is 9.7.  The Commission set that, but they could have gone lower or somewhat higher.  The highest millage they could have set was 10.  One tenth of a mill, for the average house (around $300K market value) is worth about $13 a year.  So if the Commission had taxed us as high as it could have, at 10 mills, it would have cost the average homeowner about $39 a year more than the tax at 9.7 mills will.  The question is, if you like this neighborhood as it is, the way it was when you decided you wanted to live here, if it's worth it to you to live here, if you can afford to pay your property tax at 9.7 mills, would you be able and willing to pay an average of $39 a year more?  The other way to look at it, the not nice way, is to say that if you can afford what you pay, but you couldn't afford $39 a year more, then your finances are not fit for home ownership.  The fact is, if you're homesteaded, your taxes are going up 3% a year anyway. So if you're that marginal, you're not going to make it, one way or the other.  Unless you favor yearly tax decreases, so you won't have to pay more, in which case Biscayne Park comes to the end of the line a lot sooner.

I would add that we have failed to provide for our other needs, like median development, the log cabin, etc, and I think it's worth considering if we should begin to assess ourselves, beyond ad valorem taxes, to create a fund to attend to these other needs.  All for discussion.

5) Annexation.  We might have a unique and very interesting opportunity to increase revenue.  That opportunity is to annex unincorporated territory just east of our northeast corner, on the other side of the train track.  This area is commercial, some industrial, and some very nice apartment building rental.  There are some single family homes as well, and they are pretty much like many of the homes in Biscayne Park.  Less than half of that area is residential, and most of what is is not homesteaded.  So the opportunity for us is to realize significant tax revenues, far in excess of what a similar sized tract of homesteaded territory would yield, by annexing that territory, and having it be part of the municipality of Biscayne Park.  Calculations suggest we would net hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, which we could use for maintenance and improvements.  This is a remarkable opportunity, if it's really available to us, because it preserves BP proper, the triangle, and results in a very sizable influx of revenue.  It essentially solves most or all of our fiscal problems.  The drawbacks are that we can no longer claim to be "100%" residential, though the commercial component is invisible to the triangle, and we welcome a population of voters, whose interests are not likely to be the same as homeowners.  The "good" news, however, is that it is beginning to appear that because of a high proportion of renters, and the unfortunate tendency of many people not to be interested in voting, there are actually very few registered voters in that territory.

I see our having some real opportunity to save ourselves, which I would very much like us to do.  As best I see it, we should increase our taxes (it costs each of us very little to do so, and we're buying something we very much want), and annex.  That, I think, gets our medians improved, our administrative buildings renovated, our streets repaired, and the beginning of a fund to build a barrier along the track.  It also, for what it's worth, improves police activity in the area we can annex, which is good for them and good for us.

I want to serve you on the Commission, and I don't mind starting now.  Please contact me at fredjonasforcommissioner@gmail.com, or call me at 305-891-5030.  "For the Best We Can Be."