New Math

It appears agreed that the Village is in fiscal trouble.  We spend more than we make, and/or we do not have enough money to pay for the kinds of things a successful municipality must do.  Various people have described this problem in various ways, and a range of suggestions have been made to correct it.  At most dire, some feel either that the municipality will become defunct in up to 10 years, or that it will be annexed, presumably either by North Miami or by Miami Shores.  Neither of those municipalities, by the way, has any reason to want to absorb the erstwhile Village of Biscayne park.  We would be the same fiscal problem to them that we are to ourselves.

Standard approaches to our problem have included solutions like raising taxes, economizing more, and annexing some other tract of land and land use.  Each one makes a certain kind of sense, with some being a bit more sensible, or workable, than others.

But very recently, I heard two other approaches.  They are creative, unusual, and perhaps even counter-intuitive.  I always like thinking "outside the box," so approaches like these grab my attention.

The first of these approaches was suggested by Noah Jacobs.  Noah, by the way, is one of those people who says he recognizes that we are in fiscal trouble.  His recommendation was summarized at the special Commission meeting to negotiate salary and benefits with our new Manager.  There were actually two orders of business at that meeting.  The second was the Manager's contract, and the first was acceptance of the ad valorem tax rate and the coming year budget.  Noah had two proposals.  One was an objection to the tax rate and budget (he voted against both of them), and he reminded us of his wish for lower taxes.  The other was persistently, at each and every instance, to advocate in favor of any salary or benefit concession the new Manager requested.  So Noah's solution to the Village's fiscal problem, the problem that can be summarized as the Village's spending more than it makes, was to have it make less and spend more.  I told you this might seem counter-intuitive.

The other approach was shared by someone who brings fresh eyes to our problem.  Manny Espinoza is a very new BP resident.  He's been here for about 13 months now.  But he's fallen in love with the Park already, and he decided that he should be a Commissioner by now.  He already identified one problem, which was that the P&Z Board and the Commission did not think he should have a fence in front of his house.  It may even be that he will, in time, discover other imperfections.  But the present issue is that it just so happens that Manny is an accountant.  Manny informed us at the candidates' forum that in that he is an accountant, once he takes office, money will simply appear.  He didn't use the term "magic wand," but that was the sense I got in listening to him.  Or maybe he just meant that he is a devotee of "creative accounting."

So those of us who look at fiscal situations, and address them with standard addition and subtraction, may have it all wrong.  We may be suffering from lack of creativity, or the confinement of conventional thinking.  Adam Smith's "invisible hand" theory was intended to suggest that capitalist systems find their own homeostases and thereby regulate themselves.  The "invisible hand" theory "on crack" may suggest the possibility of entirely alternative realities, where amplifying deficits somehow resolves them, or money grows on trees or falls from the sky.