It's true it costs a lot more to live in Miami Shores. It costs more to buy a house, and more to pay the property tax on that house. And that's not all that costs more in Miami Shores.
We and the Shores share a system of funding solid waste disposal. Each of us charges a separate fee, not part of the ad valorem tax bill, to pay for garbage pick-up. This fund is self-contained, so that no more goes into the fund than it costs to run the service. And supposedly, whatever it takes to run the service is the basis for calculating the fee. Supposedly. The fund doesn't make money, and it doesn't lose money. Supposedly.
In fact, just about three years or so ago, some BP Commissioners complained about our solid waste fund, wondering if the "administrative fee" component wasn't excessive. That's the level of scrutiny, and imagined precision, by which the fund is overseen.
As I said, the Shores has the same system for doing this as we have. They hire people, they own trucks, and they dump wherever the authorized dumping is. Assuming everything is about equal, Shores residents should be paying about the same amount for solid waste as BP residents do. Although one possibility is that the Shores could be taking advantage of "economy of scale," and their residents could be paying less than we do.
Not...even...close. We pay about $575 per dwelling per year. Miami Shores residents pay about $130 per year more than that, or around $705 per dwelling per year. They have the same rules about self-contained funds as we do, so how can they be paying much more? Their fund isn't allowed to make money. So where is the extra money going?
There are two answers. And I'm checking on one of them, to see if it's correct. The one I'm not sure about is what they pay their employees. We're not good to the people who work for us. We should be, because we're grateful to them, and they work hard, but we're not. It may well be that Miami Shores pays their employees a more decent wage.
But here's the answer of which I am sure. We have two garbage trucks. We use them a lot, and we use them for literally heavy lifting. Your car won't last forever, and garbage trucks have a much shorter life span than our cars do. Both of our trucks are now in need of last gasp repairs. Both trucks need to be replaced. (They cost about $120K each.) Guess what we never planned for, charged for, or saved for. So now we need two trucks, and we have no money set aside to pay for them. When Miami Shores needs repairs and replacements, they'll have them, because they have the wisdom and future-thinking to charge extra every year, so the money will be there when the equipment dies.
So now we scramble. We can either find a way to assess ourselves enough to buy the two new trucks we need, or we can assess for less than that, for leasing or lease/purchase. Some people will talk about "outsourcing" garbage pick-up, which will cost us the personal service from the employees we like, but don't pay adequately. And it will only shift the responsibility from our administration to some private company, which will do what we should have done and what we should do now, what Miami Shores knows to do: charge what the work costs, including repairs and replacement.
I'm glad I chose to live in BP. I'm glad my arm didn't get twisted into changing that. And I'm glad to be here now. I don't ever want to go any place else. I don't want to live in Miami Shores, and I don't want us to be Miami Shores. We are who we are. But we have to live in the real world, and we have to provide for ourselves. We have to pay for what we want, and for what we get. That's life everywhere, and it's life in Biscayne Park.
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