I Owe Tracy Truppman an Apology. And So Does Mac Kennedy.

It's a weak excuse, I know: Mac and I are "not the only ones."  Maybe we're the most vocal, or maybe not.  I can name other people who say the same thing.  But I really do know.  It's no excuse.

Mac and I have incessantly accused Tracy of having no vision for the Village.  We've cited what we thought were examples of Tracy's lack of vision.  Tracy won't do this, or she won't do that.  She won't move the Village forward.  And Mac and I, and some others of us, concluded that this is proof that Tracy has no vision.  She refused to have the standard visioning conclave.  See, more proof.

I started complaining about what I thought was Tracy's lack of vision for the Village even before she got elected.  Even when we were running, I pointed out Tracy's refusal to specify any one thing she wanted for the Village.  She did say she was offering finally to "listen to residents," but that turned out not to be true.  And after she won, and commandeered complete personal domination over the Village, she wouldn't advance any agenda at all.  The only partial exception was her claim that policing needed to be improved.  But since that was already under way, it wasn't a real initiative.  So I thought, and Mac thought, and some others of us thought, Tracy had no vision.

But Mac and I were wrong.  Tracy does have a vision.  Her vision isn't to move the Village forward.  It is, if you can forgive the split infinitive, to not move the Village forward.  Tracy's vision is to hold the Village where it is.  Nothing is to be demanded of Village residents and property-owners, except that they shouldn't roll through stop signs, and nothing is to be done to improve, or change in any way, the Village.  If it has faults, or limitations, or failings, they should remain that way.

I'm saying this as if it was purely negative, but I suspect Tracy doesn't think of it that way.  I suspect Tracy thinks the Village is in some sense quaint, and that it is a laid back and homey oasis amid change, progress, and gentrification.  And I think Tracy would say she's protecting Village residents and property-owners who are satisfied with their situations, and the Village as it is, and don't want anything demanded of them.  Or they're not financially disposed to make or even capable of making improvements, or even doing normal maintenance.  Tracy's Biscayne Park is a haven for the unambitious, and the less endowed.

When Mac and I talk with each other about Village properties, we have visions that are different from each other.  My view of the Village is that it is changing, as I accept and expect that it would, and that some of those changes include contemporary looks, and two-story houses.  I like it like that.  To me, it's part of the Village's eclectic theme.  Mac doesn't agree with me.  He likes a more old style or old time Village look.  He thinks properties should be kept up well, as I do, too, and he and I agree that landscaping should be improved, but Mac would otherwise not want the Village and its properties to look more modern.

Tracy goes further than that.  She's satisfied if nothing at all changes.  She does not support stronger Codes, or more Code compliance.  If the Village looks like what someone else would call run down or poorly kept, Tracy has no problem with that.  But that's not the absence of vision.  That is Tracy's vision.

Every month, every property in the Village receives a copy of The  Egret, a publication of the Miami Shores Chamber of Commerce.  Our most recent former Mayor, David Coviello, and the Mayor before him, Roxy Ross, produced without fail a Biscayne Park column, which the Mayor in Biscayne Park is always invited (and desired) to do.  Tracy refuses to produce a column.  I've reminded her about it.  And again, I made the mistake of thinking Tracy was failing to do part of her job as the main spokesperson for Biscayne Park, because she refused to produce the BP column.  But my mistake was thinking the Mayor in Biscayne Park should provide connection to our neighboring municipalities.  Based on my theory, any Mayor who didn't do that was failing to do part of his or her job.  But connecting with neighboring municipalities is not Tracy's wish.  She's much more isolationist.  She doesn't care about Miami Shores, or El Portal, or North Bay Village.  She has no use for them.  Where I think her refusal to produce a column for The Egret is a failure, I suspect Tracy would call it a success.

So I now think I was wrong about Tracy and what I interpreted as lack of vision.  I think Mac was wrong, too.  I think Brad Piper was wrong.  I think any of us who saw stagnation, and thought it represented apathy or disinterest, was wrong.  It's just laissez-faire.  Stagnation and unaddressed decay are not evidence of Tracy's lack of agenda for the Village.  They are her agenda.  And she's been unwavering about executing that agenda.  So I apologize for having misunderstood.

What Makes the World Go 'Round

I attend lots of cultural events.  I subscribe to most of the organizations whose presentations I attend.  I donate, beyond the cost of the subscription, to most of the ones to which I subscribe.  You have to donate.  Ticket sales provide less than half of what cultural/arts organizations need to survive.  Any arts organization that could do no more than fill a performance hall would go out of business.  And if they charged enough for tickets to pay their bills with the gate, no one would buy the tickets.  They'd be too expensive.  It's up to the devoted patrons to make up the difference with donations.  And grants from the Knight Foundation, the County, and other funders are critical.

The same is true of other settings.  The reason politicians don't want to have to rely only on public funding is that they want to spend much more money than the public will give them, either governmentally or by limited personal donations.  They rely heavily on the big donors.

One of the invariable features of public or community radio is that it relies on donations from listeners.  And the fund drives always make the point that it is a small proportion of the audience who donate to keep the station in business.

Someone recently told me about an amazing public museum somewhere in Arkansas.  From what I gather, it's a museum of Americana, from the earliest days to now.  The building is fabulous new architecture, and the collection is impressive.  The museum is free to the public.  This project was organized and paid for by Alice Walton (a Walmart heir) and several of her very rich friends.

Bill Gates, with support from Warren Buffett, have pooled a tremendous amount of money to effect public projects (education and otherwise) here and in other countries.

We see more modest versions of that here in BP, too.  We charge ourselves almost the highest ad valorem property tax rate we easily could, because we are a unique, and uniquely limited, community, and we need to support ourselves in unusual ways.  What we charge ourselves isn't enough, and even if we don't, for who knows what reason, decide to charge ourselves more, we make part of it up in other ways.  We charge ourselves non ad valorem fees, too.  We have to, because we need the money.  But even that isn't enough, which limits our ability to be a proper municipality.

One thing we have done, which is like the arts/culture organizations, or political candidates, is relied on the extra efforts, and extra devotion, of some of our neighbors.  We have public sculpture, because some of our neighbors have given of themselves financially to buy it, and donate it to the Village.  We have a Foundation, and it provides what it does, because many more of our neighbors make personal donations.  All of that is what has to happen, because taxes don't cut it, like ticket sales don't cut it.  Sometimes, public policy or vision is lacking.

Very recently, when I was on the Commission, I asked my Commission colleagues for a few things.  I asked them to task the Parks and Parkways Board to give us a unified median plan.  I also asked them to approve renaming the streets in BP, to reflect the old names these streets had, as well as the numerical names they have now.  I was disappointed, and surprised, to have had both requests declined.  To the extent that I could explore the feeling against these two requests, the answer seemed to be that the Village could not afford to improve the medians, or to buy new street signs.  But I wasn't asking for that.  I wasn't asking for money.

My vision was that we-- some BP residents, selected BP residents, many BP residents, maybe most BP residents-- would donate to create these improvements.  The Village recently improved a median in 114th Street.  But the money for the new plantings didn't come from Village coffers.  It came from personal donations.  I live on 119th Street.  There's a median in front of my house.  If there was a plan for what could and should go in that median, I would donate to provide it.  I'm sure a number of my neighbors would, too.

Maybe it's sad to say that many good things wouldn't happen without the extra dedication of a relatively few people, but that's generally true.  And we have those few people living right here in BP.  We have people who are interested and dedicated, and they show over and over how reliable and generous they are.  It's true that many people don't have that kind of vision, but that doesn't stop the people who do.  And it's those kinds of dedicated extra efforts that seem to make the world go 'round.

Can We Buy Back Guns? Should We?

No one disagrees that there's too much gun violence in this country.  No one disagrees that there's too much gun violence in south Florida.  Some people think the answer is that no one should have a gun.  Others think the answer is that many more people should have guns.

What we can all agree about is that too many people who shouldn't have guns do have them.  And they shouldn't have them in part because the use they intend for them is antisocial.

Gun buy-back programs work.  They have worked in Australia, Great Britain, and at least one of the Scandinavian countries.  The result of them is lower rates of gun crime.  Presumably, the theory is that some people who have guns have them for impulsive and marginal reasons, and that given the opportunity, those people would rather have some money than the gun.  That gets the gun out of the least serious and responsible hands, and off the street.  No one can have a problem with that.

We in Biscayne Park have our own problems.  Some of those problems have to do with crime.  Some have to do with our limited fiscal resources.  We do the best we can to confront crime.  We don't do the best we can to improve our fiscal status.  But we do something.

What if we started our own gun buy-back program, and we agreed to pay anyone with a gun some amount of money, and they would give us the gun.  We would then turn the gun over to law enforcement with more fiscal reserves than we have (probably the county), and they would destroy it.

I have no idea what a gun is in any sense worth.  I don't know what we would have to pay someone to get theirs.  What a gun is worth is whatever we would have to pay to get someone to sell it to us.

Should we designate a certain amount of Village money to be used to buy people's guns?  Someone would have to figure out what it would take to get someone to sell us their Saturday night special, or Glock, or AR-15.  What if we started out with a relatively small amount of money?  Let's say we started with $10K.  What would we have to pay someone to get them to give us their Saturday night special?  $50?  $100?  The kinds of people who would sell a Saturday night special to us are the kinds of people who didn't pay much for it.  Maybe they bought it on the street.  Maybe they stole it.  How much would we have to pay for an AR-15?  $500?  $1000?

If a program like that worked, maybe we could fund it with more than we have in Village coffers.  Maybe someone would make donations to our gun buy-back fund, to keep it going.

I'd be interested in a BP program like that.  I'd set aside Village money to start one, and see where it goes.

A Dumb Game.

It was a long Commission meeting tonight.  It lasted about two hours.  That doesn't seem long, except there was about 45-60 minutes of material.  No one I consulted was sure where the time went.

A presentation that could have taken a lot of time took almost no time.  The Consent Agenda was reasonably quick.  A few Commissioners commented that they expected a bigger crowd for discussion of the sanitation fee, and some of us in the audience were surprised, too.  But few were there, and there wasn't much to discuss.

The fact is, I was going to call this post "The Sublime, and the Ridiculous," to illustrate the contrast between Roxy Ross and the the four stooges.  It was frankly breathtaking.  Roxy was serious, detailed, exploratory, well organized, and clearly concerned about Village residents.  The rest were bumbling, inept, and ultimately had no meaning.  But I decided to focus on something else.  I wanted to focus on the discussion about the sanitation budget.

At one point, a propos of nothing in particular, Tracy "Big Mama" Truppman was trying to explain the increase in the sanitation charge, and she talked about how the Village was essentially padding the bill, for the sake of general Village finances.  She didn't want anyone to think they were being scammed, but just that this was a way to recover some money for Village staff expenses.  And she wasn't wrong about that.  She was right, and I agree with her.  She was addressing the Village's limited fiscal resources.

But here's the problem.  The Village has for some years now charged Village homeowners a property tax millage of 9.7.  For years, no one has wanted to change this millage.  Apparently, it feels consistent to Commissioners, and maybe to non-Commissioner residents.  It's the same number-- 9.7-- year after year.  But this number of mills-- 9.7-- has no meaning.  It's just a number.  The same number of mills every year is not the same tax to homeowners, and it's not the same revenue to the Village.  It's 9.7 mills, but that millage is applied to property values, which change every year.

Even if property-owners get a homestead exemption, which is what 80% of Village property owners do, the value of their properties can still change every year.  And they do.  If property values go down, as they did in 2008 and 2009, the tax goes down.  If they go up, as they do most years, the tax goes up.  The value in getting a homestead exemption is that if assessed values go up, the assessment on homesteaded properties, for taxation purposes, can only go up by 3%.  So a 9.7 mills taxation one year is a different tax than the same 9.7 mills tax another year.

The reason it's important to remember this is that when someone like Tracy "Big Mama" Truppman talks about fiscal constraints, which she would like her neighbors to know can be slightly ameliorated by a manipulation in the sanitation tax, the fiscal constraint is a self-inflicted problem.  It was Tracy and her stooges who did not increase the ad valorem tax rate above 9.7 mills.  They could have.  Any Commission could.  It's odd and a little grating to hear Tracy complain about fiscal constraints, when she has taken a role in imposing those constraints.  And that idiotic discussion took up a certain amount of time in tonight's meeting.  For one thing, we paid our attorney $165 an hour to listen to Tracy explain to her neighbors why she advocated for charging them an inflated sanitation fee, which was in consequence to deciding not to charge them the taxation rate they should have been paying anyway.  It was, as I said in the title of this post, a "dumb game."

There was one other dumb game during the Commission meeting tonight.  It was about board appointments.  I applied to be on the Public Safety Board, but suddenly, there were seven new applicants-- gee, I wonder how that happened-- so I withdrew my application.  I knew Tracy and the stooges wouldn't appoint me to the Public Safety Board-- they no longer had to, since there were these suddenly interested Village residents-- and I decided to apply to be on the Parks and Parkways Board instead.  It was my impression that that board needed members, and I needed something to do.

But I was wrong.  It turned out P&P already had what was essentially a full complement of members, except that Randy Wagoner's membership had lapsed, and he had to reapply.  Which he did.  So there was only one real opening, and Randy and I both applied.  There was great confusion about the count of which Commissioners voted to seat which one of us-- me and Randy.  The Clerk said twice that three Commissioners chose me for first choice, and two chose Randy.  I thought this was very odd, since it was announced that Roxy Ross, Big Mama, and Will Tudor chose me for a first choice.  Will Tudor gets confused sometimes as to what Big Mama demands that he do, but Big Mama never gets confused.  Why would she have voted for me as a first choice?  After some fumbling around, the vote was re-announced, and this time, Randy got three first place votes, and I got two.  So Randy was back on the Board, as he should have been.  What was funny about this, apart from the long time it took to count the votes, was that I later learned that Big Mama had asked for a recount.  It was as if Big Mama somehow knew in advance how the vote was supposed to come out.  I wonder how she knew.