Is It True What They Say About Lemmings?

I wasn't sure what to call this post.  My first thought was "The Brains of the Operation," which turns out to be Dan Samaria.  But that title seemed like too much of a punchline.  Then, I thought of "Reality Bites," which I think I used in the past, or maybe something like "It's a Bit More Complicated Than it First Seems."  But the latter was too dry and academic.  So I decided on the title about lemmings.  I think it appropriately describes last night's special Commission adventure.

The reason for last night's meeting was to discuss the legislative agenda for the Village to communicate to our lobbyist.  The state has money to give out to municipalities, and it's the job of the municipalities to ask for it.  And the request, now cutely and ungrammatically referred to as an "ask," has to be for a specific purpose or project.  So the alleged purpose of last night's meeting was for the whole Commission to arrive at some sort of consensus about what to request.

BP Commissions always have this kind of meeting for the purpose of organizing this kind of list of priorities.  Well, BP Commissions always did have this kind of meeting, until the reign of Tracy Truppman.  In December of 2017, Tracy unilaterally (the only way she knows how to do anything) compiled a list of Village requests, which she had the manager submit to the lobbyist.  She was caught doing this, scolded for it, did her usual defensive and blaming-everyone-else dance, had her stooges vote to retroactively approve what she wrongly did, which they did without having familiarized themselves with what she did, and did it again in April of this year.  Much of this was the subject of reminders and complaints from the audience last night.  Tracy did not, of course, respond to any of this.

Tracy started out by noting that each Commissioner had submitted his and her own lists of priorities, and she noted that one priority-- the poor condition of the roads-- was shared by everyone.  So she proposed to request some wavering number of millions of dollars from the state for road resurfacing.  It seems to me the high number was 70-something million dollars, and the low number might have been around $55M.  Whatever it was, everyone very quickly realized it was ridiculous.  But that wasn't the problem.  The problem, as it increasingly came into focus and couldn't be ignored, was that there were reasons the roads were falling apart, and, as Dan Samaria, the brains of the Commission, pointed out, it wouldn't do any good simply to resurface roads that were being actively and inexorably eroded from below.  It would be, as Dan starkly, but correctly, put it, "wasted money."

Attention was then grudgingly paid to the real causes of the problem, which were summarized as a rising water table, old and leaking water pipes which we don't control, and the fact that most of the Village (Tracy wrongly said the whole Village) is on a septic tank system, not sewer pipes.  The discussion then got increasingly vague, sketchy and meaningless, including concepts like separating ourselves from the water system that is owned by North Miami (we can't afford the pipes, and we'd still be receiving water from CNM anyway), and paying some sort of attention to our drainage problem.  There was also some fantastical, if fleeting, talk about converting ourselves to sewage pipes instead of septic tanks.  Several tens of thousands of dollars per house?  That conversation ended quickly.  The further problem, especially for Tracy, was that this left us where we were with the last Commission, which is terrifying to Tracy, who continues to try to make a career out of demonizing the past Commission, and attempting to portray herself as the Mama in shining armor who's going to right all the wrongs she fantasizes she inherited.  So this conversation fizzled out, with the new Public Works Manager resolving to explore all of these matters further.  How this insight didn't precede and possibly obviate the need for this discussion is a bit mysterious.  It appears that Tracy, Jenny, and Will, who pat themselves on the backs (well, Tracy does, and the other two just let their heads bobble) for having hired a Public Works Manager, never actually spoke to him about this problem.  The whole thing had a bit of a Three Stooges or Keystone Kops quality to it, and it was onto another windmill.  The lemmings had all followed each other over some cliff.

The next favorite ambition had to do either with improvements at the recreation center, or getting a generator for Village Hall.  This conversation, too, was jerky and somewhat incoherent, and for me, it was no longer worth the time to listen.

I'm told there was one other idea floated, and for which someone thinks we would need extra funding.  Betsy Wise wants to open a school in Biscayne Park.  Maybe she can get funding from Donald Trump, who can open the Biscayne Park campus of Trump University.  Yeah, that's who we are.