Miami Mayor Francis Suarez says transportation efforts going nowhere

As Miami-Dade’s transportation planners were about to vote on a five-year improvement plan last week, the City of Miami’s representative, Mayor Francis Suarez, notable mostly for his absence, dropped a bombshell as he complained that the group is all talk but no action and at the same time called for more talk about transit ideas.

“We talk a big game and a good game,” he told the 20 representatives of the county and major cities, but “the results speak for themselves, or the lack of results speak for themselves. And we hear about it every day from our community, every single day. If you don’t hear it from your community you’re not listening. We can talk about all the things that we’re supposedly doing but there’s no results.”

“Thank you for coming here today and throwing a hand grenade,” Transportation Planning Organization Chairman Esteban Bovo Jr., the mayor of Hialeah, told him. Mr. Bovo acknowledged that “I did ask you to come.”

Mr. Suarez, who seemed unaware of multiple ongoing transportation efforts, started by complaining that the five-year plan’s listing of $680 million financing at Miami International Airport for the expansion of Concourse D and other projects was too little money and too little work over five years.

“I think the airport needs a lot more money than that,” Mr. Suarez said. “I think it’s going to need a tremendous amount of investment.”

In fact, the airport has begun a well-publicized capital improvement of $754 million this year for the South Terminal alone, part of a $6.8 billion capital plan over the next five to 15 years.

Then Mr. Suarez came to the heart of his complaints.

“Probably the reason why I don’t attend the TPO meetings is because we stopped talking about mass transit, it feels like, and I think it should be an item on every single agenda where we should discuss it, deliberate on it, brainstorm, have ideas 15 minutes, 30 minutes. I mean, it’s the number-one issue.”

Beyond that, he called for looking at ideas in new technology.

“We’re not being very innovative,” he said. “We’re still looking at yesterday’s technology…. We have to start looking at innovation: urban air mobility, tunneling. What are we doing as a board, what are we doing as a community, to look at innovative solutions rather than just, here, we’re going to do more heavy rail?”

He added that “this is the five-year plan… it doesn’t give me a lot of hope that over the next five years you’re going to be in a better place than we are sitting here today talking about this issue.”

“Things like urban air mobility and sea gliders are things that we’re actively working on. So we’re actually trying to be proactive,” responded Oliver Gilbert III, the organization’s vice chair and chairman of the Miami-Dade County Commission. “We know technology is forward looking so we’ve been forward looking. We’ve set up a taskforce with the industry so they could help us draft the regulations so that it’s not completely burdensome to them, something they can do.”

Mr. Gilbert said he would accept Mr. Suarez’s idea of a taskforce to talk about mass transit but “one of the things that we’ve been doing is actually working on it,” adding that parts of the Smart Program to add six new corridors of mass transit are now in the county’s budget.

Mayor Suarez noted that Mr. Bovo while a county commissioner had sought development of a tax increment district to fund mass transit “except we stopped talking about these things…. We should be talking about this every single meeting.”

“All of these things we can talk about, but I submit that we are actually working on it,” Mr. Gilbert said. “I would love to have you here every meeting.”

Eileen Higgins’ transportation infrastructure improvement district “item that comes before the county commission at this next meeting is the funding mechanism that you’re talking about,” said Commissioner Raquel Regalado. “And she has been working on it for two and a half years.”

Ms. Regalado continued, “I think it’s important to look at the work the county commission has been doing because we have made a lot of changes in the last few years really moving the ball forward in terms of prioritizing transportation.”

Commissioners Gilbert and Regalado also noted that the City of Miami has been fighting the county’s plans for the transportation tax increment financing that the Miami mayor was calling for.

“As [Mr. Gilbert] mentioned,” Ms. Regalado told Mayor Suarez, “we are in litigation with the City of Miami and we would love a meeting date that we can have our second meeting and try to resolve it.”

The mayor did not offer a date.