Despite a recessionary budget crisis and the brutal reduction of city and county workers across Miami-Dade County, we managed to add three notable new employees to the public payroll last week.

For $191 million.

For their money, taxpayers will be getting the services of two pitchers and an infielder.

Paychecks going to Mark Buehrle, Heath Bell and Jose Reyes will be signed by a Marlins executive but the money for their fabulous otherworldly salaries will come out of a mighty pile of revenue that the Marlins expect to extract from a new baseball stadium. A stadium that happened to have been built with public funds. Miami-Dade residents, mostly of them unwillingly, are liable for bonds that provided 80 percent of the $684 million needed to build the Marlins their gleaming new money factory.

The timing of the Marlin’s shopping spree was not exactly serendipitous. The superstar contract spectacular, and a $200 million bid for a prolific hitter named Albert Pujols (who ultimately signed with another team), was juxtaposed against news of subpoenas issued last week by the Securities Exchange Commission. The SEC wants to see all the documents, e-mails, memos, financial statements; everything the city of Miami and Miami-Dade County considered before peddling the bonds that financed the Marlins stadium and two adjacent parking garages.

It made for a week of baseball schizophrenia in South Florida. The signing of actual stars gave baseball fans a sense that they’re getting something for all the millions they’ve given away to the Marlins, even as the SEC investigation reminded others how much they loathed the stadium deal. Just a couple weeks ago, city of Miami residents learned that they were also liable for $1.2 million dollars a year in county property taxes to be levied on the two parking garages the city had built for the Marlins. The Marlins had slyly inserted language in the contract, apparently unnoticed by city lawyers, that passed on all taxes to the municipal taxpayers.

The slick deal only added to the public outrage, already plenty intense. Last spring 88 percent of the county voters had voted to recall the county mayor and city commissioner because of their association with the Marlins deal.

But those subpoenas gave us a sense that finally the SEC would bring hellfire and retribution down on those responsible for this stadium mess.

Except there’s not much history of hellfire and retribution when the SEC digs into dodgy municipal bond deals. Last year, four city administrators in San Diego agreed to pay an $80,000 settlement after the city misled municipal bond investors about the San Diego’s shaky finances. But those fines were unprecedented. Other findings against public officials have brought no more cease and desist orders and even those tepid actions can’t quite be classified as the usual outcome.

“Often as not, it doesn’t end up as anything,” warned Robert Doty, a California based financial services consultant and the author of From Turmoil to Tomorrow, a book about the impact of the financial crisis on the municipal securities market. Doty told me that SEC investigators typically reveal very little during the course of their investigation. Then it could be years before they announce their findings. “And sometimes, after they initiate something, it goes nowhere,” he said. We may never hear a thing.