It was a sobering, frustrating and inspiring experience to sit through most of the final marathon public hearing on the Miami-Dade County budget for 2009-10. The inspiring part was the dozens of speakers from cultural groups and community-based organizations whose funding was about to be shut off if the mayor's proposed budget was adopted. To a person they spoke with passion and conviction about how their lives or their children's had been changed for the better by services provided by various CBOs or arts organizations facing doomsday without continuing dollars from the county.

I'm talking about people like Catherine Penrod who runs Switchboard of Miami, where the number of suicide calls has risen dramatically in recent months and where those calls might not be answered but for a county grant. There were a dozen or so women -- many of them immigrant farmworkers -- who'd been beaten and abused by men. These women bravely stood up and said they'd overcome their ordeals with help from Mujer, a Homestead-based center for victims of domestic violence and rape.

There was Patricia Robbins, who 18 years ago founded FarmShare, which distributes tons of donated produce from South Florida growers to 30,000 needy families every month. There were talented kids from the Roxcy Theatre Group and the Miami Youth Symphony who played and sang to show commissioners that there's a big payoff from a small investment in the arts.

I was particularly impressed by the lack of competitiveness and rancor between these groups, all of whom were pleading for the same piece of a shrinking pie.

Black and white, rich and poor, young and old, Hispanic, Anglo and black, they stood together in harmony as supplicants begging, cajoling and sweet-talking commissioners to keep the money coming.

Somewhat surprisingly and happily, commissioners for the most part did. Or more accurately, County Manager George Burgess did. Not in the public hearing, however, but after meeting individually with each commissioner in a room off the commission chamber into the early morning hours. We don't know precisely what they talked about because reporters weren't invited, but some commissioners said later they simply listed their budget priorities and asked that they be funded. Somehow, Burgess looked into the nooks and crannies of the county's coffers and came up with most of the needed money. We ought to start calling him Merlin.

But if that's the case, what do we call the mayor besides strong? When Carlos Alvarez unveiled ``his'' proposed budget in July it was an end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it document. About 1,700 county jobs would be cut, and all workers lucky enough to keep their jobs would have to take a 5 percent pay cut. There was no money for CBOs or cultural grants. Libraries would be closed for another day. Parks would have longer grass and fewer programs. It was a doomsday scenario.

Now you have to wonder if Alvarez was engaging in hyperbole so he could later be viewed as a savior or simply reciting the facts as he knew them. Because all that hand-wringing and woe-is-me stuff was fairly pointless by the time Burgess looked into his bag of tricks and pulled out about $100 million early Friday.

He more or less explained how he did it in a lengthy memo issued a few hours after the budget was approved. You'd need to be a forensic accountant to fully understand it, but it's clear Burgess dipped into various reserve funds as well as moving some capital expenditures over to the operating budget. And then there were the 945 county employees who'll lose their jobs, although exactly who wasn't made clear.

There will also be some pay cuts, Burgess wrote, but not the 5 percent across-the-board cuts the mayor wanted because that would be ``contrary to our results-oriented management framework and would in many cases have a direct impact on county service.'' In other words, the strong mayor's pay-cut plan just didn't make much sense so we didn't do it.

The mayor, meanwhile, was busy unleashing a tirade against The Miami Herald for publishing a story the day of the budget hearing about how he had handed out still more pay raises to his favored groups -- police, firefighters and top county executives. The mayor's fit of pique is understandable since the story was embarrassing, but he seems to have conveniently forgotten that recent polls show the vast majority of Miami-Dade residents, including Cuban Americans, are PO'd with him about handing out any pay raises when he's calling for sacrifice from other county employees at a time when so many residents are struggling to make their mortgage payments, put food on the table, etc. Alvarez can try to shoot the messenger, but those pesky facts remain.

Here's the main fact: Miami-Dade County has found a way to operate for the fiscal year that starts Thursday pretty much the way it did in the last one. And all those the-sky-is-falling threats and dire warnings were, what? So much hot air? A good thing, but what happens when they try it again next year? Will anybody believe them?

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