Toll wars: Lawmakers want Miami-Dade’s MDX gone by the summer. Can the mayor stop them?

Backlash against Miami-Dade tolls may end up dismantling the county board that sets them.

A bill to dissolve the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority and sharply cut tolls on its roadways cleared a Senate committee on Thursday. It passed with the support of county Democrats and Republicans and over warnings from Mayor Carlos Gimenez that it will kill a planned expressway into West Kendall.

After concessions that would maintain local control of the MDX expressways and preserve existing rules on the county’s transportation tax, the bill is moving closer to floor votes before both Republican-controlled chambers.

“The Miami-Dade delegation certainly knows how to get the attention of its locals better than any other county in the state,” State Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon, said after Gimenez, who also serves as the MDX board chairman, urged the committee to reject a bill backed by two Miami Republicans. “There’s a genuine concern from the delegation up here that something going on with the MDX down there is not right.”

MDX has been a target of Miami-Dade’s Republican lawmakers in earlier sessions, but past bills to shut down the toll agency have died their own deaths in Tallahassee. That could still happen — by a lost vote, a failure to reconcile the House and Senate versions, or amendments that wind up neutering the existing legislation. But the politics have gotten bumpier for MDX this year.

One of the lawmakers who led the charge against the toll board, Jeanette Nuñez, now is lieutenant governor and playing an influential role in the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis. While Gimenez brushed off past legislative efforts to control the toll agency, this year he traveled to Tallahassee multiple times to lobby against bills by Rep. Bryan Avila, R-Hialeah, and Sen. Manny Diaz, R-Hialeah Gardens.

He was there Wednesday afternoon pressing lawmakers ahead of the showdown hearings, and — after a quick trip home — back again Thursday morning to speak to the Senate committee in person.

“I don’t think what is happening is right,” said Gimenez, who joined the MDX board in 2017 through an appointment by the County Commission. He told the senators MDX’s $250 million in yearly toll revenue accounts for only about 40 percent of the tolls collected in Miami-Dade, with the rest charged on state roads, like the Florida Turnpike. As a concession to the legislators, he’s willing to have a new toll board, but in return he wants that board to take over Miami-Dade’s portion of the Turnpike and MDX’s five expressways, pool the money and impose a 20 percent toll cut.

”If we really want significant toll reduction,” he said, “what we need to do is combine systems so we can have toll reduction for everybody in Miami-Dade.”

The Senate hearing didn’t take up Gimenez’s request, but a compromise with Miami-Dade Democrats did water down or eliminate some of the provisions targeted by the mayor. The original proposal called for the state’s Transportation Department to take over the MDX roads. That morphed this week into a new toll board, the Greater Miami Expressway Agency, replacing the MDX with the “GMX.”

Diaz’s Senate version would have let DeSantis appoint six of the seven GMX board members, flipping the current power structure at the MDX, where the governor fills a minority of the seats and the County Commission controls the majority.

Committee members on Thursday approved an amendment by Sen. Annette Taddeo, D-Kendall, that gives the commission a majority of the seats again. Her amendment, endorsed by Diaz, also bars elected officials from serving on the new toll board and mandates that two local appointees come from the suburban areas that the expressways cross. Taddeo said the language was designed to put at least two Kendall residents on the board.

Her new language also stripped the Diaz bill of restrictions on Miami-Dade’s half-percent transportation tax. The old bill would have banned spending the sales tax on transit salaries and maintenance in order to divert dollars to expansion projects.

The Gimenez administration warned that would doom the county’s efforts to secure federal transportation dollars for new bus and rail projects. Her legislation retained the Diaz language barring current MDX board members from moving over to the new entity, but dropped a ban on MDX Director Javier Rodriguez applying to run the new toll authority.

“We fixed the worst parts of it,” said Taddeo, who introduced the last-minute amendments after talks with Diaz and other Democrats. “It still gives me some pains.”

The Diaz version (SB 898) contains the compromise language, but its companion in the House (HB 385) retains the provisions Taddeo removed. Avila, the House sponsor, praised the Senate compromise. “I think Senator Diaz did a great job of getting a unanimous vote of approval,” he said.

The original legislation called for ending MDX tolls altogether once existing debt was paid off over the next two decades, but that’s been dropped. Both bills now impose what amounts to a 25 percent cut in MDX toll bills for hometown drivers by mandating an automatic rebate program for all vehicles registered in Miami-Dade. MDX’s current rebate program requires sign-ups and only applies to any vehicle paying at least $250 in tolls a year.

That mandated cut for the bulk of MDX drivers has Gimenez warning the bills will scuttle what he describes as MDX’s most popular move in recent memory: a planned $1 billion extension of State Road 836 about 13 miles into West Kendall. Gimenez’s deputy mayor for finance, Ed Marquez, said a county analysis shows the 25 percent cut would reduce toll revenue enough that it couldn’t cover debt payments for the planned Kendall Parkway.

Avila says MDX has the money to proceed with the 836 extension, which will generate new toll revenue along the expanded roadway. At a morning hearing, he traced the MDX’s current political predicament back to a 2014 vote by the agency to end free drives along parts of the 836 and the Airport Expressway — a tolling expansion that nearly doubled the authority’s revenue in two years. “That caused a tremendous uproar,” he said.

Led by Nuñez and other Miami-Dade lawmakers, the Legislature in recent years passed bills trying to force MDX to cut tolls and threatening ouster of the current board if rates didn’t come down. MDX agreed last year, but continues to fight other provisions of the law.

On Thursday, Gimenez acknowledged MDX’s political missteps. “MDX, without a doubt, was arrogant in the past,” he said, referring to votes before he joined the board and then became chairman. “People told me I was crazy to go to MDX. ... I went there to say: ‘Okay, how can we become accountable?’”

This story was originally published April 4, 2019 at 8:12 PM.