Miami-Dade mayor’s first budget includes flat tax rates, $3M more for her staff

In her first budget proposal, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava keeps the county’s main property-tax rates flat, boosts spending on parks, police and environmental regulation, and wants about $3 million more for her staff of aides and deputies than her predecessor received.

The $9 billion budget holds spending flat across all departments, as cuts at PortMiami and Miami International Airport from the COVID-19 travel downturn balanced out some increases funded with growing tax revenue and federal COVID relief.

Made public Wednesday during the third week of the response to the fatal Surfside condominium collapse, the budget beefs up staffing at the county agency that performs building inspections and oversees 40-year recertifications for structures outside of city limits. The budget for Regulatory and Economic Resources states the agency is behind on some compliance inspections for past violations and enforcement cases for construction work without permits following more than a year of COVID-19 disruptions, and the extra staff will be “addressing the backlog” of violations tied to construction work without permits and other compliance issues.

Of all the county divisions, the Office of the Mayor shows the largest proposed spending increase as a share of its budget, with a 62% spike from $4.8 million under the previous mayor, Carlos Gimenez, to $7.8 million for Levine Cava’s first full year as the county’s top administrator.

Mayor staff earns more under Levine Cava than under Gimenez

The higher spending in Levine Cava’s office doesn’t come from added staffing, with the mayor proposing only an additional five positions to the 41 payroll slots in Gimenez’s final budget. Instead, staffers in the mayor’s office under Levine Cava are getting paid more, with the average employee in that office earning $163,000 in 2022 compared to $126,000 this year, based on dividing payroll costs by staffing numbers.

Part of the increase comes from a new management structure.

Gimenez had several of his top deputies on the 29th Floor serving part time as department heads, too, with their salaries and their assistants paid from the departments they supervised. Levine Cava’s newly hired deputies, including Chief Safety Officer J.D. Patterson and Chief Operating Officer Jimmy Morales, earn about $275,000 a year and do not serve as department directors, with their salaries paid out of the mayor’s office. Ed Marquez, chief financial officer and finance director under Gimenez and Levine Cava, was also paid out of the mayor’s budget under both administrations, a spokeswoman said Friday.

Even so, Levine Cava said she’s created more senior positions in the mayor’s office more than Gimenez did, which came with higher salaries for new offices for equity, constituent services, small businesses, community safety andother initiatives she launched after the November election.

“It’s a more professional staff,” said Levine Cava, who reduced the mayor’s salary by 20% to $200,000 after taking office but did not impose pay cuts on her staff. “We have people with higher degrees, people with a lot more experience, people coming in from the private sector.”

Will my property-tax bill go up?

The 2022 budget proposal faces a September vote by county commissioners, but the board sets maximum property-tax rates this month. Those rates then are used to calculate likely tax bills sent to property owners in August — mailers known as “TRIM” notices.

Most of the property-tax rates remain flat in the Levine Cava budget, including those that fund countywide services, municipal services outside city limits, and the county’s fire department and library system. Those amount to $929 for every $100,000 of a property’s taxable value — the same rate as this year, as set in Gimenez’s last budget.

The county’s debt tax — which covers bond payments on debt authorized by county voters in past ballot items — is set to increase, as it did in 2019. That tax currently costs $48 per $100,000 of taxable value, and it would increase to $51 under the budget proposal.

Combined, the proposed overall tax rate of $980 per $100,000 represents less than a quarter-percent increase in the “millage” rate imposed on taxable values.

For a house with a taxable value of $150,000 in both 2020 and 2021, the county tax bill would increase four dollars under the Levine Cava budget — from $1,467 last year to the $1,471 due by the spring. That assumes the property sits outside city limits, and pays the maximum amount of county property taxes.

Because taxable values tend to grow each year with inflation and higher real estate demand, the actual tax bill would likely increase slightly more. Add in the school board property tax and other smaller taxes, the full tax bill on a house with a taxable value of $150,000 would hit $2,654 this year, according to the budget proposal.

The budget expects water and sewer rates for homes to increase enough to generate another $31 million in 2022, about 5% more than this year. But the spending plan doesn’t provide details.

Spending and staffing increases in the budget proposal include:

▪ An 8% increase in Parks Department staff positions. Levine Cava said the county is continuing to convert part-time positions to full-time at the chronically underfunded agency, which has some of the lowest-paid workers on a county payroll with about 29,000 jobs. Levine Cava also is increasing Parks staff through expanded summer jobs and counseling programs under her Peace and Prosperity Plan, which commissioners approved in June. Part of that plan can be found in the police budget, too, with about $680,000 for youth programs under the department’s new Community Affairs Bureau.

▪ Higher budgets for public safety, with small staffing increases. The Police Department’s budget grows 4% to $796 million, with 55 additional positions, a 1% increase. The extra dollars include seven analysts hired to monitor social media and research ballistic information as part of the county’s strategy to reduce gun violence under the Peace and Prosperity funding plan using revenue from naming rights at the county-owned FTX Arena.

▪ The Fire Department’s budget grows 6% to $567 million, with 65 new positions, a 2% increase. The Corrections Department’s budget grows 3% to $397 million, with a tiny loss of four positions out of a staff of more than 3,000.

▪ Lower operating budgets for PortMiami (down 9% to $108 million) and Aviation, the department that includes MIA (down 2% to $516 million).

▪ A 22% increase in the budget for Regulatory and Economic Affairs. That includes more staff to inspect buildings, as well as to respond to sewage overflows, improve storm-water management and enforce environmental codes, according to the budget. “You can’t inspect if you don’t have personnel,” said Levine Cava, who is calling for more aggressive enforcement of Miami-Dade safety standards for buildings after the Surfside condominium collapse. “You can’t do code enforcement if you don’t have personnel.”

▪ Projections of a $200 million budget shortfall in 2023, growing to roughly $300 million by 2025, when Levine Cava would submit the final budget of her first term. Long-range forecasts show most of the shortfall coming from growing debt and project expenses tied to transit projects and the new civil courthouse under construction in downtown Miami.

Budgets under Gimenez predicted similar shortfalls from transit and the courthouse, which will replace the 1928 building recently closed after an inspector recommended multiple floors be evacuated over safety concerns.

The deficits could have been far worse, but the 2022 budget is the first to reflect partial payments from the $500 million Miami-Dade is receiving from this year’s federal American Rescue Plan legislation.

Other agencies received direct payments from Washington, leading to historic influxes of county dollars. The county’s transit system received about $530 million from Washington in 2020 and 2021, according to the budget summary — a figure that approaches the division’s roughly $615 million operating budget in the 2022 budget year, which begins Oct. 1.

This article was updated to correct the fact that Ed Marquez, Miami-Dade’s chief financial officer, is paid out of the Office of the Mayor.

This story was originally published July 15, 2021 at 9:10 AM.