In her efforts to close a budget shortfall she says is caused by the sudden loss of COVID dollars and the five constitutional offices separating from the county, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava might be compromising public safety.
Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosanna “Rosie” Cordero-Stutz all but waved a big red siren this week, warning commissioners that Levine Cava’s proposed 2025-26 budget shortchanges her brand-new department — and could leave Miami-Dade residents waiting longer for help. She said the sheriff’s office will be looking at a deficit of deputies by this summer.
The mayor initially gave what used to be the Miami-Dade Police Department an 8.5% bump — about $55 million more than last year — for a total of about $915 million of the county’s $12.9 billion annual expenditures. Savings found since July have resulted in $7.5 million more for the sheriff’s office. But Cordero-Stutz says it’s not enough to keep up with reality.
Read related: Budget Band-Aid: Miami-Dade mayor finds $66M to fill $402M budget hole
“This $63 million does to put one more deputy on the road. It does not even buy a paper clip,” Cordero-Stutz told the commission at last week’s committee of the whole meeting, where the board tried to tackle the budget with an Exacto knife rather than a chainsaw. Her ask? An 11% increase, which she says comes out to $93 million more. That’s just to stop the bleeding.
Sheriff Rosie says she already has 180 vacancies from retirements and resignations and that there are the same number of officers today as in 2007. She warned that there will be more than 260 deputy vacancies by the summer. Ladra’s not sure what’s scarier — that number or the fact that the mayor and the sheriff are already locking horns in Year One.
Cordero-Stutz wants to use $12.5 million for five academy classes to fill the empty positions. “As we’re still trying to recover from this year’s budget cuts where we lost academy classes,” she said.
There are also the special events that are coming next year, like Formula One and the FIFA World Cup. “Can you all imagine the impact on the safety and security at these events,” she asked the commission. She sounds like she’s trying to scare us, but we don’t want a repeat of the 2024 Copa America Final whee the Hard Rock Stadium experience a security failure when thousands of unticketed fans breached gates and checkpoints, ending in a game delay and 27 arrests.
The sheriff’s department is also dealing with expired equipment and 242 fewer civilian positions since 2004.
“I should not even be here fighting for most of these funds,” Cordero-Stutz said, adding that the commission approved a new contract with the police union that they don’t want to fund, she said. And she is saving money where she can, she added. It would have cost the county $4.9 million more to change uniforms to a green color rather than just replace the patch on the browns.
La Alcaldesa‘s proposed budget also wants to shift the cost of the county’s four rescue helicopters away from the countywide property tax, which everyone pays, and dump it onto the special Fire Rescue tax, which is only about 80 percent of homeowners in 29 of the county’s 34 municipalities. Coral Gables, Hialeah, Key Biscayne, Miami and Miami Beach all run their own fire departments. Their property owners don’t pay the Fire Rescue property tax. But they do call for those county choppers when they need a medical evacuation.
Read related: Mayor Daniella Levine Cava wants Fire District to pay for air rescue helicopters
Levine Cava’s budget flip would leave some cities flying free while everyone else’s Fire Rescue money gets siphoned off. And nearly 100 firefighters in yellow shirts packed the chamber — a sea of canary protest that no commissioner could ignore. Their message: Don’t clip the wings of Miami-Dade’s air rescue, which does everything from wildfire response to medevac rescues to search missions with state and federal partners.
“It hamstrings our ability to open new units,” Miami-Dade Fire Union President William “Billy” McAllister told county commissioners at last week’s committee of the whole meeting. That has an effect on response times.
While the department administration has said that the average response times are 6.35 minutes for fire calls and 7.45 minutes for medical calls, McAllister says it’s actually more than nine minutes from the time the 911 call is made.
And that puts people at risk.
In Levine Cava’s budget, there are no new units going into service this year, even though a document says that three dozen more units are needed to bring the response times to the “golden standard” of around five minutes, McAllister says.
McAllister warned that a sudden shift in funding could ground Miami-Dade’s air rescue helicopters for the first time in 40 years. And the fire union is ready to file a lawsuit to stop it because then move robs funds needed to add more trucks, crews and stations so firefighters can actually cut response times.
Miami-Dade Fire Chief Raied “Ray” Jadallah tried to put a brave face on it, saying the department is still adding stations and engines. The 13 additional units are recommended over the next five or 10 years. It’s part of a longterm strategic plan. There could be a unit added midyear, he said.
The real obstacle, he said, isn’t money but land. “Everyone knows the cost of land is expensive or it’s overpriced,” he told commissioners. “So we continue to search.”
He said that some of the projected stations are for later — like where the American Dream Mall will go in Northwest Miami-Dade “Would I put that unit there now? No,” Jadallah told the commission.
He also said that the fire department is working on proposing three new locations at parking garage projects that are still in the pipeline.
Read related: Facing $400M budget shortfall, Miami-Dade cuts senior meals, lifeguards, more
Commissioner Raquel Regalado — who was the one that called the meeting to go over the budget line by line — said she was more concerned about Southwest Miami-Dade or West Kendall, which are areas where development is booming and asked them to look at county properties that could be used for a fire station.
And she also said that the number one reason people who live in the unincorporated areas want to incorporate or be annexed into adjacent municipalities is because of police and fire response times.
“I want you to recognize what is at stake,” Realado told the chief. “Because if you don’t fix that, it could end up being worse.”
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