Last week, Jim Murley was appointed to a new Miami-Dade position and a $190,000 salary by Mayor Carlos Gimenez. As described by the Miami Herald,
Murley will be the county's Chief Resilience Officer, a new post created after citizens clamored at a recent budget hearing about the failure of Mayor Gimenez to take climate change issues seriously.“The people’s voices were heard,” Gimenez spokesman Michael Hernández told the Miami Herald. He might have added the mayor also heard challengers promising to do a better job for people in the 2016 election cycle.
Mayor Gimenez noted Mr. Murley is a "veteran planner", a planner like Jack Osterholt, the deputy mayor who oversees the county’s climate-change and environmental functions.
Planners populate governmental task forces, commissions, and committees. They understand their roles to be assessing and analyzing information, but also to straddle the divide between stakeholders with competing interests; pro's and anti's, those for and those against any particular action being planned.
Anyone who has observed or participated in government commissions or committees understands how the end product of planning, studies and recommendations and planning documents, often diffuse, delay and soften the imperative to action. Moving roads, building new suburbs or extending old ones, the normal exchanges of planning -- one purpose against another -- is often designed to put people to sleep so what special interests want eventually gets done, one way or another.
Sea level rise is, as a middle school teacher of mine used to call a problem; "a horse of a different color".
Jim Murley is not going to be asked to "do" or to "act" or even to interpret the intent of Mayor Gimenez who may or may not be convinced there is anything for him to "do" about climate change. Why should the mayor, when there is the example of leaders like Florida Senator Marco Rubio whose response to pressure to act on global warming is to shrug; "we are not a planet".
In the context of climate change, the "we are not a planet" comment by Senator Rubio wraps up a couple of conservative ideas: 1) that the United States can act, but our actions will have no impact because India and China aren't keeping pace with necessary changes, 2) that the planet will do what it will, with or without us.
Mayor Gimenez' recent county budget proposal, pre- appointment of Jim Murley, more or less cozied up to Rubio's view, "Yeah we got lots of low-lying land, but what are we going to do about rising seas? If the seas go up, so what?"
It is not exactly a secret that big campaign contributors have the last word on policies implemented by government and how they are funded by taxpayers. For planners, whole careers are made from muddling through, otherwise called mastering "the art of the possible".
"While Mr. Murley’s credentials are impressive, it is his proven track record as a collaborative regional planner that makes him the perfect candidate for the job of CRO," Gimenez wrote in the memo. What a great success regional planning has been. (Not.) To our readers, it should go without saying that under Gov. Rick Scott, decades of purpose-driving state planning was thrown under the bus.
Maggie Fernandez, a Miami-Dade activist and president of Sustainable Miami told the Miami Herald that Gimenez’s pick was “disheartening” because of Murley’s planning background. "Is he the dynamic leader I was hoping for? I don’t think so,” she said. “I envisioned someone with fresh ideas."
In the scheme of politics, it doesn't matter if Citizen Maggie Fernandez is right, Mayor Carlos Gimenez has more right to be wrong. That's the privilege of high office in South Florida.
The problem for taxpayers is that planning processes end up acquiring a life and momentum of their own, and all participants become wholly vested in staking out positions that lead to no change or improvement or accountability for solving what they came together to plan in the first place.
If you've read this far, read what all the fuss about sea level rise, here:
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Royal…
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