Raise-idents First!

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“I picked a hell of a day to quit drinking.” That’s the famous Randy Quaid line from Independence Day that kept running through my mind as I watched the dumpster fire on top of the train wreck on top of the natural disaster that was last Wednesday’s city commission meeting.

You see, I’ve been meaning to trim the length of my posts in order to make each installment of this newsletter a tad easier to digest, and, wouldn’t you know it, just as I earnestly commit to doing so, I am gifted/cursed with a meeting so fateful it deserves its own series on Masterpiece Theatre. How on God’s green earth am I supposed to keep this one under 3,000 words?

I suppose I’ll have to set aside some rather enormous themes, such as the elections, millage rate, Kirk’s decision to serve as Ariel’s coat holder, and the general dysfunction that has since April become a semipermanent feature of Gables politics. Believe me, this will require all the restraint of a vampire walking past an unguarded blood bank, but, alas, I am determined. I will suppress every urge to unburden myself so that I can properly focus on the scandal that has the whole town talking: the commission’s pay raise.

The anatomy of a scandal

Not a soul on that dais deserves a 70% pay raise. Full stop. I know it, you know it, and they know it. It’s why the three commissioners responsible for the raise—Ariel, Melissa, and Kirk—didn’t bother to ask for it. No, they knew where asking would lead them, so they chose instead to seize all that sparkling booty with their greedy, rum-soaked hands. Yo ho, Yo ho!

Ariel, Melissa, some woman, and Kirk holding a strategy session.

But one really needs to pause and reflect if one is to truly comprehend the scam these three tried to pull off; to appreciate just how brazenly they pivoted from “it is an honor and privilege to serve the residents of Coral Gables” to “you people don’t pay us enough for this crap.”

Maybe pivoted is not the right word, because it was more of a zig zag, a series of rapid and increasingly desperate moves from one excuse to the next. Somehow, in the span of a mere 48 hours, this unholy trinity and their propagandist allies managed to cycle through three different phases of damage control: feigned ignorance, deflection, and justification.

The feigned-ignorance phase was essentially plan A. It involved sitting quietly and refusing to confess if anyone happened to notice that a massive pay raise was surreptitiously inserted in the city’s budget. It’s astonishing that they thought this had any hope of working. For starters, there is no way to wipe the fingerprints off a commission-directed pay increase. What’s more, any strategy that involves Ariel or Melissa not grandstanding (or Maria Cruz not speaking) is too conspicuous to succeed. These are the same people who earlier in the day couldn’t help but bust Lago’s balls for 15 minutes over a free clock; the same people who used a lone employee as a punching bag over a 17% pay raise; the same people who thought it was a good idea to turn one portion of the meeting into an episode of Jerry Springer because the mayor was allegedly mean to them at a ribbon cutting (someone call the wambulance). So, indeed, when the topic of the raises was finally broached, the fact that Ariel, Melissa, and Kirk suddenly transformed into the Three Wise Monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) raised a red flag so bright it was practically glowing.

The deflection phase kicked in next, approximately 24 hours after the meeting. This was the quietest phase, when the blogs, chat groups, and grassroots rumor mill began pushing the idea that the raises were the result of city staff gone rogue; that this entire ordeal was nothing more than a false-flag operation carried out by disgruntled employees. You might have missed this phase because it didn’t last very long, as there are only so many miles one can get out of a lie that is easily exposed through public records.

Finally there’s the justification phase, which is the current and likely last phase of this saga, as it’s the only card the perps have left to play. This involves somehow spinning this scandal into a heroic tale of overworked and underpaid public servants. It’s the product of pure desperation, hence the tacky introduction of phrases such as “living wages” into the discussion, as if our elected officials are minimum-wage employees flipping burgers at McDonalds. They really need us to believe that this part-time gig they’ve landed—you know, the one they begged us to give them, the one they spent several months and thousands of dollars campaigning for—is just too important and too difficult to be done for a mere $42,000 per year. They need us to believe that the endless series of ribbon cuttings and cocktail hours and comped meals at Michelin-rated restaurants is backbreaking work that commands annual compensation of roughly $83,000, which is approximately $30,000 higher than the average school teacher or oil-rig worker’s salary. I can almost feel the calluses on our commissioners’ hands myself. Real American heroes, the lot of them.

Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I’m willing to pay someone $83,000 to do a job that scores of other residents are happy to do for free. And I’m not so sure I find the unnecessary and wanton destruction of the goodwill that once existed on the dais to be worth double the price we’re currently paying. You can keep your beat-the-heat PSAs, Ariel, if it means my fellow residents and I can hold onto that extra $40,000 a year. No, really, I insist.

On the brink

It’s not every day you see politicians not only grab a political third rail, but bear hug it. And if you think that’s laying it on a bit thick, just take a quick stroll (I recommend you hold your nose first) through the comments section of the zombified Gables Insider. Yes, it’s baaaaaaaack. The ratio, as they say, is not pretty, and the fact that these raises stink to high hell might be the only thing that a healthy majority of our community agrees on. I guess Ariel and Melissa united us after all.

But, seriously, I fear we’ve already reached an inflection point. We can handle a commissioner that is a flimflammer. We can handle a commissioner that is compromised. We can even handle a commissioner that is non compos mentis. But I’m not sure we can handle all three finding common cause in unabashed thievery. And, make no mistake, that is exactly what this salary scandal is—thievery, plain and simple. It’s three commissioners distracting the public by dangling shiny concepts like trust and transparency in one hand, while slickly snatching $200,000 out of city coffers with the other.

The thing about shorter posts is that they are defined as much by what they leave out as by what they include. That’s life, I suppose. All in good time. But, for now, I’ll leave you with an answer to a question a reader recently emailed me to ask. The question was, do I regret voting for Ariel? Well, let me put it this way, if you told me I could travel back in time and either assassinate Hitler or take back my vote for Ariel, I would probably choose to assassinate Hitler…but I’d definitely have to think about it.