Dance of the Reptiles (12 page)

A stunted view, favored by those who rely on right-wing talk shows for political instruction, is that the government’s role should have been to mop up the slop and then butt out. But for many who live near coastlines where oil companies drill (or want to), it would be reassuring to think that the feds are using at least some of our tax dollars to protect us from future calamities. That was, in fact, a widely held assumption before the Deepwater Horizon blew up.

The truth, as we now know, is that the agency that was supposed to be monitoring offshore oil exploration had been neutered into basically a jobs program for ex–industry employees. In the wake of the Gulf spill, Obama ordered a makeover of the lame Minerals Management Service and a more aggressive agenda.

Unfortunately—and this is the scariest part of the BP story—little has changed. Another major blowout could occur in the Gulf today, with the same harrowing results. On that point, the experts agree.

The Minerals Management Service is now called the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation & Enforcement. It has a new director and a tougher slate of rules but remains disgracefully underfunded and critically short of staff members who are experienced in petroleum engineering.

“They changed the name, but all the people are the same. It’s embarrassing,” said William K. Reilly, a former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and co-chair of the bipartisan presidential commission investigating the BP disaster.

During the 87 excruciating days it took to cap the
Macondo well, the administration was forced to rely too heavily on BP’s version of events. That’s because the government was woefully short of expertise and technology. It still is.

Far from the beaches and bays of the Gulf, members of the new Congress are working doggedly on behalf of oil lobbyists to minimize federal oversight of offshore operations. It’s as if the Deepwater Horizon blowout never happened, as if those 11 men never died.

The House is considering legislation that would expedite the approval of drilling permits along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Another measure would weaken environmental requirements for exploration in Alaskan waters.

Given the attitude in Washington, there’s no mystery why the accident rates for offshore drilling projects in the United States are higher by several times than in Norway, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where strict safety rules are better enforced. Somehow the oil companies operating in those countries manage to cope with the regulations and still make mountainous profits. How amazing.

Here in the United States, politicians fronting for the industry are counting on $4-per-gallon gas prices and a short public memory. Their optimism is well founded, if recent polls are accurate. The images of dead sea turtles and starved pelicans are fading. Ironically, though, the BP spill cannot disappear entirely from the news as long as people are fighting over who gets the blame and who gets the money. It will take years to clean up that part of the mess.

In Mississippi, the city of Biloxi, which escaped the brunt of the spill, nonetheless used BP payouts to buy 14 trucks and SUVs, including a new Chevy Tahoe for the mayor. Rip-offs like this are inevitable when billions of dollars are up for grabs.

Of greater worry is a future in which coastal communities
must depend on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management—and the disinterested Congress that funds it—to prevent another nightmare like the Deepwater Horizon.

Only one year later, it’s way too soon to start forgetting what happened and why.

Never is too soon.

FESTIVAL OF WHORES

April 11, 2001

Who Would Pay Top Dollar for a Swamp?

Miami-Dade school officials are being humiliated daily in Tallahassee, where lawmakers are examining the district’s bizarre and suspicious land-buying practices.

Last week the Senate voted to ban the county from spending any state funds on school construction without prior approval of an oversight board. If the House concurs, the nation’s fourth-largest school system will be forced to grovel for money to expand—this, while nearly a fifth of its 368,000 students are stuck in portable classrooms.

Blame falls largely on Miami-Dade’s school superintendent, Roger “The Dodger” Cuevas, whose mealymouthed appearance last week failed to persuade a Senate panel that the county’s schools were in competent hands.

The outrage is totally justified. A recent audit of 14 land deals revealed that the Miami-Dade school district overpaid in 11 instances by a total of $7 million, based on average property appraisals.

Staffers were said to make a “practice” of ignoring appraisals that were less than the amount sought by the sellers, and methodically shopping around for higher estimates. It’s certainly an unusual negotiating technique—highballing the opposition—and one that would be challenging to explain to a grand jury. According to state auditors, the Miami-Dade school system’s land-buying procedures are so wasteful of tax dollars that they ultimately impede efforts to open new schools and relieve overcrowding.

The most disgraceful example is the purchase of the West Miami-Dade site for the future John Ferguson High. In August 1999, the district bought the 60-acre tract for almost $7 million—about $2.35 million more than the sellers originally
had paid. It was a nifty profit, considering that the sellers had acquired part of the land only days before it was resold to the School Board.

One appraiser said the site was overpriced by $2 million, but Tabitha Fazzino, then one of the district’s land-acquisition directors, never shared that report with board members. Later she said she must have forgotten about it because she was preoccupied with wedding plans. Two other low appraisals were submitted to the board, which nonetheless approved the sale at a higher price.

The landowners were represented by an influential lobbyist, Dusty Melton, who was kind enough to take Fazzino to lunch. She later said that no lobbying for the Ferguson site took place.

The deal turned out even worse than initially feared. Not only did the School Board get reamed on the price of the land; it overlooked a crucial detail regarding the location, at Southwest 56th Street and 162 Avenue.

Turns out that the property has a serious problem with flooding. The new school cannot be built until the district spends another $5.6 million raising the elevation with dirt fill. In other words, these idiots paid top dollar for a swamp.

This seems incomprehensible unless you realize that, until recently, Miami-Dade school officials routinely purchased property without physically inspecting it.

Astounding but true.

The county is fond of blaming classroom overcrowding on the Legislature’s stinginess. But judging by their extravagant conduct in dubious land deals, local school officials can’t be trusted with unsupervised access to tax dollars. As the audit noted, more than $97 million that could have been used for new classrooms instead has been funneled to pet projects of School Board members, including two gymnasiums.

Cuevas claims he has made changes to tighten the process by which the district selects and purchases property. He says he has hired new staff to handle land acquisitions and reactivated a citizens’ site-selection committee.

These moves are long overdue. Only after two years of embarrassing headlines has it dawned on the superintendent that he’s in trouble. He should have been canned long ago, but he has been kept afloat by protective School Board members with as much to fear from scrutiny as Cuevas himself.

A few of the district’s land purchases are so illogical that they can be explained only as political favors, acts of boggling stupidity, or acts of corruption.

The Legislature would be irresponsible not to step in with a noose. Every dollar squandered by school administrators is a dollar stolen from the kids crammed into those classrooms and portables.

April 22, 2001

Get Ready for Marlins Rebate II

The Florida House of Representatives has a committee known as the Council for Smarter Government.

I’m not kidding. That’s what these people call themselves—the Council for Smarter Government. Want to know how smart they are? Last week they voted 7-5 in favor of a humongous tax rebate to help the Florida Marlins build a new stadium. Thanks to a previous cave-in by the Legislature, the state already shells out $2 million a year in tax rebates for baseball renovations to Pro Player Stadium, where the Marlins now play. Here’s the punch line: The way the law was written, subsidies to Pro Player will continue for another 22 years even if the Marlins abandon the ballpark for a new site, as anticipated. That means taxpayers will be forfeiting
$44 million to improve a Major League Baseball facility where baseball is no longer played. As a bonus, they’ll be bankrolling a new stadium to the tune of at least $122 million and probably much more.

Does that sound like smart government or dumb government?

It sounds like lovable, gullible government if you’re John Henry, the owner of the Marlins, or Wayne Huizenga, the owner of Pro Player Stadium. These two fairly wealthy fellows will be the prime beneficiaries of the rebate double play pushed by lobbyists and now on its way to the floor of the House.

The original legislation, passed in 1988, was designed to entice big-league sports franchises to relocate to Florida. It has evolved into a welfare slush fund for rich team owners threatening to pack up and move someplace else. So far, nearly $90 million in sales taxes that could have been used for worthy public programs has been kicked back to private sports operations and entrepreneurs. Many millions more are committed for decades to come.

In addition to his baseball boondoggle, Huizenga scored a long-term $60 million break for the Panthers hockey arena in west Broward. To show they don’t play favorites, lawmakers awarded a like sum to billionaire Micky Arison to help him pay for the Heat’s latest basketball arena.

When deciding which sports to underwrite, the Legislature is anything but snobby. In 1996 it presented a $15 million tax break to something called the World Fishing Center in Dania, where stuffed replicas of lunker game fish are on display for public enrichment.

Last year, Gov. Jeb Bush joined lawmakers in magnanimously making room at the trough for spring-training camps in Dunedin, Clearwater, and Lakeland. The same old pitch
worked like a dream. Those towns said they feared losing their seasonal major-league visitors to competing markets, and beseeched the state for money to help spruce up the ballparks.

Now John Henry wants a minimum of $122 million over the next 20 years. Given the Legislature’s past unquestioning generosity, one can hardly blame him for asking—and expecting to get it. True, he once said he’d build the Marlins a new stadium with private financing. That was probably before he realized he was dealing with politicians who are pushovers, at least in the House.

The road doesn’t look quite so smooth in the Senate. President John McKay and Majority Leader Jim King both have expressed misgivings about funding major-league baseball at a time when social and health programs are being hacked because of revenue shortages. An added embarrassment is that outrageous arrangement with Pro Player Stadium—guaranteed $2 million a year for baseball improvements, even if the team has moved elsewhere.

Marlins Rebate II would derive from sales taxes on merchandise sold at the ball games, roughly estimated at $6 million annually. That’s a total of $8 million a year that any other business would be required to send to the state treasury, which needs every nickel.

Proposed Republican budget cuts threaten benefits and services for poor pregnant women, autistic kids, epilepsy patients, minority college applicants, and public school teachers, among others. In such lean times, subsidizing a new baseball stadium seems impossible to justify. Subsidizing two of them would be obscene.

Yet that’s the majority recommendation of the House Council for Smarter Government. If only we had a House Council for Smarter House Councils.

June 22, 2003

How Many Legislators Could Pass the FCAT?

Nothing is more frustrating to Florida parents than the idea that politicians are the ones deciding what it takes for a student to be properly educated.

The absurdity was underscored last week as state lawmakers once again “debated” the merits of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, otherwise known as FCAT.

No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don’t read, can’t write, and clearly can’t add. That’s why lobbyists for special interests author so much of the legislation. Half the politicians in Tallahassee are too illiterate to type their own fund-raising letters.

Here’s a fun idea for some mischievous state senator or representative: Propose a law requiring every elected official in Florida to pass the FCAT exam. It makes sense. Those who spend our taxes and write our laws ought to be at least as academically fit as the average high school senior.

Dreading the embarrassment, many politicians wouldn’t sit still for any sort of standardized test. Yet they’ve got no problem dictating to our kids how knowledge should be measured, and the price of failure.