Roundup? still working on it

Business isn't what it used to be
In this Miami Herald article, the Herald explains how Miami-Dade County will be appealing the state to allow Miami International Airport to install slot machines in the terminal to combat "its skyrocketing operational costs, which recently reached $600 million a year and are expected to swell to $1.1 billion by 2015."
The slot machines, which are expected to raise as much as $17 million a year, will obviously very little to curb the deficit.

As usual the Herald does not explain WHY there is a deficit (such a large one at that) nor if there are any other options being explored by the County.

Personally I'm confused as to why the County is running this airport in the first place. If my understanding from this article is correct, the County is maintaining this airport as a subsidy to the Airline companies. The libertarian in my is turning in its grave.

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This puff piece in the Herald explains a new program in Opa-locka where the city will be spending at least $50,000 to hire city residents to perform maintenance on foreclosed/blighted houses.
Residents can ear as much as $1000 per property, and are limited to working on three properties. There are currently 50 houses chosen for the program, but as unnamed Officials point the numbers are expected to "increase dramatically over the next 12 month."
There is no indication as to the average amount of work expected to be done per house, and as such there can be no estimate of what kind of impact this program can have on the community.

What also comes to mind is that as this is a "first come, first served" program, what efforts is the city of Opa-locka making to inform residents of the program? Of course the Herald doesn't bother addressing this issue. But if it's business as usual, I imagine no one will know about it other than friends of City officials.

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They needed a study for this?
The South Florida Biz Journal writes loosely about a study showing something I don't think we needed a study to show: high school drop outs makes less money than high school graduates.
Seriously? someone got paid to write about this.

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I'm still figuring this blog out, and it's obvious that a roundup type presentation will be necessary because doing individual write-ups for every article will encourage me to write too much about nothing special. But as such it's not a very sophisticated or impressive method, so we'll see how it goes.

Why we need the internet

As I've believed for a while, everyone knows, and the Miami Herald reports, Newspapers are failing, and with them comes large amounts of accountability to politicians.

They can get away with much more today than they could before the advent of the internet. What's up with that?
I'll tell you what's up: citizen journalism has yet to truly flourish--yet it is the only viable alternative to Big Media because unlike BM, citizen journalism doesn't depend on sponsorship and special interests. What it does depend on, and the biggest barrier to its proper advent, is effort. We have to make the news ourselves.

I haven't got to that point yet on this blog because it's still so young, and my posting is rather inconsistent, but hopefully this year I can make it a point to push my own limits, and demonstrate in some manner what an individual can do to bring relevant, honest news to others, which in and of itself would be a glimpse of what's possible with a whole citizen journalist network. This is certainly something I should look in to because there are already many example of citizen journalism at work on the internet, but I don't know if anything has been developed to allow communities to better watch themselves.

In this Herald article about the Omni CRA (what does that stand for?") the current Mayor of Miami is not referenced until the end of the article.
And I noticed that these pieces rarely explain when the quotes were taken.

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Short puff piece on Consumer Services Department of Miami-Dade County resolving $102,000 in financial disputes this month, and over one million dollars so far this year.

I can imagine some times I'd like to report businesses for the crap they do to me and others.

My old town of Surfside was in the news. They're implementing new parking ordinances for hotels made in the future. Although Surfside didn't strike me as all that busy when I lived there, it's been rather kicking lately, and I guess that was bound to happen, as it's happening in every other part of Miami Beach.
Much of the mainland isn't so lucky of course.

In regards to parking issues in Surfside, I'd recommend building a parking garage that could manage all those pesky cars. However this town is very picky about the height of structures, and going down is certainly not an option.
Oh well, sucks for them. Can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want a thriving commercial district you either need lots of space, or must be willing make height concessions.

Neighboring village of Bal Harbor gave up on height restrictions a long long time ago.

Why'd she quit?

The Herald has another very weak piece online that fails given the content of the article fails to provide very important information.

Opa-Lacka's attorney resigned before a recent commission meeting because later at that meeting the commission was expected to fire her. That's all well and good, but if I want to understand anything about the situation in my sister city of Opa-Lacka, wouldn't it be nice to know why they were going to fire her?

As usual, the "similar stories" are Opa-Lacka related, but don't cover this issue which they even mention was brought up at a commission meeting previously. I'd go in to it myself, but I'm done with that and have dozens or articles more to read.

Miam Dade College Financial Aid Office, 121109, Vassalage anew

While I'm not one to blame someone for something they didn't do, I don't want to give anyone more credit than they're due. The staff members at Miami Dade College's financial aid office are certainly due a certain kind of attention. I haven't seen a wait shorter than an hour in months. Today I was waiting for over three hours before I had to leave to take care of other things.

I'll be back tomorrow morning, but at least this time I'll have the right form in hand.

Wish they would have told me some months ago.

I can't tell you the number of times people came up to one of these windows and started their greeting with, "Hello, I was here a few ago and..." There are some serious organizational issues. Or perhaps that's the issue altogether.

Roundup

Fallen behind on my duties, so I'll link spam today with commentary.

This isn't the first time FPL has been in the news of late. Their in wait for an approval of a rate increases amounting to over one billion dollars. Or else they'll have layoffs and cancel programs. Not that I support FPL, but why don't they try to set it up so that rates would increase incrementally over time, rather than in noticeable jumps every once in a while?

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A woman in Boynton Beach (from the AP) hit two girls, kills one. I wonder if she was charged more or less harsh than a girl who recently received sentencing on a similar hit and run.

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Spanish language production company Univision is opening a studio in Miami. I generally don't like spanish language television content, so I won't hold my breath on how this venture turns out, but it would be nice if they produced some documentary material about the lives of latin americans in Miami.

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Another AP story, this one about a bill in the State Congress attempting to fund Tri-Rail to vie for Federal stimulus money. Is there a trend with the AP having the best local news?

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Massive Medicaire fraud.

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Superficial AP piece about cuts in school funding in the State. Interesting fact claiming families are leaving florida at a faster rate than they're coming. No link or cite. And estimates that private school kids will flock to public schools, who now have less money.

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First local piece of the night, Rothstein's relationship with Broward police.

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Profile of a struggling single mother. I didn't read the whole thing.

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Very weak and hollow piece about a petition to recall County Mayor Alvarez. No real explanation as to why Mr. Gonzalez is intent on recalling the Mayor. What are his Grievances? They even bother to have the Mayor's spokeswoman defend him, despite a lack of charges.