Miami got a reality check on public transit dreams — was it all wishful thinking? | Opinion

Miami-Dade’s ambitious plan to connect most regions of the county with public transit has hit a costly reality.

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It will cost a lot of money to build five additional corridors that are part of the 2016 SMART plan. (A sixth corridor, the Bus Rapid Transit along U.S. 1 in South Dade, is already open.) The county faces a $7.6 billion revenue gap over the next 20 years to build and operate the lines, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava outlined in a recent memorandum.

With the rising costs of construction, it’s more expensive to build and operate the projects now than it was when they were envisioned a decade ago. The SMART plan is crucial in heavily-congested South Florida. But we must still wonder how realistic it was to sell the idea to residents that the plan could add public transportation options in even the farthest parts of Miami-Dade?

The plan includes a potential rail line to Miami Gardens, trains or express buses to Kendall and Florida International University, a commuter rail between Miami and Aventura that’s planned on existing Brightline tracks and a Metromover extension to South Beach that Miami Beach officials oppose.

Levine Cava was correct when she wrote in her memo that, “Maintaining the status quo and failing to advance high-capacity, fixed-route transit — as prioritized under the SMART Program — risks compounding a mobility crisis that consistently ranks Miami among the most congested regions in the United States.”

But if taxpayers want to have more public transportation, they may have to pay more.

As the Herald reported, the memo outlines three options to pay for SMART projects: borrowing money through voter-authorized bonds that would be paid back with an existing property tax dedicated to repaying Miami-Dade debt; asking voters to double the county’s current half-cent transportation sales tax approved in 2002; or temporarily increasing the county’s property-tax rate and earmarking the extra dollars for transit.

All of these would be hard sells. The Republican-led Florida DOGE has accused Miami-Dade and other local governments of overspending, and state lawmakers put a proposal on the November ballot to slash property taxes on owner-occupied homes, which could make the county’s public transportation plans more difficult to accomplish.

In the case of an additional sales tax, Miami-Dade officials would have to explain to voters how the current “half-penny” transportation tax has been used. The tax has generated billions of dollars that have paid for the three-mile extension of the Metrorail to Miami International Airport, but it has been besieged by failed promises and community anger. A promised 10-mile rail extension to the Broward County line has yet to materialize. The Metrorail’s “North Corridor” was originally supposed to open a decade ago, the Herald reported.

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Levine Cava’s latest memo isn’t the first time a mayor has raised doubts about whether Miami-Dade can fulfill its promise of public transportation expansion. In 2019, then-Mayor Carlos Giménez, now a congressman, wrote his own memo, saying that the 2002 half-percent sales tax had generated $3 billion but failed to deliver on its biggest promises. Giménez wrote that the plan was doomed by overly optimistic predictions on costs and federal aid and construction estimates that were too low.

What “people understand was ‘promised’ was never possible,” Giménez wrote.

Seven years and another mayor’s memo later, Miami-Dade needs to figure out, again, whether the promises officials made years and decades ago were only pie in the sky. They must tell voters the truth before they ask them for more money.

For the sake of local quality of life and commuters’ sanity, we hope Miami-Dade can finally figure out how to deliver on much-needed public transportation.