*By Jose E. Navarro, MBA | Miami-Dade County | September 18, 2026*
MIAMI. Miami-Dade County commissioners hold their second and final budget hearing for fiscal year 2026-27 today. The residents showing up to speak have done homework the county itself hasn’t volunteered. Jessica Johnson and her husband, Brian Hollenbeck, spent hours combing through more than 300 pages of publicly available spending documents on their own. They found a roughly $17 million line item for “performers,” travel spending they say ran several times over what conventions and conferences should have cost, and, buried in the detail, roughly half a million dollars in golf equipment. “I can’t say that anything is being done on purpose,” Johnson said, “but there definitely has to be more oversight.” Her husband put it more bluntly. The county needs to “shape up” and deliver “transparency and accountability” before asking residents to accept anything else.
That skepticism doesn’t come from nowhere. The county is already sitting on an unresolved case study in how public money can end up serving private interests. A 20-year management contract for the Tropical Park Equestrian Center once routed $250,000 a year to the A3 Foundation, a nonprofit tied to Commission Chairman Anthony Rodriguez’s own staff, before commissioners reversed course and redirected the money to the Parks Foundation of Miami-Dade instead. The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office has since opened a criminal investigation, complete with subpoenas and witness interviews, into how A3 handled public funds tied to the county’s CountryFest event. No charges have been filed, and the foundation denies wrongdoing. But the county’s own audit of A3 has been delayed, and when Clerk of the Court and Comptroller Juan Fernandez-Barquin finally moved to act, he expanded the review to cover as many as 15 other local nonprofits that also receive public money, a tacit admission that A3 was unlikely to be the only case. SEIU President Martha Baker has pointed to a related trust problem. As the county debates service cuts, she warned residents should expect water and garbage bills to keep climbing, with garbage collection itself a candidate for privatization.
The county has, to its credit, moved on one front. Commissioners just approved procurement reforms expected to cut contract-award timelines from as long as 349 days down to 120 to 150, untangling a system that had required roughly 100 administrative steps under more than 200 separate pieces of legislation. The reform effort launched in August 2025, the same month Florida’s chief financial officer, Blaise Ingoglia, began gathering information on county operations as Governor Ron DeSantis signaled possible state oversight of local government spending. Rodriguez welcomed the state’s interest publicly. But faster procurement addresses how fast a new contract gets signed. It doesn’t address who is watching the ones already in place, or the nonprofits already receiving county checks. That’s the exact gap the A3 case exposed.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The county faces a budget shortfall exceeding $400 million, and the cuts on the table today are not abstract. The Transport Workers Union says current proposals would eliminate 12 bus routes and disrupt millions of passenger trips a year for residents who depend on transit to get to work. Labor groups gathered ahead of today’s hearing to warn that further cuts land hardest on people already squeezed by housing, insurance and grocery costs. Transport Workers Union representative Joseph D’Elia put it plainly: the proposed cuts don’t just eliminate routes. “It cuts the length between workers and their paychecks,” he said. Layered on top of that is Amendment 3, a statewide ballot measure that would raise Florida’s homestead exemption. That’s a genuine benefit to homeowners, but one county officials warn could strip away enough property-tax revenue to force even deeper cuts to the services labor groups are already defending.
That is the actual choice in front of Miami-Dade today. Accept bus-route cuts and brace for a possible further revenue hit, or find the money somewhere else in a budget that residents, working with nothing but public documents and their own time, have already flagged for a $17 million entertainment line and half a million dollars in golf equipment. The county is asking for public patience on the spending it hasn’t explained while asking the public to absorb cuts to the services it has. Before commissioners finalize this budget, they owe residents the same accounting Johnson and Hollenbeck did for free, and a timeline for finishing the A3 audit that doesn’t keep sliding while the list of nonprofits under review keeps growing.
Human-Directed AI Journalism — reporting and analysis produced under human editorial direction with AI research and drafting assistance.