BEST NEWS FOR OVERTOWN

Once the thriving and prosperous heart of black Miami, Overtown has been in a downward spiral ever since brilliant bureaucrats thought it would be just fine to tear the place apart by running massive interstate highways through it. Today it is the poorest neighborhood in America's poorest city. Over the past decade roughly $70 million has been funneled into Overtown in a colossal, and colossally corrupt, effort at rehabilitation. Around here, that kind of public money is guaranteed to attract the greedy, the incompetent, the criminal. Clearly it did. Even a cursory tour of the area provides a compelling overview of what a city audit spelled out in detail last year: Tens of millions of tax dollars have been plundered and wasted. The Miami City Commission has appointed a panel to figure out what went wrong. It will be joining the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office, state authorities, and the FBI in ongoing criminal investigations. About time.