Letters from the Issue of August 9, 2007

One can only hope that some unsuspecting fool in a faraway city does indeed offer Mr. Crew a zillion dollars to lure him away from here. Perhaps he will take all of his apologists with him. I would pack them some salami sandwiches and even drive them to the airport. Good riddance!

Guillermo A. Rodriguez

Miami

Enough is enough: Thank you for writing the truth about Dade County's overpaid and ineffective schools superintendent, Rudy Crew. While the Herald continues to spin the truth to cover the mismanagement, waste, and poor leadership of Crew's administration, our children are being robbed of a real education, and taxpayers are being robbed of their tax dollars. At some point, board members who voted for Crew's bonus will have to start looking out for their students' best interests instead of those of Crew. We have poured enough money and resources into this sham of a superintendent. It's time for him to go! Too bad Washington, D.C., didn't take him off of our hands.

Arnaldo Perez

Doral

Could anyone do this job?: Regarding "Bad Apple": Your extensively researched article made me ponder a much broader question. While we cheer the efforts of Carlos Alvarez to dismiss, for the first time, public-sector employees whose tenures appeared to be lifelong, we somehow are using a different barometer with Rudy Crew. We vest executives with awesome powers and responsibilities and at the same time limit their ability to perform. I am not an apologist for Mr. Crew. The most troubling aspect, to me, of your reporting was the nonindependence of the inspector general, one that the board affirmed by its vote. Fortunately we live in a nation of laws, and if any of the dismissed employees were terminated unlawfully or had their rights violated, the court is the proper forum for redress. The ultimate responsibility for failing schools rests with the superintendent, but somehow the contributions of teachers and parents are never examined. I firmly believe that our teachers are grossly underpaid and underappreciated, but solutions are never as simplistic as we might wish. I suspect Jack Welch, of GE fame, would not survive as head of Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

Michael Benages

Coral Gables

Miami's Screwed, All Right

Especially the middle class: In "Miami: Screwed Again" (July 26), Tamara Lush confirms what I have grown to believe after many years in Miami. This city is run for the people who run it; the taxpayers are here to fund their projects for their friends, their unaccountable jobs, their lavish benefits (unavailable in the private sector). Those of us who resisted some of the development that has taken place over the past three or four years were told it would be great for tax revenues. Now that tax revenues have tripled, Miami seems to have an army of sometimes incoherent and incompetent bureaucrats whose salaries have doubled while the rest of us have run through our savings to pay tax and insurance increases. I can't think of anything that has improved, and just try collecting on that insurance.

That said, my experience as an urbanite suggests that this city will quickly become a place for rich and poor, and that these self-serving politicians might want to think twice about sinking their own gravy boat; the taxpaying middle class is quickly leaving. The schools are a joke — nobody wants to send their kids to them — there's no public transportation, all the development has crowded the roads, and the existing parking is, of course, all metered so the city can stuff its pockets further. The real estate market is flooded not only with people hoping to sell and get out, but also with low-income housing. Nobody is buying these small buildings because the taxes make it impossible to profit from them. The South Bronx became New York's worst slum because of bad policy; the owners abandoned the buildings they couldn't afford to operate or sell.

Most cities and regions try to attract businesses and their middle-class proprietors. Miami is a hostile place for business and the middle class. I believe the city will pay a high price for this policy down the road.