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It’s pre-budget season for municipalities across Miami-Dade County and the elected Mayors, Commissioners, and Council Members are having to face some hard, cold budget realities. The decisions that must be made are especially tough for Hialeah’s Mayor, Esteban “Steve” Bovo. For the last 10 years at least, the Hialeah millage rate — the tax rate applied to each $10,000 in value — has remained rock steady at 6.3018 mills. For a hypothetical home worth $100,000, that produces a tax bill of $630.18 a year.
Real property in Hialeah had a taxable value last budget year of over $15 billion. That valuation produced general revenues of $92 million. That is the amount of income that the City of Hialeah can control. All told, Hialeah took in a little over $362 million for all sources last year and it emptied out its $4.8 million reserves — the City’s “rainy-day fund”. For the moment, the City’s financial rating appears stable. Fitch, the rating agency, still gives Hialeah an A+ rating on its water and sewer bonds but grades the City at an A- on other bond issues. If Hialeah doesn’t start refilling its rainy-day fund, Wall Street is going to take notice and punish it by lowering its credit rating. That will drastically raise the cost of future borrowing.
Inflation has already shown up in the contract between AFSCME and the City in the new contract for the 911 Operations Center. The entry level pay for a dispatcher is going up from $31,096 to $40,898, an increase of 24 percent. The top pay for a police radio dispatcher is going from $69,290 to $95,628, an even larger increase of 27 percent. You can expect that when the police and fire fighters’ union contracts come up for renegotiation, they’re going to be looking for an increase that’s just as big.
That will bring pressure to raise other salaries, as well. And it’s not just payroll that’s increasing. Everything is going up: the cost of electricity, the price of gasoline and diesel, insurance, and everything else a city purchases. According to Pedro Garcia, the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser, the median taxable value of the 31,866 properties in Hialeah is $90,603, meaning that at the present millage rate, that median priced home would pay $571 a year in property taxes. Raising the millage rate from 6.3018 to 6.75 mills would raise that individual’s city tax bill to $611 a year, a small increase of about $40, or $3.34 more per month.
The 2023 total taxable value of all the real property in Hialeah is estimated this year to be about $17.5 billion dollars. Raising the millage rate to 6.75 would bring in an additional $7.8 million per year. That will go a long way in ensuring that Hialeah’s budgets remain balanced, and its reserves get replenished.
The choice in Hialeah will come down to whether to finally raise the millage rate or to drastically cut services. Neither is a good choice, and neither is one that a seasoned politico like Bovo will relish making.
All Hialeah needs now is a City Mayor and City Commission with the courage to do the smart thing. We encourage Mayor Bovo to get out in front of this issue.
