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For almost 60 years, if you own property in Downtown, Brickell or Edgewater, you’ve been hit with a tax that nobody else in Miami has to pay. Since 1967, the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) has called this the “price of progress.”
That’s a nice line, but the reality is a mess.
People living here are asking a simple question: Where the hell is our money actually going? This isn’t some vague government grant; it is cash pulled right out of our pockets every year – millions of it. Yet, trying to figure out how it’s spent feels like trying to crack a safe.
Sure, the records are “public.” But, if you have to file formal requests, wait weeks for a reply, and then dig through outdated systems or vague summaries, that’s not transparency.
That is just making it as difficult as possible to see the truth.
The DDA is sitting on a budget of more than $21 million. Out of that, they are putting about $275,000 toward homelessness. That’s roughly 1.25 percent for one of the biggest problems we see every time we walk out our front doors. That number should bother everyone.
Meanwhile, the DDA is living large. They spend over $700,000 a year just on waterfront office space and operations. Staffing costs are nearly $3.6 million, with plenty of six-figure salaries at the top. Toss in another half-million for “marketing” and over a million for branding and overhead, and you start to see where the priorities really are.
It probably is all legal. But “legal” doesn’t mean it is right, and it definitely doesn’t mean they are being accountable.
When you are stepping over broken sidewalks or looking at overflowing trash cans, you have to wonder if the people in those expensive waterfront offices see the same city we do. We are paying a “second tax,” but it’s getting harder to see what we are getting for it.
What we want isn’t complicated. We do not want glossy PDFs or summaries that are months late. We want a real-time dashboard. Show us the numbers, show us where the money is moving, and do it in plain English.
People are filing more public records requests because they are fed up; not because they are bored. This has moved past neighborhood griping and into City Hall. When you have a sitting city commissioner chairing the board, the lack of oversight is not an accident — it is part of the system.
Some people are starting to ask if we even need the DDA anymore. No other part of Miami deals with this. Why should we? Maybe it is time the residents got a direct vote on whether this authority even deserves to keep existing.
Downtown is at a breaking point. Either we get real honesty and some actual spending restraint, or we keep getting the same excuses while our bills keep going up.
This isn’t the DDA’s money to play with. It’s ours.
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