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I remember watching a stage production of “Peter Pan” when I was a kid. As a five-year-old, I was terrified that Tinkerbell, played convincingly by a tiny spotlight, was dead. But there was still hope! Peter Pan told us kids that if we clapped loud and believed, we could bring Tink back to life. And clap we did, and Tinkerbell lived!
Peter Pan may have been the Boy Who Never Grew Up, but I did. Wishing and hoping isn’t going to get South Miami-Dade County out of our traffic mess. And no matter who hard we clap, the problem isn’t going to just go away.
Fresh out of law school, I worked as Bill Sadowski’s legislative aide. One of the biggest issues in the 1982 Florida Legislature’s session was funding the Metrorail and Metromover projects. The federal government had given the project the go-ahead and wrote a check for over $800 million dollars. Florida and Metropolitan Dade County had to cough up another quarter of a billion dollars.
And keep in mind that was back when Bob Graham was Governor, and a cadre of South Florida Democrats controlled the leadership in the Florida House and Senate. That was the high point of South Florida influence in Tallahassee. It’s all been downhill since then.
That entire effort funded $1.05 million for just 21 miles of Metrorail track and the small Downtown Metromover loop. Adjusted for inflation, just what was built would cost $3.19 billion today.
Plans also called for more track to link the system east to the Port of Miami, to extend the system down to Homestead and Florida City, and to run two lines westward along Eighth Street and Kendall Drive, among other routes. There was a total of almost 86 more miles of track on the drawing board. The cost for building the other phases, at the original cost per track mile adjusted for inflation, would be over $13 billion today.
Cost overruns and low ridership numbers doomed any further expansion of the Metrorail system. (There’s a “ghost platform” you can still see at Government Center, meant to serve the East/West component that was never built.)
My colleague on the Palmetto Bay Village Council, Professor Marsha Matson, insists that the money to extend Metrorail down to Florida City could, would, and should come out of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which provides for $1.2 trillion in federal spending over the next five years. The new law only allocates $39 billion to modernize transit and improve accessibility and continue existing transit programs for five years as part of the surface transportation reauthorization.
Respectfully, my colleague must have watched “Peter Pan” repeatedly. Apparently, she feels that if she and others clap very loud and just BELIEVE, we can all wish that Metrorail extension into existence. Unfortunately, the world and, more importantly, the federal government doesn’t work that way.
In selling the bill, the White House has emphasized that almost all the public transit moneys will be used to address the multibillion-dollar repair backlog, representing more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 rail cars, 200 stations, and thousands of miles of track, signals, and power systems in need of replacement. The bill only provides $8 billion for Capital Investment Grants to bring transit service to new communities.
The federal government isn’t going to spend more than one-third of all the Capital Investment Grants to extend Metrorail from Dadeland South to Florida City. It’s not going to happen, regardless of how loudly my colleague claps. There are other needs in other parts of the country that will be vying for that cash.
It is enticing to hope that somehow the federal government is going to step in and wave a magic wand like Tinkerbell and solve all our transit problems and eliminate the need to build the 87th Avenue bridge. But that would require Miami-Dade County to agree to apply for, and get, a huge chunk of the Capital Investment Grants, and then for the 13 County Commissioners to agree to spend all that money in just two of the districts. Again, it’s not going to happen.
I’m not the Boy Who Never Grew Up. I’m a Grandpa who reads fairy tales to my grandkids (and who has even written and illustrated a few of my own). I understand how to separate facts from fairy tales.
The idea that we can get the federal government to pay for the $3 billion Metrorail expansion is as likely as being able to fly just by thinking happy, little thoughts.
Steve Cody is a Village of Palmetto Bay Council Member who resides in District 2 and who was elected in November 2020.
Photo credit: Daniel Christensen –(Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17735586)
