Last month the Mayor sent the County Commission a long-awaited report on how to pay for the SMART Program, the rapid transit corridors Miami-Dade has been promising its residents for over two decades. The report is honest about the problem: a $7.6 billion funding gap through 2045, and a transit operating deficit of $120 million a year beginning in 2027. But read the report’s solutions and you will find the same short menu our residents have been handed for twenty years: double the half-penny sales tax or issue a general obligation bond, create a new property tax for transit or reallocate money promised to bus service and the Golden Passport. Taxes, bonds, fare increases and service cuts make up the same old song, and we will hear it again this September in our budget meetings.
Meanwhile, at County Hall I have been asking my colleagues to consider a different approach, built on three principles. First, before we ask taxpayers for new funding, we should get full value from what the public has already invested in, and the direct beneficiaries of a project should help pay for it. Second, we should use our planning and zoning decisions to make transit part of every major project along our existing rail corridors, since part of the cost problem is buying land and easements. Third, transit dollars should fund actual transit, the buses and trains that move thousands of people, not subsidized individual car rides. Over my next three columns, I will show what each principle looks like in practice, starting with the easiest connection of all, the one between our airport and our seaport.
Consider the scale of what moves through PortMiami. Our seaport just closed the best year in its history with a record 8.5 million cruise passengers in fiscal year 2025, alongside an eleventh straight year of more than one million cargo containers, and it contributes $61 billion a year to our economy while supporting more than 340,000 jobs. On its biggest days, ten ships and more than 75,000 passengers move through the port in a single day, and nearly every one of them arrives and departs on rubber tires, across one bridge, through congested streets. It has gotten so predictable that the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department now issues traffic advisories on busy cruise Sundays, warning drivers to expect delays around the port and to find alternate routes. Cruise passengers in rental cars and rideshares stack up on the same roads our residents depend on, making it nearly impossible to move through the surrounding neighborhoods. Sadly, this congestion and multi-hour road closures have become the tax we pay for the port’s success, a tax that lands hardest on people who never set foot on a cruise ship…