Seated in the suburban diner where he learned to cook eggs under pressure, Manny Cid breezes through his plans to impose an historic spending cut on Miami-Dade government if he gets elected county mayor.
Top on his agenda: a 10% reduction on the countywide property-tax rate, a cut that would likely wipe out $200 million in revenue a year.
“It’s beyond doable,” said Cid, whose lunch-and-breakfast joint, the Mayor’s Cafe, is a nod to his part-time job for the last eight years, mayor of Miami Lakes. “Anything that was added over the last four years, it’s 100% on the chopping block. I’ll renegotiate the health contracts. Look, $200 million is not hard to find.”
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The last time Miami-Dade saw a rate cut that large was in 2011, when a newly elected mayor, Carlos Gimenez, cut the countywide rate by 11.5% at the tail end of a nationwide housing crash and imposed austerity measures that included pay cuts for police and other county employees, eliminating hundreds of positions and reducing services, from fewer code inspections to letting grass grow taller at county parks.