Dear Reader: I apologize at the outset for the decidedly local angle of this post. But I choose my hometown to talk about an issue that I suspect likely (and unfortunately) applies to your corner of the world, as well. So let’s begin…
Late into many evenings, my husband and I will sit side by side working on our respective projects. As a distraction, we will put something familiar on television as background noise. When my husband gets a chance to choose – which is not often[i] – he will sometimes pick a season from HBO’s The Wire and hit play before I get a chance to steal the remote.
The Wire is great TV – some say it’s the greatest show of all time – with compelling narratives and memorable characters and moments. At its core, The Wire chronicles the decay of civic institutions and the consequences that follow. Depressing stuff at times and frankly, it’s intended to be sobering.
Some of the characters and narratives on that show particularly resonate with me. In this instance, I focus on Augustus “Gus” Haynes, played by American-Canadian actor, Clark Johnson.
We are introduced to Gus in Season 5 of the show: he is the veteran, chain-smoking city editor for the fictional struggling newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. The storyline surrounding Gus and the paper is about the people whose job it is to understand how the city functions and report it to everyone else. Importantly, the collapse of this institution – the local paper – leaves the viewer understanding that the city’s residents are worse off.
Like all of the characters in The Wire, Gus has some great scenes. When he reminisces at the bar with another reporter from the paper – Roger Twigg – about why they became journalists, it brings a bittersweet smile to my face and probably to a lot of you as well, about our parents, the world we grew up in, and the role of the physical newspaper:
Gus: And every morning before [my father] went to work, he’d sit at the table reading the newspaper with a cup of coffee and no one could interrupt him for that 15 minutes before he walked out the door. And I remember watching him and thinking what the hell is so important about the damn paper. And I want to be part of that . . ..
Twigg: There was this man on the downtown bus, folding his broadsheet just so. The way that man folded that paper, and concentrated on reading those pages, it made him look like the smartest son of a bitch on the bus. It was just one of those moments.
Another memorable Gus moment in the show – and relevant to this post – is when Gus asks a young reporter about a scoop Gus receives about the appointment of a relatively unknown police officer to the top job of Commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department. The young reporter is clueless about the police officer, but when Gus asks Twigg – who is about to depart the paper via “voluntary” buyout – Twigg spews off a concise biography of the police officer’s entire career. Twiggs then gets the story. Put simply, the veteran beat reporter knew his beat well.
This scene came to mind as I recently read an article in The Wall Street Journal written by Arian Campo Flores about the Port of Miami (which is known as PortMiami) titled “Miami’s Wealthiest ZIP Code Is Fighting to Evict Its Least Glamorous Neighbor.” The article describes a very expensive dispute involving the fuel terminal on Fisher Island that supports PortMiami’s operations.
But first, some background:
First, if you have ever been to Miami Beach, you can’t miss the port: Massive cruise ships are lined up waiting to depart with thousands of people that fly in weekly from all over the world for all you can eat buffets and sunburn. But PortMiami is not just a cruise port; it also functions as the “Cargo Gateway of the Americas.” According to a recent economic impact study, PortMiami generates approximately $60 billion in annual economic activity, supports more than 340,000 jobs statewide, including nearly 30,000 direct local jobs, and accounts for almost 4% of Florida’s GDP. In short, PortMiami is a critical piece of South Florida’s economic infrastructure whose success ripples through local, statewide, national, and foreign economies.
Second, Fisher Island sits adjacent to PortMiami, separated only by a narrow stretch of water. It also happens to be the second wealthiest zip code in the United States, with homes and condominiums priced in the tens of millions of dollars. It is so exclusive that you can’t even drive there; rather, you have to get on a ferry and hitch a ride across the waterway. And since Covid-19, Miami Beach — Fisher Island in particular — has seen a huge influx of the ultra-wealthy moving in, while locals are being priced out.
With this background, let’s get into the dispute: The owners of the fuel terminal were looking to sell the property in 2024. The desire to sell wasn’t a secret; rather, the property was openly on the market. But as is the case with Miami, its politicians, and their ability to act timely and competently, the county government only learned about a potential sale late in the game. When the county failed to stop the sale or make a better bid, developers – including two prominent local Miami players – swooped in to acquire the property for $180 million with plans to replace the fuel terminal with what? You guessed it: More luxury condominiums.
Of course, Fisher Island residents rejoiced because it would increase the value of their property all while getting rid of an eyesore commercial property. But the county and the cruise operators? Not so much. The county undertook a study to determine how the fuel terminal could be replaced and came to the “Oh, shit!!” realization that there was no viable economic alternative. You read that right: PortMiami NEEDS the fuel terminal. So the county – caught with its pants down – belatedly jumped into action, authorizing the county manager and port director to negotiate a deal with the developer group.
The purported deal? The county would buy the fuel terminal from the developer group for a collective sum of…$400 million.[ii] For those keeping score, that’s $220 million more than what the developer group purchased the property for just 18 months ago. Or stated cynically, in a county where the cost of housing is leading to an exodus of the young and working class, our elected politicians decided to burn hundreds of millions of dollars to fix their original sin.[iii] Separately, the county threw a legal “Hail Mary” in the form of an eminent domain lawsuit in which nobody can credibly predict how it will all play out. The residents of Fisher Island – of course well-funded – hired their own fancy lawyers to put the kibosh on the county’s plans and stop any sale by the developer group.
And since publication of Campo Flores’ article, things have only gotten more interesting. The city manager and port director resigned or were fired – depends on who you ask – and the county mayor is now rejecting the current negotiated $400 million deal that she asked her underlings to go get. In other words, a colossal mess.
Now, I’m not here to complain about greedy developers or the .1% that are destroying our city and country. That story is well-told and if anything, their collective motivation is always transparent: My needs always come ahead of the collective good. That’s the American Way according to this crowd. Nor am I here to complain – or at least not too much – about the ineptitude of local government.
Instead, in reading the article, I was struck by the source. Or put more simply: Why the hell was one of the most important local stories in South Florida broken by The Wall Street Journal and not by, I don’t know, the MIAMI HERALD?
No matter how you look at it, this story is not about a national political controversy or federal agency. It’s about Miami-Dade County, PortMiami, Fisher Island, local taxpayers, local officials, and local developers. It was all happening in plain sight. And yet I, along with many Miami residents, am learning for the first time about the scope and incompetence of our local government through a newspaper headquartered in…New York City. Yes, the author of the article – Campo Flores – is Miami-based, but doesn’t that make it even worse? In a global ocean of information from which to report, Campo Flores decided to work a story that was right in front of our faces.
Up until recently, major metropolitan newspapers employed reporters whose careers revolved around understanding their local governments. These reporters attended meetings that nobody else attended and developed sources over years and sometimes decades. They learned which public officials were competent, which agencies consistently struggled, which local business leaders had influence, and which proposals didn’t pass the smell test. They acquired the sort of institutional memory that only comes from spending years watching the same people make decisions and then living long enough to see the consequences.
In doing the job, lots of their reporting didn’t focus on corruption, but rather, good ole’ fashioned competence or lack thereof. Heck, if given the opportunity, my husband will sing the praises of Mike Royko and his daily biting columns about the alderboobs, er, the Chicago aldermen, or how then Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun botched the recipe of the classical Chicago style hot dog and lost an election in the process.[iv] The point is that the local paper informed voters about the job performance of their elected pols.
Here, if the fuel terminal is as important as public officials now admit, why was its vulnerability not addressed years ago? If the facility was essential to the long-term operation of one of the region’s most important economic assets, why does it appear that the county is now reacting to events rather than planning for them? If taxpayers may ultimately be asked to spend extraordinary sums – either directly or indirectly – to preserve critical infrastructure, why did the issue not become the subject of broader public debate before private parties acquired leverage over the county?
I’d like to think that in a different era, my local paper would’ve been the tip of the spear in smoking out this story and asking questions like the above months, if not years ago. Instead, the Miami Herald is only now beginning to report about this debacle, presumably in reaction to Campo Flores’ reporting. And if you think I’m here to knock the Miami Herald, you are wrong. I have friends at that paper that I dearly respect both personally and professionally. If anything, the whole affair just saddens me. When my LOCAL paper flat out misses the biggest LOCAL news story, it makes me think what else is happening that isn’t getting reported because the resources are no longer there? For the past twenty years, the decline of local newspapers is often discussed as a business story. But what receives less attention is that our communities are losing the people with the institutional memory to know what to look for, what questions to ask, and who to pose them to. We are losing our Guses and Twiggs.
Yes, I know that newspapers – at least as we all knew them growing up – cannot be resurrected. The issue is who performs the function going forward and works the beat. There are promising leads: not for profit journalism, independent journalism, and paid subscription models. But I don’t know if any of these are a perfect substitute for what we used to have when it comes to stories like this. Honestly, I don’t have a solution I can offer that will leave you with a warm and fuzzy feeling as you read this. Rather, what we have is a story involving a local issue with enormous repercussions that required a national newspaper to discover and explain it to the local residents. That’s huge a red flag. When the watchdog function in the form of the local paper fails, the spotlight arrives late, and accountability of our pols becomes reactive rather than preventive. Ugh.
[i] At this point in my life, I am certain my husband has forced me to watch The Godfather I & II, The Dirty Dozen, The Hunt for Red October, and Heat at least twenty times. There are other films on this list – don’t get me started with all the Westerns – as well.
[ii] Per my calculator, the rate of return on this deal seems to be between 20% to 30% a year. Considering that Miami-Dade County has a relatively strong credit rating – the county pays interest on its long-term debt between 3 to 6 percent – this is an outrageous rate of return for the investor group relative to the risk they are supposedly taking.
[iii] The counterpoint that county officials will undoubtedly argue is that the cost of this entire exercise will be borne by cruise and cargo operators that pay fees to PortMiami. But if you need to jack up fees to make these payments to the developer group, then these operators will start looking for alternative cheaper ports.
[iv] In 1995, Moseley-Braun, along with other U.S. senators, were invited to submit recipes for hot dogs as part of a recipe collection. Moseley-Braun submitted a recipe for a “Chicago hot dog” that included ketchup. For those in the know, ketchup is absolutely verboten on the Chicago-style hot dog. Indeed, folks in Chicago would tell you ketchup on a hot dog is a declaration of war. Royko, in his customary acerbic tone, gutted Moseley-Braun for being a poser. In 1998, Moseley-Braun lost her re-election campaign. My husband will say it’s because of ketchup, but I suspect it’s because she had a lot of other baggage as a candidate. Either way, you can find Royko’s column here.
Great post, Katie. As always, you provide valuable insight that hits the nail on the head.
Katie, you never fail to impress me with your intellect and keen observations!