10/13/03 Miami Herald
City tries to unravel Overtown spending
By Oscar Corral
Nearly half of the $70 million in tax money invested in the Overtown area during the past 10
years has gone to Miami's Community Redevelopment Agency, whose job was to turn the
blighted neighborhood into a place of clean streets, thriving businesses and affordable homes.
The results: mostly parking lots, nightclubs, a strip joint and broken dreams.
Only five of 36 CRA projects have been completed, agency records show, and the CRA has not
pushed a single housing initiative in the area in 10 years, despite spending $34.7 million.
The lack of results has not only angered CRA board members and community activists but has
caught the attention of the FBI and Miami-Dade County prosecutors.
''If we spent $33 million in a decade, absolutely it's been thrown away,'' said Miami
Commissioner Johnny Winton, the CRA vice chairman since 1999. ``Show me where it is. I can't
identify $33 million worth of projects.''
Winton, along with the rest of the Miami Commission sitting as the CRA board, voted to approve
many of the projects and expenses that are now in question. But commissioners contend that
CRA staff members purposely kept them in the dark about financial matters.
''Half the time we didn't even know what we were voting on because the staff didn't provide
backup information on the agenda,'' Commissioner Joe Sanchez said. ``Sometimes we wouldn't
even get the agenda until we got to the meetings.''
Asked whether he felt responsible as a board member for some of the problems, Sanchez said:
``We've been part of some of the bad decisions. But these were presented to us as positive things
by the CRA administration, and they went wrong in the execution. In many cases, the CRA administration basically lied to us.''
AUDIT OF SPENDING
Miami Auditor General Victor Igwe hopes to answer some of the financial questions in the coming days, when he releases what is
expected to be a scathing audit of the agency's spen