PUBLIC SERVICE IS A NOBLE CALLING

MY WIFE HEIDI JOHNSON-WRIGHT

HAS HEEDED IT FOR NEARLY FOUR DECADES

My wife Heidi, celebrates her birthday today.

I am proud of her lifelong career as a public servant.

When she was in law school at Ohio State University, she interned at a state agency in our native Ohio.

Even in undergrad, she volunteered on a campus programing board that served the state of Ohio at Kent State University.

She practiced law her first decade out of law school, for a pair of state agencies in Ohio.

After we moved to Miami in 2000, Heidi became the first full-time Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Coordinator for the City of Miami Beach.

She was in her first decade as a proud public servant there when Miami-Dade County – one of the largest (in population and land mass) government bodies in the U.S. – did a nationwide, high-level candidate search for the next person to guide its ADA department.

Heidi has now proudly served Miami-Dade for a decade and a half. She has endured the late 2009-2010 financial crisis that saw virtually all of her staff laid off or forced into early retirement.

ADA was abolished as a department under some of the worst mayoral “leadership” this county has ever known. A mayor who filled the county with cronies cared not a moment about people with disabilities.

Now, under Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, the ADA office has at least regained about one third the level of staffing that it traditionally had for decades.

Heidi and her hand-picked group of expert pros are now empowered to ensure that Miami-Dade’s vast facilities and programs are accessible to all.

There are still great hurdles. Miami-Dade could use tens of thousands of affordable, accessible housing units.

People with disabilities are by far the most under and unemployed of all minority groups.

The face an impossible reality of less than 1 percent of all U.S. housing being move-in ready for wheelchair users.

Some housing bureaucrats still push back mightily on the idea that even a few units (required by federal law) should be move-in ready for people with disabilities.

They insanely plot to pass adaptation costs on to impoverished people with disabilities.

Those clueless policies cause homelessness and worse.

Hopefully, Mayor Levine Cava will get another term and continue to empower Heidi to influence other departments – from airport to seaport to parks, transit and housing – to follow federal law by making 100 percent of buildings and programs accessible to all.

WILL SOUTH FLORIDA'S LEADERS LEARN TO PRESERVE AGRICULTURE

 AND DIVERSIFY THE ECONOMY POST PANDEMIC?

I remember years ago, talking to a person who distributed produce from a rail head in Allapattah – before it became the next Wynwood-like hot spot for artsy urban development.

When I asked if the produce came from the Redland, the person laughed at me.  He told me virtually all of it comes from the seaport, a little from the airport.

He said it will always be cheaper to grow fresh food in South America, Central America, Mexico, even farther flung places and ship it through Port Miami and MIA.

Well, what happens when there is a pandemic or some other global crisis? What happens when the source nation (wisely) needs to hold onto its produce to feed its own?

What happens when the cost of fuel makes it no longer viable to depend on places hundreds to thousands of miles away for Miami’s essential fresh food?

What happens, because of pandemic or other cause the cargo planes stop flying, the cargo ship arrivals are reduced to a tiny fraction of typical sea traffic?

I hope, when live returns to something resembling normal, that our elected and appointed leaders prevent any land suitable for agriculture from being turned into pavement and rooftops.

I hope they pay more than lip service to diversifying the economy. The under write and subsidize billionaires every day. Those taxpayer funds used to enrich the richest could be redirected as seed money for organic farming on a scale never before undertaken here.

I hope they ignore the endless influence of mega wealthy donors who want tourism and concrete to be the be all and end all for greater Miami’s economy till the end of days.

I’m an optimist, but if we keep greenlighting projects that pave over precious agricultural land and perpetuate policy that forces a huge portion of our residents to pay half their gross income to put a roof over their head – I think South Florida’s end of days may come much sooner than later.