Alternative: Villages with council that get services from county

As fear grows about the effects of more Dade neighborhoods forming cities, a compromise to incorporation is floating around County Hall: the creation of Metro villages.

Imagine a neighborhood where you elected a city council, but still received most of your basic services, like police and parks, from Metro. The council would control zoning and have some say over how local tax dollars are used. Some of the village tax revenues would be set aside for poorer unincorporated areas.

The upshot: Those neighborhoods could gain some of the self-government they want, while poorer areas of Dade’s vast unincorporated region would still get enough money — or some money — to prop up county services.

“It’s an experimental thing,” said Allan Bly, assistant director of Metro’s planning department. “It’s sort of a compromise that gives these areas some of the decision-making power they want.”

But some advocates of incorporation call the idea a poorly disguised attempt by Metro bureaucrats to keep their kingdom and keep tax dollars in county hands. They say Metro is throwing a meatless bone to restless neighborhoods.

“A naked attempt to grab and keep power,” said Gene Stearns, a lawyer who helped Key Biscayne break away from Metro in 1991.

The proposal would work like this: Elected officeholders in the villages would control zoning — what gets built where. Appeals of the zoning decisions would bypass the Metro Commission and go straight to circuit court.

The officeholders also would control some tax money, but exactly how much isn’t clear. One formula would give a village control over 75 percent of its excess taxes — that’s 75 percent of the difference between what the area pays to Metro and what it receives in services.

The remaining 25 percent would go to a revenue-sharing pool, to help pay for services in poorer areas of unincorporated Dade. That’s an improvement to those worried that poorer areas would get left behind by the incorporation movement.

Currently, areas known as “donor” communities — areas that pay more in service taxes to Metro than they receive in services — can find themselves with a windfall of money when they incorporate, and keep all those service taxes to themselves.

With Metro villages, a portion of those taxes — and the percentage surely would be the source of debate — would go to the tax-sharing pool.

The tax money the area always paid to Metro would still go to Metro, and still buy services like police, public works and parks.

The excess money — the 75 percent — could pay for improvements in services, selected by the new group of elected officials. Villages could decide they want extra police, graffiti paint-outs or improved park landscaping. The cities could use Metro’s personnel, or seek bids for better deals.

“I think it’s a fascinating formula for solving the problem we have,” said Gonzalo Sanabria, chairman of a Metro citizen’s board that studies planning issues. “It will make Metro a much better government at the regional level, free up its time from localized issues, and bring power back to the people.”

Though the Metro Commission would have final say on whether to create Metro villages, Sanabria said the system ideally could be presented as an option to a community that wanted to test the waters on cityhood “without jumping into the pool.”

After three years, he suggested, an area could choose to go ahead with incorporation or cast the system aside.

Though the proposal is popular among urban planners and some activists, others don’t like the idea. They say it doesn’t give communities the self-government they’re seeking.

“We view these ‘quasi-cities’ as merely second-class entities, which will again be controlled and dominated by the County Commission,” said Gary Matzner, one of the leaders of Pinecrest’s effort to incorporate.

Critics question why villages should have less power than Dade’s 27 other full-fledged cities.

“How in the world can we give the people of Miami Springs the right to form a city, but deny that right to people in Pinecrest?” said Stearns.

The Metro village is a more detailed version of a plan floated more than a decade ago, when the county was also studying incorporation. Metro planners will bring some version of the plan before commissioners in June as an option to consider.

“It might actually be the makings of a potentially good compromise,” said Jose Rojas, leader of an incorporation movement in West Kendall. “It’s something worth discussing as an alternate.”