Executive Summary

Click here to download the full report 

Miami has been plagued with a reputation for corruption. In fact, it is a reputation propagated within the last six years by grand jury reports on problems arising out of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the County’s contracting process and absentee ballot voting, and reports of local elected officials ousted from office for various abuses of the public trust. Yet, beyond the political effects, emerge a more harrowing effect, the erosion of public trust in local government institutions. 

In 2002, under the direction of the Miami-Dade County Commission on Ethics and Public Trust, a group of academics, civic and business associations and law enforcement officials, collectively known as the Ethics Coalition, met to discuss local ethics and anti-corruption efforts. Since 1998, these various individuals and organizations, in no small measure, have been working to improve Miami-Dade County’s ethical climate. The Ethics Summit determined it was time to assess the reform efforts of the past six years.

As the title suggests, this report reflects the community’s resolve to not only summarize the response by local enforcement authorities and other civic associations to corruption and to abuses of the public trust, but more importantly, to critically assess the impact of this response.

The report addresses such questions as:

• What resources have been expended in the last six years to combat corruption and restore public trust?
• Besides law enforcements’ efforts, what are other community initiatives, such as educational programming, ethics training, legislative changes?
• Outside the government arena, what have local nonprofits, universities and business entities done to promote integrity and ethics in the workplace? 

The report begins by defining corruption from both a law enforcement perspective and from the general conceptions held by the citizenry. Thereafter, the section on legislative output highlights ethics and other good government laws enacted in Miami-Dade County and in the 32 municipalities. These include measures regulating lobbyists, laws supporting accountability in procurement and contracting and local legislation to improve the administration and process of elections and campaign finance.

The discussion then turns to enforcement activities from federal, state and local authorities. Statistics and other data supplied by the US Attorney’s Office and the Public Corruption Unit of the State Attorney’s Office provide an overview of the types of public corruption cases filed against government officials and employees. During the course of the drafting of this report, the Florida Legislature in its 2003 session passed the “Paul Mendelson Citizen’s Right to Honest Government Act” which among other things, increased penalties for bribery and established new prohibitions in bid tampering.

As noted above, the community’s efforts to promote public trust include a myriad of diverse stakeholders. The efforts are not only limited to aggressive law enforcement action and legislative enactments. Ethics education and training and participation by Miami’s civil society, also known as the nonprofit sector, are recognized as additional and necessary components as well. The report offers a considerable review of these public/private initiatives, community partnerships and education programs. For instance, the adoption of a Model Business Code of Conduct by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, local university efforts to integrate ethics in the curricula and internal considerations within nonprofit agencies in Miami-Dade County.

The series of long-term and short-term recommendations offered upon the conclusion of the report are in no way meant to serve as a “magic bullet.” At minimum, they are presented as the collective opinion of the drafters of achievable and financially sustainable goals that can be implemented within a reasonable period of time.

Overall the report is meant to convey Miami-Dade’s unceasing commitment to restore public trust and accountability in government. From the beginning, the group understood the challenges of evaluating with any real precision the impact such various community efforts have on the social fabric. Despite the high levels of cynicism that persist, the report encourages the public to remain cautiously optimistic that the resources and developments in Miami’s anti-corruption campaign are generating positive outcomes.