Taking The North Miami City Council To Task.

The little fishing pier at the city's only bayfront park is probably in the wrong place for the best possible fishing, but it's a nice quiet place to watch the gulls and pelicans, and most times you can pick up a snapper or a grunt or a jack for the fry pan, a barracuda for excitement or maybe even a nice big snook, but it'll most likely be out of snook season when you do.

After the pier was built perhaps thirty years ago the parks department took good care of it. Sometimes you'd spot a plank with the early stages of rot but on your next visit there'd be a brand new plank in its place. Perhaps ten years ago that all changed. I think that it had a lot to do with the perception that "the wrong element" was going there to fish, driving through the streets in an upscale neighborhood. The city cut back on maintaining the pier. More and more rotted wood went unreplaced. Eventually it was determined that the pier was an unsafe structure.

Wonder of wonders, suddenly the city found the funds to construct a chain link fence type barrier to block all access to the pier. It probably cost more for that barrier than it would have cost to repair the pier, maybe even maintain it for a few years also. Now I can't head over there a couple of evenings a week for a bit of fishing. Those days are gone.

More recently they "found" the money to give themselves an obscene raise, plus an overly generous benefits package, at about the same time that they hit the citzens with a huge obscene rate hike for water and sewage. "Oh, we need a new water plant!" they told us, but the timing was sure suspect. Thanks a lot, guys.