Commissioner Alex Fernandez is bringing a wide-ranging fiscal transparency measure to the Miami Beach City Commission on July 22, asking colleagues to direct City Manager Eric Carpenter to reform how the city discloses employee pay, study ways to rein in personnel costs, and quickly solicit an independent salary review.
What's Proposed
The resolution, dubbed "Truth in Transparency," targets three distinct but connected concerns: the accuracy and clarity of the city's public employee salary portal, the long-term trajectory of personnel spending — particularly in public safety — and the city's lack of a current, comprehensive compensation benchmark.
On the salary portal, Fernandez wants the city to strip out former, inactive, and reserve employees who currently appear in the system, a cleanup the resolution acknowledges may include data displayed in error. More substantively, the measure would require the portal to break annual pay into three clearly labeled components — base salary, overtime, and off-duty pay — and disclose the number of hours worked in each category. The resolution would also add language clarifying that off-duty assignments are funded by private parties, not city taxpayers, a distinction that has been obscured in current displays of gross compensation figures.
The proposal also calls for removing the "last paycheck gross" column from the portal entirely, citing the risk that the granular, real-time figure exposes employees to phishing schemes and other predatory financial targeting.
The Personnel Cost Question
Perhaps the most consequential element of the resolution is its directive to Carpenter to present a written plan — due at the September 10, 2026 commission meeting — outlining how the city can limit long-term personnel cost growth. That plan must include a financial analysis of what would happen to overtime expenditures if the city reduced the number of sworn police officers or firefighters while holding public safety service levels constant.
The framing raises a fiscal tension familiar to many municipal governments: cutting headcount in public safety often drives up overtime costs as remaining staff covers vacancies, potentially negating any savings. Whether the analysis will ultimately support reductions or argue against them remains to be seen, but Fernandez's resolution frames the exercise as a necessary baseline for sound budget planning.
The Compensation Study
Within 30 days of passage, the city would be required to issue a competitive solicitation for an outside salary and compensation study — a standard tool for benchmarking municipal pay against comparable jurisdictions. The resolution carries no fiscal impact statement, meaning the cost of the study has not yet been publicly quantified.
What's Next
The resolution is set for a vote at the July 22 commission meeting, where a majority of the seven-member body would need to approve it. If passed, the City Manager would face a tight timeline: the September 10 personnel cost plan lands less than seven weeks after the commission's summer recess, and the compensation study solicitation would need to launch within a month of passage. The portal modifications carry no explicit deadline in the resolution as drafted.
