Last month the Mayor sent the County Commission a long-awaited report on how to pay for the SMART Program, the rapid transit corridors Miami-Dade has been promising its residents for over two decades. The report is honest about the problem: a $7.6 billion funding gap through 2045, and a transit operating deficit of $120 million a year beginning in 2027. But read the report’s solutions and you will find the same short menu our residents have been handed for twenty years: double the half-penny sales tax or issue a general obligation bond, create a new property tax for transit or reallocate money promised to bus service and the Golden Passport. Taxes, bonds, fare increases and service cuts make up the same old song, and we will hear it again this September in our budget meetings.

Meanwhile, at County Hall I have been asking my colleagues to consider a different approach, built on three principles. First, before we ask taxpayers for new funding, we should get full value from what the public has already invested in, and the direct beneficiaries of a project should help pay for it. Second, we should use our planning and zoning decisions to make transit part of every major project along our existing rail corridors, since part of the cost problem is buying land and easements. Third, transit dollars should fund actual transit, the buses and trains that move thousands of people, not subsidized individual car rides. Over my next three columns, I will show what each principle looks like in practice, starting with the easiest connection of all, the one between our airport and our seaport.

Consider the scale of what moves through PortMiami. Our seaport just closed the best year in its history with a record 8.5 million cruise passengers in fiscal year 2025, alongside an eleventh straight year of more than one million cargo containers, and it contributes $61 billion a year to our economy while supporting more than 340,000 jobs. On its biggest days, ten ships and more than 75,000 passengers move through the port in a single day, and nearly every one of them arrives and departs on rubber tires, across one bridge, through congested streets. It has gotten so predictable that the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department now issues traffic advisories on busy cruise Sundays, warning drivers to expect delays around the port and to find alternate routes. Cruise passengers in rental cars and rideshares stack up on the same roads our residents depend on, making it nearly impossible to move through the surrounding neighborhoods. Sadly, this congestion and multi-hour road closures have become the tax we pay for the port’s success, a tax that lands hardest on people who never set foot on a cruise ship.

That alone would be reason enough to prioritize a mass transit solution, but here is the part that adds insult to injury. Over a decade ago, PortMiami, the Florida East Coast Railway, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the State of Florida together invested roughly $50 million to restore the rail link to the port, including the rail bridge across the water, and today that brand-new line sits idle, an investment we made and barely use. I am working to change that on the cargo side through an inland port, moving freight logistics inland and north where they belong, which protects our limited waterfront for the cruise and cargo business that earns PortMiami its title and opens the restored rail line for its next mission: passengers.

Because the same FEC corridor already carries Tri-Rail into downtown Miami on the Little River Branch, and the Board of County Commissioners has approved a development with a new Tri-Rail station at Little River, which will house the headquarters of MSC, a Tri-Rail station at PortMiami is the logical next step. The public has already invested in a rail line linking the busiest airport in Florida to the busiest cruise port in the world, and all that remains is to build a station and run a passenger train on the last mile of it.

Completing the connection, roughly $33 million for the station, would not touch the half penny, the transit tax increment district, or any bond or new tax, because it would be funded half by Miami International Airport and half by PortMiami from their enterprise revenue, the money earned by the two direct beneficiaries of every traveler who moves between a plane and a ship. The destination would be an SFRTA (Tri-Rail) station at the port, the first passenger rail station at any Florida seaport. I am working with the airlines on the passenger experience, including how luggage could move between the airport and the cruise ships, so that a family can land at MIA, step onto a train, and meet their bags at the cruise terminal, and every traveler on that train is a car that never crosses the bridge and never idles on our streets.

The SMART Program will need many funding tools, and some may eventually involve the voters, but before Miami-Dade County asks residents for billions, it owes them proof that it has gotten full value from every investment already made. The airport-to-seaport connection is Smart Transit because we can build it in less than two years and prove that not every problem is fixed with a tax increase.

Next week: how Smart Planning and Partnerships, not the half penny, can build our train stations.

Raquel A. Regalado represents District 7 on the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners. She is chairwoman of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority and vice chair of the commission’s Transportation Committee.