Inside City Hall: Small Office, Big Budget

Though it accounts for only a fraction of city spending, the Office of Agenda Coordination offers a window into both the promise and the predicaments of cutting costs within the City of Miami’s ever-growing multibillion-dollar budget.

For a city with a $3.8 billion annual budget, does every cent truly matter?

That has been the refrain of newly-elected Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins, who on the campaign trail repeatedly called for greater transparency and accountability in a city where overall government spending has doubled over the past five years.

And while the biggest line items are easy to spot — millions of dollars in outside legal fees and over three-quarters of a billion spent on police and fire rescue — what about the lesser-known departments that quietly handle the day-to-day work of keeping city government running?

Consider, for instance, the Office of Agenda Coordination, the three-person team charged with the sole task of sharing with other city staffers, via email, the agenda that guides the roughly 20 City Commission meetings held annually at City Hall.

The office, which operates under the direction of the city manager, accounts for just 0.03% of the city’s operating budget, or a bit over a half-million dollars.

“We work for about a month on each agenda,” Assistant Agenda Coordinator Carolina Aguila explained to the Spotlight in a recent interview. “So, we start about a month before the actual meeting, and then the work is being done little by little.”

Aguila describes her office as a hub, receiving drafted legislation from city departments and commissioners’ offices, routing it for review and approval by other city staffers, and ultimately assembling each item into a single agenda that governs commission meetings. 

Once finalized, the multi-page document is transmitted to the City Clerk’s Office, which posts it publicly in accordance with state law. 

Along with the Equal Opportunity & Diversity Programs and the Civil Service Board, Agenda Coordination is among the city’s smallest offices, each staffed by just three employees. It is also the least expensive, operating on a $532,000 budget this fiscal year — roughly $200,000 less than the next smallest office, the Civil Service Board, at $722,000.

By comparison, the Miami’s Police Department — the largest city department — will spend about $468 million this year.

Higgins has been vocal in her efforts to reduce the city budget.

“You’ve got to do a deep dive into what the heck is going on in the budget because we have to find savings for our residents,” Higgins said in a video posted to her Instagram account before December’s runoff election.

Higgins, who did not respond to a request for comment for this article, has not offered specifics on where those reductions would be made.

In offices like Agenda Coordination, where personnel costs account for nearly the entire budget, meaningful cuts would likely come only through reductions in staff, salaries or benefits.

In 2025, Miriam Santana, who heads the office, earned $158,259. Assistant coordinator Carolina Aguila earned $92,417, while the office aide, Mabel Betancourt, earned $58,122.

Collectively, the three employees also cost city taxpayers about $188,000 in benefits, including roughly $89,000 in retirement contributions, $72,000 for health and life insurance, and $27,000 for payroll taxes and other fringe benefits.

Overall, salaries make up about 60% of the office’s personnel costs, with benefits accounting for the remaining 40% — slightly higher than the national average for government employees, where benefits represent about 38.5% of total compensation. In the private sector, benefits consume a much smaller share, averaging 29.8% nationwide.

Asked about possible cost-savings from personnel in the office, Santana says there is little left to squeeze from an already bare-bones operation. 

“I would say, no, we’re working with the least amount of people that we’re able to work [with] to produce and to continue producing the work that we’re doing,” Santana said.

In Coral Gables, a single city employee performs a comparable agenda coordination function.

Aguila agrees that belt-tightening would prove difficult, explaining that the job is more involved than just receiving items by email and copying and pasting the items into a PDF document. There is constant checking and double-checking — a kind of tedium carried over from a pre-digital era.

“It sounds simple in theory because we’re kind of the middleman, but we’re working on about three agendas at a time and they usually have close to 60 [agenda items per meeting],” Aguila said. 

The office is also the clearinghouse for “substitution ordinances” — the controversial, last-minute changes to legislative items that often escape public scrutiny, in possible violation of state law, prior to binding commission votes.

Read more: City Measures Often Approved with Undisclosed Changes

Last year, the office processed 54 substitutions, records show.

In recent years, Santana explained, the Office of Agenda Coordination has slowly embraced technology, streamlining the process to run entirely online. Last year, according to the city’s budget documents, it introduced a new system to better manage workflow.

“[ln the late 1990s and early 2000s] “it was done manually,” she explained. “It was an extensive laboring process before and after the commission meetings. So, we’ve come a long way. We’re now paperless and that helps us to make that process easier.” 

While Higgins has frequently pointed to technology as a tool to help “modernize” city government, Aguila said it is unclear whether AI or other advances or systems upgrades could meaningfully streamline an office that already operates almost entirely online.

“I don’t think we’re looking into it,” Aguila said. 

Despite the office’s transition from paper-based to digital operations over the years, those changes have not produced corresponding cost savings, city records show. The Office of Agenda Coordination has remained a three-person operation for as long as Santana can recall, and the cost per employee has greatly outstripped inflation.  

While the federal cost of living adjustment in 2025 was 2.5%, salaries in the current budget for the office’s three-person staff are 10% more than a year ago. In the previous year, salaries increased 17%. Over the past five years the office’s total budget has jumped 40%.

Those increases are not easily explained by budget documents, which note 11% salary increases in each of the last two budget cycles — a 5% union-negotiated “step” increase and a 6% “across-the-board” increase.

Aguila and Santana could not explain the discrepancy. 

Whatever the cause, the cost structure of Miami’s Office of Agenda Coordination mirrors a broader pattern among public-sector employment, where personnel costs — and especially benefits — dominate operating budgets.

National data help explain why. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total compensation for state and local government workers, once benefits are included, averages about 40% more than in the private sector.

In Miami, that gap may be widening. Over the past five years, the city’s workforce has grown by 11%, while salaries and wages have increased 54%. Employee benefits have risen even faster, climbing 62% over the same period.

This year, nearly three-quarters of the City of Miami’s operating budget — 77%, or $947 million — is devoted to salaries and benefits for its 5,031 employees.