There's a memo sitting on the desks of Miami-Dade County commissioners right now, and if you live in this county, you need to read it — or at least understand what it says.

Earlier this week, WLRN reported that Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, in a memo co-authored with the Department of Transportation and Public Works, has laid out a stark reality: Miami-Dade's ambitious Strategic Miami Area Rapid Transit (SMART) program is in serious financial trouble. Five of the six planned rapid transit corridors — the North, Beach, East-West, Kendall, and Northeast lines — still have no funding secured. And the price tag for building, operating, and maintaining them over the next 20 years? The county estimates it is $7.6 billion short of what it actually needs. To cover the gap, the memo floats two options: doubling the transportation sales tax from half a cent to a full penny, or creating a dedicated property tax for transit projects.

Commissioners are scheduled to discuss it at their July 21 meeting. Mark your calendar.

Let's be honest about what this memo is: an acknowledgment of a generational failure of planning, dressed up in the language of fiscal responsibility. South Florida's transit crisis did not materialize overnight. Miami-Dade voters approved a half-penny transportation surtax back in 2002, and advocates have known for well over a decade that it was never going to be enough. The SMART Plan, adopted in 2016, simply repackaged old aspirations without solving the underlying math. The county celebrated the launch of its South Dade TransitWay — the one corridor that actually got built — while the other five corridors languished in study phase limbo.

Now here we are. Construction and labor costs have surged. The state has pulled back major transit funding. And a county of nearly 2.8 million people, growing denser and more gridlocked by the year, is still waiting for the transit network it was promised two decades ago.

The funding options on the table are uncomfortable but not unreasonable. A full-penny sales tax would align Miami-Dade with peer counties that invest more aggressively in transit infrastructure. A dedicated property tax for transit is a model that has worked in cities from Atlanta to Denver. The real question isn't whether residents should pay more — it's whether county commissioners have the political spine to ask them to.

There's a secondary crisis lurking in this memo that deserves equal scrutiny: the county's ongoing negotiations with Brightline to operate a commuter rail Coastal Link connecting Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach — a deal that could cost taxpayers upward of $33 million per year — is being pursued even as Brightline carries junk-bond debt ratings and even as the critical track-owner, Florida East Coast Railway, reportedly isn't even at the negotiating table. The county risks signing a contract built on a foundation that a third party hasn't agreed to. That's not transit planning; that's wishful thinking with a price tag.

Meanwhile, Metrorail continues to carry roughly 51,600 weekday riders, a respectable number for a system that hasn't meaningfully expanded in over a decade — which tells you something important: when you actually build transit in South Florida, people use it. The demand is there. The political will is what keeps evaporating.

Commissioners should walk into that July 21 meeting prepared to make a real choice, not schedule another round of studies. Miami-Dade cannot keep approving transit plans it cannot fund while the traffic on I-95 gets worse and workers in Homestead, Kendall, and North Miami are locked out of any viable alternative to their cars.

The $7.6 billion gap is not an obstacle. It's a test of whether this county's leadership finally means what it says.