She just wanted to help, that's all!

At least that's what the City of South Miami's police chief's wife said when the Miami Herald asked her about the strange business relationship between the city and her tag agency that's located nearly ten miles away.  According to the Herald article we talked about yesterday, the police chief's wife, Ileana Martinez de Castro, claimed that by doing business with the city she helped "the police officers expedite things quickly".  That's a wonderful sentiment isn't it, especially coming from the police chief's wife.  What with things being so expensive, it's great to think that the chief's wife wanted to help save the citizens of South Miami some money by processing the police departments tag work in the most expeditious fashion.  
Does her statement make any sense though?  Are we to believe, according to the Herald story, that a police officer or other city employee, made their way all the way across the county practically to Hialeah to process a tag in an effort to save money?  Major Baixauli from the city goes on to say...

"They saved us time.  If our officers would have gone somewhere else they would have had to sit and wait for two to three hours,"

Ok, fair enough.  Let's for a moment buy into the premise that a uniformed cop or other city employee would have to wait in line at a tag agency, for the time being, let's just concentrate on how long it would take to get to the chief's wife's business, Airways Auto Tag Agency, from the City of South Miami City Hall.  According to Google maps, the distance between City Hall and Airways Auto Tag Agency is 8.8 miles, based on what Google tells us that drive would take approximately 21 minutes with no traffic, I strongly disagree as I often drive that route myself, depending on traffic I'd put it at something closer to 30 to 45 minutes depending on traffic.  So let's just say for the sake of argument that it's 30 minutes in each direction and add in another fifteen minutes for parking and actually taking care of the transaction, that gives us a total of one hour and fifteen minutes, again, this is a highly optimistic estimate, in the real world this deal would take closer to two hours, regardless, let's settle on an hour and fifteen minutes for the purposes of our conversation.
Now, what about that other tag agency that we discussed a few weeks back that was less than three miles from city hall?  Once again, from Google maps we found that the tag agency located at 5759 SW 40th street is only 2.6 miles away from city hall, according to Google, door to door it's less than seven minutes away.  For those of you who are familiar with the area, you'll recognize that this is just a hop, skip and a jump away from city hall.  Wouldn't this make more sense than driving all the way across town and fighting traffic around the Miami International Airport?  It sure seems like it to me.
Ok, now that we've established that the tag agency over on 40th street is far closer than chief's wife's tag agency over by the Airport, the question we're left with is which is more convenient from the service standpoint?  Major Baixauli claims that if the PD was to use another tag agency, they'd have to possibly wait for hours before their transaction was processed, I guess anything is possible right?  The only way to figure this out was to go ahead and go to the tag agency over on 40th street and see for myself.
Off we went at 15 after 9 till we got to the Red Bird shopping center located on the corner of 57th avenue and 40th street where the tag agency is located.  I found myself there a few minutes before the tag agency opened, so I found a parking spot in the center's massive parking lot, went next door to the cafeteria and picked up a pastry while I waited for the agency to open.  This agency's location is in stark contrast to where the chief's wife's agency is located in an unsavory and nasty part of town, with somewhat less than adequate parking and no amenities anywhere around the agency's location.

As soon as the agency opened up, I walked right in, no one else there except me and two tellers.  If I did have any business to transact, I could have theoretically been in and out of there in less than five minutes.  No lines, no hassle, no wait, very much unlike the atmosphere at Airways Auto tag where there's always a crowd of people inside, always a wait and always a pain in the ass.  If we were to have left from city hall, we could have been in and out of here and back at city hall in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to go over to the chief's wife's tag agency.  
So now, assuming that a city employee actually ever trekked across town to do business with the police chief's wife's business, how could they possibly have saved time by doing so?  We all know that this likely never happened and that the suggestion that it ever did is nothing than an insult to our readers intelligence.  
What about the chief's wife's contention of "just wanting to help?", I think this sums it up pretty well... 

Oh well, just another day in South Miami I guess...