40 years of public service wasn’t enough for Jim Cason.
After serving in the US Foreign Service throughout Latin America and being tasked with auditing embassy operations in Baghdad and Amman, the capital of Jordan, Mr. Cason decided again to step into unfamiliar territory, Coral Gables city hall.
He was criticized during the campaign by some for only being a short time resident, less than three years, but said his past experience gives him the exact skill set the city needs during these times.
“The nature of [foreign service] work is that you are always an outsider coming into an organization that’s very complex, usually with 20 to 40 federal agencies that you have to work with,” he said. “You're very flexible [and] versatile, you move in the different cultures, different languages and different specialties.”
He’s committed to serving the city for only four years. “I don’t want to be a career politician,” he point out. And during that time he’s looking to bring employee pay and benefits in line with the revenue the city collects, re-establish its reserves fund and re-internationalize Coral Gables in hopes of attracting multinational corporations to open offices there.
The city’s greatest strength to that end is it’s human capital, he argues.
“I think we can't ever aspire to having as much in the way of warehouse type businesses” like Doral, Mr. Cason said. “Ours has to be intellectual capital. I think we need to have here the corporate executives, top level people that want to run Latin American business for example.”
Mr. Cason sat down in his home to discuss the campaign, his first days in office and the challenges ahead with Miami Today staff writer Zachary Fagenson.