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Negotiations to build a commercial complex to replace Miami’s city golf course are following a familiar disappointing pattern as negotiators seek to pack the deal with more benefits but miss the biggest issue.
Talks to build Freedom Park, a vast complex that includes a soccer stadium, seek public benefits that parallel those hyped in the contract that created a multi-billion-dollar baseball stadium debt.
City commissioners are angling for peripheral benefits: higher pay to the developers’ employees, more jobs and contracts for minorities, and more rent for the city. Nothing wrong with these aims, but they miss the point, as did negotiations for the Marlins stadium.
Both negotiations mimicked hard-nose dealing for the public but ignored the massive giveaway.
For what is now loanDepot Park, the city handed over 17 acres of the ex-Orange Bowl site and the county handed over billions in return for giving all the benefits of a stadium to team owners who then publicly ridiculed governments that signed the contract.
The Freedom Park giveaway is less noxious monetarily but might be even worse for the public. The city is leasing out its largest greenspace, the 131-acre Melreese golf course, and the developers are to return to the city 58 of its own acres as a park and pay to convert other sites that the city already owns into 20 acres of park – a net loss of 53 green acres.
We don’t expect Freedom Park owners to be so boorish as to laugh in public about this deal afterward or to boast that they took city officials to the cleaners. But swapping 131 contiguous green acres that can never be reclaimed for 78 acres spotted over five or more sites is a huge loss for Miami ecology, not to mention that the developers never put up a square foot: the city already owns the land it is being “given.”
As Miami Today wrote last week, before the commission votes in September the city attorney is dealing with developers’ representatives to get benefits that commissioners seek.
But, says City Attorney Victoria Mendez, many of the developers’ offers are “aspirational” – they hope or aspire to do something.
The same thing happened in the baseball stadium deal 14 years ago, and some aspirations even wound up in contracts, saying team owners would use their best efforts to accomplish them. Among such benefits in documents are a Major League Baseball youth academy. In eight other cities they today send minority players to Major League teams. Miami was to get the second site. Nothing has happened here.
Another of the benefits was to uplift Little Havana around the stadium. Commissioners talked of fine restaurants in stadium garages that the city paid to build. A decade later, some of the retail space in those garages has never been occupied. Little Havana has yet to visibly change.
The jobs at the stadium had mostly existed at the former ballpark and simply migrated south. But governments hailed the baseball deal at the time.
They were all good aspirations that never happened, best efforts that weren’t good enough.
So while the city haggles for peripheral benefits to claim as victories, the public would salvage more for the future if the city pressed developers now to replace more lost greenspace by buying land for city parks.
The city could ask developers to hand over the Overtown site they bought for the stadium before they got the only golf course in the city to parlay with a plan to build at least a million square feet of offices, hotels, retail, a 4,960-car garage and a stadium.
The agreement for the land spells out not how much the developers may build, only how little they must build. The plans now are only the first bite of the apple. Elected officials no doubt hope for even more development, because the city’s take grows with developers’ revenues.
We have long said that a no-bid deal that wipes out most of 131 parkland acres is not in the city’s interest. It swaps parks for cash. It also flies in the face of the city’s own policy that requires no net loss of parkland.
Commissioners recognize the loss.
“I can tell you right now,” Commissioner Ken Russell said in 2020, “20 acres is not enough, and that’s what’s being applied for in terms of replacing the green space that’s there right now.”
Commissioner Russell and the three who joined him in a July preliminary vote to OK two zoning amendments (Manolo Reyes has long opposed the project) should insist that the developers actually put some skin into the game of replacing parkland before the final vote.
Mr. Russell was right: 20 green acres cannot replace 73 being lost. The best benefit the city can get is not more rent or more job promises or more aspirations but more green acres that residents can enjoy, land that will not be paved over.
Nothing can make this deal look good, because it isn’t. But more replacement land coming from developers’ pockets can make it less painful. If commissioners want to both look good and actually benefit the public, they should insist on it.
“If it’s not clear, I’m going to defer it,” commission Chair Christine King said of her call for more minority-owned businesses and more job preferences in the deal.
How about using that same strength to get more developer-provided parkland for her district – and the others too.
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