A vote is set for Miami Beckham soccer complex. It’s unclear if it will mean anything
On paper, Miami commissioners have a big decision to make on Oct. 24.
On the agenda is a no-bid, 99-year lease to allow the city-owned Melreese golf course to be redeveloped into Miami Freedom Park, a $1 billion complex that would include a 25,000-seat stadium for David Beckham’s Major League Soccer team, Inter Miami.
The lease documents attached to the meeting agenda, which was published this week, are in draft form, with significant blanks in key clauses such as the amount for a base rent derived from the property’s fair market value, and key deadlines for construction. The city is still waiting on new land appraisals, an independent environmental analysis and detailed traffic study.
The paperwork represents nothing more than a draft of an outline of what the kind of agreement the city’s administrators and attorneys think is fair. It includes a ground lease, stadium operating agreement and environmental reports — but none of them are ready. No one expects the blanks will be filled in before the meeting.
“I’m not even sure this is even an approvable document,” said Mayor Francis Suarez. “This is why you can’t do things in a shotgun fashion.”
What’s an incomplete lease doing on the agenda? Last week, city commissioners demanded it be put there. Opponents of the project will lose a key ally after the Nov. 5 city election, when term limits will cost Commissioner Wifredo “Willy” Gort his seat.
If opponents can kill the plan for a soccer stadium, office park, mall, hotel, and 58-acre public park, they want to turn around and solicit bids to develop Melreese some other way, possibly as a golf resort. With an election next month that could change the political composition of the commission, Oct. 24 may be their last chance.
“I am definitely looking forward to finishing ending this saga,” said Commissioner Manolo Reyes, a staunch opponent of the plan since its inception. “Since the beginning this has been a farce.”
Beckham’s local partner, Jorge Mas, has shepherded the proposal from its sudden unveiling last summer through a successful referendum that allowed the city to negotiate a no-bid deal with the team. Mas is chairman of MasTec, a Miami-based infrastructure firm. He and his brother, Jose Mas — the MasTec CEO — are investors in the team, along with Beckham, Sprint chairman Marcelo Claure, and Masayoshi Son, SoftBank CEO.
The vision for Miami Freedom Park has drawn scrutiny from the beginning. It is a proposed redevelopment of Melreese golf course that has already sparked a plan to move a lauded youth golf and mentorship program, The First Tee, to another location. Jorge Mas has pledged $3 million to fund the relocation.
In Melreese’s place, the soccer group would build at least one million square feet of retail, restaurant and office space, along with a hotel with at least 750 rooms and a 58-acre public park. The roof of a one-story parking garage would have public soccer fields. The stadium, on a 10-acre corner of the property, would be the venue for home games played by Inter Miami.
In November 2018, voters considered this broad outline of the deal, along with a minimum rent of $3.6 million annually, or 5% of gross rent revenue collected from tenants at the site. These details were included in the question of whether voters should authorize the city to forgo normal competitive bidding and negotiate only with Miami Freedom Park.
Sixty percent of voters approved. The referendum did not give the city commission a deadline to vote on the deal, meaning that even if a lease was voted down, a renegotiated document could come back later.
The only certainty about the Oct. 24 agenda item is that it will be another opportunity for Miami’s bitterly divided elected officials to face off on the topic. People on each side have accused their opponents of machinations to delay the vote in hopes of either killing it or waiting for a more favorable political atmosphere.
Reyes, who vehemently opposes the proposal, says he believes the city has purposefully dragged on the negotiations in order to delay a vote until after the municipal election when Gort will be replaced.
Gort, who represents the district that includes Melreese, has been critical of the idea since its inception. Reyes’ and Gort’s scrutiny of the deal are key — because it’s a no-bid lease, it requires four of five commissioners to approve it.
Reyes, who has repeatedly stated he is an unwavering “no” vote on Miami Freedom Park, told the Herald the city could have been hammering out other terms while waiting on consultants’ reports. The negotiation team has dragged its feet, Reyes said, in order to push the vote until after the election in hopes a more sympathetic candidate is elected.
“The contract is not only about money. There are all these terms and all that, that could’ve been taken care of,” he said. “But they didn’t do anything and that’s something that I think was done on purpose. And I’m going to keep on saying it.”
Reyes suggested the commission discuss setting another firm date and pressuring the administration to work faster to develop a deal.
On the other side, Suarez said the demand for an Oct. 24 vote is an attempt to derail a process that was endorsed by voters. He sees Reyes’ rhetoric as “disrespectful” to the voters who empowered the city to work out a deal, and he defends administrators’ work on the negotiations.
“I find it almost comical that the commissioner has the audacity to blame the administration,” Suarez said.
Suarez also noted that Reyes and other commissioners took months to select the law firms that would represent the city in negotiations. The deal would be much further along, the mayor said, if there had not been a whole string of delays that began with an ethics complaint immediately after the referendum. The complaint prevented the city from talking to the soccer group for months in late 2018 and early 2019.
The Oct. 24 vote might have been called in “shotgun fashion,” but the genesis of the project was similarly rushed in July 2018. Amid public scrutiny, details about the broad outline of the deal were rolled out clumsily by Mas, Beckham himself and supporters, with little advance notice to the public. Then the soccer group asked commissioners to quickly put the referendum question on the ballot to get voters’ authorization to do a no-bid lease.
Reyes is co-sponsoring a separate resolution for Oct. 24 to terminate negotiations with the Beckham group and put Melreese out to bid for redevelopment. Commissioner Joe Carollo, who has since 2018 said he thinks Melreese should be redeveloped into a shopping center, is co-sponsoring the resolution.
“I don’t think our parks should be developed. I don’t think our green space should be given away,” Reyes said. “But if it’s going to happen, it should be through the process. We should vote on a bidding process.”
Supporters tout the deal as a lucrative opportunity for the city to, at not cost, boost tax revenue, collect undetermined millions in rent to the city and create jobs with living wages at the complex. Mas has also pledged to pay for remediation of contamination at Melreese, which sits on a plume of toxic ash, that would need to be addressed if the site was completely redeveloped.
