Beckham’s Inter Miami stadium complex plan makes big promises, but many questions loom
When retired footballer David Beckham and his Miami partners won voters’ support for a massive soccer and commercial complex on public land, they effectively kicked a long, bending ball the length of the pitch, looking to connect for a winning score that would finally bring high-level professional play to the city.
Today, nearly two years later, the ball is still up in the air. And when and if it finally lands, there’s no telling yet if the ball will set up the lunging players for a sure goal, or sail wide of the net.
This week, Beckham and his partners filed an ambitious and long-awaited rezoning proposal with the city for the grandly named Miami Freedom Park. The proposed “special area plan” outlines the broad contours of their vision for replacing the city-owned Melreese golf course next to Miami International Airport with something completely different.
The proposal, like every muddled step of the widely watched and oft-criticized process that has dragged on for years, is high on aspiration, but short on detail.
The master plan, drawn up by Miami-based Arquitectonica, calls for splitting the 131-acre property into two segments bifurcated by a new four-lane road running north to south. On the western side, running along LeJeune Road, would sit a vast parking lot covered by 16 acres of rooftop soccer fields, a 25,000-seat stadium and a pedestrian promenade lined with commercial buildings. The north end, facing a drainage canal, would see more commercial buildings, including a hotel and a “tech hub.”
The eastern portion would become a promised 58-acre public park facing Grapeland Heights, a low-scale residential neighborhood across Douglas Road. The version presented in the submitted plan is at this stage mostly schematic, with few details about its features or uses other than a one-mile-long wellness loop.
The idea behind the plan, team representatives have said, is to remedy pitfalls that have accompanied other stadium development schemes that fail to generate broader promised benefits. They argue that the commercial piece ensures the financial viability of the stadium, which would host fewer than 20 soccer matches a season, while acting as an economic engine for the city.
JUST A START
The master plan is just a start — a conceptual blueprint to be filled in later with specific building plans and designs. It leaves numerous critical questions as yet unanswered, including how the complex would look and function and what benefits the public would gain in exchange for leasing the valuable property to Miami Freedom Park LLC for 99 years. It’s still unknown precisely how the city would replace nearly 21 acres of rezoned park land, a requirement under city law.
Beckham and his principal backers, MasTec chairman Jorge Mas and CEO Jose Mas, along with SoftBank executive Marcelo Claure, would finance the stadium, commercial development and creation of the park privately, using no public funds. But still to be determined is who will pay for some critical, promised elements, including improved transit services and development of small new parks that would be scattered across the city to replace the lost green acreage.
“It’s basically the first step in what we expect to be a lengthy process,” Miami planning director Francisco Garcia said in an interview. “The project will evolve and it will improve.”
Years have already passed in this iteration of Beckham’s quest, the fourth proposed site for a soccer-only stadium that would satisfy Major League Soccer’s requirements for a franchise. The broadest strokes of this concept were endorsed by 60 percent of voters in a 2017 referendum that authorized the city to negotiate a no-bid lease with Inter Miami’s investors. Since then, progress has stalled due to a lobbying ethics inquiry, commission debates over the city’s legal representation in the negotiations and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic.
The filing of the group’s application makes one thing abundantly clear: It will be years more before any soccer is played at Miami Freedom Park. And that’s assuming that at least four of five Miami commissioners vote to approve a lease agreement that, in the words of city manager Art Noriega, is “not even close” to being finalized after more than a year of negotiation.
The special area plan itself may itself be vulnerable to legal challenge.
Beckham’s Inter Miami team said they are co-applicants with the city on the Freedom Park plan, since the city owns the land. But city planners characterized the partnership differently, asserting the city is the applicant given its sole ownership of the land, with input and guidance from the soccer franchise, which is fully responsible for the development.
The distinction may matter. Miami’s zoning code bars the city from partnering with a private entity to apply for a special area plan zoning change, and some eyebrows rose quickly when the plan was announced this week. The ban was put in place to limit the use of special area plans, which have become a focal point of community opposition in some places, after an unsuccessful attempt by a developer and the city to include publicly owned Legion Park in a redevelopment scheme under such an SAP.
With Freedom Park, city staffers will review plans that were submitted by the city itself, a circumstance Garcia said will require the city to “wear two hats.” The approach raises questions over how the city will negotiate a controversial, multifaceted deal while acting as landowner, landlord to Inter Miami and applicant for the redevelopment plan.
“There’s always additional complexities when the city is wearing multiple hats,” said land-use attorney Javier F. Aviñó, of Bilzin Sumberg, who is not involved in the project.
Iris Escarra, who represents the Beckham group, said the city has to be a participant under the Miami 21 zoning code, which requires a zoning application to come from the property owner. She argued the bar on a joint application was meant only to stop developers short of the nine acres required for a special area plan from using public property to boost the acreage.
Beckham’s team, Inter Miami, started play earlier this year in a smaller stadium at its new training facility in Fort Lauderdale before the COVID-19 pandemic forced suspension of the major league soccer season.
The plan the group submitted on Tuesday represents only half of what’s required for the city to review and approve the substantial up-zoning the partners need for the development to proceed. The city and Beckham’s group must also hammer out a development agreement, a complex document that lays out in detail how the property would be developed and enumerates the benefits they will be required to provide the city and its residents.
Garcia and his deputy director, Jeremy Gauger, said the partnership has shown the city a draft of a proposed agreement but has not formally submitted it. Escarra said the agreement draft is at a “very preliminary” stage.
But she said the referendum language requires the team to provide or pay for needed infrastructure improvements, including auto and pedestrian connections, as well as construction of at least a basic, landscaped park space with utility connections.
TRAFFIC IMPACT
Also still to be finalized, the city planners said, is a study analyzing the project’s impact on traffic on surrounding streets and detailing how the expected surge in the flow of automobiles will be managed — a key concern since it could affect access to the airport and adjacent State Road 836.
The proposed plan provided to the city suggests that traffic generated by the complex could be significant.
When Beckham first floated the idea of major league soccer in Miami, he and his backers spoke volubly about creating an urban downtown stadium with an emphasis on pedestrian and transit access, including a traditional “walk to the game.” After elected leaders rejected two plans that would have put the stadium at PortMiami and what’s now known as Maurice Ferre Park, Beckham’s group purchased Miami-Dade County land on the edge of Overtown for a venue that would have had no on-site automobile parking at all.
But that third vision was also set aside after the Mas brothers joined the venture and considerably expanded its scope by targeting Melreese — which is hemmed in by the 836 expressway on the south, a highway-like stretch of LeJeune on the west, the canal to the north and multi-lane Douglas Road on the east.
The team has said it expects many game attendees and other visitors to the complex will arrive by transit. But the master plan they developed for the site also leans heavily on automobile access and recalls a suburban office park — a characterization Garcia and Gauger did not dispute.
It calls for an eye-popping 5,400 parking spaces and at least two new internal roads, including one running parallel to LeJeune, plus one new principal auto entrance on Douglas. One of the internal roads would have on-street parking to make park access easy. The plan also includes a flex-lot for car-share drop-off and pickup.
The plan also calls for a new entry-only road connection from LeJeune, but no direct access from 836, Escarra said.
The blueprint does show a pedestrian bridge connecting across the canal to the Miami Intermodal Center, a transit hub that has Metrorail, Metrobus and Tri-Rail stations. Garcia called that link “a major piece” of the plan, but added that it’s not clear yet who would pay for or build it. He emphasized the city has no jurisdiction because the area where it would be built lies over the city line in unincorporated Miami-Dade. Oddly, the city line runs just south of the canal through the edge of the Melreese property, he said.
Escarra said her clients have committed to paying for the transit bridge, though she said it will have to be approved by several jurisdictions, including the state and the South Florida Water Management District.
The plan contemplates what Garcia referred to as “enhanced” city trolley service to the site, though details and funding have also yet to be worked out. It also provides for 200 bicycle parking spaces, though there are few if any streets connecting to the site that are safe or suitable for riding a bike.
PROPOSED PARK
The proposed park is another work in progress.
Included in the SAP submission is a bare-bones green space with no specific features or uses, which Garcia said are to be determined in part through public consultation. It would be the largest park in that end of the city, he noted, but it’s unclear who the city or the Beckham group envision would use it, or how — whether it might be a mostly passive park with trees and grass, for instance, or focus on active recreation, or some combination of the two. The referendum language requires the partners to contribute $20 million to the city for park maintenance, Escarra said.
Since there are relatively few residents in easy walking distance, it would most likely function as a regional destination, Garcia said. It would incorporate and supplement the existing Grapeland Water Park, a popular attraction, and the busy baseball fields next door, and be managed by the city parks department, he said.
But park features could be limited by soil and underground water contamination left behind by the site’s former use as a dump. The team is on the hook theoretically for remediation, but no specific estimates or plan have been approved. Most likely that would involve covering the property with a layer of clean fill and geotextiles to contain contaminants below the surface. Once-contemplated water features have been dropped from the initial park scheme as a result.
The park is being designed by ArqGEO, the landscape architecture arm of Arquitectonica. Although ArqGEO has designed lauded landscape plans for the Pérez Art Museum Miami and new University of Miami dorms, among numerous other projects, it has not to date designed a complete, built park.
Garcia stressed that the city expects Beckham’s team to ensure the park has clear and seamless pedestrian connections to the garage-top soccer fields, and across Douglas road to the abutting neighborhood.
Another knotty problem is how the city would go about meeting a legal mandate to replace lost 20.9 acres of public green space. Administrators have identified 100 city properties that could be converted into small parks. Because of limited land availability, none would be larger than five acres. One benefit, however, is that approach would bring small parks to what Garcia termed “park deserts” across the city — neighborhoods lacking green space within walking distance.
But Garcia acknowledged it’s still to be determined who would pay for those park conversions, and district commissioners would be consulted since neighbors have rejected planned parks in the past.
Finally, although the plan is amply illustrated with renderings of office buildings, a hotel and tech hub, those are purely conceptual placeholders to suggest the mass, scale and uses of possible development if the property is up-zoned as the Beckham group wants.
“Those are rough approximations,” Garcia said.
The team has released no specifics on commercial development, and no actual buildings have been designed save for the stadium itself — although no construction documents have been submitted to the city. That’s not likely to happen until zoning and development approvals are in place.
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
