Parents opposed to Wawa gas station sue Coral Gables to stop construction
Parents at Carver Elementary School opposed to a Wawa gas station and convenience store being built across the street are suing the city of Coral Gables for violating its own laws by skirting public input and rushing approval for the project on land originally designated for affordable housing.
The Gables Accountability Project, made up of six parents and Gables residents involved in the Carver PTSA’s effort to halt construction of the Wawa on the northeast corner of Grand Avenue and U.S. 1, filed a civil suit accusing city government of fast-tracking the project, which they say poses health and safety hazards to the school community. Carver Middle is behind Carver Elementary.
“A dangerous building is going up in my community, in front of my kids’ school, and I never had a chance to express my concerns as a resident, parent and professional who treats victims of car accidents,” said Julie Kanter, parent of two Carver students and an emergency medicine physician with a master’s degree in public health.
Kanter cited Environmental Protection Agency and Centers for Disease Control warnings against putting gas stations within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds. The new Wawa’s six gas pumps will be about 300 feet from Carver’s front entrance.
“Aside from the traffic and pollution that harms quality of life, you’re also building a store that sells alcohol, tobacco and vaping products next to an elementary and middle school. These are the elements that set people up for injuries and poor health,” Kanter said. “Of all the things they could have put there, a gas station makes the least sense.”
Parents say Coral Gables illegally bypassed its usual meticulous public hearing and permitting process to quickly and quietly get the project rolling after 17 years of failed proposals for the 1.7-acre vacant plot now worth $8 million.
Miami-Dade County’s public housing department gave the land to the historically Black neighborhood’s nonprofit Lola B. Walker Homeowners Association in 2003 for a $10 fee. Both the county and the association said the goal was to build a project that would benefit the community, revitalize downtrodden Grand Avenue and provide housing in a formerly segregated area with an acute shortage of affordable places to live.
The homeowners formed a private, for-profit joint venture with real estate developer Debra Sinkle Kolsky called Bahamian Village. But over the years, their plans for a residential-commercial project ran into obstacles, then various plans for a restaurant fell through until finally, one year ago, a new project with “significant modifications” — a Wawa and gas station — was approved.
The school’s principal and the Miami-Dade County School Board complained they were kept in the dark, only finding out about the Wawa 10 months after it was approved via a special settlement agreement that enabled the city to waive fees, skip public hearings, “expedite the review and approval process,” and allow the city attorney and city manager to finalize plans by themselves.
Critics of Wawa — a 750-store chain based in Philadelphia — want to stop construction, which has already started, and consider other options for the property, or at least alter Wawa’s design to make it safer. The main entrance into and exit from the Wawa parking lot on Grand Avenue, for cars and tanker trucks, intersects with the main crosswalk in front of the school. There is no Wawa access or egress off of U.S. 1 at the busy intersection. There are two gas stations on either side of the highway less than 100 yards away at LeJeune Road, plus the new 1.2-million square foot Life Time Coral Gables apartment-hotel-retail complex is going up across U.S. 1.
When the Carver PTSA found out about the Wawa plans, parents — mostly white parents of children who attend the magnet school in the only Black-majority pocket of Coral Gables — spoke against it at a City Commission meeting. But their concerns were termed “laughable” by Mayor Raul Valdes-Fauli and characterized as racist by some commissioners, who also said it was too late, and the city could not dictate to property owners what to do with their property.
“We feel so disillusioned with our local government leaders, elected to represent us, and they shut us down and act like we’re a burden,” said Lucia Pedraja, a Gables resident, high school teacher and parent of two Carver students and a third to become a first-grader in the fall. “We’re not opposed to development, but there are 1,500 children on that campus and development needs to be in harmony with the school community.
“We want the opportunity to discuss better options for the neighborhood, for jobs, for the schools. If the city’s own laws had been followed, we could have a project of maximum benefit instead of a gas station.”
The lawsuit asserts that the city’s agreement with the property owner conflicts with the city’s zoning code and comprehensive plan and constitutes an illegal brokered arrangement between a local government and a developer, known as “contract zoning.”
Attorney David Winker, representing the parents, cited a Florida Supreme Court ruling in a previous Coral Gables case that “a municipality cannot contract away the exercise of its police powers. .... If each parcel of property were zoned on the basis of variables that could enter into private contracts then the whole scheme and objective of community planning and zoning would collapse.”
The city rejected any depiction of the deal as secret and said it was done in support of the pro-Wawa neighbors who surround the property.
“The city stands by the settlement agreement which was reached after years of delays preventing the neighborhood from developing a site that had been approved for commercial development for over a decade,” City Attorney Miriam Soler Ramos said. “The process has been transparent and the development of the site has been discussed publicly on many, many occasions. The complaint is without merit and hopefully will not further delay this matter.”
The city brokered the special settlement agreement with all its waivers in 2015, when the county threatened to take its land back from the homeowners association because nothing had been built on it. The homeowners asked city leaders to intervene so they wouldn’t lose the land and could complete one phase of the project — a community center, which turned out to be a conference room at the back of the developer’s new office headquarters, built on the eastern end of what will be Wawa’s large parking lot.
“It’s a conundrum, because the homeowners association and many neighbors are in favor of the Wawa while the concerns of parents and other residents are understandable,” Commissioner Vince Lago said. “The project has had multiple iterations. I advocated to get it finished so we could deliver the community center in the hopes that it will bring after-school educational resources to Carver students.”
The schools and Wawa site are located in a triangular slice of Coral Gables acquired by city founder George Merrick in 1925 as a segregated area for Black domestic and construction workers. It’s adjacent to West Coconut Grove, the historically Black section of the Grove founded by Bahamian settlers.
Many of the three dozen homeowners in the Lola B. Walker association are elderly residents of Coral Gables’ MacFarlane Homestead Historic District, which is on the National Register of Historic Places and the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual 11 To Save list.
Respecting the history of the area and the schools is another reason not to build a Wawa, the Carver PTSA has argued.
“Why didn’t anyone from the city stand up and say this just isn’t right?” said Pedraja, who has suggested that if the Wawa can’t be stopped it could turn the gas station into a charging station for electric vehicles. “With public input, we could have found solutions for better uses of that land in the best interest of everybody involved.”
This story was originally published January 26, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
