Key Biscayne to Miami-Dade County: Drop bid to privatize Rickenbacker and start over
With objections mounting to Miami-Dade County’s plan to let a for-profit company take over the one highway in and out of the island village, the Key Biscayne Village Council did an about-face and made its distaste for the plan official Thursday night.
The seven-member council voted in a swift, one-hour meeting to take an official position against the plan to privatize the Rickenbacker Causeway, calling for the current request for proposals to be rescinded and replaced with a “full and transparent” public process with key stakeholders.
The resolution also clarifies that Key Biscayne is not interested in bidding to operate the causeway.
“We want you to rescind, not amend or postpone,” said Key Biscayne Councilman Luis Lauredo, who put forward the resolution. “We want to begin a new, collaborative project with the stakeholders and citizens to address this infrastructure project in a full and transparent process with broad and early participation. We want to start in good faith.”
The council contends that the island village and its 13,000 residents are uniquely affected by the proposal, as the Rickenbacker is its sole means of access to and from the mainland. Residents took issue with the way the unsolicited bid triggered confidentiality rules that residents say shut them out of the process.
Village leaders had softened their tone earlier this month, agreeing to meet with county officials as opposed to pushing for a total end to the process. However, a request by Sally Heyman, a county commissioner representing part of Miami Beach, to drop the Venetian Causeway from the plan spurred a change in their approach.
“The bid, as submitted, is about to be dramatically altered when the Venetian is removed,” Key Biscayne Mayor Mike Davey told the Herald in a text message before the meeting. “It just makes sense to go back to the beginning and begin a process that includes all constituencies in an open manner to get to the best possible outcome.”
County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava recently endorsed Heyman’s request, which is scheduled for a formal commission vote Tuesday.
Levine Cava on Wednesday introduced the possibility of scratching the existing privatization plan for the Rickenbacker, too. At a public meeting she called to comply with rules barring private discussions in county government on existing requests for bids, the mayor said she’s open to extending the bid due date well into 2022 to allow more time to make the process more palatable. “I’m also open to considering cancellation of the solicitation,” Levine Cava said.
Canceling the current request for proposals would let Miami-Dade start fresh.
The draft solicitation largely meshes with the plan long heralded by architect Bernard Zyscovich, who partnered with a private equity group to propose a version of the plan to the county in March.
Levine Cava endorsed the request for the bidding process when she recommended commissioners formally “accept” the unsolicited proposals and then launch a request for proposals with terms that meshed with the plan’s original framework. The idea is to let other bidders match or beat the terms of an unsolicited plan in a competition that includes the original proposer, which must file a new bid.
While Zyscovich’s group could bid again on a second proposal, its first submission becomes public under state confidentiality laws once the original bidding process ends. That means competitors would have access to whatever financial data and other specifics were in the original bid.
“We would have issues with the removal of confidentiality because we worked very long and hard trying to put this process together,” Zyscovich, the architect behind the submission, said during an online meeting with Levine Cava. He was invited to speak by Levine Cava.
“The concern is, if we do cancel and forgo the confidentiality, it sends a message to future proposers of unsolicited bids that they may be in a position where we may not honor the confidentiality component of the process,” Levine Cava said.
Miami-Dade hired a consultant to analyze whether the privatization model — where the developer fronts the money for construction, then makes its profit over decades by collecting toll revenue and profits from businesses it can operate along the causeway — makes the most sense. Results of that study are expected by the end of October.
Raquel Regalado, the commissioner representing Key Biscayne, said at the online meeting that county leaders are facing more of an uphill task than expected. She has attended multiple meetings in Key Biscayne, which have attracted large crowds of outspoken — and often, angry — residents.
“When this was brought to us, this board of county commissioners had not heard this backlash from residents,” she said.
This story was originally published September 30, 2021 at 7:47 PM.