If Miami Beach builds the convention hotel, its Spring Break problem will be solved | Opinion

Conventions, folks.

That’s what packs the Southeast throughout springtime. Chicago, Salt Lake, Denver, New York — and even Las Vegas — have less convention density in the first quarter of the year because of weather. It all belongs to Florida. In fact, prior to COVID, Florida, led by Orlando, saw more conventioneers than any other region. Conventioneers come for business, they eat out three times a day and room blocks create stable daily rates for hoteliers.

Can you imagine if we had Siemens, IBM, Microsoft, Meta and Apple meeting here? Fintech, legal and medical conferences?

We saw some of this energy with the recent Bitcoin conference. Such conventions would create huge demand for rooms during what we know as Spring Break, as well as the shoulder months surrounding it.

This would create meaningful, positive change. Lincoln Road would thrive, and private investment around the new Convention Campus would explode. You would actually need good French toast on Lincoln Road again.

A convention center is supposed to be an economic engine, but for nearly 40 years, the Miami Beach Convention Center has been anything but. After the incredible (but embarrassing) Microsoft convention of 2001, MBCC was referred to as “Third World.”

We were promised lucrative conventions if we could get our act together, namely, redo the convention center and build the prerequisite hotel. This would create a boutique “Convention Economy,’’ where, as with Art Basel, the boat show and other “citywides,” the Beach is busy with conventioneers paying the highest rates, bringing corporate business to our city and enjoying the Lincoln Road District.

This was lined up to happen in 2012-13, as the penny tax for the center (502) was passed, and an RFP was issued for a $1.5 billion campus that would have changed the city’s trajectory forever, especially between February and April, the strongest convention months in the south.

Hailed as one of the most significant urban developments in the country, the process allowed two of the world’s best developers to compete before they selected a winner. The winning bidder, who spent nearly $20 million in fees, was promptly expelled from the city by a new administration that declared that the city should start all over, decouple the hotel and “do it ourselves.”

Big mistake.

In 2016, the runner-up in the 2013 RFP debacle returned to Miami Beach to bid solely on the headquarter hotel, but, again, the city botched the process.

In 2018, a single team led by David Martin and Jackie Soffer finally won the super-majority needed and planned the long-awaited 800-room hotel. There was more of the same opposition, but this time city voters had had enough of the incompetence that sunk the center and approved it.

In April 2020, Martin and Soffer rightly issued a force majeure letter freezing their lease because of the pandemic. Recently, talk of the hotel began to resurface, with the project getting back on track.

Well, the third time — or is it the fourth? — might be the charm. We have always been a convention city. The Grand Hyatt, programming and the activation of Pride Park, it will attract enough critical mass to create a dynamic Convention Campus.

This is our chance to make fundamental changes to South Beach and Spring Break. Build the headquarter hotel, once and for all.

Joshua Wallack is chief operating officer of Mango’s Tropical Cafe and member of executive board of the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce and Mount Sinai Hospital Foundation.

This story was originally published May 29, 2022 at 7:28 AM.