No matter whose side you stood on during the Miami Beach elections, everyone agreed that the controversial redevelopment plans for the Convention Center and area surrounding it — including the potential for using other nearby public properties — was a driving force that swayed many of the voters against the incumbents, all of whom lost.
After all, there was a referendum on the ballot that voters passed, giving themselves the last say: Any redevelopment must be approved by by 60 percent of the electorate.
But convention center interests didn’t go away with former Mayor Matti Bower and Commissioners Michael Gongora and Jorge Exposito, dear readers. Their power just shifted from one side to the other.
The mayor and newly-elected commissioners will get an update on the convention center redevelopment process at today’s meeting, the first for the four neophytes on the dais. I don’t know what they’re going to be told. Ladra called Assistant City Manager Maria Hernandez, who I was told time and time again was the go-to person on the convention center, to ask. But she got an email in return from the city’s communications office with this statement from the city manager’s office:
“The City of Miami Beach remains committed to building a first-class convention center so as to enable us to retain shows like Art Basel and attract new shows like Maison&Objet. Miami Beach is a world-class destination and we will make sure that our convention infrastructure keeps pace. The newly elected leadership shares that vision and will now guide the process in the months ahead.”
Not exactly what I had in mind. So don’t blame me if I don’t get this exactly right. Neither the city manager nor any of his staff is apparently allowed to call me back. Sources say the update is just a status report to bring the newbies up to speed with all the issues. They each got a binder with the information as well, I was told. “But there was nothing new.”
Basically, without the benefit of more information with the city manager’s office, here goes my limited account, according to my sources and some research, of what the process may look like in the months ahead.
The plan for a super modern, state-of-the-art convention center presented by the winning team — shown in these renditions provided by South Beach ACE to the media — included a hotel and part of the public property, and a $600-million public price tag, which must now be approved by 60 percent of the voters. And it likely won’t.
Newly elected Mayor Philip Levine — who made it clear at the swearing in that the redevelopment of the convention center was a priority and promised an agenda item for January — campaigned saying that there should not be a hotel component.
“We may not need something so massive, something so big. But we all agree this convention center must be redeveloped,” Levine said at his swearing in.
Vice Mayor Deede Weithorn told Ladra that many conventions require a hotel to be part of the center’s facilities and that she thinks a version that is too scaled down would be a waste of city resources and time.
And South Beach Ace, which won the project in a competitive process that some have questioned, may not want to build it without a hotel. They can back out and, maybe, sue. But the city’s liabilities are limited and the firm may already have made a significant enough investment that they don’t want back out.
Here’s the clincher: The new regime at the city has no interest in letting this group get this hefty piece of ka-ching business. Remember, three of the four new votes were helped ushered into office by Commissioner Jonah Wolfson and his PAC — which is funded, in part, by Fontainebleau Miami Beach interests, who did not get the bid approved by the prior commission and were so upset about the process, they quit the hotel association over it.
In fact, while the goons behind Levine’s campaigned accused Gongora of trying to hide ties to a Nevada non-profit that funneled funds into a PAC to attack him, Team Levine apparently was doing the same thing.
Campaign records show that Wolfson’s Let Miami Beach Decide PAC got a $60,000 gift from a ghost non-profit that nobody has ever heard of and that was created by the same registered agent as the PAC, Carlos Trueba.
Wolfson’s PAC was formed in April to fight the convention center deal. But now that it was thrown out by a court, Wolfson is free to use that money in other ways and everyone knows he was half the brain behind Levine’s campaign (the other half being his campaign consultant, David Custin).
The non-profit Miami Beach Residents for Responsible Government was formed a month later in May by a flight attendant, a poll working Democratic Party activist and a property manager. There have been no fundraisers that anyone knows of. And everyone in the political business knows — and others can imagine — how difficult it is to raise $60,000 in just over three months.
One might be led to suspect that these three people are faces found to front some third party funnel for funds to Levine’s campaign, vis-a-vis Wolfson. Anywhere else in the business world, this kind of transaction could be called money laundering.
To wit, Sam Dorr, the alleged chairman of the organization according to Florida Division of Corporation records, says there have been no board meetings that he knows of and that he doesn’t know anything about the organization. He basically admitted to being a frontman.
“I wouldn’t say I’m involved. I was asked to be on the board. It paid a little bit of money and I needed the money,” Dorr told Ladra. “I was not involved in the day to day at all.”
At first, Dorr could not remember who had put him up to this. But then he called me back and told me it was Juan Cuba, of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. Cuba told me all he did was suggest some staffers for another consultant, Ben Pollara, who I hear has worked with former State Rep. Marcelo Llorente and Alex Heckler, lobbyists for the Fountainblue folks to create more awareness of the convention center redevelopment issue (when there was still a chance it would get on the ballot).
When Ladra called him about it during the elections, Pollara did not recall the details and did not want to discuss it.
And many of these folks are also tied to Chris Korge, a heavy Democratic Party fundraising powerhouse who became the concession king at Miami International Airport during the administration of former Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas.
Ladra just happened to see Korge at the swearing in for Levine and his slate-minus-one earlier this month, chatting it up with City Manager Jimmy Morales (I snapped the photo above).
He told me that he was just an old friend of Levine’s.
But how much you want to bet that he would love to get the concessions contract at a new convention center?
Miami Beach Convention Center still at play in City Hall added by Ladra on
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