Airport City is dead, but firm gets $65 mil consolation prize

The $65 million “change order” on Wednesday’s transportation committee agenda is really a consolation prize for Odebrecht USA, who has been working with the Miami-Dade Aviation Department for more than six years on the development of Airport City — which is now never going to happen.

That’s right. Airport City isn’t stalled. It’s dead. It’s been dead since this summer, basically on life support. But they’re pulling the plug.

And, like flowers laid on a grave, the county is laying 65 million bucks on Odebrecht — so we don’t get sued.

Oh, that’s not what they are going to say at the meeting today, where the committee will likely approve the “change order” for what really amounts to $65 million worth of brand new work at the American Airlines terminal — including the repair of issues that are code violations and possible safety hazards. No, our commissioners on this committee will say that this emergency item — because everything is an emergency in Miami-Dade — has to be addressed right away, of course, and that Odebrecht is already at Miami International Airport anyway for the North Terminal project that was recently completed and that it is cheaper and easier to just have them handle it rather than bid the work out.

But this “change order” can also be characterized as part of an unofficial settlement to the Airport City plug being pulled, according to two sources with knowledge of the negotiations. It’s an “add-on” to the agenda — which means it wasn’t there on the draft but turned up suddenly — that calls for the waiver of the competitive bid process.

The other part is $3.5 million that the county is willing to pay Odebrecht for their architectural designs and business plan relating to the hotel component of their ambitious, now-scrapped plan to build a $512-million mini downtown at MIA.

This total $68.5 million is supposed to make Odebrecht back off the lawsuit they threatened in July because the county was dragging their feet on Airport City — a luxury or convention center-class hotel with restaurants and retail shops around it, and a gas station and pet kennel nearby (should they have called it Airport Mall?) — after the company had already spent about $11 million developing the project since winning the bid in 2010.

Last year, MDAD Director Emilio Gonzalez, who inherited the project, cut the footprint down to about a third after he determined that Airport City would eat into space MIA needs for future growth of the actual airport part of the airport.

But you could see the writing on the wall back then, couldn’t you? Our mayor and commission just lost the love for Airport City after it got embroiled in all the conflict about the parent company’s business in Cuba. Even though a court ruling protects the firm from being rejected for that reason, their Cuban connection is precisely why Commissioner Esteban “Stevie Wonder” Bovo — who should be a happy guy at this meeting — wanted to toss Odebrecht on their butts in February.

His resolution to throw out the bid and start the process again died in a tie on the dais, in part because Commissioner Dennis Moss, who chairs the transportation committee, threw a hissy fit about how any times the procurement department has hit the do-over button.

But the project still never moved forward. And that is because the will just wasn’t there anymore.

Even Moss, who has always been Airport City’s biggest ally because of the jobs he said it would bring, is accepting this, Ladra is told.

They just needed to wait for the right consolation prize to suddenly present itself so they could lay their flowers when they pulled the plug.

Airport City, Miami International Airport

Airport City is dead, but firm gets $65 mil consolation prize added by Ladra on November 12, 2014
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