So there is finally a doable plan to build a stadium and
bring a David Beckham‘s dream Major League Soccer team to Miami and everyone can celebrate.
Well, almost everyone.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez aka “King Petty” isn’t as excited as the rest of us. In fact, he’s pissed off.
You might be, too, if after nearly two years of false starts — of smiling and batting his eyes at Beckham, of laughing at his weird British jokes, of coming up with locations that just aren’t suitable and getting people riled up, comparing any deal to the Miami Marlins giveaway — now Gimenez has to stand on the sideline and watch someone
else make the goal.
Read related story: Go west, Beckham — Strike 2 for waterfront soccer stadium
Worse: that someone else is none other than his nemesis, Miami-Dade School Board Member and mayoral candidate Raquel Regalado.
See? Beckham’s latest deal is atraves del school board, which would serve as landlord once it buys the property where the soccer stadium would be next to Marlins Park, as Superintendent Alberto Carvalho proposed last week.
The property is owned by the city of Miami, where Raquel’s dad Tomas Regalado is mayor, wants to take the plan to voters in March, on the same ballot as the presidential primary. That provides voters with a chance to, finally, make the decision on that property and, maybe, turn the bad juju around. The school board needs to get it finalized by November and the county, which also owns a small parcel within the proposed stadium campus, would have to approve it by December to get it onto March’s ballot.
Gee. What a concept! Get it to voters? And on a real election day? Not a made-up special election day planned strategically when nobody is going to vote? Yep, you can tell the county is no longer running the show. And thank goodness. Maybe
it will actually happen now.
Major League Soccer requires any franchise to have an educational component, so this makes sense. And it makes sense for the school board, too, which spends somewhere around $1 million a year renting venues for football games and concerts and graduation ceremonies, because now they will have their own venue for all that.
In fact, what didn’t make any sense was the fact that Gimenez never called Carvalho to include him. Maybe King Petty is afraid of Carvalho, too, even though we all know The Sup isn’t running for mayor after all. But, then again, Gimenez never called Mayor Regalado when he was giving away city of Miami property at the Port.
For a guy who is not so inclusive, he sure gets sensitive when he’s not in the loop.
“El no resiste no ser protagonista,” Regalado has said over and over again on radio and TV interviews. Translation: Gimenez can’t stand not being the star.
Her dad suggested, live on radio, that the other mayor could stand in front with
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