Fisher Island fuel depot developer blames Miami-Dade for fiasco

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The audacity.

That may be the most remarkable thing about HRP Group CEO Roberto Perez‘s recent Miami Herald op-ed defending his company’s Fisher Island fuel depot project.

Not the eloquent tribute to capitalism. Not the lecture on the Constitution. Not even the sermon on property rights.

The audacity.

Perez would have Miami-Dade residents believe his company is merely the innocent victim of an overreaching government that suddenly woke up one morning and decided to confiscate private property because somebody at County Hall had a bad day.

If only the story were that simple.

Let’s begin with the one thing Perez gets exactly right.

Miami-Dade government failed. Spectacularly.

Read related: Miami-Dade’s $400 million ‘oops’ — Fisher Island fuel depot fight explodes

The county knew for years that the Port of Miami depended on a privately owned fuel depot. It had opportunities to buy it. It had opportunities to develop alternatives. It had opportunities to plan.

And it didn’t do anything.

Ladra has said exactly that from the very beginning.

But was it really government incompetence when nobody ever dreamed someone would try to turn that contaminated land into luxury condos? I mean, the property had been bought and sold several times before and always leased back to PortMiami as the fuel depot for passenger and cargo ships.

And even if was incompetence, that doesn’t automatically transform HRP into the white knight riding in to save the day. Quite the opposite. They look like opportunists looking to feast on the carcasss of decades of government mismanagement or neglect.

Nobody is accusing HRP of creating this mess. But it’s fair to ask whether the company saw Miami-Dade’s biggest planning blunder in decades and thought, ‘Jackpot.’ If the county left the vault door open, HRP walked in carrying shopping bags.

Perez portrays his company as courageous entrepreneurs who simply followed the American dream: identify opportunity, invest capital and create value. That’s one way to describe buying the only marine fuel terminal serving one of the world’s busiest cruise ports with plans to replace it with luxury condominiums.

Another way would be this: You knowingly purchased a piece of infrastructure that everyone understood was strategically important to the public. You probably did this knowing that you were going to flip it for a wild 200%+ profit at the expense of the public taxpayer because the county couldn’t afford to let it become a new luxury high-rise.

This wasn’t an abandoned warehouse. It wasn’t a vacant shopping center. It wasn’t some forgotten industrial parcel nobody cared about.

It was the fuel depot that keeps PortMiami moving.

Surely HRP’s army of lawyers, engineers, consultants and investment partners understood that. Or are we supposed to believe one of the country’s premier redevelopment firms somehow missed that tiny detail during due diligence?

Read related: Fisher Island fuel depot flipping fiasco smells like a long con on Miami-Dade

“We’re just innocent entrepreneurs,” Perez wants us to believe. Really? HRP isn’t some mom-and-pop outfit that stumbled onto an old gas station. Perez spends half his op-ed bragging that HRP specializes in redeveloping complex industrial sites. If anyone understood the significance of a fuel terminal serving PortMiami, it would be HRP. He boasts about seeing opportunity “where others see complexity.”

Well, congratulations. The complexity has arrived.

“We have invested years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars of capital to unlock one of the most significant residential development opportunities on the East Coast, expected to generate billions of dollars in economic activity and create extraordinary value for Miami-Dade. This is our plan for this property; it has not changed,” Perez wrote in his op-ed.

Except he forgot the part where they bought the land for an inflated $180 price and offered to sell it back to the county for whopping $400 million.

That sounds more like it was expected to generate millions of economic activity and create extraordinary value for him and his investors.

Perez also argues the county should have built another fuel facility somewhere else. Maybe.

But that’s a separate argument from pretending HRP had no idea this property would become the center of an enormous public policy battle. He knew exactly what he was doing.

You don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring one of the most strategically sensitive properties in South Florida without recognizing there’s risk. Sometimes enormous risk. Developers price risk into deals every day.

That’s capitalism, too.

Perez also warns that eminent domain should never become a remedy for government planning failures. That a fair principle.

But here’s another one: Private investors don’t get to privatize the upside while socializing the consequences.

Read related: The Fisher Island fuel depot long con may be over; now comes the bill

When you buy infrastructure that serves a vital public function and announce plans to eliminate that function, don’t act shocked when government decides the public interest suddenly matters more than your wallet.

The irony is impossible to ignore.

Perez criticizes county officials for lacking foresight. Many Miami-Dade residents would agree.

Then, in the next breath, he asks taxpayers to sympathize with a developer who invested hundreds of millions of dollars in property whose redevelopment depended on the government simply accepting the loss of the region’s primary marine fuel terminal. Let’s not even get started on the fact that at least half the property is under a covenant that would forever keep it a fuel depot unless a super majority of commissioners decided, nah, we don’t need it anymore.

That, too, was a gamble. Maybe a very expensive one. And now that gamble has collided with reality.

Let’s also dispense with the suggestion that criticizing this project somehow amounts to opposing capitalism.

Capitalism is not a guarantee that every investment succeeds exactly as envisioned. It’s a system in which investors reap rewards when they’re right— and absorb losses when they’re wrong. It’s important to realize both things are necessary.

Government shouldn’t abuse eminent domain. That’s true. Neither should developers wrap themselves in the American flag every time a project encounters resistance.

The Constitution protects private property. It also permits eminent domain for a public purpose, subject to legal standards and just compensation.

That’s not socialism. That’s also part of the Constitution.

Read related: Daniella Levine Cava goes eminent domain on Fisher Island fuel farm deal

Ultimately, this entire fiasco comes down to one undeniable truth.

Miami-Dade County failed to plan. HRP decided to bet that failure wouldn’t matter. Now both sides want taxpayers to believe the other one owns all the blame. Roberto Perez — who joined with local builders Jorge Pérez of Related and Russell Galbut (where are their op-ed excuses?) — wants to make this about developers versus government.

Sorry. Pero no.

This mess has plenty of blame to go around.

And if there’s one lesson to be learned from the Fisher Island fuel depot saga, it’s this: Critical infrastructure shouldn’t become an afterthought.

Not for government.

Or for the people hoping to replace it with waterfront luxury towers.

Perez says this fight is about the American Dream.

No, Roberto. This fight is about whether taxpayers should applaud because a sophisticated investment firm identified a government’s spectacular planning failure and decided to monetize it.

That’s not the American Dream. That’s finding a leak in the roof, buying the house anyway, and then acting offended when it starts raining.

Miami-Dade deserves criticism for creating this mess or, at the very least, allowing it to happen.

HRP deserves no medal for deciding to profit from it.

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