Aventura

All by Ourselves

City officials to go it alone on $5 million cultural center project

By Randy Abraham

The Aventura City Commission decided against merging a proposed 300-seat art and culture center with a new Northeast Miami-Dade library.

Instead, city officials decided Dec. 14 to build a separate, 14,000-square-foot freestanding cultural center just east of Aventura’s Community Recreation Center complex on 188th Street.

Now commissioners must decide whether to award a contract to Pierce, Goodwin, Alexander and Linville architecture and engineering firm in association with William Rawn Associates — the same architectural team they selected to design the cultural center/library almost a year ago. City officials also must decide whether to allocate $5 million in general obligation bond money for the center’s construction.

For Mayor Susan Gottlieb, the decision ends a frustrating process. “The project was being stalled by all the requirements of the county,” Gottlieb said. “It’s been two years since Hurricane Wilma, and each time we seemed to have made progress, there seemed to be another requirement. The end result is the city will have a 300-plus-seat performing arts center on a city-owned property that is more beautiful than was originally considered.”

The county’s Northeast branch library, located at 2930 Aventura Blvd., was slated for a renovation when Hurricane Wilma severely damaged the structure in October 2005. The facility was closed, and a temporary library was established in the Aventura Government Center.

In early 2006, Gottlieb suggested a joint project: The county would rebuild the library facility in conjunction with a city-operated cultural center that would share the same site. Plans called for a two-story facility, with the county operating the first-floor library and the city running the second-floor cultural center.

However, the city and county have been working since spring 2006 to ink a contract, to no avail, Soroka said. “The agreement was never finalized,” he said.

Soroka noted that developing the cultural center on city-owned property presents some advantages, such as a faster completion time using the city’s procurement process, sharing parking with the Aventura City of Excellence Charter School and community center and having a more picturesque waterfront location. A one-story building also will be less costly to build and staff, he said.

Soroka said the limited access to the city-owned site through 188th Street would not pose a problem since most of the cultural programs likely will be scheduled in the evenings.

In other business, city officials agreed to take no action on a request to sponsor a federal grant to secure funds for the reconstruction of the Point East condominium seawall and bulkhead that was damaged by Hurricane Wilma. Recently, city officials agreed to draft a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in support of the grant, on the condition that the city would not be responsible for monitoring the terms of the contract or for any aspect of the project’s completion. However, they were informed on Dec. 14 that the city would need to serve as a sponsor and take on other complex requirements.

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