Miami-Dade

Let ’Em In

Homeland Security measures hurt foreign tourism, bureau says

By Claudio Mendonca

William Talbert III, president of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, is pushing for Congress to pass the Travel Promotion Act of 2007.

Miami-Dade County tourism officials are taking steps to combat difficult security measures for foreign tourists that, they say, are a detriment to Miami-Dade’s economy.

“Miami still has a strong brand, but we are mindful about our competition, especially places such as Dubai and Panama City,” said William Talbert III, president of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, during the organization’s annual meeting Monday at Dolphin Stadium.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, international tourism to the United States has declined 17 percent, costing the country 16 million jobs, $94 billion in visitor spending and $16 billion in tax revenue. In Miami-Dade County, the hospitality industry employs nearly 102,000 people, according to the bureau.

To counteract the nation’s stringent rules and regulations on foreign visitors, the bureau wants to increase the number of international tourists, which make up 46 percent of Miami-Dade’s visitors and spend an average of $1,400 per stay.

“The entry process for international travelers into the United States is the worst in the world, 20 times worse than Canada and seven times worse than England,” Talbert said.

The bureau also plans to get more involved with the Travel Promotion Act 2007, which aims to create an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce to promote tourism to the United States. The bill already has 20 supporters in the U.S. House of Representatives and five in the Senate.

“It’s a global marketplace; we look for support to get foreign visitors so they can stay longer and spend more,” Talbert said.

Talbert and other officials said that if Miami is to remain a top global destination, the Miami Beach Convention Center has to be enhanced and modernized.

“Expanding the Miami Beach Convention Center is a necessity,” said Gene Prescott, the bureau’s incoming president and manager of the Biltmore Hotel. “It’s been 18 years since a significant improvement.”

Prescott’s predecessor, Royal Caribbean’s Maria Sastre, said that in her two-year tenure, Miami grew its summer business and overcame two difficult hurricane seasons. This summer, occupancy rates in Miami hotels increased 5.4 percent over last year and room rates rose 8.2 percent.

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Miami

Holly Hilton!

Zoning board refuses to back 16-story hotel

By Claudio Mendonca

The Miami Zoning Board ruled Monday against the construction of a 16-story hotel on Brickell Avenue, pleasing local residents who fear more high-rise development will increase traffic congestion in the area.

The hotel would sit on 50,000 square feet of land at 2660 Brickell Ave. and would house 219 units, 250 parking spots and 500 square feet of meeting space. A small, two-story office building currently stands on the site.

According to developer William Holly of Holly Real Estate, the project involves a residence-hotel that would be more affordable for guests than those now on Brickell. The property is zoned for office use, but Holly wants City Commission approval to operate it as a hotel and has already begun talks with the Hilton Hotel Corporation in anticipation of that approval. The commission convenes in December.

“It’s a quality project and has a great design,” Holly said during the zoning board meeting Monday night. “It would be the first green hotel in Miami. It has a similar concept to a hotel in Dubai. We are doing our best to make it compatible to the neighborhood.”

But his plans faced opposition from two organizations, the South Miami Avenue Homeowners Association and the Miami Roads Neighborhood Civic Association, which were concerned with the construction of large commercial buildings in the residential area.

 “The problem with this item is that they are asking for a zoning change,” said Robert McCabe, vice president of the South Miami Avenue Homeowners Association, who was pleased with the zoning board’s decision to reject the project. “If this zoning change passes, the developer will have the right to construct a building four times as large as is currently permitted.”

The whole area from Southwest 15th Road to Aviation Avenue in Coconut Grove is residential, McCabe said.

“This is too large of a building,” he added. “It is out of scale with anything nearby. It is important to protect single-family neighborhoods.”

Though the final decision lies with the Miami City Commission, McCabe doesn’t believe they will pass the 50,000-square-foot development, especially since the zoning board recommended against it.

“Hopefully the City Commission will take all into account and not approve it,” he said.

For Grace Solares, president of the Miami Roads Neighborhood Civic Association, the project “is not in harmony with adjacent establishments.”

“It affects public safety and negatively influences the area and property values,” she said. “We don’t want development of such scale within surrounding areas.”

Zoning Board Chairperson Ileana Hernandez also disapproved of the project.

“It’s the worst site to have a hotel or office building,” she said. “There is always heavy traffic in the morning and the afternoon.”

Board member Joseph Garbuzza said the intersection where Holly wants to build the 16-story hotel is one of the most dangerous in the city of Miami. “Recently I had a serious accident with my son,” he said. “It’s a bad idea to put a hotel there.”

Despite opposition from some local residents, Holly said he has the support from two other local organizations: the Brickell Area Association and the Brickell Homeowners Association.

He and his staff believe a hotel would do very well and fill a need in that area. Brickell Avenue is home to South Florida’s tallest building, the 64-story and 789-foot-high Four Seasons Towers. The height of the proposed building would blend in with other area properties, they said. “This is a very important development which would help adjacent properties.”

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Miami Beach

Certain Attorneys Prohibited

Ethics commission complaint filed against city commissioner

By Ben Torter

Commissioner Michael Gongora says representing clients on code issues does not violate a Miami Beach lobbyist ordinance.

With less than a week remaining in his re-election bid against challenger Ed Tobin, Commissioner Michael Gongora once again has to defend his ethics.

Mitch Novick, a majority owner at the Sherbrooke Apartments, 901 Collins Ave., filed a complaint Tuesday with the Miami-Dade County Commission on Ethics and Public Trust alleging Gongora abused his position as a city commissioner to benefit a client, and failed to register as a lobbyist. Kent Harrison Robbins, Novick’s attorney, prepared the 33-page complaint.

Robbins argues that Gongora used his position as commissioner, and the services of his commission aide, Diana Fontani, to help Richard Pleban, a private client whom he was representing in a Sherbrooke Apartments dispute. The suit includes as evidence multiple e-mails between Gongora and Fontani and other city officials.

In an e-mail dated May 15, from mgongora@becker-poliakoff.com, Gongora wrote, “Diana, Don’t forward this email. Please call Richard Pleban and see who handles ADA Compliance with the City of Miami Beach. Inform them our office has received a complaint that a handicapped tenant is not being given access to the handicap lift.”

At the time, Gongora was representing Pleban, who owns a unit in Sherbrooke Apartments, against the building’s association and Novick.

Gongora sent that e-mail in response to one he had received from Pleban stating that the tenant living in his apartment — a man with AIDS whose rent is subsidized by the group Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS — hadn’t “been given access to the handicap lift in the lobby.”

Fontani and Dolores Mejia, special projects administrator in the Miami Beach city manager’s office, also exchanged e-mail messages regarding Pleban’s tenant.

Mejia, in turn, contacted building official Thomas Velazquez and Vivian Guzman, director of the city’s neighborhood services department. Her e-mail was copied to Assistant City Managers Hilda Fernandez and Tim Hemstreet, City Manager Jorge Gonzalez and Fontani. The message: “Tom/Vivian, I received a complaint from Commissioner Gongora’s office relating to lack of access to an ADA lift by a resident at 901 Collins Avenue. Is there any way the city can cite or compel the owner to accommodate access?”

Robbins contends that the city began harassing Novick with unwarranted code searches after feeling pressure from Gongora.

“After the e-mail from Gongora to City Hall, [Richard] McConachie and [Andres] Villareal, top officials in the building department, went to Mitch Novick's personal apartment at 901 Collins and inspected the premises on the pretext that they had received a complaint from Pleban,” said Robbins. “What would motivate top building officials to drive to and search Novick's home at 901 Collins other than the pressure of knowing that Gongora had a special interest in this matter?”

Gongora denies any wrongdoing, insisting he was simply trying to make sure the tenant had proper ADA access.

“My law firm is not precluded from doing code compliance on Miami Beach,” Gongora said. “My law firm does code compliance before the special master still. I don’t think I did anything wrong.”

Pleban, who’s been in a years-long dispute with Novick over a set of windows that were replaced in every unit but his, said he stopped using Gongora a couple of months ago because he wasn’t getting any satisfaction and couldn’t afford Becker & Poliakoff’s fees.

“I don’t think he misused his office because, if he had, I’d have my windows,” Pleban said.

Gongora is no stranger to ethics challenges. He and his firm challenged Miami Beach’s tough ethics laws before the ethics commission earlier this year and lost. He also voted against removing a loophole in the “certain appearances prohibited” section of the city of Miami Beach’s tough anti-lobbying law, but recused himself on second reading. Lawyers must register as lobbyists before representing clients at City Hall and, under the certain appearances ordinance, elected officials or board members are not allowed to lobby the commission.

“It looks like it’s just more of this conflict of interest, which is why I decided to run,” Tobin said. “Gongora’s using his city authority to use leverage and make his law firm more money.”

Now it’s up to the ethics commission to decide who’s right. But with so little time, a ruling will not be known until after the election. Gongora believes that was his accusers’ intention.

“This is complete nonsense,” Gongora said. “This is a political strategy on the part of my opponent, and a last ditch effort to turn voters against me, and I think it will backfire.”

Robbins insists that the timing is merely coincidental. “It took the building department 20-some days and 15 phone calls to get the public records,” he said. “It wasn’t last minute.” Gongora’s name also was not mentioned in the public records request, which was meant to find out why Novick was getting so many code searches. “We never imagined Gongora was involved. It’s so clearly illegal,” Robbins said.

Comments? E-mail ben@miamisunpost.com.

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Joe Youth Center

Commissioners discuss renaming North Beach facility after activist

By William Alton

The North Shore Park and Youth Center might be named after the activist Joe Fontana and his wife Flora — or parts of it anyway

The Miami Beach Neighborhoods and Community Affairs Committee took the first step Tuesday in renaming the North Shore Park and Youth Center the Joe and Flora Fontana Youth Center.

But the drawn-out process of renaming a public facility calls for three separate votes of approval: first the neighborhoods committee, then a 5/7 vote from the full Miami Beach City Commission and, finally, a ballot referendum.

The youth center, which opened at 701 72nd St. in 2005, was a project that Joe Fontana spearheaded in 1995. He chaired the youth center’s oversight committee and, when city funds ran short, Fontana helped raise money from private sources.

Fontana, who died Sept. 3 at the age of 82, was politically active in Miami Beach since retiring from New York in the 1980s. He ran for city commissioner several times from 1991 to 2005, most recently in 2005. He and his wife Flora, who died eight years ago, helped found the Beach Republican Club. More recently, he was president of the Miami Beach Condominium and Homeowners Alliance and actively campaigned for Commissioner Michael Gongora’s re-election.

In his honor, Gongora presented Fontana’s sister, Lee Bobrow, a proclamation naming Fontana an “honorary commissioner.” Gongora also asked that the neighborhoods committee — consisting of himself and Commissioners Matti Bower, Richard Steinberg and Jerry Libbin — consider renaming the youth center after Fontana and his wife.

Miami Beach’s public facility renaming regulations stipulate that if a name is going to appear on a facility’s exterior, it must go through the three steps of approval. However, if the city were to name an interior component of the building (the basketball court or auditorium, for example), the City Commission can simply vote on it without a subsequent referendum.

Commissioner Steinberg feared that voters may not know how much effort Fontana put into the youth center’s development.

“This was his passionate project and I might say that it was his dream that his name could live on with it,” Gongora said.

The committee unanimously agreed to forward the renaming request to the City Commission in January to give citizens time to understand the relationship between Fontana and the youth center. The commission would also have the choice to name only interior components of the center after the Fontanas.

The committee also discussed building a new waterfront park on a public lot on North Bay Road and 23rd Street following a petition request by the lower North Bay Road Neighborhood Association.

The lot — 102 by 208 feet — has been vacant for several years and its upkeep has been largely ignored, causing one resident to call it “disgusting.” Resident Mark Balzli has been leading the petition drive to create the kids’ park, with playground equipment, benches and landscaping. Balzli gathered more than the required 64 signatures, including that of former Miami Heat center Rony Seikaly.

Still, funding could be a major problem. The project is estimated to cost around $250,000, including sewage, electricity and water support expenses.

 “I don’t know where the funds would be coming from,” Steinberg said. “We already have a lot of capital projects and I don’t want to give false hope to the community with the promise of a new park.”
The committee agreed to revisit the issue at a later date.

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