Murray We Hardly Knew Ye
‘Gentleman’ City Attorney Dubbin, 76, Retires; End of an Era

“My dad said, ‘Why don’t you come over here and I’ll explain it to you.’” — Sam Dubbin

By Rebecca Wakefield

Murray Dubbin is not, at age 76, quite as old as the city of Miami Beach. But the city’s retiring attorney definitely hails from another era. He was around when the Art Deco district was just another development phase. More recently, Dubbin spent almost 11 years shepherding the city through some of its trickier legal permutations — from the Portofino lawsuit and sleazy opportunist Thomas Kramer to height limitations and the city’s protracted negotiations with developer Don Peebles over the city’s first black-owned hotel.  Now he’s leaving and a lot of history leaves with him.

Dubbin looks and speaks like an old country lawyer. His soft voice still has the old Myamuh twang bred into it by virtue of being born into one of Miami’s pioneer Jewish families. He favors bowties, and not particularly snappy ones. He doodles at commission meetings, occasionally drawing caricatures of speakers who drone on too long. Most of his hair has long fled the premises, and his head has settled comfortably into his neck. His hands sometimes shake a bit, but his blue eyes are as steady as ever.

He has a way of speaking that suggests a dry humor, but one carefully masked through long decades of dealing with the rampant egos of countless politicians. When I asked him recently to tell me a bit about himself, the first thing he said after a pause was, “Well, I’m a lawyer.”

Former mayor Seymour Gelber, who recruited Dubbin back in 1995, says Dubbin brought both sharp legal and political skills to the job. “You have to be a good lawyer and a great politician,” he opines. “You’ve got seven commissioners who all think they’re great lawyers even if they’re not lawyers.”

There are those who say Dubbin had passed his prime and that it was time for him to go. That may be true, but his prime was hard to top. He’s been a practicing lawyer since the ’50s. Before he was a city attorney, Dubbin spent 11 years in the Florida Legislature, from 1963 to 1974. During his time there, he chaired the committee that wrote the state’s 1968 constitution, attempted to muscle through the equal rights amendment, and briefly modernized school construction through the Murray H. Dubbin Act of 1974. He was even asked to be Ruben Askew’s running mate for governor, but declined. Dubbin also served as counsel to one of my favorite nut towns, North Bay Village, from 1984 to 2001. “It was crazy then,” he acknowledges. “It’s crazy now.”

Miami attorney Sam Dubbin, one of Murray’s four sons, recalls following his dad around Tallahassee as a teenager. One of his favorite stories has Bob Graham recounting Dubbin’s legislative prowess at a luncheon in his honor. “[Dubbin] was making a point on the floor and a junior member across the room got up to question it,” he recalls. “My dad said, ‘Why don’t you come over here and I’ll explain it to you.’”

The junior member made his way across the floor of the House. Dubbin started the vote. “By the time he got to my dad, it was passed,” his son laughs. “He said, ‘I’ll explain it to you. Don’t fuck with my bill.’”

That is where he learned to play hardball, but with a style that kept him from gaining many enemies. In 1976, Miami Beach hired him to form and counsel its first redevelopment agency, on South Pointe. The dreamers and schemers running the city at the time concocted a ludicrously ambitious plan that involved cutting 12 miles of canals, flattening just about everything but Joe’s Stone Crab and transforming the run-down neighborhood of elderly Jews into a new Venice.

Dubbin dutifully helped the city with the plan, and a $300 million bond issue to do the work. “I was their lawyer, not their policymaker,” he explains. The bond became a bitterly contested court battle, pitting activists and then State Attorney Janet Reno against Dubbin and the city all the way to the Supreme Court. “Janet philosophically felt it was a bad idea,” he remembers. “She was an economically conservative person. She fought it like the very devil.”

Ironically, two decades later, Dubbin found himself back in South Pointe, this time trying to keep the Portofino Group, the development company headed by German entrepreneur Thomas Kramer, from killing the city with lawsuits based on the changing nature of development expectations. Kramer had bought several upland parcels south of Fifth as well as legal settlements, including the 1985 settlement with South Shore Development Inc., which allowed construction on land near the Miami Beach Marina.

Then in 1995, the city worked out a different deal with Kramer that would allow him to build a massive high-rise next to South Pointe Park, in return for the city buying a piece of Kramer land next to the Miami Beach Marina to keep as open space. (That open space being the marina’s parking lot.) All this galvanized local activists to pass a Save Miami Beach referendum that requires voter approval of any zoning increase along the waterfront. Dubbin then argued that the amendment was “unconstitutional on its face and in its entirety” but it was placed on the June 3, 1997 ballot anyway. After the amendment was passed by voters, Kramer backed out of the agreement and sued. Dubbin and other lawyers hammered out a new deal with which let Kramer sell off the headache to Jorge Perez.

Clifford Schulman, the attorney who represented Portofino at the time, calls Dubbin “a gentleman adversary.” “He’s a wonderful man,” he says. “He’s smart and has a heart.”

Joel Minsker, a former law partner of Dubbin’s, and a frequent special counsel on tricky projects like the Royal Palm Crowne Plaza Hotel, says Dubbin is a gifted mediator. “Murray is a great consensus maker,” he says. “Whatever the problem is, he hones right in on it and get to the short concise solution.”

Perhaps that’s why even people who don’t get along with each other agree on Dubbin. For instance, Neisen Kasdin, former mayor of Miami Beach, calls the man “very much a Southern gentleman, very old school.” Current Mayor David Dermer chose the words “consummate gentlemen” with a “wealth of institutional knowledge” to describe Dubbin.

He bears no grudges from his days spearheading the Save Miami Beach movement. “I was battling a hostile government,” Dermer recounts. “Murray was defending the position of the commission. Then I became a commissioner. Everybody reinvented themselves after the election of ’97 and became down-zoners. Murray was consistent in his flexibility.”

Now it’s over and Dubbin is leaving. He plans to work as a mediator and possibly write a book.

Former commissioner Jose Smith will take his place in a few weeks. Smith, who calls Dubbin “the dean of municipal attorneys,” says he has a million questions for him.

Perhaps the most important is how an intelligent man can stop himself from occasionally telling the politicians that what they want to do is wrongheaded. “I do have strong opinions and think I know what’s best for the city,” Smith says. “At the end of the day, I’m the attorney and I cannot do my own thing. I’ve been cautioned by some of my former colleagues about not getting involved in politics and I won’t.”

That sounds about right to Dubbin. “From my perspective your job is to make sure the papers say what the people intended them to say, that they’re legal, and do the right thing,” he says.

Fair enough.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.