Rezoning the News
Daily’s Future as Civic Institution Partly Tied to Land Deals of Corporate Parent Knight Rid…, er, McClatchy Company

This is just so much public relations hooha in the company’s ongoing shell game.

By Rebecca Wakefield

I shouldn’t keep harping on basketball, but I can’t help it. This series has been incredible. Props go out to the lithesome gold-diggers at the Forge (you know who you are) who did their hometown proud last week by keeping several members of the Dallas Mavericks, ah, occupied, well into the night before a critical game 4. Angered at the players’ “vacation mentality,” aka limp performance, last Thursday, nearly apoplectic coach Avery Johnson subsequently banished them to Fort Lauderdale. The Heat’s championship is due to the dissipating forces of South Beach at least as much as Dwyane Wade’s bank shot.

Back to the regularly scheduled column:

Blue-shirted hordes against yet another massive high-rise in downtown Miami are expected to pack City Hall today (June 22) unless the application is deferred pending the replacement of Commissioner Johnny Winton. At issue is the short-term future of development collaborations between our local skyscraper hustlers and imports from, say, New York, South America, Israel or Europe. The boom tide has ebbed.

The official reason for residents to protest is a couple of zoning changes requested by Citisquare Group, a company controlled by Terra Group developer Pedro Martin. Martin’s other listed investors include parking lot magnate Hank Sopher, NYC developers Michael Fuchs and Aby Rosen, Sabado Gigante scion Patricio Kreutzberger, and mega-developer Shaya Boymelgreen, who otherwise seems to be shedding downtown Miami property as quickly as possible.

The changes are part of plans for a mixed-use retail and residential project that would include a kind of mall and three or four condos arranged prettily between the Performing Arts Center and Biscayne Bay. The basic reasons why residents of the Venetian Islands and other surrounding neighborhoods oppose the project include the usual concerns of too much traffic on inadequate roads, and the blocking off of the last of the waterfront by an enormous wall of glass and steel. That 64-story condo would be built on a bayfront parking lot between the Herald building and 15th Street.

But the issue that has garnered the most acrimony is a proposed zoning change that would allow condos to be built where currently the bulky Miami Herald edifice squats along Biscayne Bay, even though Citisquare Group does not own the land. Knight Ridder executive Larry Marbert signed a little piece of paper indicating that the company supported Citisquare’s application, even though Herald and Knight Ridder execs keep saying the office building isn’t going anywhere.

This is just so much public relations hooha in the company’s ongoing shell game. They already agreed to sell about 10 acres worth of property to Terra Group for $190 million, a deal that appears to be contingent to some degree on the company going along with the rezoning. It does make me wonder how Greenberg Traurig attorneys can ethically represent both parties considering the stated divergence of their clients’ plans for One Herald Plaza.

Other relevant questions, some of them brought out by the city’s zoning board when it rejected Citisquare’s bid in May, include (1) why would the city want to make such a big change before the Miami 21 planning effort is complete? (2) why would the city rezone property that is currently in transition from Knight Ridder to McClatchy Company, which bought the newspaper company and its holdings earlier this year?

But really, the big question was not one that could be answered by the zoning board, or any city official. It is the question of how the Herald is viewed by the community it serves. Most people don’t differentiate between the Miami Herald, the watchdog and civic bastion, and the Miami Herald, the cutthroat advertising business and property owner. “I find it odd that the Miami Herald, who is supposed to be the voice of this community, has lost its voice when it comes to this application and hasn’t spoken clearly,” complained zoning board member Joseph Ganguzza.

The painfully disingenuous responses of Herald management to its reporters who do cover the story illustrate the point. However, score one for the ink-stained wretches this past week. Thanks to the sleuthing of three of the paper’s best reporters (the delightfully curmudgeonly Larry Lebowitz, earnest Matt Haggman and proficient Andres Viglucci) — the shady past of Citisquare pusher Mark Siffin (a partner on the retail side of things) was revealed. The story Siffin told about how he made his money is ludicrous on its face, but that’s the sort of visionary Miami has always attracted. We’ve got a long history of former (alleged) drug traffickers transitioning into real estate. Always room for one more.

I sat with a half-dozen residents, many of them attorneys experienced in government, who explained to me various ways in which this entire deal stinks. One very relevant complaint they raised was that the city doesn’t appear to have a good system in place for properly notarizing documents submitted after an initial application is in. Loretta Alkalay, a Plaza Venetia resident and an attorney, told me she discovered the city’s Board of Hearings allows signed, dated and notarized applications to be amended by substituting pages — without re-dating and signing the documents or otherwise indicating that the documents have been amended.

This means a developer could just about file his grocery list, then come back later and insert the right documents. Speculator heaven. “You’re backdating the documents,” Alkalay says. “How does the public know what’s changed? It’s shockingly unfair. Imagine you go in and think the application is frozen in time, but you have no idea what the changes are and can’t trace the changes.”

In general, if Miami is going to be a grown-up city with walkable urban neighborhoods, it will eventually need to concentrate the bulk of its density in downtown and along the waterfront. That is probably why the city’s planning department recommended approval, even if the zoning and planning boards did not.

What is not inevitable is how it all happens and who benefits. I’m encouraged that some of the residents opposed to this particular project have decided to form the Miami Shoreline Alliance, a group that will tackle the larger issue of protecting our county’s biggest visual asset.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.