Parking Lot Bingo 

People have known for a long time that for the Carnival Performing Arts Center to succeed, adequate parking would have to be created. Many different ideas were floated in the last decade, but nothing came of them until recently, when the PAC finally cobbled together a temporary fix with the Miami-Dade County school district, the Omni and the Miami Parking Authority. In the longer term, PAC officials hope new parking facilities will be built on vacant land nearby.

For several years, the school district has kept the PAC in mind as it considered various proposals for a bit of land it owns on the corner of 14th Street and NE Second Avenue. Currently, the land is just a parking lot for employees who troop to the nearby School Board building each day.

But clearly it could be so much more. It could, for instance, be the cornerstone of an ambitious mixed-use development that would include an underground parking garage capable of providing the PAC with hundreds of spaces. It could be a wedge in an internecine squabble between competing developers, or the impetus for a lawsuit that may be filed against the School Board. It could even be the inspiration for an enterprising expansion of the School Board into the wonderful, fraught world of affordable housing.

This little piece of land is all these things and the linchpin is School Board member Evelyn Greer.

In 2003, the district under then-Superintendent Merrett Stierheim began seriously thinking about letting a parking garage be built on the property, likely in conjunction with parking magnate Hank Sopher, who owned an adjacent lot. But all the meetings and proposals came to naught when Sopher sold his piece to Leviev-Boymelgreen Developers.

Leviev-Boymelgreen was then in a heady expansionist mode. The Israel-New York company strutted into Miami in 2004 and bought $130 million worth of properties, largely from Sopher. The plan involved building more than a billion dollars worth of new development on the real estate.

“I was naturally drawn to things I’m familiar with. I’m not going to go in there and give advice on what book to buy for the third grade.” — School Board member Evelyn Greer

The company assembled most of the property it needed for one large project on a couple of blocks west of the PAC, and drew up a huge development plan somewhat similar to Pedro Martin’s City Square deal on old Miami Herald parking lots to the east. “It’s a retail and entertainment complex with office and apartment components and a hotel,” said Andrew Hellinger, head of Leviev-Boymelgreen’s Miami operations. “We have very ambitious plans.”

Those plans include an underground parking garage that could be used by PAC patrons. But to make it work, the company had to control more property than it owned. One key piece was the school district land. Armed with parking promises for the PAC, the company convinced the district to issue a request for proposals for the sale of its lot, which it did in August 2005. Leviev-Boymelgreen won the bid and proposed to buy the land for $8 million, plus provide 750 parking spaces for district staff during the day, free of charge, for 10 years, while also promising to provide about 1,000 spaces to the PAC, and a few other conditions.

The district began negotiations. From the beginning, board member Evelyn Greer, who also is a member of the Performing Arts Center Trust Board of Directors, was heavily involved. I reviewed hundreds of pages of documents tracking months of negotiations and found her fingerprints everywhere.

For instance, an e-mail she sent on February 23 from her private business account to district staff handling the negotiations included her line-by-line revision of the proposed contract. “Paragraph 14D. This is not acceptable. We agreed that the back end delay penalty would be tolled for the number of months that we received front end penalties.… We did not discuss this when I was in the room, so I would reject this.”

On February 24, Greer sent an e-mail to Patricia Baloyra, an attorney representing Leviev-Boymelgreen. “Patty, I spoke with Rose again after we spoke. This is making everyone very nervous about your intentions, as this is such a small issue in the context of the deal. I am going to give it one last try; if it doesn’t work, I don’t know what to do but we will not proceed without security.”

It’s clear from numerous e-mails and sources close to the deal that Greer was intimately involved in negotiating this contract and staff was reporting to her. There are precedents for such things; for instance, if the School Board votes to allow a member, usually the chairman, to negotiate an agreement with another governmental entity on its behalf. But for a member to take it upon herself to act like the board’s attorney is not the appropriate role of an elected policymaker. I asked actual School Board attorney JulieAnn Rico Allison about this and her response, pleasant but nervous, was, “I’m not going to comment on that one.”

I also asked Greer to explain her reasoning. Greer said her primary interest was to get a deal moving so the board could evaluate all its property downtown and consider more efficient and lucrative use of it. As a real estate lawyer and developer, she felt her expertise would be helpful. “Actually it’s not that unusual,” she said. “In the areas where [board members] have expertise, staff often consult them. I was naturally drawn to things I’m familiar with. I’m not going to go in there and give advice on what book to buy for the third grade.”

Greer offered her opinion on a few matters, but an outside attorney handled the bulk of it. “I don’t think I crossed that line,” she added. “I didn’t know any of the parties. I’m not involved, never represented them, didn’t know the lawyers. I was interested in could this be a way to unleash money for affordable housing [for teachers]?”

Plot Twist

The deal moved forward until March 9, when attorney Hugo Arza suddenly popped up at the School Board offices, claiming his client, Mark Siffin of Maefield Development (which is a partner in the retail component of Citisquare Group’s plans), was negotiating with Leviev-Boymelgreen to buy some of its properties, including the district’s parking lot.

Internal memos and a letter from Arza illustrate his claim that the two companies had been discussing figures way higher than $8 million for the parking lot. More like $25 million. Arza also claimed, according to documents, that Leviev-Boymelgreen didn’t control all the properties it had said it did in the bid and wouldn’t be able to complete its project with the parking without some land that Maefield controlled. Arza’s concern was whether the sold lot could be flipped to Maefield.

Arza also provided e-mails between power real estate broker Edie Laquer and Siffin, as well as e-mails between Laquer and Shaya Boymelgreen. The e-mails indicate that Laquer was trying to broker the sale of the properties concurrent with closing on the Miami Herald parking lots or by January 2007. The amount is blacked out, but there is an offer and a counteroffer. There’s also a reference to somehow using eminent domain to acquire the property of a pesky landowner who didn’t want to sell. Leviev-Boymelgreen attorneys sent a threatening letter to Arza accusing him of lying and telling him to shut up.

Sources close to Siffin, Boymelgreen and the school district indicate this plot twist occurred because Siffin found out about Boymelgreen’s plans through Laquer, then put contracts on a couple of the properties his competitor needed in an attempt to, in one source’s opinion, “worm his way in” to a bigger deal. A counter opinion is that a former Boymelgreen rep tried to strong-arm the pesky landowner into giving away her land, and she went with Siffin’s offer instead. Neither Arza nor Laquer returned calls for comment.

Whatever happened, Arza’s allegations stalled the negotiations, piqued the interest of a couple of School Board members, and caused the district to insert a “no-flip” provision in the contract. Still, on March 17, board attorney Rico Allison sent a memo to Superintendent Rudy Crew advising that the deal was done. He in turn advised the board members. Leviev-Boymelgreen sent the district a $200,000 deposit.

Then the whole thing fell apart over issues having to do with performance guarantees for the parking garage and a letter of credit or other collateral. On March 24, Rico Allison sent the money back to Leviev-Boymelgreen with a letter stating the two parties had come to an impasse. “It’s a dead deal,” Rico Allison confirmed.

Leviev-Boymelgreen’s Andrew Hellinger begs to differ. “We won the RFP and we intend to move forward,” he said. “We have a signed contract.” Hellinger declined to say more.

I would not be surprised if the company files a lawsuit because based on its plans, the School Board land is critical. In May, the Daily Business Review ran a story that depicted Leviev-Boymelgreen as a company that had bitten off too much and found itself with a mouthful of real estate mush. Its operations in Florida were, according to the story, plagued by financial and management problems. The Herald also wrote about the company divesting itself of some of its local properties. Given that, losing this contract could be the deal-killer for the company’s dreams in Miami in general.

Parking for Housing

As the Boymelgreen deal was falling apart, Greer’s considerable energy shifted in another direction – to affordable housing. In April, she created an affordable housing task force at the School Board, for the purpose of pushing the idea of selling off surplus district property and using some of the money for a trust fund to help teachers buy homes, or even possibly using district land as “host sites for teacher workforce housing.”

At roughly the same time, a bill was set in motion in Tallahassee to allow school districts to provide affordable housing to their employees and to create a Community Workforce Housing Pilot Program. Filed by Jacksonville-area Rep. Don Davis, it was co-sponsored by a number of South Florida legislators, including Carlos Lopez-Cantera, whose father’s company, Pan American Companies, recently registered to lobby the School Board. The bill passed and became effective July 1.

The members of Greer’s task force included a couple of board members, plus a teacher’s union rep, district staff and Alicia Cervera Lamadrid, president of Related Cervera Realty Services, which markets a lot of the Related Group’s condo projects. The first meeting was June 20.

Greer’s idea was to piggyback on the county’s affordable housing loan program. If a teacher qualified for, say, a $50,000 loan through the county, then the district would throw in another $25,000, as long as the teacher remained with the district. “The golden handcuff, to use the corporate term,” explained district Chief Financial Officer Martin Berkowitz.

At a meeting July 10, Berkowitz (who has since resigned his position) ran through a scenario of what this would look like, assuming the district put about $20 million toward this lending trust. Using primarily the interest income, Berkowitz figured the district would be able to fund about 500 $25,000 loans over 10 years.

Scott Rosenbaum, a housing activist who had attended the June meeting, questioned the wisdom of selling land in a down market to fund a loan program that would decrease in value as building costs rise. “Just as a basic citizen looking at basic numbers, their math makes no sense,” he said. “Even if it raised $100 million, if you got rid of all your land, you have to buy land at some point.”

At any rate, School Board Chairman Gus Barrera made two good points about Greer’s idea. First, he thought the program should be open to all district employees, not just teachers. Second, he questioned whether the district should also consider rental subsidies, since not all employees could afford a home even with the assistance.

Two days later, Greer brought a proposal to the School Board to hire a consultant to evaluate the district’s properties and its future needs to house administration. She estimated that the district could get $100 million for the 10 acres of land under and around the board’s downtown building. Greer’s colleagues, clearly uncomfortable with the rapid pace, decided to workshop it, which is one popular way to kill an idea.

Now, after the House of Lies bust of the county’s shameful housing program by Miami Herald reporter Debbie Cenziper, the county’s affordable housing efforts are in shambles, the county manager has marching orders to root out the festering evil, and commissioners are running for cover. Juan Garcia, a housing agency employee invited to the June meeting by Greer, was one of several people fired this week.

It is still a good idea for local governments to attempt to mitigate the housing crisis, but now innovative ideas will be met with greater cynicism and fear than they were a few weeks ago. That will be a problem for leaders who, by the very nature of their success in this small town, will necessarily have conflicts of interest.

For instance, several people pointed out to me that Evelyn Greer has close ties to the affordable housing industry through her husband and son. Husband Bruce Greer started affordable housing development company The Carlisle Group in 1998 along with current CEO Lloyd Boggio and Luis Gonzalez, now president and CEO of CenTrust Development Group and, incidentally, Commissioner Rebeca Sosa’s appointment to the county’s Housing Finance Authority.

Son Matthew Greer is Carlisle’s current chief operating officer. The younger Greer also registered a company called Miami Gardens Downtown Development Group this past May. Miami Gardens elections have attracted quite a bit of interest from affordable housing developers who have contributed to various campaigns, and more than one elected official in that city has ties to the industry. Evelyn Greer is a big supporter of Mayor Shirley Gibson.

Is any of this illegal? Nope. Should it have been disclosed? Well, yeah. Greer says she became interested in affordable housing years ago, and more so after serving two years on the county’s Affordable Housing Advisory Board. She says the school district should not be in the business of building housing, just in finding ways to keep teachers in the county.

“I don’t have anything to hide here,” she said. “I have absolutely nothing personal in any of this and neither does my husband or any of my family. My real estate business is commercial. My son is COO of an affordable rental housing company. They have nothing to do with for-sale housing. I’m not interested in being in the housing business. I just think we could do what the county does, provide housing assistance.”

I hope that is true. Greer is a smart, wealthy woman with a park named after her in Pinecrest, where she was founding mayor. A truly well thought out and innovative program to help teachers, bus drivers, custodians and other employees afford the cost of living in Miami-Dade County would be an even better legacy for her and the rest of the board.

A slipshod operation covering for yet another diversion of public money to real estate developers would be business as usual – and a shame.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.