Ho, Ho, Ho!

Miami Mayor About Town Manny Diaz may be too busy to return the calls of reporters but he sure has been making the rounds. In addition to hosting the official opening of the Havana Club and orchestrating Miami Cares Day II earlier this month, he also made it to a holiday celebration on Nov. 30 at a condo development tree-lighting ceremony at which he posed with Santa and his helpers.

All I can say is buen viaje!”

Off to Maricopa?

You probably don’t know this, but Miami Beach won’t have Hamid Dolikhani to kick around anymore.

On Dec. 1 Dolikhani submitted his resignation, and just this past Monday the former assistant building director for Miami Beach collected his last paycheck.

City Manager Jorge Gonzalez gave him a classy send-off in his memo (dated the same day as Dolikhani’s resignation) to the Miami Beach City Commission:

“Mr. Dolikhani worked for the Building Department for the past 18 years and made many contributions during his tenure with the city,” Gonzalez wrote. “From April 2005 to March 2006, Mr. Dolikhani served as the acting building director where he dealt with several serious and life-threatening situations with major condominium buildings, significant damage to older structures resulting from Hurricane Wilma, and also dealt with policy issues relating to the city’s historic building stock, such as the coral rock house [referring to the Avery Smith house] and the Neptune building.

With regard to Hurricane Wilma, with Mr. Dolikhani’s help and participation, the city of Miami Beach was one of the first municipalities to fully recognize and address the housing issues caused by the storm’s effects, which put the city at the forefront of raising the awareness of the issue to Miami-Dade County, the state of Florida and with FEMA. The majority of surrounding municipalities had not even begun inspections of multi-family structures by the time the city was able to complete our initial assessment. Mr. Dolikhani’s pro-activeness was instrumental in getting the county and state to recognize that a legitimate temporary housing crisis existed and helped to persuade them to open and keep open temporary shelters to assist those residents affected.”

Wow. Sounds like Dolikhani is loved and appreciated in the Beach, huh? So why did he leave?

“I was disappointed with the decision of the selection [of the current building director],” Dolikhani admitted to Murmurs. “Despite that I decided to stay but the work environment was made [such] that I did not [feel] it was conducive for anything.”

And so Dolikhani resigned.

When Phil Azan resigned his post as the Building Department director last year, Dolikhani filled in as the interim director. At the same time, a statewide search for a permanent director was conducted. Among the many who answered the call were Dolikhani himself and Thomas Velazquez, the building official for Broward County. Although Dolikhani received the highest score of eight finalists in an evaluation, Gonzalez awarded the job to Velazquez.

In response to an e-mail from Murmurs, Velazquez wrote, “Hamid Dolikhani never told me why he left, and I don't think it would be ethical to make any derogatory comment about him now that he is gone. All I can say is buen viaje!”

So what will Dolikhani do now? He told Murmurs that he has job offers from various communities — all of them outside Florida. Among them is the post of planning and design director for Maricopa County in Arizona.

Amnesty Holiday

Call it an act of mercy. Call it a means of drumming up business for Miami, well, businesses. Call it a good idea. Call it a sign that the end of the universe is near considering that the good idea actually comes from an agency affiliated with the city of Miami. At any rate, the Miami Parking Authority is calling it a Holiday Amnesty program. It works like this: If your meter has expired, don’t sweat it — the Miami Parking Authority will grant amnesty for an hour after the time on your meter, or your ticket from Pay and Display machines, ran out. “Customers will receive a special Holiday Courtesy Citation on their windshield rather than a ticket. The offer applies to all MPA on-street parking meters and Pay & Display machines spread throughout the city of Miami, including downtown, Coconut Grove and the Design District,” stated a release written by Atwater Creative. There is also no “minimum amount” to qualify for the program.

The amnesty program will continue until Dec. 26.

Complex Housing

Sunsouth Place, formerly the Meridian Hotel and possibly the future Meridian Place. Photo by Margaret Griffis

At www.carrfour.org,  the Sunsouth Place project is listed as “future housing” with a note that it is slated to open in 2005. That plan is now off the books.

Miami Beach Community Development Corporation hopes to soon purchase the South Beach property and provide permanent housing for “formerly homeless” residents age 62 or older.

“It will be targeted mostly to people who are being displaced,” explained Karl Kennedy, vice president of the Miami Beach CDC. The agency is under contract to purchase Sunsouth Place (the former Meridian Hotel at 530 Meridian Ave.) from Carrfour Supportive Housing. The anticipated purchase price of $3.8 million, said Kennedy, takes into account structural work Carrfour has already done to the property. Carrfour intended to make Sunsouth a 70-plus-unit permanent housing complex for “previously homeless” individuals and individuals at risk of becoming homeless.

Kennedy said the Miami Beach CDC decided to reconfigure the building to give residents their own kitchens and bathrooms and to reduce the number of studios to 34. Carrfour’s plan called for shared bathrooms in some cases, Kennedy said, which Miami Beach CDC felt “could create problems in the future.”

Kennedy said the CDC is now “trying to retain those funds” that were previously allocated to the project — funds in the neighborhood of a couple of million county and state dollars that Carrfour obtained when the project was geared for more than twice the number of residents than Miami Beach CDC plans to house there. The city of Miami Beach, Kennedy said, had also pledged $309,000 for Sunsouth. According to him, though, the city has now decided to funnel $1.5 million in Redevelopment Agency funds into the property with the prospect of its new owners. “I think it [our project] was more in line with what the city wanted to approve,” Kennedy said. He wouldn’t mind if they also left that extra $309,000 on the table, he quipped.

As of Dec. 15, a “demonstration loan” of a million dollars from the Florida Housing Finance Corporation was approved for transfer from Carrfour Corporation to the Miami Beach CDC, who will rename the project “Meridian Place,” according to Florida Housing Finance Board meeting minutes.

However, another piece of the funding puzzle was temporarily displaced this past Tuesday, when an item about the transfer of about a million-and-a-half dollars from the Miami-Dade County Housing Agency didn’t make it onto the County Commission agenda, said Kennedy. “We’re hoping to close before the end of the year,” he said. “With the county item postponed, we are thinking how we can do that.” When asked why he thought the item, now scheduled to be heard sometime in January, didn’t make it to the commission floor Tuesday, Kennedy replied that he thought the strong-mayor issues may have overloaded the meeting. “I think they didn’t feel like mixing that in.”

Meanwhile, although it has yet to open, Carrfour Supportive Housing’s other Miami Beach housing development, Harding Village, was awarded the “Signature Community Development Project” by the South Florida Local Initiatives Support Corporation at the 2006 Community Development Awards Reception on Dec. 6. According to a press release, “Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) is dedicated to helping nonprofit Community Development Corporations (CDCs) transform distressed neighborhoods into healthy communities of choice and opportunity — good places to work, do business and raise children.”

Debate Time!

For the cause of representational democracy, Miami-Dade County Commission Chair Bruno Barreiro will get over his chronic shyness and reluctance to engage in debates during elections and do verbal battle with State Sen. Gwen Margolis on the strong-mayor issue.

Barreiro, like all of his colleagues on the dais, opposes giving the county’s mayor (in this case Carlos Alvarez) the ability to hire and fire department heads and authority to designate the county manager as the mayor’s lackey. However, Margolis, who chaired the commission herself a few years back, favors the plan.

The spoken-word sparring match takes place at American Legion Hall at 6445 NE Seventh Ave. (east of Biscayne Boulevard), Miami, on Jan. 4 from 6 to 8 p.m. and is sponsored by the Urban Environment League. Will Janitza Kaplan or Alvarado Fernandez show up, thus inducing Barreiro to get stage fright? Will Miami-Dade Commissioner Natacha Seijas whisper something in Margolis’ ear about body bags, causing the senator’s heart to skip a beat? Hey, anything could happen. Call the UEL at 305-532-7227 or e-mail uelmiami@bellsouth.net.

Web Extra!

Normandy Sud Bandit

Two burglaries in less than one week have placed the North Beach neighborhood of Normandy Sud on red alert. According to a release sent by the North Beach Development Corporation, the burglaries occurred in the 1300 block of Bay Drive and the 1800 block of Biarritz Drive. In response, NBDC has asked residents to participate in a neighborhood crime watch. Anyone who sees suspicious activity, persons and vehicles is urged to call the Miami Beach Police Department at 305-673-7901. In an emergency, call 911.

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