High Stakes: Playing Ball
With Miami Taxpayer Money

Keep creating CRAs and Miami will just be known for having the best and brightest deal-seekers.

Vampires, being undead, are hard creatures to kill. Yet these fictional bloodsucking entities can be taken out by direct sunlight, a stake through the heart or — depending on the story — a silver bullet.

The publicly subsidized Florida Marlins deal, though, continues to live and thrive, no matter how much sunlight, how many silver bullets or missed deadlines are thrown at it.

The latest idea, according to the Miami Herald, is to place the Florida Marlins stadium on land north of Northwest Third Street between Interstate 95 and Biscayne Boulevard. It’s publicly owned land, the Herald reported. And if the deal were simply to build this baseball stadium on top of the public land at some sort of nominal rent, well, it might not be so bad.

But that isn’t the end of it. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz and city officials want to include the stadium in the Park West/Overtown Community Redevelopment District. That way they can give millions of dollars in property taxes collected in Miami’s poorest neighborhoods to the stadium’s owners.

Funny thing is, the money is supposed to eliminate blight and slum conditions, according to the vision of the Community Redevelopment Agency. “The CRA’s longstanding vision is to improve the quality of life for residents and stakeholders of the Overtown, Park West and Omni community redevelopment areas,” the CRA vision states.

How would expanding the CRA to enable hundreds of millions of dollars to be funneled to a baseball stadium for a major league team owned by billionaires help Miami’s poorest residents? Answer: It won’t. The Miami Arena didn’t help Overtown when it was built in the late 1980s. Neither will a subsidized Florida Marlins stadium.

And expanding the CRA won’t help Miami’s tax base, either. It will only harm it. Already most of the property taxes collected in the CRA districts of Overtown, Park West, Omni and — the latest addition — Midtown Miami are trapped within those areas. The revenues can’t flow to pay for services like police and fire for Miami at large. Instead they must be invested back into those districts to pay for surveys or redevelopment schemes meant to eliminate blight.

In short, CRAs are the vampires of a city’s tax base.

In the coming weeks there will be much hoopla about how important this latest deal is to keeping Major League Baseball in Miami. Without it, they say, we could lose the Marlins.

Yet there is more to life than just baseball. We aren’t saying the ills of society must be wiped out locally before entertaining future public-private ventures. However, it would be nice if Miami could pay its cops, firefighters and other essential employees a competitive salary so the best and most talented would stick around.

Keep creating CRAs and that won’t happen. Rather Miami will just be known for having the best and brightest deal-seekers who can come up with the right plan to suck up city taxpayer dollars in the name of economic development. Who knows, perhaps these characters will be able to hang out at the new Florida Marlins stadium, if it’s ever built. But, with public safety stretched to the limit in Miami, we wouldn’t suggest they hang out in the parking lot after dark.