Have Mercy on Coconut Grove
Will Politics and a Ridiculously Tall Tower
Overshadow Coconut Grove’s Waterfront

Already, some of the Grove blogs are calling for a threat to make the Grove its own city, which will never happen.

By Rebecca Wakefield

I had something important to do last Thursday, so I missed the six-hour spectacle of the Miami City Commission awkwardly attempting to justify why it was going to open up the entire waterfront of Coconut Grove to luxury high-rise development.

But I got so many irate e-mails and phone calls afterward that I figured it was worth opining. Not that the commission ever listens to me. But it does tend to make their significant others (spouses, mistresses, prospective attorneys) ask them a few questions, which is only healthy.

For those who missed the brief Herald story this last Friday, Coconut Grove’s Mercy Hospital and the Related Group won the first round of a fight to build a ridiculously tall luxury tower on six acres of land next to the hospital. Commissioners Joe Sanchez, Angel Gonzalez and Michelle Spence-Jones voted to make the good sisters at Mercy nearly $100 million and Related Chairman Jorge Perez somewhere between $900 million and maybe a couple of billion dollars, depending on whether he can really sell 300 condos for $3 million to $15 million a pop.

The commission approved on first reading a zoning change that would allow the proposed Grove Bay Residences tower to rise to twice the height of anything within a mile of it. This despite the fact that both the city’s Planning Advisory Board and its Zoning Board recommended denial of the change.

I’m told the meeting was spicy, with a couple-hundred Grovites pitted against yellow-T-shirted Related and Mercy allies, and members of two homeowners groups paid off by Related to support the project. (Related reached settlements in early 2006 with associations in Bay Heights and Natoma Manors. Few know the amounts involved, but they’re rumored to be in the millions.)

Former Knight-Ridder Chairman Alvah Chapman, who must be about 327 years old at this point, was there. Another speaker at the meeting was Max Blumberg, a trustee of the nearby Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. He expressed dismay at the project’s potential impact on Vizcaya, and when he walked back to his seat, several individuals heard Jorge Perez spit the word “asshole” at him, causing nearby City National Bank Chairman, Prez and CEO Leonard Abess to clutch Perez’s arm in a “calm down, buddy” motion.

Blumberg is a classy guy, and when I asked him about this, he declined to repeat what was said, but made his concerns clear. “I heard what he said and I ignored it,” he told me. “I took it to mean I made a good speech. I respect him as a successful businessman, and I understand his point of view. The problem is [this project] would tower over the historic gardens. It [Vizcaya] would be really damaged by being in the middle of a canyon of high rises.”

Blumberg added that when voters approved the huge county bond issue a few years ago, Vizcaya got a $15 million chunk of change for improvements — money that would be somewhat wasted if the gardens end up being blighted by a huge tower blocking the serene view. It’ll be interesting to see how the social elite of Miami come down on this one.

A few weeks ago, a couple of sources supposedly plugged in at City Hall told me that the vote would occur as follows: Marc Sarnoff and Tomas Regalado would vote no (Regalado because he’s a populist contrarian who wants to run for mayor; Sarnoff because he opposed the project during his campaign). The other three commissioners would vote yes.

One of the rumors I put no stock in whatsoever (although I’ll repeat it here for fun) involved a complicated scenario in which former City Manager Joe Arriola and former Assistant City Manager Alicia Cuervo Schreiber (whom Arriola, a mentor of sorts, got a job for at the Related Group shortly before he left the city) were actively working the commission on this project.

Some claimed Arriola told at least one commissioner that he had secured Sarnoff’s blessing for the commissioner to vote for the zoning change, even though Sarnoff would have to vote against it for political reasons. Others pointed to the friendship between Sarnoff’s chief of staff (whom he chose after first hiring another guy, then changing his mind when he was told the former city veteran wouldn’t be politically palatable to his colleagues) and Cuervo Schreiber. Conspiracy! It’s all a fix! The sky is falling!

Yada, yada. From a practical perspective, none of that rumor-mill stuff matters. What matters is the votes. Sarnoff voted no, as he said he would.

What’s interesting is the three yes votes. Usually, when there is a development issue in one commissioner’s district, the other commissioners will follow that commissioner’s lead in voting, unless there is some overwhelming issue that affects them. It’s called collegiality, or “you vote for my stuff and I’ll vote for yours.”

But conventional wisdom held that the vote was fixed well before the commission meeting. Gonzalez would vote yes, I was told, because a) he likes money and Jorge Perez has lots; b) Manny Diaz would tell him to vote yes; and c) Joe Arriola, a good friend of Jorge Perez’s, and, as former city manager, helpful to Gonzalez when it came to firing pesky city employees he quarreled with and helping derail certain inconvenient legal inquiries, would tell him to vote yes.

Spence-Jones would vote yes for reason “a” — and because Diaz and Arriola were instrumental in getting her elected (also, she owes Diaz’s law firm a bunch of money for helping her challenge a Florida Elections Commission decision that came down after an opponent complained of election violations).

The potential wild card would be Sanchez, because although he has usually been close to Diaz and his fundraising machine, he also has aspirations to run for mayor himself in a couple of years. This means he will have to appeal to a broader constituency than the little old ladies in his district who like to squeeze his cheeks and thrill to his raspy rendition of Guantanamera.

Given that riled voters in District 2 (which includes the Grove) managed to beat the incredible fundraising machine Diaz and company assembled around former Commissioner Linda Haskins this past November, Sanchez has got to weigh the value of old allegiances and the allure of all that certain campaign cash against the potential danger of inflaming the highly flammable Grovites and their newly energized allies all over the city. Sanchez will also have to weigh just how loyal the Diaz machine will be to him if County Commissioner Carlos Gimenez jumps into that race.

Already, some of the Grove blogs are calling for a threat to make the Grove its own city, which will never happen, but the blog posts indicate the level of disgust some residents feel about the commission’s decision.

For me, it’s stupid to approve yet another luxury condo in a down market, when the certain traffic and other infrastructure impact on that neighborhood will make the place near unlivable. Not only that, but if this gets approved now, it opens the door to Mercy’s other 80-some acres of land, plus a bunch of other waterfront properties being targeted by developers looking for that high-margin profit they can’t get in downtown Miami.

Do we really want to completely shut off our waterfront behind glass and steel edifices with perhaps 10 percent of the lights on at night?

I agree with attorney Patrick Goggins, who is representing a Grove resident opposed to the project. “To think they would stop here is naïve in the extreme,” he told me. “This is not just a not-in-my-backyard issue. It’s starting to become a good government issue.”

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.