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John Matuska, president and CEO of Mercy
Hospital, has a dream. Matuska wants to take the little old
hospital built by nuns in Coconut Grove and make it a
state-of-the-art facility, with expanded clinical programs. He
figures he needs about $200 million-$300 million to do so. He
thought he had found a way to generate some of the money when
the Related Group and Ocean Land offered to buy about six acres
of parking lot near the water.
Assuming
the city went for the necessary zoning change, the development
group would in turn build 300 luxury condos and make a sizable
pile of cash. Things went well at first. The Coconut Grove
Chamber of Commerce and the Village Council supported it.
A couple of squeaky-wheel homeowner associations followed suit
after some financial settlements were made.
Then,
suddenly, problems. Pesky Grovites tuned in to a process that
had been quietly moving forward for two years. The city’s
advisory Planning and Zoning boards recommended against the
zoning change. Local blogs, such as the Coconut Grove Grapevine,
fired up the evil-developer rhetoric. Then the trustees of the
Vizcaya Museum & Gardens started hiring people to demonstrate
that the condos would destroy the tranquil sightlines of Vizcaya.
County Commissioner Carlos Gimenez, who wants to run for city of
Miami mayor in a couple of years, backed them. City Commission
chambers filled with opponents as nervous politicians tried to
divine electoral consequence from all the money and passion
colliding in the room.
All of
this left Matuska deeply frustrated. Mercy Hospital currently
resembles, in sections, the set of a B-grade horror movie in
which you fully expect Jack Nicholson to jump out from an
elevator and run screaming down the hall. When I walked into
Matuska’s office (escorted by cheerfully and relentlessly
on-message public relations man Israel Kreps), I half-hoped to
see Christopher Lee rise slowly from an overstuffed leather
chair.
Unfortunately, Matuska’s office was quite ordinary, if filled
with more nuns and crosses than the average CEO’s. Matuska
himself has pale blue eyes, a broad, moon-shaped face, and a
slight New Jersey accent. I decided he looked like the sane
younger brother of either Dennis Hopper or Christopher Walken,
and said so. “I get James Caan sometimes,” he said gamely.
Matuska
ran through his pitch. The nutshell version is that Mercy, built
around 1950, is too old. The buildings need to be replaced. A
new ER is being built. The not-for-profit hospital makes it, but
is struggling to compete against for-profits such as Baptist
Health Systems, which uses its wider profit margins and larger
size to leverage much better deals out of insurance providers.
The money has to come from either leveraging the land’s value,
or fundraising.
Matuska
essentially wants Mercy (which currently sees about 21,000
patients a year, 3193 of them charity cases) to become almost a
boutique operation, attracting specialists such as neurosurgeons
and developing new clinical programs, as well as serving more
patients. Miami Heat Coach Pat Riley got his hip surgery done at
Mercy, and Matuska would love for the hospital to become the first choice for
other osteo patients.
“It’s a
waste to have it as a parking lot when it can be used to provide
medical services,” he said. Already the land can be used to
build medical offices, or an assisted living facility, but
Matuska said they went with residential because the traffic
impacts on overloaded Bayshore Drive would be much less. He
didn’t anticipate the opposition from wealthy, influential
Vizcaya supporters.
“I
suspect the motives of these people,” Matuska told me, but
refused to elaborate on what those motives might be. “The
question I have, is why were [opponents] asleep for two years?”
My stab
at this is that the Mercy issue is Commissioner Marc Sarnoff’s
ticket to re-election in November. In the last election, just
fewer than 5,500 people bothered to vote in his district, about
15 percent of registered voters. A big portion of those came
from Coconut Grove, which was the epicenter of anti-incumbent
sentiment. Because Sarnoff only has one year between elections
to distinguish himself, he’s got to score one or two big
victories if he wants to discourage a credible opponent from
attempting to take his seat away.
So even
though the SunPost quoted Sarnoff last May, as a
then-Village Council member, calling the condo proposal “a good
project,” because its traffic impact would be less than office
buildings, he’s now the white knight of saving the Grove from
Related Group Chairman Jorge Perez.
Matuska
just shrugged noncommittally when I mentioned this theory.
Kreps
showed me a couple of renderings of what the condos would look
like as viewed from the garden terrace at Vizcaya. In it, the
buildings, which the developer offered to reduce by 20 percent,
barely peeked over the Photoshopped treetops.
John
Hinson, a condo developer himself and co-chairman of the special
preservation committee of the Vizcayans, scoffed at these photos
when I asked him later why, if the rendering was accurate, such
a small disturbance would be so, well, disturbing. A Related
Group spokesman had also told me they offered to helicopter in
50-foot-tall oak trees to mask the condos. He also noted that
you can already see parts of Brickell from Vizcaya.
Hinson,
who amusingly kept referring to the condo project as the Related
Group's “final solution,” explained that Vizcaya is currently in
the middle of planning $50 million worth of renovations and they
can’t “just indiscriminately plant a bunch of trees in the
garden.”
Related
later e-mailed me the updated photos, without the trees. In
these, the towers aren’t huge, but they do certainly change the
character of the view. Hinson and the others wanted a massive
reduction, as much as 50 percent of the original project. This
was a no-can-do for Related Group, senior executive Bill
Thompson told me. “We have spoken to Mercy about a reduction in
price [to offset the project’s reduced profits] and Mercy has
respectfully said no,” he said. “If we go lower it might meet
Vizcaya’s goal, but defeats the purpose of Mercy selling the
land.”
Thus
after multiple meetings between the Vizcayans and Related Group,
the garden people declined, politely, to support the developer’s
plan. Hinson said that Vizcaya is a national treasure on par
with Mount Vernon or Monticello,
and its protectors won’t compromise that for the sake of letting
a hospital sell off its assets to “a luxury condo development
scheme.” “If this deal goes through,” he said, “this land can
never again be used to help poor people [because of the land
value]. There are huge public impacts.”
Says
Thompson: “We don’t feel we have a negative impact on Vizcaya
but we respect their position. We’ve all tried, on both sides.
At this point we can’t go any further.”
What if
the Miami City Commission kills the project? “I’d have to find
another way [to raise money] and it would take me longer to do,”
Matuska said. “But I’ll do it, come hell or high water.…”
He
paused, looked around the room as if a giant ruler was poised
above his knuckles. “I don’t want the sisters mad at me,” he
said. “Say ‘Come low or high water.’”
The
City Commission will vote on this issue today (April 26) at City
Hall, beginning at 10 a.m. Wear your waders. |
