View of a building located at 9250 W. Flagler St. that is the site of the future West Dade Government Center. Miami-Dade commissioners on Tuesday, June 4, 2024, approved a $256 million plan to buy and upgrade the property, as proposed by Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
pportal@miamiherald.com
To create new government office space in the western suburbs, Miami-Dade County is ready to borrow $256 million for a real estate deal approved Tuesday.
The unanimous vote by county commissioners would convert a 1974 office complex originally built for Florida Power and Light into the new West Dade Government Center, a one-stop hub to get permitting paperwork approved.
Commissioners approved the deal unanimously, with three members absent for the vote: Danielle Cohen Higgins, René Garcia and Oliver Gilbert, the board’s chair.
Commissioner Anthony Rodriguez, the sponsor of the legislation to purchase the property at 9250 W. Flagler St., noted that some saw the deal as “spending a lot of money.”
“I will just use the word ‘investing,’” he said. “Investing in the future of our residents.”
Paying off the debt for the $182 million purchase, and another $74 million mostly for planned upgrades, is expected to cost about $16.6 million a year over the next three decades, according to a county estimate.
Is that a good use of taxpayer dollars?
Here are five factors that will help answer that question.
The price could have been higher, but it was still well above appraised values obtained by Miami-Dade
Two appraisal firms hired by Miami-Dade said last year that the 625,000-square-foot building with roughly 80% of its office space vacant was worth about $110 million “as is” to would-be investors.
Those valuations didn’t dent enthusiasm for the deal last year as Mayor Daniella Levine Cava asked the commission for expedited approval of a $205 million purchase price in December without going through the board’s usual committee hearing. That plan fell apart after a Miami Herald article questioned the proposed price.
Levine Cava pulled the deal and said she would pursue a lower price with owner Bushburg Properties, a New York real estate investor. The final contract approved Tuesday on a 10-0 vote was 11% lower than the deal that was submitted six months ago.
The county’s real estate arm justified both the proposed $205 million price in December and the new $182 million price approved Tuesday with “hypothetical appraisals” that were generated by the same firms that calculated the market prices.
The hypothetical values came in at an average of about $191 million, based on what a commercial buyer would offer if the office building was fully occupied by one tenant, as it will be once Miami-Dade moves into the facility. In reality, the old FPL center had about 20% of its office space rented when the appraisals were conducted last year.
While the proposal presented to commissioners in December included both sets of appraisals, the one approved Tuesday only mentioned the higher values. The administration also said the lower purchase price made the deal competitive on a square-foot basis with other recent commercial transactions.
“It went through the committee process, and the deal got better,” Commissioner Kevin Cabrera said. “We’ve gotten significant concessions from the folks who are selling this to us.”
Affordable housing on the campus could provide lower-cost options for county employees
The 26-acre complex has enough parking and undeveloped land around the office building for residential development, and approval of the purchase included language requiring Levine Cava to explore building affordable housing there. That could include a program where county employees would have first dibs on renting some of the units.
“They would be on site, so they could actually walk to work, which I think would be transformative,” Commissioner Raquel Regalado said. “It would help us with retention.”
The cash-strapped Solid Waste department will pay more after the move
Ahead of the planned December vote on the deal, the interim director of the Solid Waste Management Department was privately fighting the administration’s effort to move the agency into the new center. “The cost is too high, and we cannot afford it,” Olga Espinosa-Anderson, then head of Solid Waste under Levine Cava, wrote in an Oct. 16 email to Alex Muñoz, director of Internal Services, the county’s real estate arm.
READ MORE: ‘We cannot afford it’: Miami-Dade’s waste director resisted mayor’s $269M office deal
According to internal emails, Solid Waste pays about $1.3 million a year for its current space in the county’s Martin Luther King Office Plaza by the MLK Metrorail Station in Liberty City. A May 13 forecast of projected costs for the nine county offices moving into the West Dade center had the new space costing Solid Waste $1.8 million annually.
That’s far less than $2.8 million yearly cost originally projected for Solid Waste last fall when Espinosa-Anderson, now deputy director of Solid Waste, was objecting to the move. That was weeks after the agency won a 7.5% rate increase from commissioners, a hike that still wasn’t enough to cover costs of the county’s trash-hauling operations.
The full expense for Solid Waste’s new space at the West Dade center won’t be known until Miami-Dade secures an interest rate for the money being borrowed for the purchase and renovations. The county’s finance arm plans to bring legislation for that later this month, with final approval expected in July.
The building will deliver Miami-Dade’s goal of moving permitting offices into a central location
Purchasing the West Dade site ends Miami-Dade’s long-standing plan to spend $85 million building a permitting center to replace rented office space in a Tamiami shopping center five miles away.
With a larger footprint, the Levine Cava administration said the West Dade center will let more agencies involved in residential and construction permitting — including the Clerk of the Court and Water and Sewer — operate in the same space.
“I wholeheartedly believe this is going to be a giant leap forward,” Lourdes Gomez, director of Regulatory and Economic Resources, which oversees permitting, told commissioners. “I’m excited.”
There’s a chance a Metromover station could go there
After years of pursuing a modernized bus system along Flagler Street, Miami-Dade shifted its policy in January to study building a Metromover route over the 10 miles between Miami International Airport’s Metrorail station and Florida International University.
While the idea is only a concept at the moment, the West Dade center would give Miami-Dade additional county-owned land for a station should the plan become reality in the coming decades.
“The most expensive part of implementing the Flagler Street project is going to be right-of-way purchases,” said Commissioner Eileen Higgins, using a technical term for when land is bought for transportation projects. “If we happen to own the property, we can give it to ourselves for free.”