Two Futures In Question
What a difference a week makes.
On the evening of Dec. 7, Jorge Gonzalez, appearing alongside Matti Bower at her Mayor on the Move forum with residents, was at the peak of his form, briefing an audience of 100 in his typically authoritative, proficient style about the city’s bold hopes and aspirations for its aging and much-maligned convention center.
Exactly seven days later, on the 14th, the city manager found himself in an awkward – and rare – position akin to an unruly pupil being reamed out by his teacher, or a lover about to be jilted: Confronted with the unmistakable signal that some on the Commission dais want his 11-year tenure as the Beach’s chief steward done and over with already.
The casino brouhaha, as far as the Commission is concerned, is settled and done; their unanimous thumbs-down was a shot heard ’round the county and region, on up to Tallahassee, cross-country to billionaire mogul Steve Wynn’s office in Las Vegas, and clear out to the other side of the globe, to Kuala Lumpur, in the posh high-rise headquarters of Genting Malaysia.
Remaining to be settled, however, are the fates and futures of these two – the Miami Beach Convention Center and, across the street at City Hall, the man who has made its rehabilitation a cornerstone of his work for much of this year but who must now tackle the even more personally important challenge of saving his job.
That is, if he still wants it and, if he does, can secure the votes to save it.
Fault Line
The Ground Is Opening Up Below Jorge Gonzalez
Make no mistake about it, a fissure has formed at City Hall between some city commissioners and the city manager. Guessing how further deep and wide it opens – and whether it claims the manager – is likely to become the new parlor game for Hall watchers over the next 90 days.
If the split had been in the making for some time, it was nearly a well-disguised secret. But – as if a pipeline had suddenly ruptured – that secret finally leaked to the public during a heated portion of the Dec. 14 city commission meeting when, for the first time in Jorge Gonzalez’s 11-year tenure, a commissioner dared to do the undare-able and called for him to go.
Now, the entire commission will decide at its March 21, 2012, meeting whether to retain Gonzalez or fire him.
DECISION TO COME IN MARCH
At issue were the annual job performance appraisals of not only Gonzalez but also City Attorney Jose Smith. The commission opted not to extend the contracts for either man, prompting a motion from Commissioner Jonah Wolfson to fire Gonzalez. Deede Weithorn seconded the motion, leading to a discussion about the manager.
A vote on Gonzalez’s fate was tabled and deferred until the March meeting, at which time the commission will also evaluate his performance.
One of those whose vote Gonzalez will presumably need when the Commission Seven do decide is Michael Gongora, who, in a monthly newsletter released last Saturday, hints of which way he is leaning.
“THE CITY CAN DO BETTER”
“Although Miami Beach is fortunate to be in solid financial standing compared to many other communities, several commissioners, myself included, feel the city can do better still,” Gongora wrote.
“Miami Beach must take action to correct problems across departments and hire the best talent available to lead these departments. Paramount to this discussion are the building and police departments. These discussions are most consequential […] for ensuring that Miami Beach has the best possible administration leading us into a bright, sustainable future,” he added.
Gongora said he “must also be convinced” that the Gonzalez administration is “working diligently” to resolve his constituents’ requests for assistance when they arise.
Wolfson’s mind is already made up. He wants Gonzalez out even sooner than March: The end of January.
GONZALEZ’S “ANNUS HORRIBILIS”
Commissioners’ uncharacteristically candid and publicly-vented disenchantment with Gonzalez caps a year that the manager might readily concede was his “annus horribilis.”
– His hiring of Cynthia W. Curry to be the city’s building department director in September 2010 – despite the qualms of several commissioners about her qualifications and the process by which Gonzalez hired her without their input – was among the first seismic waves that foreboded turbulence between them and him.
Curry, hired by Gonzalez to be an executive assistant just a month before he elevated her to building director, was the subject of an investigation by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office into whether she, as a private subcontractor, had bilked the county a decade earlier while working on the Miami International Airport expansion.
Though she admitted knowingly and repeatedly double-billing the county, the SAO refused to prosecute, saying that a case would be difficult for them to prove. Her scandalous past, however, did not endear her to the Beach commission.
At a November 2010 commission meeting, Jorge Exposito, Gongora, Weithorn, and Wolfson voiced discomfort with various aspects of the Curry appointment, compelling Gonzalez to have to defend his decision and vouch for her qualifications. The commission refused to confirm her and, lacking a majority vote to retain her post, Curry was out.
Nevertheless, Gonzalez remained adamant in his support.
“She is no-nonsense. She holds people accountable,” he told the Miami Herald at the time. “She will terminate people if they need to be terminated. And that generates people who aren’t happy with Cynthia. My apologies.”
– In April 2011, Gonzalez and Assistant Manager Hilda Fernandez were themselves referred to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office for investigation of allegations that they illegally squeezed the New World Symphony for free event tickets for city officials in return for releasing a held-up $15 million city grant promised to the NWS for its brand new and recently-opened performance center.
The SAO, in October, decided not to lodge formal charges against the pair and dismissed the complaint against them, but not without pointing out ethics irregularities arising from “Ticketgate” which the Beach commission would be well advised to address and rectify so as to avoid similar trouble in the future.
Add to those controversies these:
– City-wide dissatisfaction with Urban Beach Weekend’s masses, mess, and maelstrom during last Memorial Day weekend.
– A police department in need of a new chief and fraught with unwanted bad publicity brought on by misbehaving cops, some of whom have ended up on the wrong side of the bars, reaping embarrassing headlines – as well as videos and photos – for the city.
– Anxiety that the city’s past and ongoing negotiations with its public employee unions has saddled it with obligations that could, in time, break its financial back and soil its good credit.
FALL FROM FAVOR
Gonzalez’s fall from commissioners’ favor is astounding especially considering that the 45-year-old, boyish-faced city administrator – recruited in a nationwide search from his post as an assistant chief administrative officer for Montgomery County, Md., in August 2000 – has stewarded Miami Beach through a decade remarkable for some of the most dynamic growth and development in the city’s history. He has done so with the proficiency of a technocrat, minus much controversy, all the while gaining the fraternal respect and high regard of civic leaders from around the region and state.
In 2004, he was named the Florida League of Cities City Manager of the Year, and in 2009 was recognized as the South Florida Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Public Official of the Year.
Less than a year into his new shoes, Gonzalez was praised, in a letter to the editor published in the Herald, by former commissioner Victor Diaz, Jr., a member of a blue ribbon panel that recommended Gonzalez’s selection for city manager.
“[He] has helped recruit outstanding new personnel to the city, which has helped make our City Hall one of the best-run in the county,” wrote Diaz. “[His] performance as city manager […] is the best proof that we must expand our horizons beyond our local boundaries and set higher standards if this community wants to recruit the kind of public servants we deserve and demand.
“Thank you, Jorge Gonzalez, for finally giving us some good news about local politics and helping to restore faith in our community’s ability to stay on course toward excellence in local government.”
CONVENTION CENTER & GONZALEZ – INTERTWINED?
Watchdog Report’s Dan Ricker, whose dispatches frequently appear in the SunPost, reports this week that according to an unidentified “long time observer of Miami Beach politics and the commission,” Gonzalez will “be gone in the months ahead and [that] any chance of building a world-class convention center ‘was over’.”
Whether or not the convention center’s fate is inextricably tied to that of the city manager who has spearheaded the effort to renovate or rebuild it, Jorge Gonzalez may likely spend this holiday season contemplating his own future and whether he has the appetite for anymore of a job he has been content to stay in for such an atypically long time for a city manager, yet one which, in 2011, seems to have evolved into an evermore thankless and unrewarding burden.
If he concludes that it is no longer worth a fight, or that he lacks the votes, then some of the empty boxes from under the Gonzalez tree this Christmas could find themselves carted off to the manager’s City Hall office and reused for packing up his belongings.
Full Speed Ahead
Casino Talk Won’t Derail City’s Focus on Convention Center Revamp
Amid South Florida’s contentious preoccupation with gaming legislation and casino gambling, Miami Beach officials are moving forward, undeterred, with their expansion/enhancement plans for the city’s 54-year-old convention center, even as the future of that center is likely to be greatly impacted by the 800-pound gorilla that is the gaming question.
USE REMAINS “STRONG”
The Miami Beach Convention Center, declared City Manager Jorge Gonzalez at the Dec. 7 “Mayor on the Move” public forum, remains a “top priority” despite that city leaders regard the current hoo-hah over the prospect of destination resort gaming in the region as a “distraction.”
The MBCC – whose last major renovation, a $92 million one in 1989, saw it double in size – has been the beneficiary of $45 million in capital improvement projects in the last decade. Its utilization as a convention host, said Gonzalez, “remains strong,” with 118 events scheduled there in fiscal year 2010-11.
“COMPETITIVE DISADVANTAGE
However, the center has taken on a “competitive disadvantage” with convention centers elsewhere, due more to what the city administration attributes as the lack of a hotel on the premises rather than any facility issues.
The Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau found in a recent study that $300 million in convention business could be lost in the next decade if the MBCC cannot compete with others of its kind.
A revamped MBCC is essential, Gonzalez said, “so we can remain competitive as a convention city.”
He decried criticism of the complex as being decrepit, old, and unusable as “not true.” But it was Mayor Matti Bower herself who, at another “Mayor on the Move” forum a year ago, in November 2010, pronounced the convention center as less than aesthetically pleasing.
Bower and Gonzalez had just returned from an official trip to Chicago where their itinerary included a tour of a convention center there. The new part of the Windy City’s complex was “beautiful” and “just gorgeous,” Bower extolled, in contrast to its old part – “how ugly, how depressing…[which is] how this [Miami Beach's] convention center looks like when you walk in.”
One of the chief complaints about the MBCC, says City Hall, is the center’s lack of flexible multi-purpose space.
CITY HALL’S DEMOLITION?
At their January meeting, Gonzalez will request city commissioners’ authorization to proceed with a phased competitive bid process for the MBCC’s overhaul. “Qualified development teams” bidding for the project may be offered development packages including financing options.
City leaders bill the potential 52-acre development site – which encompasses the convention center, its enormous west parking lot, and the adjacent Fillmore Miami Beach at The Jackie Gleason Theater – as comprising approximately six million square feet of floor-to-area-ratio space.
They are willing to be flexible on the convention center’s height “if it creates better massing on the property.”
Mixed-use development on the site, proposes the city, can include a convention hotel, retail, entertainment, housing, and “other commercial uses.”
The project’s potential scope would not only see the evolution of a newer, improved convention center complex, but could come at the expense of long-time neighboring structures: the Gleason, the 17th Street parking garage – even City Hall itself.
The City Hall building, whose architect was given the first Honor Award by the South Florida chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1977 for his design of it, could be offered up for demolition to a potential convention hall developer, as could the 61-year-old Gleason, and the 1,460-space garage, the city’s largest.
“THE SHOW MUST GO ON”
In South Beach: Stories of a Renaissance, a newly-published, coffee table pictorial of prominent Beach landmarks and architecture, author Eleanor Goldstein recalls that the MBCC’s size was seen as limiting its potential long before now.
“By the early 1980s, there was a definite consensus that the Convention Center needed to be enlarged. The idea was postulated that if [it] was expanded, someone would build a major convention hotel.
“In 2001, a new study concluded that in order for the [MBCC] to once again stay competitive, they would need to add a finished ballroom space. This study accumulated dust until 2009 when a decision was made to spend $55 million in phases to build the ballroom and link the whole complex together.
“This plan [also proposes] a new convention hotel located on the site of the Fillmore (the old Jackie Gleason Theater), closing out one of the last vestiges of the Gleason era. But the show must go on. Miami Beach is in demand and remains a popular convention location.”
Category: COVER
