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Daniel Rivero<\/p>\n
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WLRN News <\/p>\n
The entrance to the Rickenbacker Marina, Rusty Pelican and Gramps Getaway urges voters to reject Referendum 3.<\/p>\n
But City Attorney George Wysong told them they were required to place it on the ballot because of the appeals court decision. Failing to do so could lead to commissioners being held in contempt of court.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u200aThe court says essentially in the order that this is a ministerial action which means you have no discretion,\u201d said Wysong.<\/p>\n
The tract of land in question is notable for one very big reason: It is one of the extremely rare waterfront properties that offers an unobstructed view of the growing Miami skyline. The sun sets just over the city, a fact that has made the Gramps Getaway bar there a major hit with residents since it opened doors in 2023. <\/p>\n
READ MORE: Miami is keeping its historic City Hall, but a local museum imagines what the space can be<\/a><\/p>\n Commissioner Miguel Gabela repeatedly and unambiguously said the proposed contract was bad for taxpayers and the city.<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aI think this is a bad deal for the city, something that’s ten years old. It does not reflect property prices today, what we can get as a lease today. It doesn’t reflect any of that, so this is a bad deal,\u201d said Gabela.<\/p>\n Daniel Rivero<\/p>\n \/<\/p>\n WLRN News <\/p>\n Patrons at Gramps Getaway see signage at the bar urging them to vote No on Miami referendum 3, which would impact the bar.<\/p>\n Fellow commissioner Damian Pardo said he \u201cshared\u201d Gabela\u2019s concerns. Commissioner Ralph Rosado asked: \u200a\u201dIs there no wiggle room to negotiate better deal terms with the party that was awarded the contract?\u201d Commissioner Christine King voiced frustration about being rushed to place it on the ballot in November, saying that she believed it could be placed on the ballot at a different time and still comply with the court order.<\/p>\n Mayor Eileen Higgins worried that residents would not know or understand that the terms of the contract were negotiated nearly a decade ago, when property values were about half what they are today. She said: \u201c\u200aObviously we’d like to have a better marina deal.\u201d<\/p>\n After all the frustrated discussion, commissioners reluctantly but unanimously voted to place the item on the ballot. Referendum 3 is set to go before voters in November.<\/p>\n The terms of the contract<\/p>\n If Referendum 3 passes, the city will enter into a 45-year lease for 27 acres of waterfront land on Virginia Key, just off the mainland. The contract includes two options to renew the lease for 15-years at a time, turning it into a potentially 75-year lease deal.<\/p>\n The company that would win the lease is \u200acalled Virginia Key LLC, which is a 50-50 partnership from the Connecticut-based RCI Group<\/a> and Texas-based Suntex Marinas<\/a>.<\/p>\n Attempts to get in touch with the Vote Yes to Save Virginia Key campaign<\/a> were not successful.<\/p>\n On the property today is the restaurant The Rusty Pelican, the bar and restaurant Gramps Getaway, the privately-run Rickenbacker Marina and the publicly owned and city-operated Marine Stadium Marina<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s an opportunity for the city to get both a fiscally and ecologically beneficial deal. It has to be thoughtful, and it has to be forward-thinking, because this is a seventy-five-year deal.\u201d<\/p>\n Adam Gersten, owner of Gramps Getaway<\/p>\n Under the terms of the proposed lease, the company Virginia Key LLC will be able to evict the tenants, knock down the existing facilities and build a brand new waterfront center featuring bars, restaurants and shops. The existing private and public marinas would be consolidated into a single privately-run marina.<\/p>\n In turn the city would get a minimum $2.2 million rent for the site, as well as an additional 6% of all revenues. These terms were negotiated a full decade ago. The plan for the site was drawn by Coconut Grove-based architectural firm Arquitectonica.<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aIt’s not just for the boaters. It’s for people coming to enjoy the restaurants. For those on a date after the restaurant, you can take a stroll. You wanna train for a triathlon, we’re gonna have lockers to keep bikes and keep things in the building,\u201d Robert W. Christoph Jr., President of RCI Group said in a recent podcast episode<\/a> of A Day In Miami.<\/p>\n Courtesy Save Virginia Key campaign<\/p>\n Computer rendering of the proposed new development, should Referendum 3 pass. <\/p>\n \u201c\u200aThere’s a lot of upgrades that need to happen,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd so we’re not just building the marina for today, for the boater today. We’re building it for the boater in 25 years.\u201d<\/p>\n The companies behind Virginia Key LLC both have long histories with marinas in South Florida.<\/p>\n Suntex currently runs the Miami Beach Marina on the southern end of Alton Road. Just weeks ago it was ordered to stop operating sections of the marina because city inspectors found it had become unsafe. Sections of the concrete docks have literally fallen into the water.<\/p>\n RCI Group \u2014 the other company \u2014 ran the Miami Beach Marina in 2000 when a contractor ruptured a sewage pipe under a boat slip \u2014 leading to a 25 million sewage spill, one of the worst sewage spills in Florida history, leading to widespread beach closures. The company and its contractors reached a $2.5 million settlement with Miami-Dade County in 2001, records show.<\/p>\n The push for a no-vote<\/p>\n A large coalition<\/a> of individuals and groups have come out against the referendum, including boater groups, current tenants, Gramps Getaway bar patrons and the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. Even Bruno Barreiro, the Republican candidate for House District 113, a district that includes Virginia Key, has come out against the deal now before voters.<\/p>\n Daniel Rivero<\/p>\n \/<\/p>\n WLRN News <\/p>\n Aabad Melwani (left) and Adam Gersten (right) are leading much of the campaign to defeat Miami Referendum 3.<\/p>\n Aabad Melwani, the president of Rickenbacker Marina, the private marina on the site, said he likes his private marina \u2014 but fears the loss of the public marina will be bad for the public, especially for the boating community.<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aIt displaces a number of small businesses. It displaces middle-class boaters. It displaces all the regular folks that keep boats in the water here. And in its place, what the garish renderings look like [it\u2019s this] luxurious kind of retail complex and then megayachts in the water,\u201d Melwani told WLRN.<\/p>\n The area was originally dredged in 1963<\/a> to create the Marine Stadium basin, where boat races took place for decades. Melwani’s family has run the Rickenbacker Marina since 1983, and he said that since then he and his family have been planting mangroves, which protect the shoreline from rising seas, around the marinas, and he said that the proposed development will cut all the mangroves. Renderings released by the supporters of the referendum show no mangroves. Melwani also fears that if larger boats are allowed into the proposed marina that it will mean deep dredging of environmentally sensitive areas once again.<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aThis was all dredge fill basically that we’re on. But now it’s kind of a thriving habitat. We have an incredibly healthy seagrass bed. We have an incredibly healthy wetland habitat,\u201d said Melwani. \u201cIt’s amazing to go down there and see rainbow parrotfish chewing barnacles off the pilings, nurse sharks, bonnetheads, all kinds of different fish. \u200aPeople at the end of the day need to be reminded that Biscayne Bay is essentially a giant estuary, and it’s not ripe for development.\u201d<\/p>\n In the midst of the long string of litigation, in 2021, City of Miami voters were asked to weigh in on a ballot referendum that would have waived competitive bidding and give Melwani’s company a 45-year lease for the land. Virginia Key LLC sued to block that ballot referendum while it sued the city to have its deal placed on the ballot, but in the end voters rejected the proposal<\/a> by 52%.<\/p>\n Adam Gersten, the \u200aowner of Gramps Getaway, said the No campaign has received so much support because \u201cthis is our public waterfront.\u201d He said the main problems with the proposal is that \u201c\u200ait’s just a locked in deal. It is what it is. There’s no sort of wiggle room to change it up.\u201d<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s against any kind of proposal to change the status quo on Virginia Key. He said he hopes that the referendum is defeated and that on the flip side, a better deal can be negotiated.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s an opportunity for the city to get both a fiscally and ecologically beneficial deal on the other side, and one that’s collaborative,\u201d said Gersten. \u201c\u200aWe’re not anti-development. We’re just saying it has to be thoughtful, and it has to be forward-thinking, because this is a seventy-five-year deal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This November, City of Miami voters will be casting ballots on a question about city marinas that no…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422130,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[225,227,226],"class_list":["post-422129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-hialeah","tag-hialeah","tag-hialeah-headlines","tag-hialeah-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791455531_952_.jpeg\"\/)
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