Miami commissioners on Thursday unanimously accepted the site plans for a new $634 million ballpark and parking complex for the Florida Marlins in Little Havana.The vote came after a fairly brief presentation by the Marlins on the planned 37,000-seat facility with a retractable roof.
It was a virtual repeat of the presentation the team's architects gave to the city's planning board a few weeks ago.
Thursday's commission vote came with one main condition: The four-acre plaza that fronts the stadium and is covered by a sliding roof on game days will be open as public space during the entire year, including the offseason.Also Thursday, as the board unanimously accepted architect Leo A. Daly to design the $94 million worth of parking sites at the stadium, it cleared up a slight brouhaha over general-fund money that City Manager Pete Hernandez had said was needed for the parking structures.
The manager said he needed $9 million. The announcement, running counter to earlier promises not to touch the city's operating budget for the stadium, touched a nerve with commissioners and prompted Chairman Joe Sanchez to pull the item from the agenda.
Part of that $9 million, Sanchez said he was told, was to go to ongoing projects like construction of Wynwood's Roberto Clemente Park. Hernandez called that a ''misunderstanding'' and said the extra money -- $4.1 million -- ''was just a contingency by conservative CFO'' Larry Spring.
Eventually, commissioners voted to pay Daly the $4.9 million it says it needs to design the parking sites, with the money coming from a combination of State Sunshine loans and Convention Development Tax money -- but not general funds. The additional $4.1 million wasn't needed, Hernandez said, and was only being requested should the cost exceed Daly's $4.9 million budget.
