The builders of Miami Wilds are accusing Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniela Levine Cava of killing a controversial h2o park deal to safeguard her reelection bid, a recent courtroom filing states.
Miami Wilds countersued Miami-Dade on Monday, alleging the county breached a 2022 lease settlement making it possible for the organization to create the h2o park, a 200-room hotel and up to 20,000 sq. ft of places to eat and retailers on 66 acres at the Zoo Miami campus in an unincorporated space of southwest Miami-Dade.
The Miami Wilds countersuit alleges Levine Cava killed the offer to “appease some of the political activists who make up her foundation.”
Miami Wilds is led by Paul Lambert, Bernard Zyscovich and Miami legal professional Michael Diaz Jr. Lambert qualified prospects Lambert Advisory, a Miami-based mostly actual estate and financial advisory organization that is not associated in Miami Wilds. Zyscovich qualified prospects his eponymous Miami-primarily based architectural agency that made the Miami Wilds resort, but not the water park.
In February, Miami-Dade sued Miami Wilds to terminate the agreement, citing a recent federal ruling that put again in position deed limits at the Zoo Miami web page. The limits prohibit leasing and producing the vacant land for industrial use, the county’s lawsuit states.
Mitchell Jagodinski, a law firm symbolizing Miami Wilds, said Levine Cava undermined the lease agreement with his shopper for political good reasons.
“This scenario, at its main, is really basically about a breach of deal,” Jagodinski reported. “It is a self-inflicted wound by Mayor Levine Cava.”
In a statement, a Levine Cava spokesperson denied the mayor permitted politics to manual her selection to terminate the Miami Wilds lease.
“Politics has almost nothing to do with her positions,” the statement mentioned. “When it turned obvious that the hurdles with the federal authorities remained, the proposed undertaking grew a lot more demanding, and extensions ended up fatigued at this issue.”
County officials have been battling conservation teams for numerous years more than the probable redevelopment of the 66 acres, which is a natural habitat that was previously owned by the Nationwide Parks Company. In the course of general public hearings past 12 months, Zoo Miami’s superstar spokesperson, Ron Magill, joined environmentalists in publicly opposing the undertaking.
In 2022, Bat Conservation Global and Tropical Audubon Modern society, as perfectly as Tropical Audubon President Jose Barros, sued Miami-Dade to end the project. The plaintiffs alleged that the county illegally permitted the improvement to commence with no first trying to find a voter referendum. Final yr, a Miami-Dade Decide granted partial dismissal of the lawsuit, but Bat Conservation and Tropical Audubon have a pending appeal, court docket information present.
The acreage is household to endangered species this sort of as the Miami tiger beetle, Florida bonneted bat, Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak butterfly and Florida Leafwing butterfly, the Tropical Audubon lawsuit states.
