Boca Raton’s Planning & Zoning Board voted in favor of developers James and Marta Batmasian’s proposal to build a mixed-use hotel near the Mizner Park shopping and entertainment district.
Despite pleas from downtown area condo residents, the board voted 5 to 1 on Thursday to recommend parking space waivers and other zoning changes that will enable the Batmasians to build Mizner Plaza, a twin 12-story hotel project with 242 rooms, 18,840 square feet of retail and 16,000 square feet of restaurant space at 132 and 170 Northeast Second Street.
The project would replace a U.S. Post Office branch and a retail plaza.
The board also voted 5 to 1 to recommend that the city transfer its 0.3-acre parking lot at 190 Northeast Second Street to the Batmasians so they can build underground parking for the project.
Board member Dorothy MacDiarmid was the lone dissenter for both measures, which will ultimately be decided by Boca Raton’s mayor and city council members at a future meeting.
The parking waiver will allow the Batmasians to build just 372 spaces at the 1.9-acre site instead of the 569 spaces currently required, the developers’ land use attorney, Ele Zachariades said. The developers also want to build two-levels of underground parking below what is now a city-owned, 17-space parking lot.
The waiver will allow the developer to incorporate a stepped-style crafted by Boca Raton-architecture firm HdA that would place the retail, restaurant spaces and amenities on the first, second, fourth and 12th floors of the hotel, Zachariades said.
The hotel rooms would be between 380 and 1,100 square feet in size, according to a memo.
The Batmasians offered to replace the lot’s 17 parking spaces and turn the above ground area into a mini public park. But the majority of the planning and zoning board sided with city staffers’ recommendation that the developers pay the city for the land’s appraised $2.4 million value with nearly $900,000 in cash and the rest in public improvements and maintenance credits related to the spaces and future park.
Without the parking waiver and city land, the developers would pursue a design that would end up blocking most condo dwellers’ views and consist almost entirely of hotel rooms, Zachariades said.
But residents at the neighboring Tower 155, a complex finished in 2020 that is up to 150 feet tall, asked the board to vote no on the project or delay it for further analysis.
Jeff Costello, a planning consultant retained by Tower 155’s condo association, said there will be more than 2,400 daily new trips in the area once the hotel is built, much of it going through a 20-foot alleyway between Tower 155 and the future development.
Richard De Witt, an attorney representing the same asociation, argued that the project should be delayed because it did not go through proper procedures and that the sale of the parking lot should go out to bid.
De Witt also pointed out that a previous appraisal for the land done by the city’s consultant, Walter Duke & Associates, put the value of the land at $3.3 million.
“Once the developers saw that they balked at the price and demanded a new appraisal,” De Witt told the board, adding that the Batmasians want “to pay zero” for the land.
Zachariades countered that the first appraisal included public properties that were not part of her clients’ undergrounding plans.
Most board members, though, said the project would help revitalize the Mizner Park district and Boca Raton’s downtown area.
“I do think it is a beautiful building. Mizner needs something. Mizner has a lot of problems,” board member Timothy Dornblaser said.
This is the second hotel plan the Batmasians have proposed near Mizner Park. An earlier proposal, made in the summer of 2023, would have consisted of two 11-story buildings with 266 hotel rooms and 32,400 square feet of retail and restaurants.The Batmasians founded Investments Limited in the early 1980s and have become one of the biggest real estate developers in the Boca Raton area. James Batmasian served eight months in prison after pleading guilty for evading $250,000 in payroll taxes in 2008. But he was pardoned by President Donald Trump in December 2020.
Read more
Residential
South Florida
Boca Raton to vote on James and Marta Batmasian’s Mizner Plaza proposal
James Batmasian’s complicated legacy
