October 23, 2009

Marlins garage cost lowered, sorta

Stop the presses: The Miami City Commission actually did something yesterday, lowering the cost of the Florida Marlins parking garage the city has to build from $41 million over budget to only $26 million over budget. Though when you read the fine print, maybe "doing something" is a bit of an overstatement:

[Commissioner Marc] Sarnoff suggested lowering the financing cost to $120 million. [City Manager Pete] Hernandez said he'd negotiate terms with project managers and others to lower the cost. If it's not possible, he and Sarnoff agreed, the administration would return to the commission asking for more money.

{Commissioners [Joe] Sanchez, [Angel] Gonzalez and Sarnoff accepted the motion.

Also yesterday, the commission rejected using $6 million in tax-free federal stimulus bonds to pay a share of the garage cost, which is more or less trivial in terms of the overall cost (the city would have saved maybe $2 million in the long run), but which allowed Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones to assert that she wanted stimulus funding to be used strictly for neighborhood recovery: "I don't want one penny, one quarter, one dollar, or one piece of lint to go toward the Marlins stadium, period." I guess no one offered her a quid pro quo this time.