Boca’s Ballot Question Part 2: Is It What The Ads Say?

This article is a cup of coffee or lunchtime worth of time to read. It is an in-depth look at the proposed project to renovate Boca’s 31 acres of public land downtown. The city council’s approach as represented in its proposed Public Private Partnership plan is in the hands of voters on March 10 as a ballot question. ICYMI, it has fractured the city.

In “Boca’s Ballot Question Part 1: Here is the Truth“, I explain how we got here. This article is a deep dive into the proposed use of the public land versus the ads and marketing campaign inundating your inbox, phone, social media, and TV. It identifies hidden side effects, things that were lost that nobody is talking about, and what is gained for the public… the land owner. In the upcoming Part 3 of this series, an alternative framework will be presented for accomplishing similar goals but with a focus on using public land for the public. First, a look at the ballot question:

You are voting on a 99-yr lease of public land, not a plan.

The words in the ballot question:

“a new community center/city hall/police substation, Memorial Park area, honoring veterans and expanded green spaces”

seem to be misleading and the marketing campaign makes it sound like Boca gets all of that stuff in exchange for leasing its public land for 99 years. To clarify, those are not things built by voting yes. Those are things listed as examples of things that the “generated rent and revenues” could be used for in addition to “general uses” for the city. What Boca gets financially in the deal is hotly debated. See Martha Parker CPA article “$4 billion in revenues, really?” for an explanation in laymen’s terms of how to cut through the marketing and PR speak. A friend and finance guy boiled it all down to this question:

The Essence of the Ballot Question

Now you have found the essence of Boca’s ballot question which, in balance with the marketing hype and biased ballot language, could be put in these terms:

• VOTE YES: In the year Boca Raton celebrates being 100 years old, yes, lease 8 acres of public land to a developer for 99 years to build a seven building 12-story Transit District based on the Brightline that dumps a thousand household, 180 room hotel and 9 story office building’s traffic into one of the craziest and problematic intersections in Boca Raton.
• VOTE NO: I’m all in favor of redeveloping our 50 year old campus but we should do something better. Even if we have to issue a bond to do so … just like the Police Station. Where there is the will, there’s a way.

Said another way, the private Transit District development forces a reduction in space that is available for the Community Center and public recreation amenities.

The Transit District Private Development

You may have noticed your inbox, phone, and social media feeds are inundated with One Boca advertisements urging you to vote yes. The council’s redevelopment proposal is branded “One Boca” by its creator Terra Frisbie. Jessica Gray looks into its evolution and PACs involved in her article “Who’s behind the One Boca Ad Campaign?“.

LAND USE SUMMARY

To make it work, a new street had to be invented between Palmetto Park Rd and NW 1st St. Except for a pocket park at the south tip, the council’s Transit District concept for the area is to have six “ground floor commercial, rest of the floors hotel/residential/parking buildings” that flank a pedestrian walkway. There is one 9-story “ground floor grocer rest of the floors office and parking” tower at the end opposite the pocket park. That tower is located in what is now the library parking lot/flood control green space. It is roughly the girth and height of the Bank of America tower downtown.

One of the six buildings is a 180 bed hotel with parking garage. By comparison, Boca’s Hyatt Place Hotel is 200 rooms and of similar height. The remaining five buildings are mixed use residential/parking 12-story buildings with a total 947 dwelling units. By comparison, Boca’s Tower 155, of similar height, sits on 1.38 acres (the lawful minimum by Ordinance 4035 was 2 acres but it was lowered by Council for T155) and is approximately 110 units with 300 parking spaces. Roughly speaking, the math says the private Transit District development will have the equivalent dwelling capacity of eight Tower-155 buildings on less than seven-ish total acres (accounting for space used for the hotel and office building).

Building Heights

Currently, the 31 acres of public land has two city government buildings, police station and small business. The intensity of traffic, sewer, power and water from the properties on the east side of NW 2nd Ave is currently only what is needed by the police, small business, city vehicle parking, and code enforcement employees.

The Transit District diagram for “Building Massing” shows how the intensity and infrastructure demands are arranged on the public land. Below is the building massing for the proposed Transit District side by side with the building massing of what is currently on the public land. To do the comparison, I added additional categories in the legend for the lower intensity things currently there and for a fair comparison, added them to the Transit District as appropriate.

BUILDING HEIGHT SUMMARY:

Building #1 is a 9-story grocer/office (Bank of America equivalent) tower. It requires the 50 space library overflow parking lot plus half of the current flood control green space. The remaining six buildings are 12-story (purple) , 4-story (orange) and 2 story (yellow). That is a drastic difference compared to the sparsely arranged 1-2 story buildings and open areas there now. Here is the Terra Frisbie visualization of the corner of NW 2nd Ave and NW 4th Diagonal compared to the current city vehicle and library overflow parking that is there.

The Current Land Use

Below is a land use diagram for the current usage of the entire 31 acre property. The Transit District 99-yr lease agreement requires the police and city administration buildings on the east side of the public land be removed. That clears the east side public land for the Transit District. The lease requires all government and new police substation be on the west side public land. It calls them “Public Amenities”.

NOTE: The 99-yr lease agreement for the public land says that the police station will be replaced with a “Police Substation” located on the west side (Memorial Park). However the Police Substation is missing from the land use concept for Memorial Park. That means something currently shown for Memorial Park must be changed/deleted.

Currently, the east side of the public land is entirely employee and city vehicle parking lots, a City Administration building, the police station and its secure parking. As for the west side, since the 1960s, that area, has served as the “Patch Reef Park” of East Boca providing the following current day amenities for the public:

• Public parking (311 total spaces in 4 locations on the property)
• Community Center
• Tennis Center (10 courts)
• Community baseball (two fields)
• Skate Park
• Shuffleboard Courts
• Children’s museum
• Children’s playground
• Basketball court (1)
• City Council Chambers

What must be done to make the Transit District plan work

The “walkable neighborhood with residential, retail, office, and hotel uses” Transit District approach reduces public land that is available for pubic use from 31 acres to +/- 17 acres. But, before anything can be done, the City Council has to fund $224.6 million in preparation as follows:

• $17M – Move the city government to North Boca five miles away
• $12M – Move ball fields out west three miles away
• $3.6M – Move skate park to Boca Teeca four miles away
• $192M -Move the police station to Spanish River Library 4.5 miles away ($175M bond + $17M taxpayer reserves)

Let that sink in. Before doing anything, the City has already, before the vote, put plans in motion to spend almost $225 million BEFORE doing anything toward a new city hall and is taking out a $175 million police station bond (also on the ballot) to do so.

The Police station, Ball fields and Skate Park aren’t the only things being moved out of the city

This is a good point in the discussion to recall that renovating the 1960s era City Hall, Administration building and police station was the goal. The Public Private Partnership (P3) Transit District is the City Council’s alternative to a straight up renovation of the existing government campus using the plentiful open space on its public land to shuffle functions around.

So, to clear the east side public land for the Transit District, the plan is to move the police station and its 170 vehicle parking spaces to Spanish River Library. What about the two city government buildings and their 370 parking spaces?

To make more room for the Transit District, the city purchased a two building 70,400SF, 660 parking space complex¹ in North Boca for $17M. Initially, the move was reportedly as temporary². But that has changed. The 6551 buildings are the permanent location for most city offices. The city confirms:

“The new office building (6551 Park of Commerce) is intended to be permanent for most employees. It has always been intended to house the building and code enforcement functions permanently.  At one point we were planning to build a full replacement city hall downtown for all other city hall functions (Council, executive, legal, HR, recreation, finance, etc.). In the interim, these functions (except recreation) were going to be temporary housed at 6551. The current plan is to build a smaller city hall downtown to include Council, Executive, Legal, and City Clerk. Essentially, the current 3^rd floor city hall functions plus a chamber. All other functions such as HR, Planning, and Finance will remain at 6551. This was primarily a financial decision as refurbishing 6551 is much less expensive than building new.”

The Plan for Memorial Park (West side public land)

The Transit District approach has a major omission. The lease agreement requires a police substation to be part of the west side Memorial Park development but does not allocate space for it in its Memorial ParkConceptual land use diagram.

The Transit District concept for the west side Memorial Park deletes

• The skate park,
• Robert Pinchuk Memorial field
• The softball field
• Shuffle board court

Like the east side land use diagrams, I annotated current and concept land uses to use a common notation. Except for the Children’s museum which is left as-is, the 99-year Transit District approach is to raze (bulldoze) and redevelop:

MEMORIAL PARK SUMMARY:

1. The Police Substation required to be on the west side Memorial Park public land by the 99-yr lease is MISSING.
2. Public Parking: There are two lots totaling roughly 160 spaces split between two lots at polar opposite end of the park. The current Memorial Park has about 311 spaces interspersed with the amenities.
3. Children’s museum: Remains as-is. As best as can be determined, its parking spaces are consolidated into a new adjoining 80 space parking lot for city hall and playground amenities.
4. New City Hall: This is shown as a triangular building roughly 200′ on each. It is roughly the same footprint on the land as current city hall. According to the city this will contain only city manager, mayor, city council and city clerk offices plus meeting/chambers facilities. There is no parking lot and it doesn’t look like there is vehicle access to an internal parking garage. Current city hall has about 195 spaces of public parking.
5. New Community Center: A bigger footprint and probably taller but there are NO PARKING SPACES compared to 70 spaces in the current one.
6. New Basketball Courts: Increased from one to two.
7. A new tennis center will be built from scratch at a new location on Palmetto park. It has its own 80 space parking. That lot is so close to the intersection, it may only have an entrance from westbound Palmetto Park Road and possibly South Bound NW 2nd Ave. This will add new congestion to the intersection.
8. New Community Field: The current greenspace used by the community for pickup games or flying a kite is filler space. The new one consolidates about the same amount of space into on square field.
9. New Garden Walk/Banyan village: These two passive spaces about 25% larger than Wildflower park fill out the remaining areas in the plan and include some pavilion like structures under the banyan trees.

What is the best use for Boca’s downtown public land?

The ballot question lease agreement for the Transit District P3 represents one take on how to use the public land. It is arguably the development centric approach. The alternative approach would be public centric.

There are several public focussed approaches. Some include private components that enhance rather that preclude public benefit. But none of them begin by leasing away half the public land for 99 years for a thousand family high-rise neighborhood with an office and a hotel, getting rid city office buildings, getting rid of the police station, getting rid of half the public recreation amenities, then using what’s left for a ceremonial city hall, new community center and public green space to fill in the gaps. And remember, the police substation is missing from the Memorial Park concept diagram so expect that “whoopsie” to delete yet another amenity from “East Boca’s Patch Reef Park” to make room for the Transit District. Bye bye sports field?

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REFERENCES

1. Merdian Office Center 6551 Park of Commerce Blvd ↩︎
2. Boca Raton Approves Purchase of Office Building for $17M ↩︎