Miami’s living textbook holds keys to the past and the future

To understand Miami, look at how we got here. We seem to repeatedly tread the same ground.

Fortunately, it’s all documented. The textbook is the newspaper, which compiles history one edition at a time. Take a single copy of Miami Today from exactly 25 years ago. Some articles reveal progress, some show that we still face the challenges of 1999 or that we didn’t learn from the past.

Miami-Dade’s mass transit gap is among today’s major issues. On the front page in April 1999 we reported that county commissioners would vote that day on gathering $7.2 billion to match federal funds to build the transit system over the next 20 years. 

What happened? Commissioners didn’t approve the funds, voters agreed three years later to tax themselves to build mass transit, the funds were raided for other uses, and 25 years later we’re still trying to fund that transit network.

The other transit needs report on that front page ended in success. Transportation interests had convened to fill in the gaps between the county’s 300 bus routes and decided to look at having private drivers in their own vehicles do the job.

Today that’s a non-issue. The county contracted with a private firm to run MetroConnect as one solution, privately run Freebee vehicles working for governments serve multiple areas, and municipal trolleys funded by our transportation surtax are thriving. But principally, the concept of a fleet of private vehicles became a successful global industry via Uber, Lyft and others. One problem solved.

Another problem that was solved – but that you haven’t paid for yet – was how to fund a stadium for the then-Florida Marlins. On the front page, team owner John Henry was saying that the community could get up to $195 million for naming rights, which of course never happened. 

But in his “Ask the Mayor” column on our Viewpoint page, Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas answered a reader’s question of how much county money he would be willing to commit to a baseball stadium this way: “While county governments may be able to support new stadiums in various ways, I do not support the use of public dollars to construct a baseball stadium.”

Almost a decade later, a new county mayor, Carlos Alvarez, took the opposite position and pushed through the present stadium, for which county taxpayers still owe more than $2 billion in bond debt and interest. Repaying that will make the headlines of the future. 

In another reversal, the City of Miami asked its manager to find an outside organization to run its Tower Theater in Little Havana as a non-profit cinema, our report detailed. Eventually Miami Dade College took over as a highly successful presenter of quality films – until the city decided recently that it didn’t want outsiders doing the job after all, took back the Tower, and handed it to Commissioner Joe Carollo to program and operate.  

The opposite occurred as Coral Gables planned to turn its old fire and police station at Salzedo Street and Aragon Avenue into a historical museum but had hurdles to overcome moving operations from the site. The city succeeded, and the building now houses the highly successful Coral Gables Museum.

Not all cultural sites fared as well. The Coconut Grove Playhouse reported profitability, with revenue up 90% over five years as subscription sales grew in 1999, but said it was endangered because the building was crumbling, Miami Today wrote. 

Today the playhouse building is still crumbling, but it has been vacant since it was shuttered in 2006 as profits evaporated and debts mounted. The City of Miami and the county continue to battle in court over how the theater will someday be restored and operated.

Another arts venue was days from a May 1 and 2 groundbreaking ceremony by the Performing Arts Center Foundation. What is now the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County did eventually open, in October 2006, as the Carnival Center. 

Another article in that edition noted that the arts center would not open with a parking garage, as experts noted where patrons could park. One idea was to park in what was then the American Airlines Arena with just a 10- to 15-minute walk to theaters. Studies found a total of 5,900 on-street and downtown garage parking spaces, so they decided a garage wasn’t needed for the arts center. A garage has never been built, a decision some patrons regret to this day.

Under the heading of a job never finished, Miami International Airport was destined for terminal expansion and a new runway. At the time, the director was predicting that the airport might handle as many as 30 million passenger arrivals and departures a year. Last year the airport passed 50 million, projects 52 million this year, and the current director’s forecasts are for 77 million by 2040. Of course, the airport is now at work on expansion projects.

More very unfinished business: a hearing was scheduled to discuss raising county commissioners’ expense allowances and benefits. What was not done was to raise commission pay, which in the 1950s was set at $6,000 – where it remained in 1999 and where it remains today for what decades ago grew into a full-time job overseeing more than $11 billion a year in spending.

Other reports in that one newspaper edition probed how to build our film industry, a lingering question; whether the City of Miami’s mayor should also be city manager, as today people question how many jobs the city’s mayor can do simultaneously; how Parrot Jungle (now Jungle Island) would fund its move from Pinecrest to Watson Island and how and when it would repay its debts, an issue that long lingered; how to deal with 6.3% county unemployment, an issue that has reversed to how to find people to fill vacant jobs; how to keep the state from weakening Miami-Dade’s strong building code rules; and a note that Federal Express would open its Latin American Cargo hub at Miami International Airport, which became a business bonanza. 

At the time those reports appeared it was unclear which ones would become keys to the future. As it turned out, all have remained relevant today. But what lessons did we learn along the way?