Will anyone pay the county for its crumbling courthouse?

The Dade County Courthouse is about to go to auction, with commissioners praying hard that someone actually bids on their historic 28-story white elephant.

Everybody loves the building, which when it was built in 1928 was the tallest south of Cincinnati. But like other revered buildings (think Miami Marine Stadium, the Freedom Tower, the Coconut Grove Playhouse, the Olympia Theater) paying government a lot for it and then spending untold millions to restore and preserve it makes little business sense.

As commissioners last week voted to auction off the courthouse as fast as possible, they also ticked off its demerits. 

For one, it’s falling apart – that’s why county users are moving out. The top, a former jail, has been vacant for years. The basements flood.

For another, it’s got built-in health problems, like lots of mold.

The few small elevators wouldn’t work for most suggested reuses.

Commissioner Keon Hardemon acknowledged what others would not: tearing down the decrepit building would make the most economic sense for taxpayers, because its Flagler Street site would be a great buy for developers. But the building is historic, so a teardown is an issue.  

Otherwise, as outgoing commissioner Eileen Higgins said at her last meeting before she became a runoff candidate for City of Miami mayor, the county will be paying $5 million a year to maintain the building when occupants move into the new justice center at a coming-soon date. (Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said she expects a lower cost.)

So, if the county can’t sell the building, it will have to fix it up as well as pay to maintain it. 

“The renovation of this could be as much as $150 million or $250 million,” Ms. Higgins said. “So the math on this as a public project is really hard.”

She should know. She was the spearhead as the county tried to sell the building for a minimum of $52.3 million in July 2024 and didn’t get an offer to match, so she then negotiated with the sole potential buyer, GFO Investments, for a far lesser deal – a deal that last week’s vote ended. 

Now she suggests the county take anything at all for the courthouse if the buyer plans to spend enough that the building becomes an asset.

“If we find a bidder that wants to buy it and repair it, we’re in better shape even if we don’t get a huge capital amount but if they’re willing to spend the money on the restoration and they’re willing to spend the money operating it,” she said. “All of that is good for the community and doesn’t leave us with the shell of a building with no plan.”

In other words, offload that white elephant at whatever price and let the restoration and operation be someone else’s problem.

The county couldn’t figure out how to make it work. But the great hope is maybe someone else will do it – like the greater fool theory that applied in Miami a century ago as land was flipped from hand to hand because someone would bail out the latest buyer with even more money. That worked until it stopped working in the great Miami land bust.

As Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez put it, “In a public auction, if nobody’s interested then we have another hot potato on our hands.”

On the other side was Raquel Regalado, who warned that it wouldn’t look good to hand over the building for peanuts (as Miami just did with its historic Olympia Theater, which was costing the city a lot to maintain). 

“We can’t give away another public building” in the hope that someone fixes it up, she said. “The optics of that is bad.” 

“I think that what we’re going to end up seeing is similar to like the Freedom Tower or something else,” Ms. Regalado predicted. “This is going to be something that somebody buys in order to get like a tremendous tax write-off by giving it to somebody else.”

And if that doesn’t happen?

“What I don’t want to do,” said Mr. Bermudez, “is be here two years from now with (a request for proposals) that brings us back to the same place.”

As commissioners suggested multiple uses for the building – Ms. Regalado cited college classrooms, an event space or a restaurant on top – Ms. Higgins had a sobering reminder: “We had a public solicitation process. Nobody bid. Nobody met the bid. Nobody even came close.” And that was for any use at all. 

As Oliver Gilbert III noted, the value and carrying costs of the building may not be in line with what will work in the marketplace. “There was a public process. So the market speaks the way the market speaks. They speak with their intention, their bid, their checks” – and the county got nothing.

The choice came down to sitting on a building everybody loves but nobody can use or auctioning it off for anything at all in hopes someone will take it off the county’s hands fast – cheap, but fast – with the provision that it must be maintained properly as an historic building.

If the county gets offers, commissioners will get the final say on accepting the best. If not, taxpayers will keep on paying millions to maintain an empty historic building that can’t be used. How much money would a crumbling icon be worth to maintain? Or should Mr. Hardemon just bring in the wrecking ball? It’s not an appealing group of choices.