Where is Walt Disney (who always paid for his stuff) when you need him?
Dr. Gregory Bush always derided Miami for its boosterism. This is the mother of all boosting: Miami Wild. What are we Orlando? Do we need every stupid thing they can think up at our fingertips and help pay for it to boot? Do we want to be a land of chain hotels and restaurants, or a farming community? Remember this is the only subtropical farming in the continental United States. Doesn't that mean anything to anybody?
Look at what the South Florida Business Journal reports (Attention: more of our tax money needed):
"20th Century Fox wants $13.5 million from the Miami-Dade County Economic Development Fund to replicate several US Coast Guard communication towers so that they can build their Miami Wilds amusement park.
The film company and Miami-Dade are negotiating the logistics of the proposed $930 million Miami Wilds development that might rise at the county-owned Zoo Miami, according to Miami Today. Included in the plans are theme park rides; a water park; a 400-room hotel with a Sony Music Theatre venue; a 30,000-square-foot retail and restaurant village; an entertainment center with movie theaters and bowling; an outdoor area for sports; and a 1.5-mile transportation link that brings it all together.
20th Century Fox plans to lease land from the county for the project. The company says it would pay Miami-Dade more than $67.1 million in rent during the first 20 years of operation, Miami Today reports.
The reason why the company has to replicate Coast Guard tower? Part of the Miami Wilds complex is to be built on federally owned land northeast of Zoo Miami where the US Coast Guard now has facilities. For that to happen, 20th Century Fox needs to replicate several towers.
20th Century Fox is also requesting public sector funding for $40 million parking, $26.5 million site preparation, $26 million roadways, and a $24 million transportation mode inside the entertainment complex."
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| This is exactly where we don't want a big theme park, near our subtropical farms - the only subtropical farming in the continental U.S. |
14 comments:
Bad link to bizjournals.
The county is tourist and real estate friendly. Alternatives to Ghetto Beach keep the tax dollars flowing.
Pine Rocklands are the most unique and endangered ecosystem in the world, and they want to build a theme park over and next to it (eye roll). Throw in Walmart's building plans for South Dade and you're pretty much decimating a huge portion of what is left in that area. Luckily the Feds have gotten involved.
Ghetto beach? Where do you go swimming
Maybe if Charlie Crist gets elected and Amendment 1 passes, we can get all this land reclaimed as a state par or preserve. Please people, get out and VOTE. Early voting at public libraries is open and you can even request to vote by mail until Oct 28. For this and so many issues, vote in this election.
Keep your eye on this one. The original version of the theme park proposed to destroy 14 acres of globally-imperiled pine rockland.
And don't be fooled by the number in the Biz Journal. The public subsidy will be over $100 million. For that much money we could buy all the endangered forest around the zoo and protect and care for it forever.
Shame on the Parks Department for being the biggest cheerleader, and special shame on their hired staff and consultants for masterminding all the worst aspects of this proposal - like destroying pine rockland for roads and toll booths, and getting the University of Miami to consider destroying more of their pine forests too.
The Mayor should learn more about the project before becoming a cheerleader. If we care about preserving this special pineland, there is no way the theme park and the pineland can coexist.
Enough is enough. There were 180,000 acres of these forests when Miami was first settled in the early 1900s. There is less than 2% remaining. A theme park can go anywhere else - in Moss' district, if that's so important.
Stay involved - pay attention - tell the Mayor and the Commission the theme park has to go somewhere else. If you are mad about the piddly acreage Wal-Mart is going to impact, this project is going to dwarf that one.
Isn't Moss behind all of this. It started out as an expansion of Metro Zoo which is no Zoo Miami or to tourists, "someone got the sign backwards" meaning it should read Miami Zoo!
The Feds are no better. back in the 1990s they destroyed acres of the same pineland on the western side of the Richmond site when the DOJ expanded the jail where Noriega was serving time.
they did no environmental study and paid no fine mitigated no lost habitat.
Even if Miami Wilds isn't built atop pine rocklands, it would negatively impact them. First and foremost, it would destroy treeless antenna fields FULL of state-listed pine rockland plants. Secondly, it will make it THAT much harder for managers to burn the preserves that remain, and they have to burn to survive. (And c'mon Genius of despair, tropical farming is great, but pine rocklands are our unique natural heritage!)
I really can't stand when we use public money for private things like this.
It sure seems all they want to build in Florida are amusement parks, high density housing and casinos. Why not production studios for 20th Century Fox. At least this would bring real jobs, not minimum wage part time gigs.
I've been reading this blog for several years now - And Al Crespo's great blog too - and if there is one take away lesson from all of this it's this - you get the representation you deserve. If you don't like the current power structure (venal cocksuckers just about all of them), change it. Vote. Vote. Vote. Levine Cava is a great start. We need seven or eight more just like her. By the way, can we get a love for the original blogger, Carl Hiaasen? He's been railing against the Great Destroyers for decades. Pick up Tourist Season, it's as acutely relevant (and sad) now as it was when first published.
And by the way Deltoid Spurge and Bartram's Haistreak Butterfly were both found on those pine rocklands in a very recent survey. Both these species which are Federally Threatened/Endangered had never been officially documented on the Coast Guard site. Now they are, does this mean anything, anything at all?!
Voters have been electing the biggest creeps. Let us hope voters are smart enough to turn down the $393 Mil bond issue AKA "blank check for connected insiders". Smart voters will vote 169.
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