By Mary Hladky
Moving on an accelerated timeline, the Boca Raton City Council has approved an interim agreement with Terra and Frisbie Group that allows the joint venture to refine its conceptual plans for redeveloping the 30-acre downtown government campus.
At the same time, Terra/Frisbie and the city will assess whether the project is financially viable and if the proposed public-private partnership between them is in the best interests of the city.
Another component is developing plans to ensure little disruption to city services if the project moves forward, such as finding temporary offices for city workers displaced when theirs are demolished, making sure there is a functioning police headquarters off-site during construction, and that any recreational facilities that are displaced have a new home.
The time Terra/Frisbie has to make changes to its initial proposal has been reduced by one month, with the deadline now Aug. 25. If all goes well, the two sides could have a final deal by the end of October, or two months earlier than originally projected.
Even with that, the campus will take nine years to complete, according to initial projections.
The council members’ action on March 18 comes just five weeks after they selected Terra/Frisbie as their top choice to handle the massive redevelopment.
In addition to building a new City Hall and Community Center, Terra/Frisbie has proposed 1,129 residential units, 84,790 square feet of retail, 71,800 square feet of food and beverage, 265,758 square feet of garage and surface parking, a 150-room hotel, a 250,000-square-foot office building, a 10,000-square-foot police substation and six acres of green space.
Residents filled the council chambers to capacity to give their opinions, with a few supporting the development but the majority voicing objections raised every time a major project is proposed in the downtown.
Chief among them is that the council is allowing overdevelopment that will diminish their quality of life and clog roads, causing more accidents.
“We elect you guys. You are going against our desire. Please, I beg you, do not build any more,” said one woman as the audience applauded.
Some said they learned only recently about the development plans, complaining the city had left them uninformed.
And several demanded that the council step back and instead let residents vote on the proposal.
“A project this immense, it needs a vote,” said a man who said he was speaking for 20 people in his neighborhood as the audience applauded loudly. “There are so many people who do not know about this.”
In a rejoinder, Mayor Scott Singer said, “It might surprise you to know a lot of people have various opinions. … A lot of people are excited about the proposal before us.”
“Where are they today?” several residents shouted.
Two residents asked why the city was moving so quickly into a public-private partnership with developers, rather than financing the project with a bond issue which the city’s strong financial position easily allows it to do.
As the comments became heated, two residents suggested council members had accepted bribes to vote in favor of the project.
That drew pushback from Deputy Mayor Yvette Drucker. “Your comment about taking bribes is in very poor taste,” she said. “No one is bribing us to do anything.”
Yet most of the criticism came from downtown residents who do not want to lose the recreational facilities — including tennis courts, softball fields and a skate park — located near City Hall.
City Manager George Brown previously has said that the city is working with the Greater Boca Raton Beach and Park District to find new homes for recreational facilities that will be moved off-site to make way for development. But all will be replaced or enhanced, he said.
The softball fields will go to Sugar Sand Park and the skate park might move to North Park.
Judy Morrow, an avid tennis player, brought 250 signed petitions from people who want to preserve the existing 10 clay courts at the Boca Raton Tennis Center.
While Terra/Frisbie has conceptually proposed four hard courts within the downtown government campus, that is insufficient to accommodate the 21,000 players who used the existing courts last year, she said in an interview. And hard courts are not a good option for older players with knee and joint issues.
Further, other tennis facilities close to the downtown are always full and have hard courts, she said.
Speaking at the meeting, she begged Brown, “Please, please, please keep the Boca Raton Tennis Center downtown.”
“It is the city’s clear intention to replace the 10 courts with 10 courts,” he told the audience. Although no location has been selected yet, “we will have a plan to replace the courts.”
Thomson’s ‘no’ vote
As the council neared a vote on the interim agreement, the meeting veered in a very different direction.
Council member Andy Thomson renewed objections that he had made a month earlier. “In my view, all the proposals were too large, too dense, too intense, too many units, too many issues related to recreational facilities,” he said.
The timeline to reach a final agreement with Terra/Frisbie seemed “too rushed” and needed to be slowed down.
He then said a contract clause, stating that the developer shall not be involved in any political campaign for city office or make financial contributions to such campaigns, had originally been in the contract but was removed.
That clause, he said, had been included in city contracts for decades.
“This represents a pretty significant departure from policy of the city. It is being done without any notice or discussion,” he said. “That is just not good. … Everyone we do business with should be controlled by this.”
He made a motion to add back the clause. It failed when no other council member seconded it, drawing a loud “wow” from several audience members.
City Attorney Joshua Koehler said the language applied to vendors. But if the council wanted to include that or modified language, it could.
Terra/Frisbie, he said, did not object to the clause.
Thomson said that since the city had used the clause for years, it should do so for a “far more consequential relationship” with Terra/Frisbie. “This is a really strange time to take it out,” he said.
Singer suggested amending the wording, but Drucker and Council member Fran Nachlas were not comfortable drafting contract language on the fly and suggested delaying the vote until another meeting could be held to do so.
That didn’t happen. The council quickly voted 4-1 to approve the interim agreement with Terra/Frisbie, with Thomson dissenting.
Before the vote, Drucker pointedly noted that Thomson had been the only council member who voted on Feb. 11 against Terra/Frisbie as their choice to redevelop the downtown campus, instead favoring Related Ross in what he said at the time was “a very close call” between “two exceptional companies.”
In an interview after the meeting, Thomson said he thought it was necessary to raise the issue since the city had used the contract language routinely for decades, and yet it was missing in the one with Terra/Frisbie.
“When the city decides to do business with whoever, those relationships should be based on the quality of work and business reasons and not on what could be perceived as political influence,” he said.
Someone must have asked it be removed, but Terra/Frisbie did not do so and city staff did not demand it, he said.
Queried about Drucker’s implication that he was acting in favor of Related Ross, Thomson said he had “no animus to Terra/Frisbie,” considers the company “very talented” and credited it for not having any objection to the contract language.
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