Miami Beach’s burning issue of where to build a new Fire Station No. 1 keeps smoking. To preserve Flamingo Park, commissioners last month unanimously excluded the park as a fire station home and agreed to explore all possible options before deciding in 120 days.
Debate over where to build Fire Station No. 1 has swirled since 2015. The earlier chosen site was the South Shore Community Center at 833 Sixth St., which would have required the city to demolish a building designed by acclaimed Miami Beach architect Morris Lapidus.
However, officials seeking to save the center proposed an alternative: put Fire Station No. 1 on underutilized green space on the west end of Flamingo Park along Alton Road, between 11th and 12th streets.
In April 2024, the city commission asked Miami-Dade to put a countywide referendum on that August’s ballot to allow construction of the fire station on that park land. County commissioners approved in May 2024 and the countywide referendum won support in August.
Last month, city officials once again discussed the fire station and its impact if it moved to the west end of Flamingo Park. They ultimately excluded the park.
The city’s firefighters have long been caught up in this controversy, Mayor Steven Meiner told the meeting. “Our firefighters, who do an incredible job, don’t deserve this … really, this volleyball back and forth.”
The mayor also noted he was “never a fan of putting it in Flamingo Park … I said it publicly then, I’ll say it publicly now.”
The need for a new fire station building is not a question, said Commissioner David Suarez. However, building a “66-foot-tall industrial structure in Flamingo Park, a historic community green space that has been here for well over 100 years, is the wrong solution.”
Mr. Suarez said the August 2024 referendum was “non-binding and lacked much context.”
Additionally, he said, the referendum was “emotionally framed, invoking emergency response times and public safety.”
Mr. Suarez expressed concerns with the precedent a decision to build in the park would set.
“If we allow this kind of industrial infrastructure in protected parkland,” he said, “what’s to stop the next one? And let’s not forget, the same commission unanimously passed a resolution requiring neighborhood consensus from the Flamingo Park neighborhood association before moving forward. That never happened. The same commission passed a stop-the-pause policy because the previous fire station was at 90% design, and we decided to change course at the last minute after five years of planning, costing millions of dollars in the process.”
However, Commissioner Tanya Bhatt spoke of keeping the door open to Flamingo Park as a possible location as the commission pursued a parallel path to find something better before the door is closed.
“It doesn’t mean doing anything further than what we’re doing currently,” she said. “No action needs to be taken. Nothing will be stopped…. There will be no pause in this project. There won’t be any – it’s kind of where it is, and we have some time before we need to get to our next step. What I don’t want to do is let the perfect stand in the way of the good.”
A “staggering” amount of “disinformation” has been swirling around the process from the outset, Ms. Bhatt said.
There were talks of placing a parking lot in Flamingo Park to accommodate the firefighters, she said, and “that would be overlooking the pool so that people could stand there leering at people swimming; obviously, that’s not a thing. There were conversations about the fire station being put in Flamingo Park, literally on top of the track and field, taking away the track and field, not adjacent to; obviously, that’s not a thing. I mean, you might not like us, but we are actually not idiots, and certainly our staff and our firefighters are not idiots.”
Ms. Bhatt agreed the referendum was non-binding. However, “we did say in that motion that provided that the referendum was approved by a majority of the Miami-Dade County voters, which had to be legally and a majority of the Miami Beach voters, in the aggregate, we could move forward. Didn’t say we had to. It said we could. I’m not misrepresenting anything here. The results of the August referendum, it passed countywide almost 76%. The referendum passed in Miami Beach by 71% overall in every single precinct, every single one.”
Nearly 6,500 Miami Beach residents voted, she said, asking if the commission was to subvert the will of the voters.
Ms. Bhatt made a presentation that recounted actions and votes on the fire station, including the commission’s unanimous order that the city administration explore design modifications at the Flamingo Park site.
The commission gave parameters, she said, such as that the track at the park not be impacted or shifted.
“As elected officials,” said Ms. Bhatt, “the only job that we are responsible for, the only thing that matters, is public safety, for the city, residents and visitors and businesses in Miami Beach. That’s it. That is job one. All the other quibbles and quarrels, insignificant.”
Finally, Commissioner Joseph Magazine made a motion: 60 days to prepare a community, administration and elected officials “sourced idea” of where the fire station can go. Additionally, the commission would hear from the community and give staff 60 days to “determine the feasibility of each of those to then which it comes back to us … take a vote of which site we’re going to put this on, and we move forward and do not look back.”
Elected officials would have 60 days for the process, he said, and staff would have 60 days to return and explore the feasibility.
Mr. Magazine explained he was envisioning they would have 60 days to give ideas, “and then 60 days, which would start September, when everybody’s back, to get results. So we could come up … have our drop box of saying, ‘here’s my idea, here’s my idea, here’s my idea.’ And then that’ll … [be] middle of September. And then the staff will have 60 days to evaluate those, or if they have any of their own, and they come back 60 days after that with a menu of options, no delay. We take a vote and we move forward.”
The commission ultimately removed Flamingo Park as an option for the fire station but highlighted the possibility of reversing that decision.
“I will vote to exclude Flamingo Park from this because that seems to be the temperature of my colleagues,” said Mr. Magazine. “That being said, whether it be this or one of the other options that are, quote unquote, ‘excluded,’ we can sit here – we reverse decisions all the time, and if it’s the will in 120 days that there’s seven people up here that want to put it in a park, then they’re going to vote to put it in a park whether we include it, exclude it.”
The South Shore Community Center was added to the motion as a site “excluded” from being a fire station location.
Mayor Meiner cited the possibility of calling a special commission meeting on the fire station’s location.
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