The Miami Heat continue to screw over Miami-Dade County by refusing to follow through on their promised waterfront park

In 1996, the Miami Heat were losing the PR battle for a new basketball arena. The Miami Heat were trying to justify to the public why the team should be given a new sports arena on the public’s dime. As a former Heat political consultant wrote in 2004, as the referendum date got closer, the “arena project appeared to be doomed”. So how did they turn it around and win the vote? They did everything they could to talk about this potential park. If they went to do an interview, the team would publicize their promise of building a “new, world-class waterfront park” that was going to show off the “city’s natural beauty” through “vast green space”. Pat Riley did TV commercials discussing how Miami “deserved a world-class waterfront park and arena”. The Heat would create a “lushly landscaped park with a soccer field”…called “Parcel B”. Suddenly, the public began to like the deal.

The Heat won the vote. Built the arena. That’s the end of it. As the Miami New Times summarizes, “The Heat won the arena, but the park never happened”. Not only has the team not built what they promised, but it sits empty today and the Heat are paying “hundreds of thousands of dollars a year” to keep the people who paid for the arena off the land. As the Miami Herald noted in 2020, Parcel B sits “padlocked behind a fence most of the time”. Thanks to an inept city council, the Heat also was able to get “heavily discounted rental fees far below market value for the prime real estate” that the public was giving them.

In 2003, a part of Parcel B required seawall work that cost $6 million to fix. How did the Heat pay for this? They didn’t. They gave the land back to the county, but continued “to lease it for extra parking and staging at special events”. This allowed the Heat to keep using it while being responsible for nothing. In 2020, the city decided that enough was enough. After 25 years, the city council decided to…change the name of the property from Parcel B to “Dan Paul Plaza”. They named it after a man who in 1996 “opposed building the tax-subsidized arena on county land”. After this pointless move, the city announced that they had “no new plans for (Parcel B)”.

More recently, when residents began to protest the lack of action by the team on Parcel B, the Heat simply released a statement claiming that they just wanted “to be a good partner and neighbor”…by not following through on what they promised? The Heat have always been good partners with the city. Remember when the team agreed to share profits with the city if it went over $14 million a year? The city has “never seen a dime of shared revenue” even after record-breaking revenue years.

How? As the Miami New Times points out, the Heat owner, Micky Arison, can move cash around to “avoid reporting any excess profits”. Such as in 2009-2010, when Arison’s company “advanced almost $14 million to the team and then reported the money as a loss”. Is it any wonder why some have claimed that Miami-Dade County “negotiated one of the worst profit-sharing deals with a local sports franchise ever put to paper”? Or how about the time Arison yet again moved money around to save $120+ million in “cost overruns to capital improvement projects” at the arena?