Downtown Still Has Its BID

Downtown Coral Gables has a business improvement district, and it is very much in business. The independent nonprofit that promotes Miracle Mile, spotlights its restaurants and shops, and runs its events, these days under the name Experience Coral Gables, was in local inboxes as recently as this week, pushing the Miami Spice dining promotion and an update of downtown happenings. It is not the city’s to run, and it has not gone anywhere.

The city’s part in all of this was always narrower than the shorthand suggests. Coral Gables did not run the district. It acted as the taxing agency for it, levying and collecting a special assessment on downtown commercial property, the proceeds funding the organization’s promotional work. That assessment ran from 1997 to 2022, and then it lapsed.

When it lapsed, the leftover money the organization still held became a fight, and the city went to court to claim it. They settled in early 2024, and the terms are worth knowing, because they frame everything since. The organization kept the funds, on conditions. It may spend them only on downtown, on events, promotion, beautification, and advertising the district, and nothing on candidates or on paying its own board. It has to open its books, delivering audits and semiannual expense reports to the city for as long as that money lasts. And it agreed to help the city study whether a new district made sense.

That study is the one that just came back no. To run it, the city hired a national consulting firm to test the idea and to ask the roughly 300 commercial property owners who would foot the bill whether they wanted a new and larger assessment. Not enough of them did, so the city set the plan aside, which is the right end for a tax whose whole premise is that the people paying it agree to be taxed. The consultant had said as much in February, telling the city’s Economic Development Board that the real test was never the merits of the idea but whether owners had the will to pay, and that the jury was out. It stayed out.

It helps to be clear about what the money would and would not have done. A business improvement district does not sweep the sidewalks; the city already pays a firm called Block by Block for that, and has since 2017. What the assessment funds is marketing, events, promotion, and advocacy, the work of selling downtown and speaking for the businesses in it. It is a levy property owners agree to place on themselves and by design it cannot exist without their consent. “Not enough support among property owners” is not a plan that stumbled. It is a plan asking its one essential question and getting the answer no.

Who gets to give that answer is worth understanding. The vote belongs to property owners and is weighted by how much they own, so the largest owner’s share alone can carry it or sink it, which is why consultants court the biggest landlord and not the block’s dry cleaner. But the merchants a district exists to help are mostly tenants, and the assessment reaches them anyway, through their leases. So the people with the most at stake often get no vote, while the decision sits with the landlords, and the loudest voice belongs to the largest.

On Miracle Mile, the largest is Terranova, which is to say Stephen Bittel, the developer who spent years trying to up-zone the Mile into something denser and taller and was stopped, with Mayor Lago his most determined opponent. That defeat has fed his grievance against Lago ever since, up to and including, by Aesop’s careful and hedged reporting, the failed recall. Ask what a new assessment would have paid for: advertising the Mile as it stands and advocating for the small businesses on it, which is close to the last thing a man who wants to tear the Mile down and rebuild it bigger has reason to bankroll. I will not tell you Bittel sank the plan, because I do not know it and neither does anyone else. But the one owner whose support the effort most needed is the mayor’s most committed antagonist, holding the biggest vote over a district meant to promote the very tenants he leases to, with every reason to withhold exactly the backing that never came.

So what happens now, and is anyone kicking the can? The settlement set no deadline. The books stay open and the leftover public money keeps funding downtown programming until it runs out, and no one has said how long that will be. When it does, the organization does not vanish; it is a private nonprofit and can carry on as one, on member dues, sponsorships, and event revenue, the way such groups routinely do. What lapsed in 2022 was never the marketing but one way of paying for it, and it is not the only way. A future assessment stays available if owners ever want one. So does direct city support, which is not hypothetical: the settlement shows the city already planning to put on several of downtown’s marquee events itself, on top of the ambassadors it pays to keep the sidewalks clean. One option was tried and declined. The others are sitting right there.

None of which is how the episode has mostly been told. The version making the rounds is that the city “quietly shelved” a downtown improvement it once promoted, a reversal to be suspicious of. That gets it backwards. The district is not the city’s to shelve, and it is thriving on its own; what ended was a proposal to tax people who said they did not want to be taxed. The city earns one modest complaint, that having floated the idea with fanfare, it should have announced the outcome as openly, rather than letting it surface only when a reporter went looking. That is a knock on a missing press release, not evidence of anything hidden.

So here is the whole of it. Downtown still has its BID, still has its marketing, still has its swept sidewalks, and lost nothing but a tax its own payers declined to impose. The people who would have benefited most were never given a vote. And the landlord whose absence mattered most is the one the story keeps forgetting to name.