The Fourth Question Isn't About the Parks

Four charter amendments went to the November ballot Tuesday on 5-0 votes. Three are housekeeping, and sound: a higher competitive-bidding threshold that brings the charter in line with state law, a one-year residency requirement for candidates, and a four-year mayoral term beginning in 2028 that changes nothing for anyone now in office. The fourth is the one worth reading closely. It would require 60 percent voter approval before the city sells a park, a golf course, or the Youth Center.

Two things about it are true at the same time.

The first is that it does less than its billing. It stops sales. It says nothing about leases, land swaps, or changes in use, which are the ordinary ways a city actually parts with a park. Dr. Castro and Vice Mayor Anderson both made this point, and the city attorney confirmed it when she noted that an implementing ordinance could define “sale” narrowly enough to exclude a swap. That is a real limit. It is not a reason to oppose the amendment. Mayor Lago proposed the threshold, a city that means to keep its parks should be willing to put that in writing, and residents can vote yes in good conscience.

The second is that no one has proposed selling anything. Granada has been city-owned since 1923 and sits on Florida’s Historic Golf Trail; there is no offer, no buyer, no plan. The Youth Center scare is stranger still. It traces to a misread account of the University of Miami donating land to the city, the same parcel the coverage itself reported in June would become a public park. The city is being given parkland. The rumor turned the gift into a scheme to pave one.

So the amendment answers a fear that other people invented. The useful question is why.

The answer is the reverter clause, which Aesop has documented for more than a year. In 1958 the association then running the Youth Center deeded the land to the city on one condition: if the city ever stops using the property as a youth center, ownership reverts to the association. The condition runs one way. It binds the city, asks nothing of the association, and would not stop that association from selling or developing the land if the property ever returned to it. Lago wants the clause cleared from the title. That is the actual dispute, and it has nothing to do with a sale.

It has everything to do with who holds the clause. The association is Kirk Menendez’s, the same Kirk who ran for mayor last year and lost to the man now trying to clear the title, its offices historically filled by his family. It does not appear on the IRS’s current roll of tax-exempt organizations, consistent with the auto-revocation Aesop documented, and the city’s push for its records ran far enough that the commission retained outside counsel. The association offers one fair rejoinder: a 1996 bylaw would send any dissolved assets to another nonprofit, so no developer walks off with the lot. Granted. That was never the objection. The objection is that a public building carries a cloud on its title held by a lapsed private organization, and whose organization it is only sharpens the point.

Which explains the sharpest line of the night. Jackson “Rip” Holmes, introduced in the room as a resident and only later as one of two candidates running against Lago in November, called removing the reverter “an attack on children.” Look at what the phrase does. A clause that preserves one private group’s leverage over public land is refitted as the protection of children, while the thing that actually serves children, the city operating the center exactly as it does now, drops out of the sentence. The children are not the subject. They are the cover. And the whole package, the retaliation framing, the invented sale, the four-word defense of a reverter clause, flatters exactly the people who would lose their claim if the clause were cleared.

Vote for the fourth question if you like. The promise is reasonable and the harm is none. Just understand that it settles nothing, because the thing that could cost this city the Youth Center was never a sale. It is one clause in a 1958 deed, held by a dormant nonprofit that will not let go of it.