Boca Raton’s voters rejected Terra and Frisbie Group’s proposal to redevelop its government campus in a landslide victory for the city’s homegrown NIMBY movement.
The city first awarded the developers the bid to redevelop the site in February of last year, but a groundswell of opposition led by Jon Pearlman’s Save Boca organization pressured the developers and city council to send the project to a referendum.
Of the 18,931 votes counted, 74.5 percent were against the One Boca.
Pearlman, who launched a bid for Boca Raton City Council’s seat B against incumbent Marc Widger, won his race with 52.9 percent of the vote. Save Boca-backed candidates Stacy Sipple and Michelle Grau won seats A and D, with 66.6 percent and 55.8 percent of the vote, respectively. Their victories land a staunchly anti-development majority in control of the city council.
Jason Haber, the co-founder of the American Real Estate Association, a Boca Raton homeowner and One Boca advocate, called Pearlman’s Save Boca movement “classic NIMBYism.” In an interview earlier this week, he worried about what an anti-development city government would mean for the city’s future.
“How are you going to get anything through if you have a council that’s dead set against development?” he said
The race for Boca Raton’s mayorship is locked in a tie between candidates Andy Thomson and Mike Liebelson and is heading to a recount.
The One Boca proposal involved a 99-year lease of 7.8 acres of city-owned land and a redevelopment of the city’s Memorial Park that would include a new city hall, community center, police substation, playgrounds and tennis courts. The plan also called for 120,000 square feet of office, 765 apartments, a 180-key hotel, a 30,000-square-foot grocery store and 2,100 parking spaces. Terra and Frisbie had also planned 182 condos for an adjacent site at 140 Northwest 4th Street.
The developers tapped Kohn Pedersen Fox, the architecture firm behind Hudson Yards in New York and Covent Garden in London, to design One Boca.
“While this was not the outcome we had hoped for, we appreciate the community’s thoughtful participation and dialogue throughout this process,” Terra, led by David Martin, and Frisbie, led by Rob Frisbie Jr. and Cody Crowell, said in a statement.
Opponents of the project raised an extensive set of issues with One Boca. Among them were concerns over the propriety of a 99-year lease with a private developer, the lack of public input early on in the process, and the fate of Memorial Park’s banyan trees. Detractors claimed that the city had enough money to redevelop its facilities on its own.
Pearlman equated the project to the theft of public land and “bulldozing Central Park.”
One Boca’s opponents also took issue with its scale. When Terra and Frisbie won the bid for the project in February of last year, the 99-year lease covered 30 acres of city-owned land and would have totaled 2.5 million square feet when built out.
With Terra and Frisbie’s proposal off the table and Save Boca’s candidates elected, questions remain regarding the future of Boca Raton’s city campus.
“The community center needs to be replaced no matter what, the city hall needs to be replaced no matter what,” Widger said in an interview earlier this month. “The city in theory could do it on its own, but that would be a burden to the tax payers.”