Kelly Tractor Headquarters Proposal for Wetlands Revived

A proposal for an industrial headquarters on 246 acres outside Miami-Dade County’s Urban Development Boundary is back for a vote, despite unresolved controversy over its impact on wetlands.

The item is slated to go in front of commissioners on Thursday. If they again postpone a vote to allow for further tweaks, it would mark at least the second delay this year.

Kelly Tractor, a supplier of Caterpillar and other construction and mining equipment, wants to build a 2.2 million-square-foot facility with offices and space for storage and repairs near Sweetwater. The site is on the northwest corner of Northwest Sixth Street and a Dolphin Expressway on- and off-ramp in unincorporated Miami-Dade.

Environmentalists’ outcry is over building outside the UDB, a greenbelt meant to restrict development sprawl onto farmland, wetlands and toward the Everglades, as well as over paving over wetlands. The ecosystem supports wildlife and is essential for water quality and flood mitigation, which is desperately needed in the area, opponents say.

After commissioners voted for the project in January, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava vetoed the approval last month. Instead of trying to override the veto, commissioners decided to allow Kelly Tractor to tweak its application and address sticking points.

The original proposal was to pave over 160 acres of wetlands. Kelly Tractor filed a reworked site plan last week, showing preservation of 44.5 acres of wetlands and of the 18.6-acre Bayhead Preserve.

That’s not enough, environmentalists said.

Kelly Tractor has to preserve at least 63 acres of wetlands on the site due to an existing covenant on the land imposed after the firm did unpermitted work years ago, Hold The Line Coalition said.

The Bayhead Preserve doesn’t count as wetland preservation because it has to remain intact either way, the coalition added, pointing to a 2023 report that says it’s an archeological and cultural preserve due to the presence of human remains.

Chris Kelly, president of Kelly Tractor, said preservation of wetlands is still being worked out and a final agreement hasn’t been reached.

Miami-Dade staff members recommended denial of the application in January, partly because Kelly Tractor failed to explain why it can’t expand at its current Doral headquarters or elsewhere on the roughly 700 acres of land available for industrial construction within the UDB.

A new county staff recommendation on the tweaked plan still hasn’t been issued, making a delay more likely on Thursday.

Kelly Tractor, founded in Clewiston in the 1930s, has outgrown its 225,000-square-foot Doral facility, company representatives have said. It has owned the site proposed for its new base since 1984, and its project is vital for job creation and to support county projects that need heavy equipment, company representatives have said.

“I don’t develop real estate for a living. I run a heavy equipment and power and energy dealership,” Kelly said. “We are not land speculators. We are not looking to buy and flip and get a return. … We are a long-term holder of the property and have a long term vision of the business.”

Kelly invoked Miami-Dade’s affordable housing crisis, the county’s most pressing problem, saying its expansion would support working class residents by providing well-paying jobs.

Opposition also has mounted over Kelly Tractor’s decision to seek approval through a text amendment, not the traditional UDB expansion process that goes through multiple layers of county and state reviews. Kelly Tractor’s text amendment proposal sets a precedent for circumventing the cumbersome UDB expansion approval process, opponents say.

In a January letter to Levine Cava requesting her veto, Hold the Line said the project is “incompatible, intensive industrial activity” and the text amendment application “weakens” the county’s growth plan as a “uniform, rules-based framework.”

Kelly Tractor originally filed its application in 2023.

“We have been very patient, in my opinion,” Kelly said. “We have tried to appease all the regulations. We are not trying to get around anything.”

In Miami-Dade, a developer-friendly county where officials sometimes even go out of their way to accommodate builders, UDB expansions remain controversial and vehemently opposed.

In 2022, a pair of developers scored approval for a 379-acre logistics and industrial center outside the UDB –– after five tries in front of commissioners and following concessions, including roughly halving the project size. They still lost their bid in 2024 due to a court decision.

In one of the largest recent UDB expansion applications, homebuilder Lennar and its partners proposed City Park with about 7,800 homes and 2.4 million square feet of commercial space, including retail, dining, offices, warehouses and schools, as well as 250 acres of open space.