SuDa Investments, Crec Capital, Madison Marquette team up for winning Vero Beach pitch.
Laurence ReismanTreasure Coast Newspapers
After more than 11 years writing about the three corners Vero Beach owns at 17th Street and Indian River Boulevard, I thought I’d feel exhilarated by the city's developer selection.
Instead, perhaps like many of you, I wondered how a pitch ranked last by a selection committee April 26 narrowly received the council’s nod 32 days later.
It took the Boston Red Sox a year to go from last in the American League East in 2012 to World Series champions.
That’s baseball. This has been a decade-plus-long community discussion about what to do with a former power plant, postal annex and a soon-to-be-relocated sewage plant.
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In 2022, 79% of Vero Beach voters approved leasing the land to developers based on a concept that included renovating the power plant into a hotel and/or conference center and adding a day marina, walking trails, skate park and other recreational amenities, waterfront dining and more.
Tuesday night’s council decision to spend up to six months negotiating a lease with a partnership of SuDa, Crec Capital and Madison Marquette wasn’t surprising, given recent lobbying for SuDa around town ― on social media and with a public relations agency.
How did a plan so woeful at its inception have such a miraculous recovery?
It gets into the ugly reality of how the proverbial sausage is made in politics and what we, as Americans, and our politician-leaders are willing to accept.
It starts with the city's hiring of a real estate firm, Colliers, to market the Three Corners. To me, Colliers didn't do a good job trying to sell the city's old Dodgertown golf course in 2017. It eventually was sold it to Indian River County for a park and parking for Holman Stadium at MLB’s Jackie Robinson Training Complex.
In late November 2023, the City Council accepted Colliers’ request to extend a deadline for developers’ Three Corners submissions from Dec. 15 to Feb. 1 to obtain more proposals.
In December, Colliers told the council it had 39 “current prospects” and expected 12 to 14 to make proposals. In January, Colliers' Ken Krasnow told the council further extending the deadline could yield what at the time would have been a fourth proposal, but the deadline was not extended.
In hindsight, we know this:
Dead last with an incomplete plan
See what Vero Beach City Council saw: Watch the final presentations of the four potential developers for Three Corners
Even without Colliers, Clearpath Services and Vista Blue Resort and Spa would have made offers, given that principals from those entities were interested in the project since at least 2020, when the city hired urban planner Andres Duany to get residents’ input and create a concept for the corners.
Edgewater Group, which presented marina-centric plan, also has a complete plan. It was so bad — including an automated dry stack building south of the bridge and future “condominium development site” ― I would not have even spent time interviewing its principals.
In the May 17 round of voting, the city’s selection committee ― city department heads and volunteer advisory board members — ranked it dead last. On Tuesday, Vice Mayor Linda Moore ranked Edgewater second, ahead of Clearpath, which led by far after two rounds of selection committee voting.
The fourth developer to file its plan was SuDa, whose initial presentation was boosted by Madison Marquette’s portfolio of properties, including Oxbow Public Market in Napa, California, which Suda would try and replicate, The Wharf in Washington, D.C., and The Mercado in Naples.
Yet the submission was so incomplete, SuDa admitted it would work “to find a successful and financially viable use for the Big Blue, but at this time we do not have a formal concept to share.”
Edging out Clearpath
Then, after other project proposals were released to the public, SuDa released a plan for a cool walkway through a renovated power plant, between a marketplace, second-floor entertainment venue and more.
SuDa's plans (ideas may be a better word) are nowhere near as detailed as Clearpath’s. Clearpath's were presented in selection and council meetings by the CEO of HOK, the nation’s sixth-largest architecture firm, which would have partnered with the nation’s top builder, Turner Construction.
After finishing second in the second round of selection committee meetings, SuDa, in a presentation to City Council, touted its Indian River Lagoon preservation efforts, announcing it added an expert from One Lagoon as project adviser. Apparently, that wasn't true, according to an email the city received Monday.
Unlike Clearpath, which committed to having Florida’s first 21C Museum Hotel, and Vista Blue, which would have had a Marriott, SuDa principal Gaurav Butani told the council his partners are so connected they’d have no problem luring a top-notch “urban chic hotel” of 175 to 225 rooms.
Vero Beach developer seeks SuDa disqualification
But it’s what Don Urgo, a 20-plus-year Vero Beach resident and Vista Blue principal, said in his May 21 council interview that might shed light on how SuDa got into the game.
Before and at his council meeting, Urgo called on the city to disqualify SuDa over what he called conflicts of interest, for failing to submit a complete proposal and for saying it would hire Duany if selected by the council.
“They were privy to what everyone else did,” Urgo said. “Obviously they were able to use that to craft their response when they came before the selection committee (which then ranked it second). … putting everyone else at a complete disadvantage.”
It was a principled point John Carroll made Tuesday when he subtly urged fellow council members to consider terms of the request for proposals the city issued. Judging SuDa’s original proposal, not its revised one, Carroll ranked it last and selected Clearpath No. 1.
Vero Beach stops using Colliers
Even more of a reason for disqualification, Urgo said, was the conflict of interest he found between Crec Capital and Colliers, which shares the same vice chairs, including Krasnow, after a merger, its website says.
“Our counsel said, ‘you have no choice … since some reporter might get ahold of this and make it into a public scandal, you have to make the community aware of it,” Urgo said. “I did this … to make sure you didn’t get … blindsided.”
City officials said once they found out about the conflict, they stopped using Colliers.
Mayor John Cotugno also expressed concern over SuDa. He said that despite request-for-proposal language forbidding bidders from contacting members of council, SuDa-related personnel asked that two emails be distributed to members.
But Urgo, Carroll and Cotugno failed to sway Moore, Tracey Zudans and Taylor Dingle.
With advocates touting two-thirds of 208 votes in an unscientific poll online hosted by a former Duany consultant as a reason to pick SuDa, Tuesday’s vote seemed more like a popularity contest than a business decision.
Granted, much of SuDa’s pitch for the power plant is cool — a fine middle ground between Clearpath’s far-more expensive, aspirational proposal, with its Sydney Opera House-type performing arts center and a crow’s nest atop a Big Blue stack ― and Vista Blue’s vanilla design.
Butani made it sound grand in his council interview. It reminded me of the promises I heard from a different South Florida developer, who signed a deal in 2019 to build at Fort Pierce's old power plant. Five years later, nothing’s built. The city has given him until June to start.
Let’s hope Vero Beach City Council has better luck after blowing off the thoroughly researched recommendation of its hardworking selection committee.
This column reflects the opinion of Laurence Reisman. Contact him via email at larry.reisman@tcpalm.com, phone at 772-978-2223, Facebook.com/larryreisman or Twitter @LaurenceReisman.
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