Braman Lawsuit Threatens More Than Marlins Stadium

We are an overly litigious society whose nuisance suits and frivolous suits keep lawyers in expensive suits.

Sometimes the plaintiff is a person who scalds himself with hot coffee but decides suing McDonald's for millions is nobler than cursing his own carelessness.

And sometimes the plaintiff is a 75-year-old Miami multimillionaire who got rich selling cars but now wants to slam the brakes on progress.

Norman Braman does a lot of good around here. Let's admit that first.

He is a philanthropist whose generosity has touched education and breast-cancer research. He was instrumental in realizing a Holocaust Museum in Miami Beach.

It doesn't mean he always is right, though. And it doesn't look like he is right in Braman v. Miami-Dade County, his lawsuit that goes to trial Thursday in Miami-Dade Circuit Court.

Braman's effort, if successful, would derail the county's $3 billion redevelopment ''megaplan'' for Miami -- the area's long-needed and most ambitious public-works initiative in decades, one that includes a new Marlins baseball stadium.

Here is local government, for all of its history of scandal and inefficiency, trying at last to think big and be big, and finally haul Miami into the 21st Century in terms of urban revitalization and renewal.

And here are the Marlins, after 11 years of trying, through three ownership groups and several evolutions of county and city commissions, finally on the cusp of breaking ground on a ballpark all its own.

Only to have the whole grand package jeopardized by one guy's nuisance suit.

This continues Braman's dubious track record of suing over how local government spends money.

In 1982, he led a campaign to defeat a city sales tax that would have renovated the Orange Bowl for the Dolphins. It was what led Joe Robbie to soon after announce he would build a stadium and move the team north. It was a harbinger of years of OB neglect that would lead to the Hurricanes also moving out and the old stadium being demolished.

With that, Braman had drawn his line against public dollars for stadiums. Yet barely a decade later, in 1993, he owned the Philadelphia Eagles and offered to build a stadium only if the city would donate the land. Evidently, Braman had by then developed a moral distinction between getting public money and getting public land.

In 1999, Braman helped defeat a one-cent sales tax earmarked for a $1 billion mass transit plan for Miami. Hmm. Imagine that. A car dealer fighting mass transit! No vested interest there, right?

Now Braman is aiming his slingshot at big government again, but unlike the Biblical David, the little guy is no hero. He is just a rich little guy with a slingshot and a team of lawyers, slinging a lawsuit because, well -- because he can.

(And perhaps because part of the Miami megaplan includes streetcars. Imagine! The car dealer is against mass transit again! What a coincidence!)

This trial's judge will rule against Braman (it says here) because so much of the suit's premise is on shaky legal footing. For example, he claims the megaplan should have been subject to a public vote, and yet the courts already have ruled the county/city vote was legal and not requiring a public referendum. He also claims it is unconstitutional to pledge public credit to a private enterprise (such as a baseball team), and yet the Florida Supreme Court ruled otherwise in the 1990s, allowing $318 million in public money to build a stadium for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and explaining the expenditure would be ``substantially beneficial to the public.''

''Beneficial to the public'' is fundamental here.

This is about our civic responsibility to see the larger picture and put the public good over individual wants.

A Marlins fan should support a new, 37,000-seat retractable dome stadium (even if not thrilled about the OB site in Little Havana), but even nonfans should appreciate the benefit of how a thriving big-league sports team can knit a community.

Similarly, you do not need to be a connoisseur of opera or ballet to see that a performing arts center improves our overall quality of life, just as you do not need to be a parent to support better schools. This $3 billion initiative, now on trial, would rejuvenate Overtown and transform Bicentennial Park into a waterfront jewel, among many other projects.

As for the new Marlins ballpark, the club would pay roughly $155 million of the $515 million cost, and the rest would come from tourists' hotel bed-tax dollars. That is a pretty painless deal for us locals, wallet-wise.

So let's get out of the courtroom and into the future, shall we?

Let's swat this silly trial that sits on our ambition like a mosquito.

Let's get to building a better Miami.


By Greg Cote - Miami Herald