In Hurricane’s Wake, a Storm Brews Over Redevelopment

For the residents of a farm town battered into near oblivion by Hurricane Andrew five years ago, a controversial plan to turn an abandoned air base into a major commercial jetport is just the latest potential heartbreak.

In the aftermath of the 1992 storm--the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history--Homestead Air Force Base was abandoned, fully a third of the population fled the area altogether, and the Cleveland Indians jilted the community by refusing to move into a new baseball stadium built as their spring training home.

In the most recent disappointment, the city was stiffed by the Rolling Stones. After agreeing to play a December concert in the new but underused $90-million motor racetrack, the band pulled out, saying the venue is too small.

“We’ll not always be a bridesmaid,” lamented Mayor Tad DeMilly, “but we have been a long time at the altar.”

The project now promising to waltz Homestead down the aisle to economic recovery is a multimillion-dollar redevelopment of the 1,360-acre air base into an airport designed to relieve pressure on Miami International Airport, 30 miles to the north.

By 2015, when MIA is predicted to be at capacity, more than 200,000 flights a year could be coming and going out of Homestead, according to one study.

In addition to a $16-million terminal building, the redevelopment plan calls for erecting a first-class hotel, warehouses, manufacturing facilities and office space.

In 20 years, the project could have an economic impact worth as much as $12 billion and create tens of thousands of jobs while turning this area of tomato and bean fields into a bustling mid-sized city.

To conservationists, that scenario is a nightmare. The Homestead site is 10 miles from Everglades National Park and just two miles from Biscayne National Park, two of the nation’s most imperiled federal preserves. Although the U.S. military operated an air base here for 50 years before the storm and Pentagon cost-cutting shut it down, opponents contend that a civilian airport and the inevitable commercial development around it would have disastrous ecological consequences.

“This is a litmus test,” said Alan Farago of the Sierra Club’s Miami chapter. “If the administration allows this, then there is nothing to stop airports from being built next to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone or Grand Teton National Park.

“This has the potential to be a massive misallocation of federal tax dollars, all having to do with electoral politics.”

Indeed, a decision to approve the redevelopment project has become a political hot potato for the Clinton administration, which has made the Everglades a centerpiece of its environmental agenda.

Vice President Al Gore has visited the Everglades several times in the last five years, most recently in June, when he reiterated the administration’s pledge to champion a $1-billion restoration of an ecosystem reeling from pollution and replumbing.

Clearly, as a presidential hopeful for 2000, Gore would like to avoid alienating the principals of the Homestead Air Base Developers Inc., the firm that was granted a 70-year lease to build the base.

The firm’s president, Carlos Herrera Jr., heads the politically connected Latin Builders Assn., and he and many of his associates in the project are influential Cuban American business people with ties to the Democratic Party.

The redevelopment project is getting enthusiastic backing from the Homestead business community, local political leaders and Florida state legislator Daryl L. Jones, who is the administration’s nominee to become secretary of the Air Force. Jones, 42, is a pilot with the Air Force Reserve’s 482nd fighter wing, a 20-plane outfit that is the only occupant of the air base.

Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas, who recently met with both Gore and Kathleen McGinty, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told a group of business executives last month that Gore has promised a decision before year’s end on turning the federal land over to the county.

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But a spokesman for the environmental council confirmed that “additional reviews are needed” after a consulting firm hired by the Air Force, Earth Tech of Colton, Calif., found that a 1993 environmental impact statement failed to adequately assess the proposed airport’s effects on wildlife and water quality in the federal parks.

An impact study is required by federal law whenever federal property is transferred.

Another report conducted for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club by BBN, a Canoga Park noise consultant, found that passenger jet traffic alone would raise the decibel level in Biscayne National Park to almost twice what the National Park Service considers acceptable.

Farago says the conservationists also have asked Jones, a Democrat who represents the Homestead area, to recuse himself from any decisions on conveying the air base property to the development company in the event that he wins Senate confirmation as Air Force secretary.

“It would be like having the fox in charge of the henhouse,” said Farago, an investment analyst and environmental activist. “Daryl Jones has done everything possible to avoid disclosing to the public the true environmental consequences of this project.”

If the land is turned over to Dade County, then the Sierra Club and other groups plan to file suit in federal court alleging violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, Farago said.

Miguel DeGrandy, an attorney for the developer, charges that the redevelopment plan is stalled because “the administration is toeing the line to please radical environmentalists whose real agenda is to kill the project.”

“Long or short term,” said DeGrandy, a Republican and former member of the Florida House of Representatives, “we will develop the base. And if Al Gore wants to wait three years and not do anything, he’ll have a hard time carrying an election in Dade County--unless he’s relying on the alligators to vote for him.”

To many in Homestead, the air base redevelopment is what DeMilly calls “the last piece of our recovery from Hurricane Andrew.”

Counted in the $30-billion losses caused by the storm were at least 7,000 jobs at the air base alone, along with a sizable portion of Homestead’s middle class.

“Over the last five years the emotions of this community have been whipsawed,” DeMilly said. “Our population has crept back up to almost what it was before the storm--28,000--but we need jobs.

“I don’t want to see Homestead turned into anything like the areas that surround [Miami International Airport]. We need to be prudent in zoning. But, managed, I don’t think the impact would be a negative.”

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.