Posts
All Comments
The Miami Dolphins have offered to repay Miami-Dade County for a portion of the public costs of renovating Sun Life Stadium, and to pay millions of dollars in penalties should the team fail to bring major events to South Florida, including four Super Bowls over the next three decades, The Miami Herald has learned.
Read the whole story at The Miami Herald
MIAMI GARDENS -- The Dolphins made a deal with Miami-Dade County voters Thursday: if South Florida doesn't get Super Bowl 2016 or 2017, the team won't use tax money for Sun Life Stadium renovations.
NFL owners vote on the locations of those Super Bowls on May 22 in Boston. There's still no date set for a public referendum for Miami-Dade County voters to approve that tax money.
The Dolphins also announced downtown Miami will be hosting the core of the Super Bowl activities. When the Super Bowl was held in South Florida in 2010, Broward and Dade counties shared hosting duties.
"If Miami does not get a Super Bowl at that May 22 meeting, even with a successful referendum, we're going to give the community the option to not move forward," Dolphins CEO Mike Dee said at a news conference at Sun Life Stadium.
Dee said Dolphins owner Steve Ross talked to NFL owners and league officials at the annual NFL Meetings in Phoenix earlier this week and feels confident the Dolphins will get one of those Super Bowls.
Dee said although he couldn't guarantee which Super Bowl South Florida would get, "...we are guaranteeing the referendum will be predicated upon a successful Super Bowl outcome on May 22."
"This is the likes of something you haven't seen," said Rodney Barreto, chairman of the South Florida Super Bowl Host Committee.
South Florida is battling Santa Clara/San Francisco 49ers for Super Bowl L in 2016, and if unsuccessful in that bid, then South Florida goes against Houston for Super Bowl LI.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Tuesday at the annual NFL Meetings it'd be tough for South Florida to get another Super Bowl without the proposed $400 million upgrades.
"It is important for us to play the game on the best possible stage and the stadiums are getting better and better," Goodell said.
Ross has pledged to pay more than half of the $400 million Sun Life renovation cost plus any overruns.
Much of the remaining financing would be done by raising the mainland hotel bed tax to 7 percent from the current 6 percent, and $90 million in sales-tax rebates over 30 years.
Dee wasn't sure the Dolphins would have made the money back guarantee if they didn't experience such a positive outcome after speaking with NFL officials and owners in Phoenix.
"I don't know; perhaps not," he said.
Ross and Dee have said Sun Life Stadium also need upgrades to remain in the mix to attract college football's national championship game. The major enemy, however, is new NFL stadiums luring Super Bowls. Sun Life Stadium, everyone agrees, needs to upgrade to stay comeptitive.
Still, Dee has little doubt the Dolphins will get either Super Bowl L or LI.
"We have great confidence that South Florida will be awarded a Super Bowl on May 22 when the owners vote in Boston," Dee said. "And I can't tell you which one that'll be, but I can tell you we're confident that vote will go our way." ___
Loading Slideshow
Related on HuffPost:Dozens of students gathered on campus at Florida Atlantic University on Monday to protest the school's recent announcement that it will name its football stadium after GEO Group, Inc., a company that operates private corrections facilities at the center of lawsuits and federal investigations.
The public university announced last week that it had struck a deal to name its football stadium after GEO Group, Inc., one of the largest operators of for-profit prisons in the U.S. and a major donor to the Florida Republican Party. In exchange, FAU will receive $6 million from the company over 12 years.
Students called attention to a record of alleged constitutional violations at the company's facilities, saying they don't want the FAU Owls to play on a field named GEO Group Stadium.
FAU president Mary Jane Saunders agreed to hold a campus meeting Friday to discuss the stadium arrangement, the Palm Beach Post reports. The announcement came after about 40 students calling themselves the Stop Owlcatraz Coalition "occupied" her office, while around 100 more gathered at another location on campus, according to the Post.
Saunders told local and national media last week that GEO Group is "a wonderful company and we're very, very proud to be partnered with them.”
"The board of trustees should have done due diligence on GEO before they signed that agreement," Gonzalo Vizcardo, a student protest leader, told the Palm Beach Post. "What [Saunders] said about GEO being 'a wonderful company' was outrageous."
One of the GEO Group's facilities, an immigration detention center known as the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., has been the subject of scrutiny for alleged human rights abuses.
At the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, another GEO Group property in Mississippi, a report issued by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice found that the institution was "deliberately indifferent to staff sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior with youth. The sexual misconduct we found was among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation."
GEO Group CEO George Zoley is an alumnus of FAU and is the former chair of FAU's board of trustees.
"The GEO Group Foundation contributes more than $1 million annually to scholarships, local charities, public schools and other worthy causes, illustrating the company's commitment to education and rehabilitation," FAU spokeswoman Jennifer O'Flannery Anderson said in a statement to WPBF.
An online petition urging FAU to scrap the deal has already garnered nearly 10,000 signatures.
Students pressed Saunders on whether she'd be willing to break the agreement with GEO, to which she responded they could discuss that at Friday's meeting.
Also on HuffPost:
