Stadium News - Sort of

As Brickell said in yesterday's Game Thread, the stadium deal is facing another lawsuit.

Sarah Talalay reports.

With just a week until Miami City Commissioners again consider a plan to finance and construct a $515 million ballpark for the Marlins, two Miami activists have filed a lawsuit to stop the project.

Graciela Solares, a member of the Miami Roads Neighborhood Civic Association, and Elvis Cruz, a member of the Morningside Civic Association, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Miami and Miami-Dade County alleging the two governments negotiated the ballpark deal behind closed doors in violation of Florida’s public records law.

The suit, filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, seeks to void last year’s Baseball Stadium Agreement – the document that set in motion plans for the 37,000-seat retractable roof ballpark at the former site of the Orange Bowl – and halt any further negotiations unless they are held in public. The suit states that if the Miami City Commission and the county commission approve five new agreements that spell out precisely how to pay for and build the venue – those, too, would need to be voided. The city commission is scheduled on March 4 to consider five agreements; the county commission is to consider them March 9.

“The only thing they can do is, in a sense, start all over again,” said Linda Carroll, a Miami attorney representing Solares and Cruz.

Carroll said the public doesn’t have a right to interfere with negotiations, but must be allowed to watch them. Otherwise, she said, when it is the public’s time to comment, it can’t make informed observations since it doesn’t know what was considered.

Didn't we just do this with Braman?

Hopefully this suit won't cause the delay the Braman suit did.  And actually, I would expect it will be thrown out of court pretty quickly.

But being that a stadium for the Marlins doesn't come easily, who knows.