MIAMI (AP) — Judge Bertila Soto has given this kind of tour for years now, a hands-on demonstration of the decay inside Miami-Dade County’s civil courthouse. In her hands at this moment: a wedge of painted plaster from a 1928 tower subject to chronic leaks and basement flooding.
“You can peel off pieces of the wall,” Soto said from an emptied-out storage room on the 25th floor of the courthouse at 73 W. Flagler St. “This has been happening since 2013.”
Once the centerpiece of municipal architecture in downtown Miami, with columned walls at the base and a ziggurat roof, the county’s 27-story courthouse now offers a case study in deferred maintenance and daunting deterioration. Repairs needed for a legally required building recertification have been delayed under two Miami-Dade mayors.
AFTER POST-SURFSIDE INSPECTION, MIAMI-DADE COURTHOUSE CLOSES
The low point arrived July 9, when Chief Judge Nushin Sayfie ordered all court offices closed in the building after Miami-Dade turned over a July 6 inspection report by Miami engineering firm U.S. Structures Inc.
The analysis, ordered up after the Surfside condo collapse on June 24, urged the county to clear out the upper floors and quickly shore up an “excessively corroded” column on the 25th floor. The recommendation to keep some floors empty but allow the courthouse to remain occupied didn’t sit well with court administrators, who wanted the entire building closed for repairs.
“In an abundance of caution we are going to evacuate ALL court personnel,” Sayfie wrote July 9 in a staff email obtained through a records request, “until we are satisfied that the building is safe.”
LATEST COUNTY REPORT: CIVIL COURTHOUSE SAFE, READY TO REOPEN
A more extensive inspection report performed by a different engineering firm later in July found the courthouse safe to reopen without significant repairs. Even so, the courthouse remains out of compliance with Miami-Dade’s own requirement for structural and safety certifications every decade once a building reaches its 40th year.
The courthouse reached that milestone in the 1960s, but Dade County didn’t enact its recertification law until 1975, following the collapse of a federal building in Miami. There’s no record of Miami ever granting the building the required recertification documents, and in 2014 a city inspector affixed a violation notice on the courthouse entrance.
A 2016 report by Miami-Dade’s Inspector General found county building administrators had failed to secure recertifications for multiple county buildings — ignoring a local law that’s gotten national attention after Surfside as making Miami-Dade’s building code tougher than most when it comes to older structures.
“It is also unfortunate that the recertification requirements of the Courthouse and other older County buildings somehow fell off the County’s radar,” the report states.
As one of the oldest government buildings in Miami-Dade, maintaining the courthouse has been a challenge for years. It’s a building so old it still has a working wooden water tank on its top floor and the original brass on the elevators that would have taken Al Capone to his 1930 perjury trial on the sixth floor.
In June 1987, structural engineer O.J. Jorgensen wrote about his recent inspection of basement columns as the county pursued a city recertification that was never completed. Jorgensen described deterioration in most of the columns, and problems with inner steel cores in some. “This presents a serious structural deficiency, and demands prompt attention,” Jorgensen wrote in a letter published in the Inspector General report.
Investigators spoke to one of the engineers involved in the late 1980s, who said the repairs were completed even if the county never obtained the recertification paperwork from Miami.
About 25 years later, Miami-Dade was again pursuing a city certification and an engineer produced a warning about basement support structures.
“Most columns have mid level damage, with some columns showing low levels and others exhibiting severe damage,” engineer Gerald Zadikoff, of the Miami firm G.M. Selby, wrote in a December 2013 inspection report to county building administrators. “It is also imperative the structural repairs commence as early as possible, as the deterioration is migrating up the columns.”
That report concluded the building was safe for occupancy. But it warned that even a minor hurricane could do serious damage, sparking a county routine of post-storm inspections of the building that remains in place. “GM Selby believes the building does not need to be condemned,” Zadikoff wrote, “however, in the event of a category one hurricane, the building should be evacuated entirely as there is a possibility of … partial collapse.”
FOR MIAMI-DADE COURTHOUSE, DECADES BEHIND 40-YEAR RECERTIFICATION
Seven years after its first recertification violation in 2014, Miami-Dade still hasn’t completed all of the repairs engineers said are needed. In 2015, crews repaired 14 columns in the basement vulnerable to flooding from ground water, and an extensive resealing of the exterior walls the following year significantly reduced rainwater leaks, Soto said. But more column work remains in the basement.
That work was supposed to start three years ago, with Miami-Dade issuing a solicitation in 2018 for contractors to repair dozens of columns and conduct other basement work to prevent flooding by ground water.
But with multiple bidders disqualified for not meeting the county’s small-business hiring requirements and other bids too high, Miami-Dade scrapped the process with plans to start again, according to a June 20, 2018, memo from the county’s top building administrator at the time, Internal Services Director Tara Smith.
Smith wrote that, after a meeting with judges, Miami-Dade planned on getting new bids for the basement work “in parallel with the sale and disposition of the historic courthouse.”
But while construction is underway on a modern civil courthouse next door on Flagler Street, Miami-Dade hasn’t moved ahead with selling the existing historic building — a deal expected to eventually offset construction costs for the new facility.
Internal Services also didn’t ask for new bids on the basement repairs. The department, now under director Alex Muñoz, expects the new solicitation to go out this month. A site visit for potential bidders is scheduled for Friday.
Muñoz, appointed in May, said he didn’t have an explanation for the delay in repairs that were supposed to start in 2018.
“I’m looking into it,” said Muñoz, the former head of Miami-Dade’s Animal Services Department who received his latest appointment from Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, elected in November. “I want to know if there was a budgetary decision, or what the decision was.”
Judges were pressing Muñoz and his staff for answers on the basement work after the Surfside collapse, when the county hired U.S. Structures Inc. to inspect the courthouse for any structural issues.
“We have also repeatedly asked about the status of the basement column and foundation repairs and were promised an update,” Judge Jennifer Bailey wrote Juan Silva, head of facilities for Internal Services, on July 9. “We need to know the status of the repairs and the county’s plan regarding completion of the balance of the work, which was supposed to have been completed in 2020.”
AFTER SURFSIDE, A SCRAMBLE TO INSPECT THE COURTHOUSE
The Surfside collapse pushed the courthouse’s deficiencies into the spotlight. On June 28, Soto, whose term as chief judge was expiring June 30, wrote court administrators and judges an email shortly after 8 a.m. about the downtown civil courthouse.
“We need to get an inspection immediately,” she wrote, “based on Surfside incident.”
By then, Muñoz had already told his staff he wanted action on overdue recertifications of county buildings, according to county emails, and an Internal Services administrator requested an inspection of the courthouse on June 25. On the same morning Soto wrote her email, Muñoz had forwarded Internal Services administrators a Miami Herald article quoting a Surfside building official as saying Champlain Towers South was in “very good shape” in 2018.
“What is the status of the Old Courthouse?” Muñoz wrote. “Please prioritize and advise.”
NEW COURTHOUSE SCHEDULED TO OPEN IN 2024
Soto helped lead the two efforts to replace the county’s troubled civil courthouse. The first failed, and the second succeeded.
Miami-Dade County would probably already have a new civil courthouse if not for a failed bond referendum in 2014. County voters rejected the proposed increase to Miami-Dade’s debt levy, a special property tax that funds borrowing approved by referendum. The ballot item would have raised $390 million for a new courthouse and repairs to rehabilitate the 1928 building, but 64% of voters rejected the proposal.
Eugene Stearns, the Miami lawyer who helped lead the failed referendum campaign, said the attention on the courthouse’s poor condition built pressure on commissioners to approve construction financing outside of property taxes. “We persuaded people it had to be done,” he said. “It just cost us four or five years.”
The leading voice for rejecting the referendum was lawyer Raquel Regalado, then a school board member and now a county commissioner. “My concern then was the plan was half baked,” Regalado said in a recent interview. “The plan they have now for the new courthouse is much more detailed.”
If all goes as planned, Miami-Dade will have a new courthouse in 2024, when a replacement building going up next door is scheduled to open.
At the urging of Soto and her fellow judges, Miami-Dade commissioners in 2019 approved the deal negotiated under then-Mayor Carlos Gimenez to pay developer Plenary Group $852 million over 34 years to build, operate and maintain a new 23-story courthouse. It’s the county’s first “P3” deal (for “public-private partnership”) and includes financial penalties if Plenary fails to maintain the new building, as Miami-Dade did with the old one.
Miami-Dade owes its first $25 million payment in 2024, and the courthouse expenses contribute to deficits in the county’s long-term budget forecasts.
Meanwhile, it’s not clear when the current courthouse will reopen.
Engineers from the Miami office of EXP, hired by Miami-Dade for a more thorough inspection of the courthouse in mid-July, found “significant” cracks on the 25th floor and corroded rebar throughout the building. But after digging into the column flagged in the U.S. Structures report, EXP reached a different conclusion.
“There is no evidence of structural distress or an impending failure of the structural elements of the 25th Floor,” EXP’s July 23 report states, and “the recommended shoring (of the column) is not warranted at this time.”
The firm also said court employees could return to work safely and disagreed with the U.S. Structures advice to clear out offices above the 15th floor. “The EXP team did not observe any conditions that support this recommendation,” the report states.
So far, the favorable report hasn’t reopened the courthouse doors. Levine Cava said the administration “will defer” to Sayfie to decide when to bring staff back into the building.
Reopening will likely depend on the county’s short-term plan to complete the work needed for recertification, Muñoz said. He said judges told him they want assurances the county can complete the required work without significant disruption to the offices and courtrooms, and that plan must wait until repair bids come back.
“We’re not there yet,” he said. “We want to make everybody feel comfortable with the process.”
Muñoz took over Internal Services this spring after Levine Cava parted ways with Smith, the Internal Services director under Gimenez. Levine Cava was elected mayor after six years on the county commission, when the courthouse’s disrepair and need for replacement was a frequent topic.
“I am certainly working on systems of greater accountability,” Levine Cava said. “We are not going to let things slip through the cracks.”
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