The Mobility Snub
A continued look at the new regime.
War and Peace, but mostly War.
If the attempted removal of the manager was the most memorable aspect of the May 9th commission meeting, the Mobility Hub discussion was the most revealing. Unlike operation coup d'état, which was tackled relatively early in the day, the Hub discussion took place after an eight-hour slog through a Tolstoy-length agenda and well after a bone-deep weariness had begun to beset the attendees. The timing of these things matters, mind you, as fatigue, hunger, and good ol’-fashioned get me the hell out of here have a way of turning what should be a battle of ideas into a war of attrition. Truth be told, if it were I on the dais that evening I probably would have given the Mobility Hub away, and thrown in a set of steak knives, just to get it over with.
To their credit, though, the commission dealt with the issue with due care and consideration. After all, the Mobility Hub is a substantial project, and a bête noire of some of the Gables’ most vocal residents. In fact, during his inaugural remarks, Ariel polished off his list of commitments with a bold and explicit promise to “stop the construction of the Mobility Hub,” and received a roaring applause from a packed house in return. It had a veritable Kennedy at Rice quality to it, except that Kennedy’s promise, a literal moonshot, was always a far more realistic pursuit.
As expected, the discussion grew into a war of wills, the battle lines forming as predictably and clearly as imagined. What was surprising, however, particularly in light of the bravado that preceded it, was how feeble the anti-Mobility Hub side looked during the discussion.
The hubbub around the Hub.
The Mobility Hub, for those who are new to the melodrama, is, essentially, a glorified parking garage. Why glorify it, you ask? Why not just call it what it is, a parking garage? Fair enough. But if you ask the city, they’d probably tell you that with the ground-level retail space, the food-delivery staging area, the rooftop park, etc., calling it a parking garage would constitute an undersell. For what it’s worth, I think naming it the Mobility Hub was a mistake, it has that too-cute-by-half air of excessive euphemism that you tend to encounter when someone is trying to sell you a bill of goods. It’s like a landscaper referring to himself as a “horticultural maintenance technician” so he can command an extra $50 per visit. It just doesn’t sit well.
But what’s in a name? The salient details, at least as I see them, are as follows:
The Mobility Hub would replace the obsolete disaster that is the 245 Andalusia parking garage; built so long ago you might expect to see hitching posts for horses.
Retrofitting said existing disaster is both practically and economically unfeasible.
Allen Morris submitted a new-construction proposal that the city rejected.
Downton Coral Gables needs a lot more parking capacity.
The lot as currently zoned allows for a structure of up to 190 feet. The Mobility Hub as currently proposed would top out around 116 feet.
It was always going to be expensive, but it became much more expensive over the last couple of years with the current projected cost coming in just north of $60M. Plus, the city is already several million dollars into the design phase.
Before you snap at me, dear reader, yes, I know there is more to the issue than that. But, frankly, I don’t have strong feelings about the Mobility Hub, at least not strong enough to steelman either side of the debate. I do, however, know who does have very strong feelings about the Mobility Hub, who has been railing against the city’s plan for years, and who has promised to put an end to this supposed boondoggle without fail.
Never surrender, but only sometimes.
The Mobility Hub is definitely a bugaboo for some. Covered critically and extensively in Gables Insider, it has become in some circles a symbol of financial and architectural extravagance. While it’s difficult to say whether the interest in this project is as widespread and organic as some would suggest, I’m not sure it really matters anymore. That’s the thing about echo chambers like Gables Insider, they assimilate ideas so thoroughly that they become nothing more than a filament of the collective conscience, attributable to no one and everyone all at once. They become, you might say, the “will of the residents.”
Real or imagined, “stopping the construction of the Mobility Hub” was supposed to be a hell-or-high-water proposition, a public preference too popular and too precious to be ignored. I’ve spoken to residents who sincerely thought, in light of that mic-drop moment at the investiture ceremony, that Ariel had the goods, a surefire strategy to stop the Hub. They figured he’d found a smoking gun, a damning piece of evidence obtained as the result of years of running around the Gables playing Erin Brockovich. They expected, at the very least, that stopping the Mobility Hub was a hill he was willing to die on.
Not quite. He didn’t just fail to deliver, he barely even tried. Sauntering into it toward the end of a broader discussion on parking, Ariel navigated the Mobility Hub issue as if it were an impromptu brainstorming session, failing to offer over the course of a lengthy discussion a well-considered, well-researched, and cogent argument against the Mobility Hub. Truth be told, Castro, who tersely mocked the notion of seeking an “experience” from a parking garage, was the more interesting of the two freshmen on this issue.
Ariel, on the other hand, grumbled unconvincingly about cost, size, and aesthetics, ultimately taking cover behind his handy all-purpose objection to everything, “the residents don’t want it.” But he eventually saw which way the wind was blowing and seized upon the consolation of another public design meeting, a token retread of past efforts from which exciting ideas such as reducing the height of the structure by 10 or 20 feet are likely to emerge.
The Snub
If anything in life is certain, it’s that the Mobility Hub will be built, in one form or another, but most likely in a form a lot like the one proposed. True, an additional public design meeting is in the works, but none of the potential modifications being floated by the commission are game changers. The Gables will get a big new parking garage because the Gables needs a big new parking garage. If you don’t believe me, just ask Ariel, who by discussion’s end—and to the chagrin of his supporters in attendance—acknowledged the same.
But the Mobility Hub discussion wasn’t just pointless, it was an insult. A huge insult. An insult of so many dimensions it deserved its own Rod Serling monologue.
It was an insult to Lago, who after offering up the idea of yet another public design meeting, saw Gables United give all the credit to Ariel and Castro. It was an insult to Anderson, who has spent a considerable portion of her first term (a term Castro and Ariel apparently slept through) working to soften the design of the Mobility Hub. It was an insult to Menendez, who Ariel and Castro keep looking to as a third vote because they obviously (and wrongly) think he is weak and unprincipled. And it was an insult to the incumbents as a whole, who after struggling for years to bring a difficult-but-necessary project to fruition, found themselves being ushered back to the drawing board because two armchair quarterbacks with questionable sincerity say “big building bad.”
The biggest insult of all, though, was inflicted upon Ariel’s voters, who over the course of a single commission meeting saw their hopes disappear into a cloud of ineptitude and faux resolve.
Then again, maybe that’s on us for getting caught up in the moment, for all-too-eagerly gobbling up the endless pandering. Maybe we failed to realize that we were simply means to an end, mere inputs in an electoral equation. Maybe all we did last April was elect a human Instagram account, a force-entity of pure self-regard, a “political strategist” utterly incapable of thinking past the selfie or applause line. Maybe, just maybe, lost in our own exuberance, we failed to recognize that the unspoken conclusion to “residents first” was always “…but only after me.”