The Grove BID at 15:  New Leadership, Lingering Concerns

In a milestone year the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District is moving beyond a critical audit report — and continued questions over how it should spend its millions in public money.

As former District 2 City Commissioner Marc Sarnoff recalls it, downtown Coconut Grove in 2009 was desperate for a makeover: empty storefronts, dirty streets and sidewalks, vandalism and petty crime. And with municipal budgets growing tighter, City of Miami service providers couldn’t keep up.

While others may remember the time differently, there’s little dispute that Coconut Grove’s urban core today, with its swanky new restaurants, Class A office space, and luxury condo towers has come a long way.

More than anything, Sarnoff insists, credit for that transformation belongs to the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District, commonly known as the BID.

“People forget what Coconut Grove was like before the BID,” says Sarnoff, who served as the group’s chair from its founding in 2009 to 2015 when he left office. “When I first became a commissioner, Coconut Grove was a place everyone wanted to get away from.” 

For the past 15 years, merchants, residents, and property owners have relied on the BID, a semi-autonomous City of Miami agency, to make the village’s central commercial sector attractive and welcoming to locals and visitors. As the theory goes, happy customers make for happy business owners. 

The BID’s overriding objective, Miami Commissioner Damian Pardo tells the Spotlight, is to boost economic vitality through marketing, promotions, special events and community enrichment programming,

“A thriving business district benefits not only the businesses, property owners, and visitors but also residents,” Pardo says. “Everyone enjoys a clean, safe and attractive neighborhood with diverse retail and restaurant options.”

But the BID has encountered bouts of turbulence during its existence, most recently a 2023 audit that uncovered some questionable business practices, including a large unauthorized financial transfer, excessive credit card spending, and insufficient board oversight. In the wake of the findings, the BID’s nine-member board of directors, overseen by Pardo, replaced its executive director earlier this year.

Since its formation, the BID has also drawn some resentment from residents because of a perception that the agency does not seek resident input, even though the bulk of its funding comes from the City of Miami’s public coffers. Board membership is restricted to those with commercial-sector ties and affiliations; residents need not apply.

The BID has also faced criticism from some business owners over how, and where, the agency spends its roughly $2 million in annual revenues. Others within the community bemoan the BID’s longstanding reluctance to extend its services down the long blighted Grand Avenue corridor in the West Grove.  

“[The BID] has been around for so many years, collecting so many millions of dollars and we really don’t know what for,” Sylvano Bignon, owner of Greenstreet Cafe, tells the Coconut Grove Spotlight. “The intent of the BID was good. But there’s been a lot of disappointment.” 

BID’s origin

In 2009, a majority of Coconut Grove commercial property owners voted to add a special assessment to their annual property tax bills to fund a Grove BID. The funds would pay for extra sanitation services, for sprucing up the village center, and for special events and marketing to burnish the Coconut Grove brand,

Despite the widely-held perception that the BID is self-funded, the bulk of its funding comes from fees merchants and property owners pay the city to waive parking provisions required under the city’s zoning code.

Funding also comes from sidewalk café fees and special events permit fees paid to the city. Last year, special tax assessments accounted for only $654,147 – or about 28 percent – the BID’s $2.375 million in total revenue.

The agency’s annual budget has grown from less than $1 million during its early days to roughly $2.2 million last year.

According to its most recent audit, the BID last year had $1.9 million in expenses, including $343,000 for salaries, $241,000 for rent and other operational costs and $306,000 for sanitation services.

The BID is also sitting on $5.5 million from investments, of which $4.5 million is earmarked for capital improvement projects including a long-awaited garage on the site of the Coconut Grove Playhouse parking lot, streetscape improvements on Main Highway and the burial of FPL lines along Grand Avenue and McFarlane Road. 

At the time the BID was formed, the board of directors was composed of 19 members. The chairperson is the District 2 Miami commissioner. The executive director of Miami Parking Authority, or MPA, also has a board seat. The remainder of the board consists of landlords or their commercial tenants.

In 2019 the Miami City Commission extended the BID’s charter for anther ten years. They also reduced the board to nine members, a response to the widely-shared complaint that the larger board suffered under its own weight. 

As the BID’s inaugural chairman, Sarnoff, now an attorney and City Hall lobbyist, credits the agency for helping attract some of Miami’s biggest companies.

Development firms Related Group and Terra, as well as design firm Arquitectonica, moved their headquarters to Coconut Grove in part due to the BID promoting the neighborhood, Sarnoff says.

“Coconut Grove went from a drink tank to a think tank,” he says. “The Grove BID had stutter steps, but I do think it has been a positive change agent.” 

Streamlining the BID

During its first decade, the BID was bogged down and had a hard time pushing forward with major initiatives, some commercial property owners complain. Exhibit A appears to be its much-ballyhooed 2018 master plan by the local design firm PlusUrbia that prescribed a bevy of capital improvement projects for the village core.

After touting the plan as the foundational vision for the next ten years, the BID quietly removed the plan from its website and marketing materials.

Grant Savage, founder of Silver Bluff Real Estate, which owns eight commercial properties in Coconut Grove, lays some of the blame on the inertia of an overstuffed board structure. “There were too many board members. It seemed difficult to get motions and things passed at the time. We also had a revolving door of interim executive directors.” 

Reducing the number of board members to nine was a huge improvement in terms of “functionality and efficiency,” says Ken Russell, the former District 2 commissioner who served from 2015 to 2022. 

“In the previous iteration of the Grove BID, every major stakeholder had to have a seat,” Russell tells the Spotlight. “That created an unwieldy board. There were a lot of conversations and discussion, but not enough action. We had so many committees that staff would spend most of the time preparing for meetings and reporting about meetings instead of focusing on the jobs they were hired to do.” 

The BID is accepting nominations, through August 1, for an open board seat.

Shortly after the 2019 vote to extend the BID for another decade, the agency’s staff was deep in pandemic mode, struggling with how best to assist local businesses stay afloat during government shutdowns and Covid-19 social distancing restrictions, Russell says.

During the height of the pandemic, the BID reallocated special event funding to provide merchants with financial assistance, Russell explains. The agency also waived sidewalk cafe fees paid by merchants to the city. 

“We only lost three businesses and over 60 new businesses opened post-pandemic,” Russell says. “I largely credit the board and the administration for creating the right program to help local business owners.” 

For Silver Bluff’s Savage, the BID provides restaurants and retailers with valuable resources that help them draw in customers. “If tenants are doing well, then we do well,” Savage says. “Anything that the BID can do to help their business and get people to buy their goods and services is better for everyone.” 

Still, he would like to see the BID tackle elements of the 2018 master plan such as transforming Fuller Street, which was closed to vehicular traffic during Russell’s tenure, into a kind of town square. 

“Fuller Street is a gem that could be fixed nicely and could be a great draw,” Savage says. “I think some of the larger recurring issues deal with infrastructure and parking. The Grove BID should be taking the lead.”

Greenstreet’s Bignon agrees. He says the BID’s lack of follow-through in implementing components of the master plan – such as streetscape improvements and new parking options – are among his chief disappointments with the agency.

Addressing the parking crunch was supposed to be a priority for the agency when it was originally conceived, he explains. “The initial goal was to build a garage,” Bignon says. “To this day, we haven’t seen it happen. It’s very political.” 

Pardo says he’s listening. Since taking office last fall, he and his staff have prioritized the Fuller Street project. He also hopes to kickstart some of the other capital projects floated in recent years.

“We should be ready to announce our plans with some finality very soon,” Pardo says. “Regarding the master plan, we are working every day on ways to implement suggestions from the master plan – from protecting and enhancing the tree canopy to increased accessibility.”

Audit’s revelations

After reviewing the audit’s findings earlier this year, Pardo and the eight other board members agreed the BID needed new leadership. At the board’s February meeting the board voted to part ways with then-acting Executive Director Cynthia Seymour, who had been leading the agency since 2019.

During the same meeting, the Pardo-led board hired a new executive director, Mark Burns. His work experience includes a one-year stint two years ago at the helm of the Bayfront Park Management Trust. 

“I cannot speak to the specifics of what happened with previous management, other than to say that we have not uncovered any fraudulent or illegal activities,” Pardo tells the Spotlight. “Once we knew what the concerns and issues were, we immediately course-corrected.”

The audit’s most damning finding was the unauthorized transfer of $300,000 from a BID investment account to its operating account. None of the money was misspent, BID officials say, but the transfer raised a question about the agency’s internal controls.

Auditors also found that Seymour had sole control of credit card purchases, which more than doubled in a one-year span, and that purchases were not detailed as line items in financial records. 

In her written response to auditors, Seymour gave no explanation for the transfer but defended her credit card usage as a way to pay for business applications such as Zoom, Google Workspace and Facebook ad campaigns.

“Generally, credit card purchases are limited to online purchases, with the exception of expenditures needed for the production of special events,” Seymour wrote. “These services bill on a monthly basis as an autopay, and do not take bank checks as a method of payment. In this day and age, it is simply not practical to send checks to every vendor.” 

But Seymour alone is not to blame for the agency’s dubious accounting practices, the auditors say, citing the board’s “significant deficiency in internal control over financial reporting.”

The audit notes that the board does not receive, review and discuss financial reports and investment performance at its monthly meetings – a practice it encouraged the board to rethink.

Seymour took the claim further, complaining that the downsized board – with no active committees – left her with little guidance, support and oversight, minutes of the February board show.

Despite his decision to seek new leadership, Pardo would seem to agree.

“These issues were a product of a lack of controls, policies and procedures at the board and staff level,” he tells the Spotlight. “The lack of oversight and involvement led to the administrative handling of transactions in a questionable manner.”

Seymour did not respond to two phone messages seeking comment.

Burns opens lines of communication

In April, Burns officially began his tenure as BID’s executive director and has been getting up-to-speed on the ins-and-outs of the agency. He’s also taking time to introduce himself to local merchants through lunch meetings and a recent meet-and-greet gathering at the popular eatery Bartaco, Burns tells the Spotlight.

“I think a lot of business owners may not understand what we do, how we are funded and what they are paying for,” Burns says. “I am letting them know that we are here to help them by keeping the sidewalks clean and safe, as well as promoting them with a robust marketing and special events budget.”

During his encounters with business owners, he explains that they are paying roughly 42 cents per square foot in special assessments, which for a small shop could be about $140 a year. He also tells them that they would still have to pay the city parking waiver fees even if the BID didn’t exist. 

“If there is no BID, the city would get that money and not necessarily use it in Coconut Grove,” Burns says. “The city could utilize those funds for other areas. The BID keeps that funding in Coconut Grove.” 

He is also addressing the audit’s criticisms. “The main thing that I saw was the moving of funds without proper approvals,” he says. “Those are in-house issues that we are cleaning up.”

Overall, in year 15, the Grove BID has lived up to his expectations, Silver Bluff’s Savage says. “There is always a difference of opinions about what the BID should be doing. Mark seems to be the guy who can work through those differences of opinions and get things done.”