MIAMI – Members of the public packed Wednesday’s Miami-Dade County Commission meeting as officials were set to vote on a lease extension for the Miami Wilds water park proposal at Zoo Miami, a plan so controversial, the zoo’s chief spokesperson publicly denounced it as a private citizen.
No vote happened Wednesday, however, as commissioners chose to defer the vote until later in the month.
Zoo communications director Ron Magill took the rare step of coming out against the plan, arguing the plans encroach even further on the already threatened Pine Rocklands, which are home to many endangered species.
Members of the public spoke out against the proposal at Wednesday’s meeting
“It’s millennia that those Rocklands took to form and it only took a few weeks for it to be down,” one woman said. “We have future generations, they deserve to see all this. This is ancient Miami.”
Another woman told commissioners the land is a “necessity” for the endangered Florida bonneted bat.
One supporter, however, thought the plan would be good for the area
“The project would serve as a great economic boost for Florida,” supporter George Morgado said.
Miami Wilds was first conceived by the county in the late 90′s and early 2000′s as an entertainment park meant to boost economic development in southwest Miami-Dade County and bring even more people to the zoo.
Developers said they’ve scaled back the project to avoid any environmental harm.
“It was a much larger project initially, but (we) have scaled it back in a way to avoid any impacts on the natural areas,” developer Paul Lambert said.
Lambert said developers’ studies don’t agree that Miami Wilds would pose a threat to the bonneted bat and the true impact is being overblown.
“Yes, the bat does fly over the property, but the notion that this is bat-nirvana or bat-palooza, where the bat just feeds every night -- the data doesn’t indicate that at all,” he told Local 10 News on Monday.
He later said: “The fact that some groups opposing the project keep calling paved parking areas at the zoo ‘environmentally sensitive’ is bizarre and absurd.”
Conservationists pushed back.
“It is the place we park our cars during the day, but to bats and other wildlife this is a large, dark, open space in a matrix of light and sound that is Miami,” Mylea Bayless, with Bat Conservation International, said. “A waterpark doesn’t belong in the matrix of the last critically endangered piece of pine rocklands anywhere in the world outside of the Everglades.”
Commissioners are now set to vote on the project Sept. 19.
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