Kelly Tractor HQ Outside Miami-Dade UDB Heads to Vote

A polarizing proposal for an industrial headquarters on 246 acres of land is coming back for a vote, this time committing to preserve more of the ecologically vital wetlands on the site. But environmentalists and opponents say it’s not enough.

Kelly Tractor, a heavy machinery supplier led by a fourth generation of the Kelly family, wants to build a 2.7 million-square-foot headquarters on a site outside Miami-Dade County’s Urban Development Boundary, a greenbelt meant to stop construction encroachment toward the Everglades and onto agricultural acreage and wetlands.

County Commissioners are expected to vote on the item on Tuesday, after Kelly Tractor submitted additional details about why it has to build its facility on this site.

The project is slated for land roughly on the northwest corner of Northwest 137th Avenue and Northwest Sixth Street, near a Dolphin Expressway on- and off-ramp and in unincorporated Miami-Dade.

It has touched off a firestorm among those who decry development beyond the UDB and paving over wetlands, which are a sponge for rainfall. Wetlands also filter pollutants from water before it reaches Biscayne Bay and the Everglades, recharge the county’s drinking water aquifer, aid the state’s costly Everglades restoration projects and are a wildlife habitat including protected species.

Opponents also take issue with Kelly Tractor’s project application route. The firm sought approval through a “text amendment” instead of the much more detailed UDB expansion approval process that would have required layers of reviews, including by the state.

Kelly Tractor, founded in Clewiston in the 1930s, has been based in Miami-Dade since the 1960s, the company’s president Chris Kelly said. The supplier for Caterpillar and other construction and mining equipment has outgrown its longtime Doral facility, where it’s been since 1971, Kelly said.

The firm’s pitch for expanding to a bigger facility partly hinges on creating more higher paying jobs that are desperately needed amid South Florida’s affordability crisis.

“There’s a lot of really wealthy and high-earning people, and there’s a lot of people earning $15 an hour,” Kelly said. Kelly Tractor’s jobs are “somewhere that puts people in the middle. Do we want all Miami-Dade local families to move because it’s so expensive?”

Kelly Tractor first scored approval in January, but county Mayor Daniella Levine Cava quickly vetoed the vote. Since then, it’s come back to commissioners at least twice, with Kelly reworking the application in hopes of scoring the supermajority votes needed from commissioners.

As of May, it needed to get one more elected on its side, with Commissioner Raquel Regalado largely seen as the swing vote. She didn’t return a request for comment.

In developer-friendly Miami-Dade, UDB expansions are one of the most controversial proposals a developer can make. Even those that pass after several tries end up fizzling out in court.

Environmental politics

Just over 162 acres of wetlands are on the development site, environmentalists say.

Under its latest application, Kelly Tractor commits to preserving at least 63.1 acres on the site and to preserving at least another 20 acres elsewhere through a Miami-Dade program.

Using the “text amendment” process also allows Kelly Tractor to only provide a conceptual project plan, meaning it’s unclear whether and to what extent wetlands on the site beyond those that will be preserved will be affected, opponents say. They argue that if the developer chooses to mitigate any potential impacts by creating or improving wetlands elsewhere in Miami-Dade, it still wouldn’t be the same as preserving on the site.

“The further away you conduct your mitigation, the less environmental benefits there are,” said Josh Sproat, policy director at Hold The Line Coalition. “If you are doing it in a different basin, you reduce the value of the mitigation.”

The development site is in the North Trail Basin, one of the county’s “most important remaining wetland landscapes for restoring and managing South Florida’s natural hydrology,” the Everglades Coalition wrote in a letter on Wednesday to county commissioners.

Kelly Tractor and its supporters on the dais have pointed out that other projects outside the UDB have been proposed under a “text amendment,” including a now-scrapped Miami-Dade plan for a trash incinerator.

According to Kelly Tractor-commissioned studies, the site isn’t really environmentally sensitive and has been a tree farm for four decades, Kelly added.

“It’s not in the Everglades. There’s no birds nesting. There’s a cement plant next door,” Kelly said. “I know the environment is very important. It’s important to me as well. We are not trying to destroy that.”

Development

South Florida

Controversial industrial HQ back for vote, despite unresolved wetlands deal