October 22, 2009

Marlins garage already $41m over budget

Whuh-oh. The Florida Marlins' new stadium has only been under construction for three months, and already there are cost overruns: The accompanying parking garage, it turns out, will cost $135 million, not $94 million as originally budgeted. The Miami city commission is set to vote on the pricier garage bonds today, which should make for fine web streaming entertainment as always.

The garage financing is actually a confusing tangle: The Marlins are paying the city $10 per space for the rights to 5,850 parking garage spaces, which the Miami Herald says will "cover construction costs over the life of the bond issue," though it's not clear whether they mean the original $94 million cost or the new $135 million figure — by my calculations, it'd only come to about $5 million a year, which wouldn't be enough to cover either. And in any case, the Marlins' rent isn't going up as the cost goes up, which means the extra $41 million in bond cost will be all on taxpayers. Marc Sarnoff's proposal to make the team guarantee garage cost overruns must be sounding real good about now.