City’s Approval of High-Rise Next to Surfside Condo Under Scrutiny

The role that city officials played in allowing a luxury condominium to be built next door to the now-collapsed Champlain Towers building is under new scrutiny by plaintiffs and investigators.

The Miami Herald newspaper reported that the City of Miami Beach in 2014 moved quickly to smooth the way for the 87 Park condo by vacating a public road and creating a new height ordinance for the 18-story building. That allowed developers to avoid two voter referendums that could have stopped the construction, or at least reduced its size or kept it further away from the adjacent Champlain Towers building, which collapsed in June, killing 98 people.

In return for allowing developers to take control of the street and expand the building’s footprint, 87 Park developers agreed to pay the city $10.5 million, the newspaper reported.

“The end result was that Miami Beach moved Eighty Seven Park’s property line — once buffered from Champlain South by the 50-foot-wide beachfront street — directly against the boundary of the aging Surfside condo, bringing heavy machinery and intense vibrations from sheet pile-driving far closer than would otherwise have been the case and heightening the potential of damage,” the report noted.

Firms associated with the luxury condo have denied the construction contributed to the Champlain Towers collapse.

“Numerous media reports have documented that Champlain Towers South was improperly designed, poorly constructed, significantly underfunded, and inadequately maintained and repaired,” a spokesperson for the developers said in a statement. “We remain very confident that a full review of the facts will show that Eighty Seven Park had nothing to do with the tragic events at CTS.”

Engineers have said that the 40-year-old Champlain condo had multiple structural problems and was in the middle of an inspection and repair plan when it collapsed. Some said that the tower was fragile to begin with and nearby construction could have made it worse.

A class-action lawsuit filed by victims’ families charges that 87 Park developers ignored warning signs that the building work had destabilized Champlain Towers by damaging the foundation with excessive vibration and caused rainwater to be diverted into the Champlain condo’s basement.