Grosvenor calculated that the development and ground leases will yield no more than $1.6-million a year for the aviation authority at maximum build-out of International Plaza.
The land lease may be hiked 5 percent — not every year but — every decade, and only starting in 2008. Just faint criticism has come the way of aviation authority members who kept alive the Corbett giveaway.
Hart, a Republican up for re-election in 1998, was questioned by unsuccessful Democratic challenger Kim Wall on the campaign trail about his failure to press for full disclosure of the lease arrangement agreement. Hart told the Tribune that the deal between Corbett and Taubman predated his service on the authority. Hart defended his inaction by saying he had to ratify the low rents or the authority would have been sued.
Wall wasn't buying the explanation from Hart, who more recently has been touted as a Tampa mayoral candidate in 2003. "Why do we keep doing deals with private individuals and letting the taxpayers get shortchanged?" Wall asked. "I'm opposed to letting private individuals make a fortune off public land."
What could be in this lease arrangement agreement, which has generated so little curiosity from Tampa airport officials?
Grosvenor executives felt strongly enough about the importance of the document that they sued Corbett and the aviation authority in 1998 under the state public records law to get a copy of it.
In one of the many curious twists to the International Plaza saga, Miller had displayed tremendous faith in Corbett's lawyers the year before. Miller inquired about how the agreement might impact an upcoming 1998 deadline for the commencement of mall construction. Miller asked Stewart Eggert to get the documents from Corbett. "I wanted him to get those and go through those and see what they said," said Miller. "He's the one who obtained them." All Miller received were eight pages of excerpts from the lease arrangement agreement, interspersed with circled hand-written notations: "break in text." Miller trusted Corbett's lawyers to decide which portions of the agreement were relevant to his inquiry.
"I'd like to see the whole thing, too," Miller said in a recent interview. "We don't have it."
Despite 18 months in court, Grosvenor failed to get even a hearing on whether the authority should be compelled to make Corbett produce the whole document. Public records lawsuits are supposed to get priority on state court dockets. Corbett lawyers appealed procedural rulings until Grosvenor dropped the lawsuit last year.
"Neither the courts nor the federal agencies seemed to be interested," said Flavin, the Grosvenor president. "Our appeals were falling on deaf ears."
Miller said he thought it was interesting that Grosvenor withdrew from the public-records litigation soon after the FAA report was issued. "Fighting a losing battle," he said.
Whatever Grosvenor's motivation, the West Shore Plaza owner has raised questions that should trouble taxpayers. Have a few Tampa power brokers leveraged Corbett's sweet International Plaza ground-lease into a windfall, at a potentially staggering loss to the public treasury? The key to understanding how badly taxpayers are getting hosed — and who else could be benefiting from the Corbett lease — may be the lease arrangement agreement.
The Planet has decided to file its own public records lawsuit in Hillsborough Circuit Court, seeking public disclosure of the lease arrangement agreement. Miller has denied the newspaper access to the full agreement. Responding to a Planet request for the document, airport lawyer Donald W. Stanley Jr. said Miller only has portions of the agreement and provided those excerpts.
David M. Snyder, the Planet's lawyer, believes the entire lease arrangement agreement is a public record, based on Florida court decisions, even if the unabridged version of the document has been in the custody of Corbett or his attorneys for all of these years. The whole document should lay out how much Corbett is charging Tampa Westshore Associates to lease about 108 acres under development for the mall. Taubman originally owned 50.1 percent of Tampa Westshore Associates. In 1999, the Michigan real estate outfit brought in a partner on the International Plaza project, Canadian retail developer Ivanhoe Inc. Taubman reduced its interest to 26 percent. Corbett retains a 49.9 percent stake.
Grosvenor executives strongly suspect Corbett charges Tampa Westshore Associates closer to market rents than what the aviation authority charges him.
With those rental figures, taxpayers could learn how big the rent spread is between Corbett and his development partners — and begin to see how big a multimillion-dollar hit they are taking.
