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Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez presents $8.9 billion proposed budget, board that was deciding between a rail expansion that county consultants said wasn’t financially viable and the administration’s proposal for a

$243 million system of modernized rapid-transit buses that would leave money to build transit projects elsewhere.

“He told me he felt strongly about the buses, which happened to coincide with my opinion,” Gimenez said of GarciaToledo, a regular donor in county races and finance chairman for the mayor’s reelection campaign. “He has influence over commissioners.”

Garcia-Toledo’s seat at the table for Gimenez’s push for the county’s first rapid-transit bus system highlights the connections he brings to Genting’s push for the county’s first modern monorail system.

On Wednesday, county commissioners are scheduled to vote on Gimenez’s recommendation to accept Genting’s proposal to launch an accelerated bidding contest to build a transit system between downtown Miami and Miami Beach. The Beach and South Dade routes are two of the six corridors identified in the county’s 2016 Strategic Miami Area Rapid Transit study effort — best known as the SMART Plan.

Garcia-Toledo is the president of Aqualand Development Ltd. Co., a company listed alongside Genting and Chinese electric-vehicle maker BYD as members of the “Miami Beach Monorail Consortium.” The vice president of Aqualand is Jesse Manzano-Plaza, a longtime Genting lobbyist and Gimenez’s 2016 campaign manager. Garcia-Toledo is registered to lobby for his own firm, G-T Construction, but not for Genting or any other company.

On May 2, the consortium submitted a confidential proposal to the Gimenez administration to build a monorail between Miami Beach and downtown Miami, where Genting wants to open a casino along the proposed transit route.

The details remain secret under county and state law governing proposals designated as “unsolicited” by a local government. Under those rules, accepting an unsolicited proposal triggers a procurement process allowing other bidders to try and beat the original offer. The county does not have to accept any of the bids; it can choose not to build the project or start the bidding process again.

Garcia-Toledo said his work helping Gimenez win support for the administration’s SMART initiative for South Dade in July

2018 did not present a conflict for his later role as a proposer for a rail project on the Beach SMART corridor.

“That is ridiculous,” Garcia-Toledo said in a written response to the conflict question. He pointed out that the county’s consultant for the South Dade corridor, AECOM, concluded last year that rapid-transit buses were the most viable option for South Dade. The report said the suburban commuting route lacked the density that would make a 20mile Metrorail extension competitive for federal transportation grants.

“I had no involvement in the technical decision outlined in the AECOM study,” Garcia-Toledo said, and those conclusions led to Gimenez advocating for rapid-transit buses in South Dade.

Gimenez proposed South Dade’s rapid-transit bus line as a waypoint toward rail, allowing the county to build the daily ridership needed to compete for hefty federal transportation grants. The South Dade vote represented one of the most politically charged transit votes since Gimenez became mayor in 2011. It asked county leaders to endorse an option other than the South Dade Metrorail extension pitched voters in the 2002 referendum that created a half-percent sales tax for transportation projects.

Ahead of the vote by the 25-member Transportation Planning Organization, Gimenez and Bravo had to head off an effort by some South Dade mayors and county representatives to insist Miami-Dade commit to building Metrorail before moving onto other SMART corridor votes.

Coral Gables commissioner Vince Lago, a member of the transportation board, met with GarciaToledo, Bravo and AECOM staffers working on the county’s South Dade study. “Their argument was that this [bus plan] was the only financially viable option at their disposal ... that they wouldn’t have money left over” after a vote to extend Metrorail.

The revelation that a political ally of Gimenez was a partner in a rail effort for a different SMART corridor has drawn harsh statements from South Dade’s Metrorail advocates, who complained the county mayor refused to consider a smaller rail segment to ease cost concerns.

The “proposal to benefit a casino company, conveniently labeled ‘unsolicited’ to skirt the sunshine laws, with one partner your former campaign finance director ... is why our county cannot be trusted to make good use of the people’s hard-earned tax money,” former Cutler Bay mayor Peggy Bell said in a statement.

Garcia-Toledo works for Genting under a construction-management contract for the casino company’s agreement with MiamiDade to build a 300-room hotel above the county’s bus depot and Omni Metromover station. Genting agreed to upgrade both, while paying Miami-Dade millions in rent.

The Metromover station sits next to the 14-acre waterfront property that once housed the Miami Herald. Genting purchased it in 2011 for $236 million in its bid to build the country’s largest casino in Miami. That effort stalled in Tallahassee when lawmakers declined to expand the state’s casino rules.

The former Herald property sits along the proposed transit route to the Beach — a project the county has been studying since the 1980s and which used to go by the shorthand “Baylink.”

Genting’s property could give it a unique advantage in the competition for a beach transit project, since it could provide real estate for a station Miami-Dade would otherwise have to purchase. Eileen Higgins, the Miami-Dade commissioner who represents the Beach side of the proposed route, met with GarciaToledo and Manzano-Plaza about two weeks before Genting submitted its monorail proposal. While Higgins said the future bid didn’t come up during the meeting about the Beach corridor, she said the Genting plan could be promising.

“This is a big property owner. In the beginning, I thought this was so unscrupulous. Then I said: Calm down,” Higgins said.

“They may be able to provide a better solution. They own all the land that could be ideal” for a transit station.

The Genting proposal could prompt Miami-Dade to vote on a transit option for the Beach before a tax-funded consultant finishes its study of the SMART corridor. The Parsons engineering firm has narrowed the options to extending the existing Metromover system from Miami to the Beach, creating a new monorail or light-rail line, or building a rapid-transit bus line similar to what was approved in South Dade. The 2020 budget Gimenez proposed Tuesday states that “the Beach Corridor consultant teams will complete preliminary engineering and environmental evaluation of the transit alternatives and recommend a preferred alternative” by the fall.

“I don’t know how much relevance the study will have,” Gimenez said. He pointed to county rules triggered when MiamiDade accepts an unsolicited proposal, including a 120-day window for other bidders to submit competing proposals. “We have to follow certain parameters.”

Genting has been laying the groundwork for its Beach corridor proposal for at least a year.

Gimenez led a county delegation to Asia in May 2018, and the two-week trip included tours of transit systems that might work in Miami, including inspecting an automated bus designed to resemble a train. Garcia-Toledo said he asked Genting to arrange a demonstration of the vehicle for the mayor and county officials in Zhouzhou. Garcia-Toledo and Manzano-Plaza were the only two private-sector executives on the visit of the government-owned CRRC facility, according to a list provided by Gimenez’s office.

Days later, Gimenez said he met with Genting Chairman Lim Kok Thay on a Hong Kong cruise ship and discussed the Malaysian casino company’s interest in a potential Baylink project. Commission Chairwoman Audrey Edmonson, whose district includes the Miami side of the proposed monorail route, said she was on the ship, too, for the meeting with the Genting chairman and that Garcia-Toledo and Manzano-Plaza were as well.

On Monday, Gimenez said Garcia-Toledo’s prior work supporting the mayor’s reelection shouldn’t disqualify him from pursuing county business, especially since county commissioners — not the mayor — make final decisions on the transit budget. Miami-Dade does not bar companies doing business with the county from making political donations, and most incumbents count on vendors, lobbyists and developers for the bulk of their donations.

“He’s not a relative of mine, and he’s not a business partner of mine . ... He was involved in my campaign. There were a whole bunch of people involved in my campaign,” Gimenez said. “There’s a process. My people who are analyzing this understand that line. I see no conflict.”

A longer version of this story may be seen at www.MiamiHerald.com.