Sports: Beckham "Bending" through "long slog" for new Miami Stadium, Franchise

The ballot measure passed at yesterday's city commission meeting and the measure will go to Miami voters. Also yesterday, a Miami man filed a lawsuit against the city alleging that it is not following the law requiring  competitive bidding for private development on city land. ORIGINAL STORY, July 18: Nearly five years after David Beckham announced he would be putting a Major League Soccer team in Miami, his investment group is back at the negotiating table trying to get a stadium built. 

A new plan calls for a $1B stadium and retail complex at the current site of the Melreese Country Club, a city-owned property that is contaminated with arsenic. Miami city commissioners will vote Wednesday on the next step in the process: whether to approve a ballot measure that will ask voters if they want to change the law to allow the Beckham group to have a no-bid contract, the Miami Herald reports. 

It has been a long slog for Beckham. Miami taxpayers have soured on funding sports stadiums because the Miami Marlins' baseball stadium notoriously cost them $2B. Beckham's group has vowed that soccer stadium costs would be shouldered with private money, but after several proposed sites were rejected and a major investor left the group, plans stalled. 

In January, Jorge Mas, the politically connected leader of MasTec, a Forbes 500 engineering and infrastructure firm, joined Beckham's group and revived the effort. The team led by Mas and Beckham has let go of partially executed plans to build on a controversial site in Overtown and is instead focusing on the Melreese site. A new plan calls for 400K SF of office space, a 750-room hotel, 600K SF of retail and a golf facility in addition to the 25,000-seat stadium.