As Clearpath Services makes a second run at being chosen to develop Vero’s planned Three Corners riverfront complex after a first-try debacle, founder and front man Randy Lloyd has seen the City Council’s embarrassing antics, and he’s ready for them this time.
The council’s inexplicable fumbling of what appeared to be an obvious decision – along with its shocking vote to abandon the process in June and call for a do-over, after its hand-picked Selection Committee overwhelmingly had endorsed Clearpath’s eye-popping vision for the waterfront property – left Lloyd with a “bad taste” about doing business with the city.
So what prompted Lloyd and his Indiana-based partnership to become one of only two development groups to submit a Three Corners proposal last week, as the Vero council tries to redeem itself?
They still believe in their plan.
“We were pretty deflated by the way things went the last time around,” Lloyd said in a phone interview with Vero Beach 32963. “We felt our team had put together an honest, well-thought-out and exciting proposal. Was it too ambitious? Maybe, but we were looking to create that wow factor. We wanted to hit a home run.
“But after licking our wounds a bit, taking some time off to regroup and decide whether we wanted to take another shot at it, we sought input from all our partners – and everybody really wanted to stay with it,” he continued.
He paused for a moment, then added: “You don’t necessarily want to go through these processes twice, but we feel the proposal we’ve come up with now is actually better for this project.”
In what way?
Lloyd said the Clearpath group responded to the feedback it received from committee members, the council and community to slightly downsize and tweak its previous proposal, which came with development costs estimated to be in excess of $500 million.
“We’ve added some things, changed some things and compacted the site, but the components are pretty much the same,” Lloyd said, declining to provide the specifics that, according to the city’s Request For Proposals, can’t be released to the public until Jan. 16.
“Our proposal still honors the spirit of what we want to do, and it still has that ‘wow’ factor,” he added, “but it’s more cost-effective and puts us at a scale that’s more appropriate for this market.”
The competing proposal was submitted by another familiar development group – the partnership previously headed by SuDa – but under a different name: The Blue at Vero Beach LLC.
The new partnership again includes the SuDa team and Madison Marquette real-estate services firm, but the RFP lists Madison Marquette as the lead entity. Edgar Jones & Company and The Continental Companies are also part of the group.
In May, the council ignored its Selection Committee’s recommendation and chose to enter negotiations with the SuDa group to develop a dining, retail, social and recreational hub on the Three Corners site, located at the west end of the 17th Street Bridge.
A week later, however, the council disqualified the group – for violating the terms of the bidding process – and decided to restart the process with a new, more-demanding RFP that required a “constructibility appraisal,” which was to be conducted by an outside consultant hired to make sure the estimates included in the proposals were accurate.
During the previous process, some council members believed Clearpath’s $503 million proposal was exorbitant and unrealistic. Mayor John Cotugno and Councilman John Carroll, though, saw the group’s cost estimate as the most credible.
None of the other three groups’ proposals was as extensive or expensive, with their price tags not even half of Clearpath’s projections.
While Lloyd said Clearpath’s new numbers are smaller – as is the scope of its refined proposal – he said the plan is still grand.
“Truth is, we probably would’ve refined our original proposal in our negotiations with the city, if the process had gone forward with us,” Lloyd said. “Being where we are now, I’m glad we had the opportunity to do this.”
Besides, the Vero council now is left with only two proposals from which to choose.