Bal Harbour Shops pays for a referendum on City Hall sale

The Village of Bal Harbour is set Tuesday to retake a vote taken last Spring on the proposed sale of its City Hall property — now that there are two new council members who were put on the dais by the people who want to buy it.

Councilmen David Albaum and Jeffrey Freimark, both elected in November, were practically funded by the Bal Harbour Shops and the Whitman family that owns it through their respective campaigns ($37,000 for Albaum and $54,500 for Freimark) and two political action committees that collected close to $350,000 between them.

Now, the Shops have the votes they need Tuesday to get the sale of City Hall on a referendum, preferably on a special election day when nobody will show up. Next, they will fund a slick PR campaign to urge voters to sell the building to them for $15 million and they will drum up absentee ballots from their friends and family.

There’s only one thing in their way: A fiesty Colombian abuelita named Patricia Cohen who is a councilwoman in the Village of Bal Harbour and who is adamantly against the sale, which she voted against in April in a tie vote. She may lose on the dais Tuesday. But she will campaign hard for a no vote on any referendum to sell the city’s oldest building. And she is a person with some influence in the tiny, posh town.

“It’s 62 years old and it’s our history. It’s all we have,” Cohen told Ladra.“We don’t have 500 year old buildings.”

Cohen is also concerned about the mall’s proposed $400 million expansion. She says the trend is against more brick and mortar and doesn’t believe more retail is in the best interest of the village residents.

Her opposition, claim the mall owners and their attorney, is based in her friendship with the families that own competing retail centers — Aventura Mall and the Design District, specifically. Or that’s what they want us to think anyway. That’s why they slapped Cohen with not one but two lawsuits in an effort to get her to recuse herself.

The first came a couple of weeks after the February 2016 public records request for all of Cohen’s emails and text messages about the Bal Harbour Shops and the Church by the Sea and the Suntrust building — dating back to 2010. Also requested were any emails that were related to or associated with Aventura Mall and the Design District and some specific people, like Beth Berkowitz and Craig Robins and members of the Soffer family (who own and operate Aventura Mall). Guess they thought that 23,000 or so emails that were caught in the search terms could be collected and reviewed and redacted in two weeks.

An early rendition of the proposed Bal Harbour Shops expansion

The second came in the summer, and accuses Cohen of violating ethics ordinances and the Sunshine law because of something she whispered in the mayor’s ear at the time of the vote. He ended up voting against the sale also.

The idea is to claim Cohen has a conflict of interest because, as a landscape artist, she has worked for the Soffer family and because she sold her house 15 years ago to the younger sister of Jackie Soffer, who is married to Craig Robins, who is credited with developing the Design District.

One email was provided to another website by Whitman attorney John Shubin (Ladra could not reach him over the MLK weekend), who told the Real Deal that it indicates she was happy about the competition’s impact on the Shops. “Can u imagine a world class  public green space with  possibly gorgeous works of art right smack in the middle of  Collins instead of that hideous suntrust bank,” Cohen asked with three question marks in a letter to a real estate broker hired by Bal Harbour to inquire about the SunTrust building site. “WE need to

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