West Palm Beach city commissioners agreed to sell 57 acres of undeveloped land to a prestigious private school for the creation of its third South Florida campus.
The Pine Crest School will purchase the land along Roebuck Road near Florida’s Turnpike for $6.6 million under a tentative agreement approved July 20 by commissioners.
There, the school plans to build a sprawling campus for students from pre-K through high school.
City leaders call the move a boon for the city’s growing urban center, where business leaders complain that a shortage of elite educational options has made it difficult to recruit high-level executives.
“I believe right now we’re in a deficit of close to 600 seats just at the moment without anything being constructed,” Deputy City Administrator Armando Fana told commissioners. “So the demand exists and will likely continue to exist as long as we have Vanderbilt coming in, Cleveland Clinic, all these institutions that are bringing in high-paying jobs and high-net-worth households.”
The land sale has been more than a year in the making. The city originally proposed last year to sell the land to Related Ross, the city’s largest developer, which said it would then recruit a school to build a campus.
The arrangement faced questions about the negotiated sales price of $6.6 million, or $120,500 an acre. A real estate expert said that price was vastly lower than its true market value.
City administrators ultimately agreed to seek out another appraisal.
Now the city is selling the land directly to Pine Crest, which will build its campus with the help of a donation from Palm Beach billionaire Stephen Ross, the chairperson of Related Ross.
Ross has made bringing a prestigious private school to the city a top priority, saying this year that “you can’t get companies to want to expand in an area without having great education.”
School aims for ‘even better version’ of its current campuses
The West Palm Beach campus will be the school’s largest. Pine Crest’s main campus in Fort Lauderdale is 48 acres, while its Boca Raton campus is 28 acres.
Commissioner Joe Peduzzi asked Pine Crest’s chairperson whether the school really needs the entire 57 acres, pointing out that “57 acres really is a lot of land.”
Todd Rosenberg, chairperson of the school’s board of trustees, said Pine Crest hoped to make the West Palm Beach campus an “even better version” of its existing campuses, and that the plan envisioned making use of all of the land.
“We want to create not just a traditional school that’s multi-level and indoors but an incredible campus, a place that that everyone could be really proud of,” he said.
The original proposed sale price was based on two wildly different appraisals, one that estimated its market value at $9.5 million and another that estimated it at $3.7 million.
Facing questions about the discrepancy, the city agreed to conduct a new appraisal this year, which estimated its sale value at $5.7 million.
The appraisal arrived at that figure by initially estimating its market value for civic or educational uses at $18 million, then reducing the value by $12.3 million because of “extraordinary development costs,” including an estimated $7.5 million to “de-muck” 36 acres of the land.
That left its final appraised value at $5.7 million.
Fana acknowledged that if the property were sold for a more profitable purpose like residential housing, “the appraised value would be much higher.”
As part of the land sale, he said that 55 of the 57 acres will be deed-restricted so they can only be used for educational purposes, and that the other two acres will be used to build an access road.
He added that the city is weighing whether to allow more city-owned land around the site to be used for housing for teachers and school staff.
The proceeds from the land sale will be donated to Roosevelt Elementary School for the school to use for academic programs, Fana said.
Commissioners’ unanimous July 20 vote approved the terms of the sale but they will need to approve a final sale agreement before the transaction is completed.
Palm Beach Post staff writer Alexandra Clough contributed to this story.
Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at amarra@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: West Palm makes way for Pine Crest School to build its largest campus
Reporting by Andrew Marra, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
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By Andrew Marra, Palm Beach Post | USA TODAY Network
