MIAMI—Developers holding land in Miami-Dade County have been facing a costly quandary. Once a developer files a plat with Miami-Dade County, it has to post a bond for neighborhood improvement—and the only way to get the bond back is to make the promised improvements.

With the economic downturn, thousands of property owners have been sitting on undeveloped land with no intent to develop on it anytime soon, if at all. What happens to the bond? Until now, there was no procedure in Miami-Dade to vacate the plat and recover the bond. For developers in need of liquidity, this is bad news. But things just changed.

Kluger Kaplan attorneys Alan Kluger and Richard Segal worked with Miami-Dade County to create a new procedure that would allow developers to vacate a plat and recover the bond tied up in escrow. One of its clients, Tetrastar had $150,000 tied up in bonds and was able to reclaim the money thanks to the new procedure.

GlobeSt.com caught up with Alan Kluger, founding partner of Miami-based litigation firm Kluger, Kaplan, Silverman, Katzen & Levine, to talk about the new procedure and how developers in need of cash flow can leverage it.