2014-0401 Special City Commission Meeting

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r Summary Minutes:Special City Commission Meeting April 1,2014 Sunny Isles Beach.Florida field,and adding a second security gate to the street-side of Town Center Park by Collins Avenue. We are further improving the gate,the main entrance to Town Center Park. We have been working on a plan to be able to get within a couple of budget years a level of having an attendant at the Parks from when they open to when they close,to maintain it, to help people, and they constantly need to be cleaned. We are constantly running these crews around with trucks back and forth from these parks. We need dedicated people in these parks to come up with the high level of service that we want. We want to work towards that type of plan because he feels if we don't have somebody in these parks the whole time they are opened,we are just not going to be providing the level of service that we need. That is a whole process within itself. 2) A couple of things that have also come out of our recent work on the parks is, he thinks we will also have to consider, like Town Center Park, fencing in Intracoastal Park along Collins Avenue as we have it at Town Center Park. We have already had some resident complaints about kids playing in it, and balls running out on Collins Avenue. Again,he is just bringing this up so that the Commission can think about it and give him some feedback on it because he thinks we may need to put the picket type cast aluminum fence along Collins Avenue as we are at the rear of the Park and as we have around Town Center Park, and most of our other Parks. 3) We are having an issue right now with the company who we are using for the playground equipment at Intracoastal Park. The bottom line is they claim that their proposal does not include the necessary pin piles for, at this point it is still a little questionable, for the poles for the shade cover and they have come up with, at least initially,with a cost for that change and he is not happy with it. He is not sure where that is going but he wanted to give the Commission a heads up on it. If you recall, that was about $150,000.00. We just got this, and again it is just preliminary, a $56,000.00 potential change on that to put in these pin piles for the shade cover poles. 4) We are currently replacing,and this is a budgeted item,the grass in Town Center Park. For those of you who have been in both Town Center Park and Heritage Park you will see that the concept of putting Bermuda Grass there where we don't have formal playing fields,in fact wherever we do have formal playing fields we have now put in the artificial turf which is working out beautifully so far. But that is the wrong turf to have in a general field area. If we want to keep that grass green and nice and have it hardy, we want to switch over to the St. Augustine Grass. We are doing it in Town Center Park now but we have a window now of seven(7)weeks that we can make the switch over in Heritage Park. Our authorized scope of services will include it but he will probably be adding it, about $35,000.00 which is more than what we would anticipate for routine maintenance of that. We want to move on that because we really feel we need it badly, in Heritage Park also. Finance Director Audra Curts-Whann would add that to an Ordinance that she is going to have on moving some monies around at the next Commission meeting. Mayor Edelcup said we have to plan to get our Parks up to the kind of quality shape we want and he totally agrees with the City Manager that we need more staff in the Parks so that they are open and manned because we have seen too many incidents of late, the Parks have not been manned and we have had an accident or vandalism taking place. He thinks it is necessary if we are going to have the quality that we really want,we need to have the staffing to be able to do it. What we are doing now is running the staff around in a band-aide kind of 7