2015-0219 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Regular City Commission Meeting February 19.2015 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida involved with the City and used to come to all the Zoning hearings. When the original designs came in for this, and what he recalls is that they were asking for what they are asking for today,and at that point the pressure on beachside Zoning was there and the nuance of allowing the buy down of the spaces was there and so the Commission forced the developer to compromise the spaces that were really needed to support the three (3) buildings for at that point getting site plan approval. Unfortunately what happens is that developers go away,they build a building and they turn it over to a condo association and say it is all yours. Sometimes the Associations recognize what they are getting into and sometimes they don't. But in this case, this developer got what they needed to get their building approved to build it but unfortunately built it under-parked. It is very difficult as a resident to realize whether a building is under parked or not under parked. We indulged that, we indulged that site plan modification to take the spaces down to less than the bare minimum obviously and then a few years later we come back and say we made a mistake, we can't fix that retroactively but we can fix it for future projects and so now we are going to make spaces nine(9) feet and we are going to require two (2) over 1,800 feet and 1'% less. Now the residents from the Trump Towers are coming up to see if we can right the wrong that was committed nine(9)years ago when the building was built. Mayor Scholl said on some of the other issues that came up,the cars are there. The fact is that he did walk the building at one point and the cars are tripled parked on the weekends,and it is an unsafe condition. If our Code Enforcement folks went there and hung out in that garage for a weekend,the building would be getting cited. To Vice Mayor Gatto's point,what happens is that someone has a party and has 20 cars and the resident who needs to park comes back late they don't have a parking space, it is not allocated that way. It is kind of allocated on a first come first served basis. He is glad to hear that the Association went out and talked to their neighbors. This is another thing that he always asks about variances, usually he is focused on the adjacent property owners but in this case,to former Commissioner Brezin's point,the view corridor does get affected. The other day he walked up and down Collins Avenue and he looked up and he agrees with Architect Castineira,the landscaping that is there tops out at the level of what they want to build behind it, and they are setting it back. And so the fact is, it is not like we are starting from ground zero,the view corridor is already impaired between those buildings because we already allowed a parking pedestal between those buildings. From his perspective,and again, this is not going to make everybody happy but as Commissioner Levin describes it, sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet and from his perspective we already killed the view corridor at the street level. He agrees that some unit owners at the right angle from across the street might get affected by this, what is most problematic for him is hearing from a building owner that is dissatisfied because he would have thought that the Association would have went to the unit owner who'might get impaired by this and take care of it. He is going to encourage that too because we just went through a process over at Gateway Park whereby we are going to build a pedestrian walkway and we have to put a tower right behind a row of condominiums and thankfully we compensated a couple of unit owners that their view corridor was getting directly impaired. And so he would encourage the folks at Trump to talk to the unit owners that were getting directly affected because that surprised him. Mayor Scholl said it is encapsulated within a project,and he thinks we are curing a wrong that we made a mistake years ago. We down parked this property when we approved it years ago