2015-1113 Special City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Special City Commission Meeting November 13,2015 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida now, we can't definitively say that the Newport Pier is causing all of that erosion. We do believe that it is causing some of that erosion. Ms. Cutt reported on future projects,plans and completed are going to provide more sand to us but how do we hold that sand? How can we keep that sand? If we place structures in our hot spots can we mitigate our sand losses to the south without starving our beaches? We can design structures but are those structures cost effective? Does it make sense to build structures that can be expensive and are proceeded by a long expensive permitting process and a lot of local engineer modeling, or shall we just keep trucking in sand to nourish those hot spots? And so these are questions that we have that need to be answered and we need to decide where we are going to focus our efforts and our energy when historically Dade County has pretty much taken care of the City beaches for the most part, not as well as we would have liked. We know that the Corps of Engineers is planning another project but they are planning to use upland sand sources for that project and the amount of funding that is really available when they are ready to build it and the cost of sand is going to dictate the volume of sand that gets placed here. Ms. Cutt said one of our main recommendations for the City at this point is to monitor your shorelines. Do a physical monitoring survey every summer at a more dense frequency so instead of monitoring every 1,000 feet along the shoreline,monitor every 500 or maybe even 250 feet to collect some more data so we can analyze what is going on. That is going to support whatever we want to go with in the future, and the other thing it is going to do is to provide us data so that if a hurricane comes through and FEMA money is available, we can get FEMA money to replace that lost volume of sand that was there pre-storm. Dade County doesn't always do a survey every summer. They usually do,they often do,but they don't do them every summer because of those fiscal constraints,and so the surveys that they are doing aren't really on a dense enough frequency to allow us to collect all the data that we need to analyze some of the things going on in the City. If we were to start doing surveys a little more frequently and more dense in the City and have that data, that would help us over the long term to analyze what is going on. We also need to decide if we want to look at a cost benefit analysis of structures because if we find that structures do meet the cost benefit test then it may make sense to lobby the County, the State, and the Corps to cost share in structures. Commissioner Levin asked what is the surveying methodology? Ms. Cutt said there is a topographic survey that is done on the beach, and then there is a bathametric survey that is done in the water and they overlap and that data is combined so we understand the full beach profile. The beach actually goes from the back side of the dune to the depth disclosure is in about 15 feet to 20 feet of water, and it is the point where sand no longer will come back on the beach through natural processes. From the depth disclosure to the dune, sands are moving constantly, in some areas it moves more than others. When a storm comes through it moves a lot more, but that whole thing is the dynamic sand system. In the winter the beach gets a lot steeper, now if we were not on a stabilized barrier island and there weren't buildings back there,the beach of the barrier islands would just roll landward,and then when things calm down again, they are going to move back out. But because we are stabilizing those shorelines and a storm comes through, the sand is trying to over top but we have seawalls and buildings there so it just kind of builds up and the ocean eats away at it and we 10