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 lose sand and it gets nice and steep there,and then it will lay back down. That is all going on between the depth disclosure and the dune. That is the area that is surveyed when we do these surveys because we like to have a nice dry beach and that is what we think of as the beach. But the beach system actually goes all the way out to the depth disclosure, and so when we do those surveys, DEP has a set of criteria so everyone in the State surveys the same exact thing, the same methodology, the same data. All that data is uploaded to the State's DEP sites and it is available for anybody to use and it is all consistent. Commissioner Levin asked if it is a combination of surveying done by man and equipment and satellites? Ms. Cutt said no, it is still labor intensive, we have two people on the beach with equipment, surveying the elevation,the location of the beach system. At this point we do not have a remote sensing technology available to us but we are looking at some drones that can do some pretty impressive surveying that is exciting for the future. Commissioner Aelion said the weight that it has is also limited to us individually as a City but as far as long term to the hot spots, etc., is it a question of polling efforts? He read a report about the circulation that the Federal government did on how much beach erosion each jurisdiction has of beach and they decided which places to concentrate on. How do you foresee that? Ms. Cutt said you have to consider the Federal government looking at the big picture. In her career she started out working for DERM, she went to South Florida Water • Management District,which is State, she went to the Army Corps of Engineers before going to the private sector. She has seen it, the Feds are looking big picture, and they are distributing their finances as they can to the area's worse in need. It comes down to the City fighting for the City and you need data as ammunition. When you have that information you can involve your Lobbyist,your Lobbyist can fight at the County level so that the County has the data and information, and Lobbyist to fight at the State level. The State fights at the Federal level, obviously the City can also go directly to the Federal level. The bottom line is that you are very fortunate in that you have a Federal project. There are a lot of Federal projects, Dade County included, where they are coming to the end of their 5th year lifecycle and fortunately through the work of Lobbyists, some of that is being extended. They don't want the projects to die but they don't want to keep spending money on beaches. So we need that data, we need that ammunition, and we need to look out for ourselves at the ground level. It is hard to go to the County and say I need this, here is a viable solution, I want you to do it, I want you to study it when they are running around looking for hot spots that are critical. And so if we can demonstrate that this structural solution will reduce the cost that you need to spend to maintain our shoreline, then they will start to look at it. And then it might be a matter of lobbying the County to cost share in that effort. Ms. Cutt said they have had a variety of clients that have approached things on right-of-ways, for example the City of Hollywood have decided to move forward and make it a sand placement event independent of Broward County. Broward County did Segment 3 before the Feds had authorized a budget to build the project and it took them about 12 years to get reimbursed by the Federal government. And so it comes down to lobbying for yourself Commissioner Aelion said either that or just owning or being a big country as opposed to user,small countries don't think they have their breakers along the so called shoreline which is smaller than here, and they don't have a problem. They have the same beach for the last 80 to 100 years, and so when you have a huge border like we have, it comes with the 11