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 sand to maintain the shoreline. Commissioner Levin said her question is why can't we have the Construction Control Line, her question is more along the lines of the actual buildings themselves, does that create a problem with the way the sand erodes? Ms. Cutt said there is something called the Line of Construction that needs to be evaluated before a building can be permitted where they will not let a building go substantially farther than the other buildings in the area. Now, if we can remove all the buildings and close most of the inlets for the most part it would be a whole different story. We are on a barrier island, and barrier islands naturally would be migrating landward and seaward in response to storms. We are not allowing that to happen,and so basically we are saying,we want to fix the shoreline in place, we don't care what wind and waves hits it, we are just going to put more sand there as the environment takes it away. Because we are creating an engineered environment,and we are trying to hold the shoreline, we are not really letting the buildings go further seaward than they are, basically they are providing us with a free source of sand. Ms. Cutt said we are talking about structures. We want to know if structures are a solution for Sunny Isles Beach to help hold the beach and keep some of our sand from going south to our neighbors. We have heard a lot in the news about structures not being permeable, structures being very expensive, structures having ecological impact that needs to be mitigated, or structures can be permitted in small isolated situations where they are fixing a problem. You can see the 32nd Street hot spot project is a project that Coastal Systems designed for Dade County where there was a headland that stuck out further into the ocean than the area to the south and you can see the shape of the shoreline there. What the structures did was reorient the shoreline so that the headlands were not exposed to all that wave energy. The County was constantly doing truck haul projects there and nourishing that hot spot, it is an isolated hot spot. So three(3)particular structures reoriented the beach and you can see how they are still a down drift impact but there is still a beach there. Despite the fact that there is an impact, we have got a nice wide beach to the north where there was no beach before, and to the south you still have a decent beach that is providing the required storm protection. Ms. Cutt said similarly Port Everglades,immediately south of the inlet,a series of structures were placed,another series of three(3)were placed to hold the shoreline there because down drift of the inlet where they don't routinely bypass,there is always a loss of sand,and so that is helping to hold some of that sand in that hot spot that is down drift of the inlet. And so you can see that in small isolated areas, structures can be permitted. In the north end of Sunny Isles Beach we have got a small isolated hot spot. Structures may be a solution and the structures put in by the Corps were intended to help but we need to evaluate whether they are doing what they were intended to do. The model since the structures in the north end of the City were installed have gotten significantly better. Also, once you place structures sometimes they subside, they sink down into the ground. Now a-days, structures are typically placed on hard bottom that is covered in a thin veneer of sand so that they don't sink because you can't place structures on exposed hard bottoms because that would be an ecological impact. But these structures may have been constructed on articulated concrete mats and they may have subsided some. When we look at this Phase I Study in 2009, they were impounded by quite a bit of sand. In 2013 it looks like there is a lot of sand but in 2014 it looks like the structures were exposed. But the question is,are those structures doing what they are supposed to? If you look across,just west of the northern structure, you see where 6