2009-0416 Special City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes: Special City Commission Meeting April 16, 2009 Sunny Isles Beach, Florida renovations associated with the Newport Fishing Pier, and other public infrastructure investments that have been taking place or are part of the Capital Improvement Plan. It is a combination of a number of factors, the total cost being one of them, but the fact that you have one acre already that is in that Corridor and you have that property associated with being able to have pedestrian access to the east side of Collins A venue. It really ties into safety considerations and the amenities that you have at the Pier, but most importantly the fact that you have that one acre there, it also brings to scale what the City's long-term plan is and by all accounts the type of open space, public parking and the public park-type facilities that the City is planning. You are talking about a 3-acre tract ofland where you can do some major community cultural kind of activities that has a fairly multi-purpose use. With that you do have the need for parking but you also have the fact that these properties are fairly contiguous to each other and that makes the ultimate cost of the particular parcels in question part of the equation but not necessarily the total formula for where the economic slides. Mayor Edelcup asked Mr. Luft, when we developed the Comprehensive Plan does it actually mandate that we create more parks and open space on the west side of our City, and Mr. Luft said the 2000 Plan did not mandate it, it addressed basically the minimal criteria that the State set which was 2.75 acres per 1,000, and it included, because it was the only way we were going to meet that number, the 98-acre beachfront that the City has. There was a concern at that time if we were going to have the range of full recreational activities that we needed because at that point we didn't have the Community Center, the ball fields, the improved Margolis Park, or Samson Park, and so it was like looking at a blank slate of potential lands we could acquire to see what we could get and where and to try to keep that formula in tact. When we came back in 2007 after the building boom where several thousand housing units were built and the population ofthe City almost doubled in a decade, it overwhelmed everybody's projections. In light of that occurrence, the City amended its Comprehensive Plan and did in fact mandate in 2007 in its Comprehensive Plan Update Process through its EAR and its annual amendment, that additional lands west of Collins A venue, and particularly south of 172nd Street, be acquired or assembled in some manner to expand public open space. That amendment put into formal law the mandate that the City proceed in that direction, and we then did a study and took a hard look at all the options to see what we could do to comply to our Comprehensive Plan. Mayor Edelcup said then that the action we take tonight if we vote favorably for this would be in accordance with the mandate of the update of the Comprehensive Plan, and Mr. Luft said under State law we have realistically a 5 to 10 year time frame to implement our Comp Plan and you must, in your Evaluation Appraisal Review (EAR) Report that you submit every 5 to 6 years, demonstrate to the State that you are achieving the objectives and goals that you set and, the next time you go around on this, you will have to address "how are we meeting the needs of park space west of Collins Avenue and south of 172nd Street." This will be a demonstrative action in meeting that, and so yes, this will satisfy that requirement. Vice Mayor Thaler said in terms of the numbers of Sunny Isles Beach official population, as of April 2008 the population was 20,121. Mr. Luft said he was dealing with January numbers and the best update he had of projections from the University of Florida, and so it grew even faster than we thought. Vice Mayor Thaler asked what will be the environmental impact, and Mr. Luft said if you just put a passive field area with flowers in it and there are 4