2016-0906 Special City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Special City Commission Meeting September 6,2016 Sunny Isles Beach,Florida First Budget Hearing Mayor Scholl said for the public, over the summer we had Budget Workshops and so these meetings are pretty perfunctory because we get into the details at the public meetings over the summer. Very few people seemed to be interested in the public meetings. He doesn't blame them because we tend to dig into a lot more detail but we go over the budget,department by department. We all kind of dig in and make sure that staffs assumptions are reasonable,and they typically are, and he thinks the most important thing to note this year is that, as the City Manager pointed out, we lowered the Millage Rate again for the fifth year in a row. He doesn't think we will always be lowering the Millage so eventually we are going to have to stop but again, we have the growth in the tax base where we feel comfortable lowering the Millage. But as the City Manager also pointed out,we have been talking about this for two or three years now, the City and the City staff will transition from being in kind of a growth mode which has been a lot of Capital projects and a lot of construction, into more of a maintenance mode. We are building out our Parks system,and we are probably getting close to the last few projects on that, and it will be important for the staff to, what we call create a world class maintenance organization to where we maintain the things that we built out. He would imagine over time that is when the tax rate will probably start to plateau because we will be just collecting the revenues that we need to run the affairs of the City, maintain what we have, maintain our infrastructure, and go from there. He is proud of the staff, and of the Commission,we continue to see the growth that we have,and he thinks a little bit of it is luck but a lot of it is good management. Obviously we have been blessed with a great location and some great markets but at the same time, it would be easy to screw them up if our staff didn't stay diligent and didn't keep their eye on the ball. Commissioner Levin said she is happy with the budget, and is glad we were able to lower the Millage Rate again. Commissioner Goldman said she is very pleased with the conservative approach that we take and that we act with prudence,that is what it is all about and that is why this Commission has been very effective. Commissioner Aelion said soon it is going to be zero lots to build on for public purposes and maintenance is going to become the leading implementing effort by the City going forward. Vice Mayor Gatto said she is very pleased that we were able to lower the Millage Rate again, and the job that staff is doing, and of course the Mayor's leadership as well as the Commission. Mayor Scholl said that the City Manager mentioned one thing, and collectively we had a Workshop and talked about the Government Center Expansion and the School Expansion. Again he is proud of his colleagues because we had kind of looked each other in the eye and said are we really hearing from the School Board the commitment regarding the District Jumper Program, what we call the Address Verification Program,and we had not felt that we had been getting the type of feedback that we feel comfortable with. That program would get implemented with a level of voracity to be effective, and for as difficult as it is we decided to put that project off. We are not saying we are canceling it but we are going to postpone it for a while until we see the level of commitment toward the Address Verification Program. He and the City Manager have some meetings with the School Board toward the end of the month that hopefully we can get that program back on track, we will see how that goes,and then we will make a decision. Again,he applauds his colleagues for taking the conservative approach, especially in an Election year. It would be politically popular to say we are charging forward