2011-0308 Special City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes: Special City Commission Meeting March 8, 2011 Sunny Isles Beach, Florida Scholl's point is very well taken with a timeline. The quantification of the Project financially, it seems that after having gone through all these change orders that we are coming to the original amount that was set three or four years ago, and he would hate to believe that the final number would eventually be close to the one that was sought. Being that we have reach this threshold and the amount is so close to the original amount, in the future he believes that a turnkey operation, like a project and scheduling and forecasted the financial cost to the City would be more profitable. Former Commissioner Gerry Goodman said he voted for the Park, he thinks it is a great Park, and he thinks that the City is doing a great thing for the people of this City. However, he thinks something in the system is wrong, when we originally voted for the Park we voted for $9.25 Million. He thinks that the system should be when you vote for something you don't leave an opening like you did here and add nine (9) items to it and raise the price from $9.25 Million to almost $14 Million. He publicly said when he brought the question up, don't come back and ask for more money, the Manager had said the Park was empty, and it wasn't his recollection that the Park was empty, the wall was there, the children's things were there, and he felt when all these things started to come back he was told that you had $14 Million and he had never heard that figure before. He said he had brought up the Pelican Park, that money was set aside for the Pelican Park to build, and there was much more money overruns in the Pelican Park and he didn't want this to happen at the Heritage Park. He thinks in the future when you want to enter into a project of this nature, what was done and discussed this morning should be discussed prior to voting on a project, get all the details rather than say a number and then spend another $5 Million. Mayor Edelcup said in defense of management and staff, when this park was first discussed, we were talking about money as high as $16 Million depending upon what kind of facade we were going to put on the garage and what kind of amenities were going to go into the garage. He thinks we needed to memorialize some of those early discussions because the decision later was made to move forward with the park but in phases, and he thinks that is where some of the information has fallen apart. Yes it was true that we were expecting to have a heritage wall and water park and at that point we were contemplating having donations that would pay for some of these which never came into fruition. Once we started the park, we had already started along the plan of building a park, and all of a sudden we were granted the opportunity to look at an extra acre, and that changed the configuration of the park. Also the discussions of what would go into that additional acre and how the park had to be repositioned to accommodate it. Even though in the early days we were talking as high as $16 Million, everyone on the Commission had hopes that we would be able to keep it into the $13 - $14 Million range by not going ahead with some of the more elaborate plans. In direct response to Commissioner Goodman's comments, looking back what we should have done was to memorialize that total of what we really expected to spend and then approve it in phases. When we moved forward we started with all these different change orders that started with the original $6 Million, they were really along a path that was going to get us eventually to the number that we are at today, and admittedly that number also contemplated donations which didn't occur, and so we would have been in that $13 - $14 Million range as the donations came in but be that as it may, the park is near fruition and we need to get it complete and certainly Commissioner Scholl's comments about being on top of it and 4