2007 0816 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes: Regular City Commission Meeting August 16,2007 City of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida 12B. Discussion/Presentation by IBM regarding the Wireless Island. Action: [City Clerk's Note: See item 4A, Memo from City Manager and Power-Point Presentation distributed before the meeting.} City Manager Szerlag said the Wireless Island as a concept has three (3) primarily components or tiers. The first tier is to develop hot spots which would include the beach and public park areas, in addition to government access for government employees. The second tier would be street level coverage which goes to about three (3) stories high and could have anywhere from a 40% to a 75-80% penetration rate; and the third tier is total verticality for having free wireless. He said in terms of an outcome that we want to be thinking of are really three (3) possible choices that the Commission can give him in terms of a direction: 1) achieve success at one tier before advancing to the next; 2) proceed full board which includes verticality; and 3) hold this project in abeyance for reason of determining what progress Miami-Dade County will make on their Wireless Initiative. He said the recommendation of staff at this time would be to achieve success at one tier before advancing to the next. Public Speakers: Manny Vasquez; Hugo Olortegui; Bud Scholl; Jud Heilson Assistant City Manager Doug Haag introduced Manny Vasquez ofIBM who gave a power- point presentation of an update on the three phases of the Wireless Island Initiative. Mr. Vasquez reminded the Commission of the benefits of the Wireless Island Initiative, the first is that it will provide a lot of public safety enhancements, the officers today can utilize this to enhance communications and allow for more reliable, faster, and more robust access to data that they would need. One of the other benefits is enabling intercommunications among City agencies, this is very standard wireless technology so every laptop today comes with it. He also reminded the Commission of the strategic goals that we all started off with, this was the first thing we worked on with City staff to identify what the purpose of this was and to prove the capabilities of the City's municipal operations by providing a friendly and efficient local government, and so this network really enhances that and moving forward you will be one of the few cities in South Florida that actually has a working deployed network and he thinks with the phase approach it is a good way to control costs as well as the expected results. Mayor Edelcup thanked Mr. Vasquez for clarifying a lot of the issues for them and he believes that the City was always committed to moving ahead with technology and he thinks the best way to do it is to cautiously move forward and go through this process as the staff has recommended by doing Phase I first, seeing the end result and the benefits we will get from it, and then moving on to Phase II and possibly Phase III. He said Phase III is $1 Million Dollars a year in mounting costs for the 29 extra buildings that are going in as to whether or not that makes any sense on a cost comparison basis, and if that is still maybe the case two years from now or whenever that would be then it is something that we will have to look at then but again maybe technology will have changed in two years and there will be other ways of surmounting that problem other then paying a Million Dollars a year to 29 buildings to use their rooftops. He said his recommendation would be to move forward with Phase I with the recommendation that our City Manager has offered to us because it brings all the public safety features into the City immediately, and all the other benefits that are to come later on are strictly at residential level. He said he feels it pays to move forward certainly on the public safety effort.a 13