2011-1215 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes: Regular City Commission Meeting December 15,2011 City of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida noise can be with 19-25 children daily over a 30-day period and open every day, it doesn't behoove him at this point to close this Park. In November they did try some bicycles which created a lot of noise. Commissioner Gatto said the skateboarders were trying to avoid the bikers, and it is not a large Park and so there was a lot of screeching and yelling, and it was more chaotic. V ice Mayor Thaler said he believes the increase that we had was caused by the bicyclists not an increase in the overall children in November. He really believes we should not close it at this point, you have 574 children there for the month, in October there were 368 but you had six (6) rain days, in September there were 600 kids there. We are getting them off the streets, and we have to look at the total value of why the Park was created. Commissioner Gatto said the issue she is bringing up is alleviating the noise. It is not the kids fault, and it is not the skateboard people's fault, it is our responsibility and obligation to do something about the noise because it is exceeding the decibel level allowed by the City. Commissioner Scholl said he has stated publicly before that the noise needs to be mitigated. He has also stated that he is not in favor of closing the Park but he feels that it is incumbent upon us to do something about it. He appreciates the fact that Commissioner Gatto doesn't want to throw what you perceive as good money after bad but he also doesn't feel a lot of movement on the part of staff as far as what we are doing about it. Commissioner Gatto clarified that she had put the hold on the $50,000 in October. Commissioner Scholl said he is inclined to find a solution because he is not inclined to close the Park, we should spend the money, find an engineering solution and be done with it. Getting 500 to 600 kids off the streets in a month is a pretty big accomplishment, and his point is that it is hard to find a venue for kids that age that they are going to use, and those numbers are pretty good. He appreciates the fact that Commissioner Gatto doesn't want to throw good money after bad but he doesn't think she has the support to close the Park, and so we might as well spend the money and try to find a solution. Mayor Edelcup said we have discussed this tonight and we have also discussed it at a Workshop and he was happy that Commissioner Gatto recommended the decision that she did because he thinks it is very realistic to assume without a study what we are talking about is hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix the problem. If it had been anything less then that he doesn't think we would be having this discussion. He thinks that the commitment we were facing is a real one, do we want to spend $50,000 to know that we have a half a million dollar problem, and now do we want to choose to either close the Skateboard Park or leave it open, and his recommendation at the Workshop was to have this discussion today with the idea of having a straight up or down vote on whether or not to have the Skateboard Park closed or remain open as is, and to schedule that vote either tonight or in January. Commissioner Aelion said we did visit this with the help of Cultural and Human Services Director Susan Simpson, we revised the hours, and we could close it for a day, and Commissioner Gatto said that was on a short term basis, not a solution. Mayor Edelcup said in talking to some of the children when the shade structure was down, the complaint that he was getting was that they didn't really want to use the Park without the shade structure because it is too hot during the summer months, and so one of the reasons you see a drop in usage was because we took the shade structure down. City Manager Cohen said the canopy was recently returned from the manufacturer in Arizona, we found out that the fasteners that are supposed to be attached to it to keep it attached to the poles had not been re-attached and 13