2012-1115 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Regular City Commission Meeting November 15,2012 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida every building needs a back of the house service area. It also has to serve the entrance and exits for the vehicles to the building, and it also had to serve as a staging area for the Fire Department. It will have the cobblestone treatment and be an attractive space. It is a space for loading vehicles to come up to get away from the traffic and back into the building for loading and unloading and so it became the staging area. It also becomes somewhat of a stacking lane for people who are going to come into the building and create a relief for the traffic that wants to continue on Collins Avenue. And so that area became very crucial in solving these problems. One of the things about the ramp is that it has to work within a certain distance,a certain inclination,and a pull into the ramps. This is not a project that has a hydraulic system for cars. They had to architecturally solve it in a sense that worked with City Code,and ease up people coming in and out into the building to upper level parking. For that reason is the five-foot variance that they are requiring. They have made great efforts in trying not to have any variances but when he adds his dimension for parking,the turning radius,the ramp,and again the turning radius for the upper floor,this column has to fall right there. He cannot take one foot less because it would not work. The baywalk would have been eliminated without the variance. He needs to place the row of columns there in order to have the ramp system. One of the important things in the process was having the presentation and the dialogue with the Shoreline Committee and staff. Because in this area, which is the narrowest point in the whole project in regard to the baywalk,you will see on the other project where it winds up and becomes a lot more comfortable. They were really struggling on how to make it attractive and the Shoreline Committee came up with some ideas and suggestions that we immediately took advantage of. We did this by creating indentations in the buildings for benches and not allowing the bench to be as part of the walk giving the baywalk a clean walking surface. Architect Castineira said they tried to put all the mechanical systems internal so that the back of the building doesn't have a lot of blank walls and grilles, and things of that nature for mechanical systems. It has open visual spaces from lobbies,parking areas,and drop off areas. One can have a view of the water of the baywalk and have a visual connection for a person within the building looking out and also people experiencing the baywalk being able to look into the gallery spaces in the glass areas of the building. They also introduced that throughout the whole project. Ed Castifleira said in the tower portion of the project there are 530 linear feet of the construction,and the baywalk starts in the office building and then continues with the existing baywalk in the St. Tropez Phase I project. We will have a lot of the similar characters and elements and architectural treatment, marine materials, and things of that nature. You will notice all around this edge,you have a club room,a library,a lobby,another sister lobby,etc. It is all glass to look out onto the baywalk,and you can see everything from the baywalk into the glass. That is one of the things that the Shoreline Committee really commended them on. There are a couple of things slightly different than Phase I,you have a similar turn around in the area for valet but here they took the lobbies and pushed them towards the water. There is a water element in between the lobbies that is a reflecting pool. Parking spaces on the ground floor for quick in and out type of services and all of that is going to alleviate vehicular stacking, etc. This part of the site has its own challenges and that is that the physical dimension that he has of the west end of the site, when he comes to the east side of the site, there is 50 feet less of actual width because of the mangrove system, and the site actually 11