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Summary Minutes: Regular City Commission Meeting October 17, 2013 City of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida <br />Russo said that we are concerned over the north exposure for our WiFi and possibly for some <br />of the Police communications equipment but with their cooperation we can work that out. <br />Mr. Dezer said that is no problem, they will have plenty of roof to give the City. <br />Commissioner Scholl said a lot of times his neighbors will come to him and say why do you <br />let these big buildings get built and he always tells them we have regulations, we have LDRs, <br />and if they build within the encapsulated size of the LDRs then they have rights and we are <br />not going to take their rights away. It is not fair because they bought the property with our <br />Zoning Code in mind and with these rights in mind. The fact is that when it comes to <br />variances he looks at them pretty harshly. In this case he believes the side setback variances <br />make some sense because there are turning radiuses and things that make the property a little <br />bit less commercially viable but he has a hard time with the setback issues because as Mr. <br />Stamm has mentioned, it is nominal. If it is nominal their way why can't it be nominal our <br />way? These buildings can be designed within the LDRs and come in and ask for a minimum <br />set of variances based on the commercial constraints of that particular piece of property. But <br />in each case what happens is, and this is for both applications tonight, developers come in and <br />they want a little bit more, they want another 10% or 15% because it makes the building more <br />commercially viable but ultimately we then deviate from our LDRs every time we do that. <br />And so he is a bit of a purist and sometimes it benefits the developer and sometimes it goes <br />against the developer, and unfortunately tonight it is going to go against these developers. For <br />that reason he believes the building can be built within the constraints of our LDRs on that <br />particular site and still be commercially viable. He completely agrees with the Mayor on <br />Atlantic Boulevard, again that is the constraint to the site. The site has egress and ingress on <br />both sides, we have to figure out how to make Atlantic Boulevard safe for our school children. <br />He would advocate maybe disallowing ingress to the property in the back during school hours <br />morning and afternoon because ultimately he knows himself that he does not always come off <br />from Collins Avenue. If this gets approved, he would encourage staff to come up with a <br />pretty strong form of mitigation to try to alleviate that traffic on Atlantic Boulevard to keep <br />the school children safe. <br />Commissioner Gatto said she uses Atlantic Boulevard a lot to come to City Hall and to do <br />some shopping at Publix. She is worried about not only the 508 parking spaces but the <br />weekend use of the parking spaces as well where we will have to be dealing with people that <br />want to come in and shop and go to the beach. She is all for a business building but she was <br />hoping that they could make this more neighborhood friendly and possibly think about scaling <br />down a bit, maybe giving some open spaces in the plaza area back to the community. The <br />variances are negligible but it is a very daunting project for this area. She is not sure they <br />understand the impact of going up and down that street especially when school is out and <br />there are staggered hours with the school depending on what day it is. <br />Mayor Edelcup said his own comments echoes somewhat of Commissioner Gatto's and <br />maybe one of the things we can get the developer to reconsider is to not have that as public <br />parking and that it would be available strictly for people using the building and /or your hotel <br />across the street. Mr. Dezer said they saw it as a benefit to the residents of the City and if the <br />Commission does not see it as a benefit, there is no problem not doing it as they were actually <br />doing it as a bonus to the City. The reason for the 508 spaces is because of the Ordinance they <br />were following. In answer to what Commissioner Scholl said earlier, the City and the LDRs <br />V <br />