2013-1017 Regular City Commission Meeting (2)

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