2014-0220 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Regular City Commission Meeting February 20,2014 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida access to City property other than as a regular visitor like anybody else has. Commissioner Levin said another thing that was proposed was that the Commission would initially fund the Foundation until such time as the Foundation had garnered enough money to start operating on its own. Again, we are stuck with the issue as to who is going to be funding this and calling the shots,are we going to be doing this or is the Foundation going to be doing it? She believes there was nothing concrete about anybody, the removal or the turnover of the Board to non-Commission members. It was proposed that there would always be a Commissioner and the City Manager on the Board. Those are her thoughts on this. She wanted to set the record straight and she wanted to put these ideas out there so that we could have a discussion among the Commissioners if they choose to because we obviously have to do this at a public forum. The City's Consultant, Lynn M. Dannheisser,Esq.,said she believes that the Foundation is a creature of the Commission,and she thinks probably the determining document,at least that has been guiding her in her actions for the Foundation and the due diligence and the recommendations, are best found in the Agreement between the City and herself which was drafted by the City Manager and the City Attorney with some input by her. But the services that she was retained to do,and she quoted from her Agreement: "The Consultant shall act as the Project Manager for the purpose of directing,assisting,and managing the creation and the potential programming of a nonprofit Foundation to partner and/or be affiliated with the City of Sunny Isles Beach in order to accomplish two objectives through charitable and proffer contributions: 1)the maintenance of current cultural and quality of life infrastructure;and 2) the continuation of the design and implementation of a series of original 21st Century initiatives which will have originated with a set of proposed initiatives to be endorsed by the City Commission." She understands that it is a little amorphous in that when you begin something,you create it out of whole cloth,when the City is involved in that,it is almost like the Charter Commission. The Charter Commission became very involved with the City, it created the City, and then some members of the Commission ran to become an elected official. There is a crossover between the City and the Foundation. The Foundation is being created as she was instructed to do by the City Commission although the goal is clearly for it to ultimately be an independent entity but it can't start out that way. It needs support. Commissioner Levin asked Ms. Dannheisser how the Commission instructed her to do that because she was only involved in one Resolution? Ms. Dannheisser said that Resolution resulted in this Agreement which you instructed the City to create. Commissioner Levin said under the impression that this was only to do due diligence as she put on record at the Workshop. Mayor Edelcup said he thinks in Ms. Dannheisser's first report we went through the difference between an independent organization or an organization that was part of the City. We determined that the Foundation had to be an independent or it would be subject to all the Sunshine rules and laws and that it would also complicate the operation of it if it were considered a organization that was not independent. Ms. Dannheisser said in fact she was instructed to do it independently but after she researched and she saw that there was different ways to do it, she felt an obligation to report that to the Commission, and give you the pros and cons of each approach. You certainly have the right at any point in time to re-evaluate and to make a different decision but she is moving forward based on the services she was contracted to provide. She does only have a 20