2014-0116 Regular City Commission Meeting

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SummaryMinutes: Regular city Commission Meeting Januar. 16. 2014 Cin- of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida 7. ORDINANCES FOR FIRST READING 7A. Add -On: An Ordinance of the City Commission of the City of Sunny Isles Beach. Florida, Amending Chapter 74 of the City Code of Ordinances Commonly Known as the "Rules of Procedure" Ordinance; Providing for Repealer; Providing for Severability; Providing for Inclusion in the Code: Providing for an Effective Date. Action: [City Clerk's Note: This item was distributed prior to the meeting. See additional action under Item 4A.] City Clerk Hines read the title, and City Attorney Ottinot reported that the purpose of this Ordinance is to codify the practice of holding an agenda review Workshop on the Tuesday preceding the regular Commission meeting. This Ordinance was requested at Tuesday's Workshop by members of the Commission present at the Workshop. Public Speakers: None Mayor Edelcup said as background to the public, generally the Commission has met the Tuesday before the formal Commission meeting to have an agenda review of items on that agenda. The idea was instead of City staff visiting with each of us separately under the Sunshine Law, they could meet with LIS collectively in a Workshop to review the agenda items for the forthcoming Commission meeting thereby ease the toll of the City staff in having to repeat themselves five times for each Commissioner and doing it in one hour instead of five or six hours. That is how the workshops started out and gradually over time items other than the agenda got added to the workshop and this led to a problem because those items generally were not noticed to the public. Even though the workshop was a public meeting it really didn't have the same impact as a general Commission meeting in the eyes of the public. Also some of the Commissioners felt that they were not necessarily obligated to attend those meetings unless they had a specific question that they wanted to get answered, and so it was kind of a voluntary situation where some of the Commissioners would be at the workshop and some of them wouldn't. As these other items started to be added to the agenda. it came to us this past Commission meeting that probably this was not a fair way to handle things because these items that were being discussed at the workshop didn't have the input necessarily of all the Commissioners because they were not aware that those items were going to be discussed. It became obvious that maybe we should have a discussion to determine if we should just limit our workshops on the Tuesday preceding the Commission meeting to just the agenda items. Which is not to say we couldn't have other workshops but they would have to be separately declared and the public would have the opportunity to know that they were taking place. What we are having here tonight is a discussion on if we should continue having the agenda workshop and limit it strictly to the agenda items. All other items would be presented at the regular Commission meeting as a discussion item or not have the agenda meeting. Commissioner Scholl said what is interesting about being a Commissioner is that a lot of times the perception of how we do things and how things actually get done are not always in synch. The agenda workshop is something he vetoed many years ago, he never attends the agenda review workshops because he has always been concerned about this issue. It is kind of like. in the computer world we call it "Scope Creep" which means that you create a scope for something and then it creeps, it kind of gets broader and broader. The thing he didn't like h