2014-0320 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Regular City Commission Meeting March 20,2014 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida and she was born in a puppy mill in Texas and lived in a shed with 400 dogs. She had never seen daylight, she was never taken care of,and she was socially a wreck when she got her as she had never been around people. She used what she had learned about training dogs, and she is the sweetest most wonderful animal in the whole world. When she saw this Ordinance, she read more about it, and she decided we should also have it here. Commissioner Gatto said she is totally sensitive to the puppy and kitten mills,she thinks it is awful. She thinks when we categorically ban a retail outlet from the City it gets tricky for us. If there is a perspective pet shop owner that wants to come to the City, he is allowed to sell rabbits and hamsters but not cats and dogs which is probably the bread and butter of that business. She does not think she wants to be the kind of City that would categorically ban any kind of business other than liquor stores near the school. She thinks there is a compromise on this as she likes what Lake Worth did. They passed an Ordinance that required the posting of signs that advertise where the cats and dogs originate from and they provide a Certificate of Source. The other thing they do is that they only have dogs and cats that are bred on the premises and only those would be allowed to be offered for sale, and of course, those coming from rescue organizations. Vice Mayor Aelion agrees with Commissioner Gatto. On the basis of the City is not able to bring on a big department store, as a principal, it may create a precedent in the City even though each individual is brought before the Commission on its merits. He tends to agree that it should not be negating one type of business because tomorrow we may get other businesses wanting to come to the City with other types of business that may be conducive to sensitivity to a certain part of the residents and not to others, and so it does open a door here. Commissioner Levin said she is okay with putting limitations on it, and she would be interested in reading the Lake Worth Statute because the bottom line is that she does not want to see puppy mills, dogs and cats sold in the City, it is just hard to police it. City Attorney Ottinot said there is an exemption to the Ordinance,on page 38, Section 100- 3(c)(1), it provides exemptions like the Lake Worth model if the dog or cat are bred on site, and so that point is addressed in the Ordinance. Commissioner Scholl said he doesn't think we will have a pet store that breeds them on site. As to Commissioner Gatto's point,it is like when you buy lumber at a lumber yard, you get a certificate basically showing that the lumber was procured from a sustainable forest. It is the same type of issue and is very common in commerce, in retail commerce especially,and so he thinks Commissioner Gatto's point,the Lake Worth model,the breeding on site does not work for this City because we are in such a high density area. The model that has some kind of certificate or proving that the animal came from an organization that was not ill conceived, and there is a mechanism for that,just like there are in a lot of other things like beef,wood,animals, it doesn't matter,this is a very proven mechanism. He thinks either we amend the Ordinance or we table it until next time so we can get comfortable with the change that we are talking about. Commissioner Levin said one of her questions would be, is there a reliable standard because anybody can go in the back room and print out certificates. Commissioner Scholl said what he thinks she is hearing is that there is not a reliable standard,and he thinks we are not going to categorically be comfortable banning anything but it sounds like if we can make some kind of a standard, that would be palpable to everybody. Commissioner Levin said to do some more research and see if we can find some middle ground. 5