2014-0515 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Regular City Commission Meeting May 15,2014 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida end up in the middle of Collins Avenue on your skateboard. In regard to enforcing the Ordinance, she agrees that it would be difficult to do but she thinks if we do lean towards community service,that it should be something that is educational and that you are going to learn from about volunteering and giving back. By giving up your time or being forced to give up your time to do something for some is penalty enough without having to work in the Public Works domain. She will challenge you to think of other routes because the truth of the matter is you can skate all behind Collins Avenue and there is only a couple of places where you would have to pick up your skateboard and walk along Collins Avenue down by Town Center Park and Walgreens,you can't go through because of the canal,and maybe by the Publix because North Bay Road doesn't go all the way through. It is basically a challenge to reroute yourself and you can still get around on your skateboards and do what you need to do. Mayor Edelcup said with that he would mention that with the building of the emergency bridge along North Bay Road you would be able to get to 172nd Street and come up 172nd Street without ever having to go on Collins Avenue. As you can tell,this is a difficult topic for the Commission to handle because we are trying to balance the fairness for all of our residents and tourists,young and old. At the same time make sure that the health and safety of all of our people are well protected. We all recognize that it is difficult to enforce but being difficult doesn't necessarily mean it can't be, and if we always chose not to do the difficult things we wouldn't be here today. It was difficult to build the City but we decided to go ahead and do that and it changed a lot of the ordinances and it changed the complexion of this City from a retirement community to a community that we have here today with a lot of children. In fact when we became a City there were 1/10`11 the number of children that are there today, and so we had a lot of difficult situations there to overcome. Mayor Edelcup said he heard the Vice Mayor talk about awareness but awareness doesn't necessarily resolve the issue because you can teach all you want about being careful in skateboarding but that doesn't take care of the problem that a skateboard is a difficult instrument to control when people are walking down busy streets like Collins Avenue or Sunny Isles Boulevard. And so he believes our Ordinance should have the awareness and teaching program because that is true on the side streets as well because we don't want people hit on the side streets either. But at the same token, there is less pedestrian traffic on those streets, more room and less opportunity for a significant accident to occur. It is unfortunate that we don't have the same people here tonight that were here last month as Commissioner Gatto mentioned to talk about the serious incidents that did occur. The way this Ordinance is being proposed is that it is compromise,it doesn't ban skateboarding in the City, it bans skateboarding on two streets of the City which probably represents less than 10% of all the streets in our City if you were to measure the length of all of our streets, and we do have a Skateboard Park for you to use your skateboards in. Mayor Edelcup said with all of that said he would still lean towards passing an Ordinance that provides for an educational program to take place sometime after second reading of the Ordinance. Once the Ordinance is passed, there would be a quiet period before the Ordinance went into effect 60 or 90 days to give opportunity for the educational process to take place. Also to give an opportunity for the City Manager to target in what the penalties would be,who is going to monitor this situation,find that there is an offense that needs to be 10