2015-0521 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Regular City Commission Meeting May 21,2015 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida go to the pharmacy is Walgreen's because it is the closest pharmacy and are open 24 hours. The egress and ingress of this building is going to be at the same entrance as Walgreen's. Commissioner Aelion said what bothers him the most is, we have embarked now on a comprehensive study for traffic and everybody seems to have an opinion but an independent study not a subjective study or objective in this case, will definitely guide us into the future evaluation of how we proceed,allowing and not allowing buildings to be erected,and it is still a work in process. It will take at least six (6) months until the comprehensive study is completed,and then we will be equipped with an objective analysis of what the real impact of present and projected use of our regular traffic is. Manhattan has multiple arteries of congested City but you have alternatives, bike paths, streets, avenues, etc., and Sunny Isles Beach has one and one only pathway to our City and that is Collins Avenue which is a FDOT State road and we have to trend very carefully here. Mr. Wasserman clarified that the building has a two-car lift, not a three-car lift, which is a drastic difference in load time. Commissioner Goldman commended the speaker Lyon Roth on his words of wisdom and insight on this subject. With that being said, she has some of the concerns of her colleagues about the traffic impact, and setting the tone for the redevelopment of the west side. The overall presentation here about this position that it is really a family friendly building and she is not sure if that is entirely the case but she is definitely concerned about what impact that this project will have in the future. Mayor Scholl described TDRs and what they really are. Let's picture a checker board, and putting a checker on every square. Picture taking the checkers from one side of the board and stacking them on the other side of the board. Then you take the next row and stack that row, and every time you pick up a checker,you don't get to put it back, it ends up on top of another checker. That is basically what TDRs do, it takes area from one area and puts on another area. We created a checker board when we made this City and we made a plan and said okay,up to 30%you can move the checkers from this area over there. At the last Commission meeting we bought a piece of land on the south end of the City for TDRs and we stuck it on top of the Armani building and so basically the development that might have ended in front of the Arlen House ended up on the top of the Armani building but nothing will ever be developed in front of the Armani building. Now, it is up to the discretion of the Commission where we want to allow that kind of intensity. Mayor Scholl said this project is very interesting for a lot of reasons, first of all he feels really badly for the developers because they did as good a job as anybody can do in terms of reaching out to the community and trying to satisfy everybody's requirements. Unfortunately they walked into a bit of a hornet's nest at a tipping point in the City, and the tipping point is west side development. This is one of the first residential projects that has been developed on the west side in this kind of late development. The developers, again a beautiful building, they worked their backsides off, they came in with the best of intentions, but they walked into a very difficult situation because this is the first project and this is a preview of coming attractions. That tipping point is of interest to him for a couple of reasons,he has never had an issue with east side density, with oceanfront density. Why, because not a lot of people live 14