2016-0114 Special City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Special City Commission Meeting January 14.2016 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida question, but it just elongates the pain is really what it does. And so she is not sold on the idea,she understands why it is an idea,but she is not sold on it because she knows now if she leaves at a certain time and maybe 30 minutes she can wait and leave,but now maybe it will be 45 minutes. Also,the four-way stops, she knows it is a solution but she spent many years on the west coast. You can't drive through the streets in San Francisco and fly through,every street is a four-way stop and everybody knows that you yield to your right. Here, nobody knows that and nobody cares and no one is going to obey the rules. She deals with that on 174th and North Bay Road, and so there is a lot of possibility for confusion and accidents. Also, the increase in school buses, you know that the school buses are scary and tricky,you can't pass them,and she stays away from them at any cause because they can be dangerous to your driving record if you screw up. She knows that you have come up with some good solutions but it just seems like all of this is just going to be amplified in a very big way once this gets going. She is not sold on the staggered hours. Mayor Scholl said if the 163rd Street bridge went up and 900 cars back up and head for Collins Avenue. If you can stagger the cars by 10 minutes apart,it would greatly mitigate the amount of impact that is hitting Collins Avenue at one time. What they are saying is,and it is just logic and science, basically if you are going to have 600 cars there, and you spread them out in half hour increments, it is going to mitigate the problem. It is not going to make it go away, it is going to elongate the pain, but it is going to create a lot less impact on the area then having the 600 cars there at one time. That is really all we are talking about. He is hearing a lot of objections but the fact is that there are no easy solutions here, this is not a silver bullet kind of solution. This is going to be a combination solution that basically take a crappy situation and mitigate it a little bit. We have professionals and they came back and are giving us different options here. But logic would tell us that if you take 600 cars that are going to converge on a time zone within a ten-minute window of that time zone, if you spread it out over an hour and a half, it is going to mitigate the impact a little bit at least on the surrounding folks that have to deal with it. He believes that the staggering of the cars will make a difference. Mayor Scholl said let's go back to the genesis of the problem. When he got elected, and we all know about the traffic problem at the school, and we started to talk about the school expansion project, and he always tries to tie things back to what they call in the blood banking business, Root Cause Analysis. What is the root cause of the problem? The fact is that we live in a City where the weather is nice most of the time,and 80%of the kids that go to that school are within walking distance because it is Winston Towers in the City core,and that is where all the kids live, they are all within walking distance. Yet we have 600 cars in the morning that come to that school to drop kids off. What does that tell us? That tells us that anybody that lives in the City whose kid can walk to school does not want to deal with that issue, and so they let their kid walk or ride their bicycles to school. Mayor Scholl said last Spring he sat down with the City Manager and said we have got to do a study or something to figure out where all these cars are coming from. So what they did was we had some folks go out over the course of a week and take pictures of every license plate in the morning and in the afternoon that was dropping a kid off, be it in the shopping center or by the school, then we ran all those license plates through the DMV, and we actually did this last April or May. It was two different periods. What did we find? We 9