2009-1029 Special Commission Meeting

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Summary Minules: Special City Commission Meeling Oclober 29, 2009 City of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida the Off-Duty Coordinator Sandra Block and when a company requests for off-duty, there is a contract and an informational sheet that is provided to them. He said Ms. Block was continuing to call RK to get this established and that is where the three-hour minimum for the Officer coming in would have come into place. Mayor Edelcup said as he recalls at the time discussions with Mr. Katz were started he had instructed our City Manager and City Attorney, since it was an agreement between the Commission and Mr. Katz, to negotiate, and the instruction he gave was that it be at cost, and so Ms. Block may have tried to call and at that point he stopped that proceeding and instructed the City Manager and City Attorney to handle the negotiations directly, and so the answer to Vice Mayor Thaler's question is no. Vice Mayor Thaler said he has a problem because it appears to be money against safety, and it is more important to save one child or resident from an accident than the money that is involved here. He said there is a real easy way out of this one, if the candles are put back up, the Police Officer would be gone, and the numbers would be reduced to a Crossing Guard which is basically what Mr. Katz is asking for. The City would be paying for the Crossing Guard not Mr. Katz and that would solve every one of our problems here. Arnold Shevlin said they have had numerous discussions with the City Manager and staff about this issue since we came before you and asked to have the candles removed so that CVS would have proper access and would actually open the store. If the candles were to go back up, there would be severe financial damages. Their agreement with the Commission was proffered based on the fact that we would expedite working together with staff to obtain a traffic light. We have spent a lot of our time with consultants, worked closely with the City's consultants (Kimley-Horn) to try to get a traffic light approved. We had a meeting last month with FDOT, and FDOT based on a Warrant Study that was submitted, denied the traffic light, and they said to come back with new numbers justifying keeping 183rd Street open, and getting a new signal at 182nd Street. On October 23, we circulated a letter to the City Manager summarizing what happened at the last meeting with FDOT saying there are three concerns that FDOT has about the traffic light: 1) we need almost a 60% variance in order to get traffic light spacing; 2) there is a stacking issue; and the biggest issue 3) the Traffic Warrant, and their argument was in Kimley-Horn's report to the Commission and to FDOT that they were basing their Warrant Study on the fact that 183rd Street was going to be completely closed, and that was the only way they were able to get it to work. So part of our question today to you is to bring on another consultant that believes they can redo the Warrant Study to keep 183rd Street as a right turn right out, spend another $5,000 to $7,000, let them work in conjunction with our existing consultants. Mr. Shevlin said that they came before the Commission to take the candles down, open the intersection, and Mr. Katz agreed to pay for a Police Officer to protect the children. At the Commission meeting, we never discussed how long or how much. Once we got a bill we said that these numbers are astronomical and they are not justified. We spent time monitoring the intersection and in the letter that we sent to the City Manager we came up with one other alternative in the interim. There is an intersection at 951h Street and Collins Avenue in Surfside, there is a sign, and a stop bar 40-feet before you get to the intersection that says "Stop Here", and the intersection is open. There is another sign right at the corner that says "Do Not Block this Intersection", and if we take time out and try that instead of putting candles up it would keep the intersection open, it would avoid people from backing 5