2016-0915 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes:Regular City Commission Meeting September 15,2016 City of Sunny Isles Beach,Florida end of the day you are not going to control everybody, you can't take their hand and make them go through this experience but it is one of those things in architecture that we do all the time and knowing human nature that once you create something that is exciting and beautiful, again Sunny Isles Beach is a city where you have a lot of vacationers, a lot of people that will really want that for the moment, and to capture the essence of why they are here in Sunny Isles Beach. And so a lot of people are going to go to Gateway Park, a lot of people are going to go to the restaurants. Again,they are going to want to walk to the beach, and at the end of the day it becomes that sort of experience. He handed out a presentation of images with a little description, as you go through it you will see that architecture is a lot of things, it can be very exciting with trellises, landscaping, materials and this is again,just to capture the idea of what they are talking about and to keep in mind that this is an element that becomes symbolic not only a practical element that is used in a certain way but it is also one of the elements that can be a signature piece and symbolic to Sunny Isles Beach. In the Gateway Park project they have that pattern wall that has been kind of almost like the symbol of the project that was based on certain ideas of a park and a tree or flowers and it is something that they feel that once people start using it, that is going to be kind of like the moment in the park where everybody is going to want to take a photograph, it is where you are going to see models coming out and photographs and that nature because it has a strong architectural element. This can be kind of like a continuation of that, an element that recaptures that. There is also a small building there at the end which is the restroom and they are also proposing,and one of the ideas was to kind of dress up that building and wrap it in a sort of scan or materials or architectural treatment that will tie the symbolically back to Gateway Park and also beautify it and become something a little bit nicer than what it is now. The idea is that not only in the day time, the shadows and all that sort of interesting architecture experience but at nighttime you can see it illuminated and it becomes kind of like this glowing walkway experience for people who are using it after hours. Several La Perla residents as well as neighboring residents expressed their concerns of public safety issues and violence at that parking lot, and requested that the 29 parking spaces be moved across the street from La Perla. Police Chief Fred Maas said he has dealt with a number of the residents at La Perla because their situations have come either individually or collectively to the Police Department. Every single word that has been spoken here representing this group from a public safety standpoint is absolutely true. It may be our single most difficult area to deal with,we have witnessed it, and he is speaking also on behalf of his officers who have been put in harm's way numerous times and just short of critical situations that they have had to handle there involving fire arms and these confrontations, and so forth. We have witnessed it, we have been told the same insults have been hurled at us including himself when he has gone out there with the City Manager on weekends,holiday weekends,dating back years ago. He is going to tell the facts only, his detectives are in the back of the room, those who were responsible for rounding up the five and six suspects who have committed robberies, not once but twice in the last couple of months. The critical point of this is the fact that it is a very bad mix when you have outsiders coming in who have criminal records, who have terrible tempers, who have demonstrated poor behavior and they come into this area because they can, they can drive into that area, it is public property and so it is accessible. We can control it only on a response to a situation and that is our difficulty. Even if he puts Police Officers out there as 26