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 Action:[City Clerk's Note:Additional Information `Income Limits"was distributed prior to the meeting. Item 7C was heard with related Item 7D.] City Clerk Hines read the title,and City Attorney Ottinot reported when the City adopted its Comprehensive Plan in 2000, the Commission made a commitment to provide affordable workforce housing to residents by creating zoning incentives for developers to construct workforce housing units. Workforce housing units under the program will be available for households with income of 120% or less of the median income in Miami-Dade County,which is currently$57,000.00 per year as a household. He emphasized that we are not talking about low income housing, we are talking about workforce housing. The proposal is to keep the vision of the proposal to allow developers additional incentives than we had in the past. Developers will be able to construct eight (8) units per acre instead of five (5) units per acre in the RMF-2 Zoning District located on the west side of Collins Avenue. The east side is not part of this Ordinance. The workforce housing must be available to individuals who meet the qualified requirements. Also, the workforce housing unit will be restrictive for 30 years made affordable to those who qualified. Moreover, the Miami-Dade County Commission has made emphasis that all municipalities in Miami-Dade County must provide workforce housing,and this proposed Ordinance promotes the construction of workforce housing in the same fashion as the proposed workforce housing ordinance adopted by Miami-Dade County. Public Speakers: None Mayor Scholl said we have always had this Ordinance on the books but it wasn't an Ordinance that ever got dusted off because we have never had a condition where somebody comes in and asks for bonuses based on workforce housing, largely because most of the development activity has been on the east side of Collins Avenue. Those buildings have their own incentives and the cost of the units on the east side of Collins Avenue are very expensive. We are starting to get more potential development activity on the west side of Collins Avenue, and we talked many times on the Commission that on the west side of Collins Avenue we are going to be tough on density because that is where most of the density comes from. On the east side of Collins Avenue certain buildings are more occupied than others but in general a lot of the newer buildings are not heavily occupied as a lot of them are bought for investment properties. We believe on the west side of Collins Avenue that will not be the case. Mayor Scholl said the County has gotten a little feisty lately about trying to impose workforce housing onto municipalities, and we are not too fond of that because we don't like to be told what to do by the County. This is a way of kind of middling that where we are going to have a little more teeth in our Workforce Housing Ordinance so that potential developments that might be coming down the road might be able to utilize this and at the same time meet some County requirements. At one point the County was talking to us about a 20% development tack-on or a fee that would just be there for workforce housing, and they said if you can't provide it that they would take the money. It was a tax basically and they were going to put the housing in another part of the County, and so we said no thank you that we would rather try to create our own circumstances for workforce housing. Commissioner Goldman said she is in favor of this, she actually works on projects like these for clients in her private practice and the way to create a great policy is to create incentives in the marketplace for developers to create and to hopefully emulate a condition that we have which is a lack of affordable housing in our County. She likes the way that this is presented, 7