2010-0916 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes: Regular City Commission Meeting September 16,2010 City of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida and Mayor Edelcup said to go back and look at your Budget book, you will find that Heritage Park has always been scheduled with the amenities to be in the neighborhood of $ll-12 Million, and what the City Manager has done here in a series of amendments is start it on an original contract to begin the construction of a garage in the Park, and that came up with a fixed number, just for the garage. Then he came back with an amendment to add some work to be done in the actual Park, and that added another number, they were still below our Budget book. Now he is coming back with some additional work. Instead of coming at the very beginning with all of these, he has been coming step by step, and he still hasn't exceeded the original price that we all agreed to in the Budget, and that is where the confusion lies. All these other things that Commissioner Goodman is referring to are still planned for in the Budget and they will come as future amendments as these particular projects reach their dates of completion. Every time you come back with an amendment you are awarding a contract against a Budget amount and we are still awarding pieces of that contract and we still haven't reached the ceiling of that Budget amount. Vice Mayor Thaler noted that we originally were talking $14 Million, and we came down to the 1l + number. Commissioner Scholl said we just defined the scope of what these additional pieces are and the City Manager gave us choices to define that scope to stay within the original budget and that is where it gets confusing, because instead of waiting, because the Park has been in a little bit of an evolutionary process as far as the scope of the Park is concerned, but we always adhere to the outside number, and even when we determined the amenities in the Park we did that in the context of staying within that budgeted number which we actually reduced. He said the reason they did it that way was because it takes a lot longer to build a garage then it does a Park. But now the garage is almost done and we didn't have the Park amenities planned at the time and so we chunked it out. Mayor Edelcup opened it for public comment. Raquel Mass was concerned about added traffic because of the 900 parking spaces garage, and she asked the Commission to take away the parking under the William Lehman Causeway. Mayor Edelcup explained that we are really only adding 70 parking spaces to the garage, there were always 400 cars parked there and we decided instead of wasting four acres of park land that is currently filled with asphalt. When we bought the land it was in the agreement that the Marco Polo would have those 400 spaces. In order to make that area greener, all we did was to move all those cars that were spread across the four acres into a parking garage that accommodates 500 cars, or 100 cars more. The reason we were adding the 100 cars more was because the Park is in the north end of the City and there are people that live in the south end that would like to have a place to park when they go to the Park. In addition, we have always had the parking under the William Lehman Causeway that had to be there in order for the federal government, in an agreement with the City, to renourish the beach. They will not give monies to the City or maintain our beaches unless there is public parking there. When we are building the new Park we are actually taking 30 parking spaces away from the William Lehman Causeway parking and they will be included in that garage. And so when it is all said and done right now or ten years ago there have always been 800 places to park your car, 400 under the Lehman Causeway, and 400 that were scattered in this lot. There has been a misconception that somehow we are providing spaces for 900 people to come and park when that is not the case. 400 of those spaces have been permanently leased to the Ramada and the owners of the condos within the Ramada and they are paying rent to the City for that privilege, and so those 400 spaces are not available for anybody in the public. In summary, we always had the 400 11