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<br />SummaI)' Minutes: Regular City Commission Meeting March 15,2012 <br /> <br />City of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida <br /> <br />Workshop, and it was hoped that two days a week would be fair to the children on the <br />weekends when they are not in school, to have the extra hour to skate. <br /> <br />Commissioner Gatto said that the weekend right now provides 14 hours of skating time for <br />the kids, 14 versus 16 isn't a huge leap but it would make a very big difference in the lives of <br />the people who live there. She would like to suggest that we don't increase the hours yet <br />until we get the Request for Qualifications or Proposals information. At this point it would <br />be a mental hardship for a bunch of folks right now to increase it on the weekend. Saturday <br />is particularly bad because right now it is eight straight hours, and it is six on Sunday. One <br />Saturday a month is family movie night which is a wonderful thing but then you have got no <br />relief for many hours on a weekend. <br /> <br />Mayor Edelcup said that we have had many people ask that the hours be extended especially <br />since it is daylight savings time, at 7:00 p.m. the sun is not near the sunset. All throughout <br />this whole episode with Skateboard Park, he thinks we have bent over backwards trying to <br />accommodate those who are complaining at Winston Towers about the noise. Asking for <br />two hours more in an entire week he thinks it is so minimal that to him it is totally <br />irresponsible to deny the children the right to be able to use that Park for two hours. People <br />are not going to bed at 7:00 p.m., and if they are, they are the exception rather than the rule. <br />There is always going to be the problem of the complaints, it is whether or not that extra <br />hour, two hours a week is such an undue burden to lay against the fact that the children are in <br />a much safer location skateboarding there than they would anywhere else on the streets of <br />Sunny Isles Beach where they would be forced to be in traffic or trying to ride among <br />pedestrians that are walking the streets, or riding around the plazas in the City. We have had <br />skateboarders even attempting to skateboard in the various Parks. We have tried to isolate <br />this to keep it into a small enough area and we have cut back the hours severely from where <br />we started, and so he doesn't see adding two hours in a week is a major hardship for the <br />people who live in the area. He recommends that it is a decision for management to make <br />and we will go from there. Weare trying to do the study, whenever the study gets produced, <br />we will see what happens and what we can do with it, but in the interim we are back to the <br />situation where the only way he can make anybody happy would be to close the Skateboard <br />Park completely. The people are not going to be happy whether it is 7:00 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. <br />and if we are going to have people unhappy he may as well have it for two more hours, those <br />people will be unhappy but at least we will have more children in a safer environment. <br /> <br />Commissioner Scholl said the fact is that we have alternatives and we are not pursuing them <br />and we know that. Where are we at in finding an alternative to the issue, and City Manager <br />Cohen said we are finally close to finishing a scope, that is one of the reasons we hired CGA <br />so that he ean get assistance in that matter, and so he is hoping to send to the Attorney, no <br />later than next week, a proposal to go out so that we can actually solicit some bids. <br /> <br />Commissioner Seholl said so the thing that we ean agree upon is simple, we want the skaters <br />off the street. As we said during the last vote, he voted to close the Park to bring attention to <br />the issue that the Park needs to be dealt with and we are not dealing with it. Again in all due <br />respect to the Mayor he acts like either closing it or leaving it open are the only two options <br />and he does not agree with that, we have other options and so hopefully we are going to <br />scope this. He is again going to air on the side of Commissioner Gatto because he feels like <br /> <br />19 <br />