2012-0315 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes: Regular City Commissioll Meeting March 15,2012 City of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida until we deal with this issue in a holistic matter to try and find a permanent solution, this is going to keep coming back to us, and it is easy for the folks that don't live there to sit and rationalize this but it keeps coming up again and again, and so it is really bothering a group of people. The fact is that we are exceeding our own noise ordinances, and we have proof of that and it is very frustrating. Mayor Edelcup said we are not exceeding the noise ordinance, if you read the ordinance because the City Manager brought it to him, it goes above the decibel reading for the higher noise. City Manager Cohen said he would like to clarifY that because we had another situation in the community and so he had to do some learning so to speak on the noise ordinance, and what he realized is there are two aspects of it regarding this situation. One is that we were under the mistaken impression that the 60 decibel limit was a solid limit but the way our Code is written it says you cannot exceed either 60 decibels or the background ambient noise whichever is greater, and so the study that was done just read the noise from the Park and he is not sure if we did a comparative. Commissioner Scholl said so we don't know what the background ambient noise was, and so we don't know if we have exceeded it or not but we assumed in the first part of the study that we exceeded it. City Manager Cohen said secondly and this is the more interesting twist in this is that our noise ordinance only applies to noise generated from private property. Commissioner Scholl said how ridiculous is that. Again, we can try to support our arguments with all of these technical nuisances and try to reach into our Code and try to extract but his point is, we need to find a permanent solution, this will be coming back to us until we do. He is not in favor of extending the hours, he would love to have the hours 24/7 if we had a permanent solution because he believes we need to keep the kids off the streets as well but we are not addressing the eore issue and we need to do it. Vice Mayor Thaler said that he thinks we are now, we are moving forward on getting the report that we are aU looking for. Commissioner SchoU said in the meantime though we shouldn't put these folks through any more anguish. Vice Mayor Thaler said he disagrees, the January figures were almost at 800 kids for the month of January, and 700 kids for the month of February which are both an increase over previous months, and he thinks if we would have closed the Park which is what your suggestion was, they would be all over the City. Commissioner Scholl said his suggestion was not to close the Park, he voted for it but he explained his vote because he was given no alternative. He has been consistent about finding a permanent solution. City Manager Cohen said he would like to clarify an important point here because he thinks based on this clarification all of you will be in favor of what we are putting forth. Technically the resolution that expired at the end of the summer would have led us to extending the hours back to the original hours of 8:00 p.m., seven days a week, and so the recommendation is not to do that but to only extend it two days a week. Ifthere is no action taken, we would be compelled to bring it back to seven days a week, 8:00 p.m., and their recommendation is not to do that. Commissioner Scholl noted that this is just a discussion item, we are not voting on this tonight. City Manager Cohen said no but he is seeking direction from the Commission on that. Mayor Edelcup said since you were compelled to bring it back, he is willing to just bring it back for those two hours as a compromise, but if we can't reach a compromise to bring it back to where it was and follow the ordinance, there 20