2012-0510 Regular City Commission Meeting

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Summary Minutes: Regular City Commission Meeting May 10, 2012 City of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida Vice Mayor Thaler said this amount is excessive, $67,000 on top of everything that we have done, we have already put a part of that complex out, and we used our own staff. Now we are going to spend $67,000 for something that our staff already did part of. He just received the whole breakdown tonight and he did not have the chance to go through it, but he was not thinking at all of coming in with even close to $67,000 on this program. He thinks we should go back and look at it and see if there is an excessive amount of items in here that we can do in -house rather than go outside. City Manager Cohen said his points are well taken which is why when they met in negotiations with CGA yesterday a number of items were taken out that we felt we could do in- house. The City Manager clarified that the lion's share of the work being performed is engineering for the preparation of construction documents and all the specifications that go into it, that we feel we need to farm out. Our staff did a very good job of preparing the initial renderings to give a conceptual idea of the park, but in order for us to let this project out for actual construction, we do need these engineering drawings. Vice Mayor Thaler said he thought we did the first part ourselves, and Commissioner Scholl said we just planted grass. Mayor Edelcup said we did more, we had a dock that was previously the Castaway Boat Docks that had to be knocked down and the ground had to be filled in. He noted that we are talking about the Oceania Park, which was done by our own staff without any outside engineering firm or outside consultants. All we said to our Public Works people was to build us a park, fill in what used to be a dock area and put some grass there, get the wall built which again our people were partly responsible for doing, and we did it all in -house without any outside consultants doing anything. Mayor Edelcup further said this was nothing more than a few more pieces very similar to that, and probably somewhat easier because in this particular case we are not worrying about covering up boat docks. He said he agrees with Vice Mayor Thaler but to get this project done he is willing to live with spending the money but he feels it is needless. Commissioner Aelion said he doesn't know the urgency of the execution of this but if a month is not something that would be too prohibitive, then it would not be a bad idea, and maybe the Vice Mayor, CGA, and the City Manager can have a sit down and we can table this for the next meeting. Commissioner Aelion said that the City Manager was very specific on the price and so he must have done due diligence as to the cap. However, in order to eliminate any doubt in the minds of the Commission, Commissioner Aelion thinks it is a good idea to go through the numbers. City Manager Cohen said regarding any sense of urgency, the staff has our urgency simply predicated on policy that was presented to us. He said it is up to this Commission to say whether or not you want to delay the project. He said to please keep in mind if you do bring the project in later that we are held accountable for the later deadline. Mayor Edelcup said he was thinking that we could have accelerated this project by having Public Works do it, and City Manager Cohen said we did not have in -house capability to do the project. Mayor Edelcup said we still have the same people that we had before, and City Manager Cohen disagreed. Amy Cooke, Director of Landscape /Architecture at CGA, said this project involves Electrical Engineering for some lighting, Structural Engineering for the wall and fencing, and for the permitting Environmental Services as well as Landscape Architecture and Civil Engineering work. City Manager Cohen said there is also approximately 2,500 feet