City Commission - Regular Meeting

Just ask all of us to bow our heads and take a moment of silence.

There we go. I guess it would be an addition unless it well, I guess it's an addition. I was informed at my one on one yesterday that there were, you know, there was planning and it was sort of a courtesy. Let us know on the commission. of planning for creating a route to take the historic building at 17 South M and move it through the city on fancy wheels of some sort to the site of the proposed garage. And to do that, they needed to trim some trees and cut down some trees. And I said, well, I think that's something that the community is probably going to want to weigh in on, or at least be m

Anthony? When are they actually planning on starting?

So then we wouldn't have the opportunity to discuss it.

Oh, I know. I think there's still a question of 17 South M, its budget, what it's actually going to do, and to start cutting down trees in order to move it. Yeah. I voted against moving it every single time. So did I. So I would not be in favor of doing anything towards that end until we've had a definitive discussion on that. Okay. I would be okay with either discussing it tonight or having no trees be touched until the commission can have a discussion on it. But I've got a lot of questions.

Fair enough. As long as we're clear, we're giving... We're giving directions.

Could we add it to the October 6th at the end of the agenda?

We do have a 10 more item and I know we pay for their time. So if we can move that up, I think it's I.

Yeah, we also, you know, are asking our staff to be here, but we don't pay them extra for it. We do pay Chen Moore extra, but it's fine if you want to move it up.

So I would make a motion to move new business. New business I in front of new business A.

Although I got to re-letter every single one.

You have to mention that you had to practically chase us out.

Before Mr. Liberty leaves, I might just propose, a while back, and Mr. Liberty is very well aware of it and has acted commendably on it, we passed a resolution setting some goals of carbon-free generation. And he may be able to help me the exact years. I believe we said to reduce it to 60% by 2035 and zero by 2045. I could be a little bit off on the exact numbers and dates. And I was just thinking it might be helpful. I think we're ahead of schedule on the first deadline. I think we're already there by a number of years or pretty close if we're not there.

So what my request to my colleagues, and maybe we should do it again when we're all five here at some point, is that we, every once in a while, get an update of how we think we're going to get to the second goal. Just a little bit of an update of where we are on the first goal, but how we're going to get to the second, because...

Thank you. So I know that particular issue is very serious, but also basically all along the golf course, you know, in areas that had retaining walls, retaining walls were removed to return to natural shoreline and areas towards the south end of the golf course. We know very low lying areas. and continue to flood. I've heard a lot of concern from the direct neighbors there on South Lakeside and Gulfview and even Palm Way about as these tides are increasing, Are we prepared? Are we looking towards grants or some sort of funding to basically take what is a low-lying area that's leaving them susc

Yeah. These are real problems that all of low-lying South Florida, which is pretty much most of it, is only going to be facing in increasing ways. And it is part of why people in our community have advocated, because we have our own utility, that we should be moving as fast as possible and as fully as possible away from carbon-based electric generation. That's not going to fix sea level rise worldwide, but we should be doing our part, particularly as a community that's on the front lines of this. And Certainly not now, but at some point, we ought to have some community discussions of what futu

Yeah, so let's keep it on our horizon, and at some point we will have to, and to Commissioner Segrich's comment, thinking about holistically, you can put a dike or a wall in front of your city, but if the next city up and the next city down don't, the water just comes around the corner. And so you have challenges there.

Go ahead. So just specific to the golf course with this, and you most definitely don't have the answer, but it would be good if we did think about it. You mentioned that Jamie has the costs on doing the fill and so forth. We just voted to invest in new sprinklers for the golf course. um quite a sizable investment um we put that in and then we have to go add fill or redo that we're going to destroy that new system that gets put in there um and potentially um if it's continuing to flood that's seawater and brackish water and and so on coming in for sure will also completely destroy that system.

Do we have to clear all the cars off the street?

So how are we going to be communicating that?

I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, how many days in advance are we going to be doing that?

Sorry, I didn't mean to speak over you. Part of my concern is that we do have neighbors who are not here all the time and may have parked in the street and are used to keeping their car in that same spot for many weeks at a time and may not be there to move it. So the concern would be if we had to move a vehicle that um that we're not basically towing and fining and and and doing that with such short notice that if we're able to kind of move it a couple of spots down the road i don't know the logistics of that with with parking and the legalities but um there's probably can't touch someone's c

Well, they could. That's what I'm trying to say. You know, I hope we would try to avoid that at all costs. But I do know there, you know, like on my street, there are some cars that have been parked there for three months in the same spot. I'm not saying that's the case, you know, there, but I would want us to look out for that.

I think just really, really quick, just for the update for the public, we, city staff has been in contact with the other recruitment firm. They have been responsive to our requests. And I don't know if we have anything solidified yet, but maybe Glenn, if you could give us a five second overview.

i'll just reiterate i have no problem with them being on it but i will reiterate my concern that um some of the things i heard at the from the my colleagues on the commission whenever we last talked about it of trying to be in a hurry to do this and i just want to be on record that i do not think that's a wise idea I DON'T THINK TRYING TO RUSH IT THROUGH, WE'RE GETTING PRETTY CLOSE TO HOLIDAYS. I THINK WE ALREADY HAVE GAINED SOMEWHAT OF A REPUTATION IN THE WORLD OF CITY MANAGERS AND I WOULDN'T BE IN A RUSH TO MAKE MORE MISTAKES. I HAVE TWO SENTENCES.

with that caution, hopefully borne in mind.

Could somebody review for us real quickly which projects they would be owner representing us on?

So this this is also for the K Street garage.

Okay. And are we asking for this because we're over the original budget or is this a periodic every X number of months, we're going to be adding $80,000 to this budget.

And do we think this is going to take us to the end of the garage, or are we expecting to keep adding to this?

And I understand that I have not had my official update that's coming on Thursday, and I don't want to hold up the process for this, especially since it does involve the Gulf Stream and other activities. I just will say I do have a lot of concerns in terms of how that project is going and how often we're getting updates and the content of those updates. So I'm excited towards the end of the week to receive that and so on. But I am hesitant about this. Because I think with some of these projects, as a city, we have a little bit of a city ownership problem in terms of allowing you guys to manage

And I completely understand that things change rapidly and that we've had a lot of ups and downs and kind of a little bit of a wild ride with some of this stuff. um i i am more of a of a fan of seeing it good bad or ugly um during that process um so thank you mr mcvoy um

Yeah, I just did. Thank you for coming. I have perhaps some overlap on concern about owner's rep, maybe from a little bit different angle. I would assume that we are paying more out of taxpayer funds with the idea that we are asking you to look out for the benefit of the taxpayers and the community as best as possible. It concerns me that, and I don't know if you were here for some of that discussion of possibly cutting down some trees downtown or possibly trimming some trees to make a pathway for moving a building. um when i asked about why that had to happen this week which is why i did post

Do we have a maximum guaranteed price for the parking garage at this point?

Well, I hear you. I had my one-on-one yesterday. I didn't hear anything about it, one way or the other, which is a concern. As far as I'm going to reiterate what I said about owner's rep, and please understand that this is not personally directed to you. It's directed to the concept of owner's rep and Shenmore in general, who we're paying to do this. I have a real difficulty in terms of governing philosophy of what happens in one-on-ones that the public has no way of knowing about versus what happens in public meetings. So I do appreciate you telling us, the public and the Commission, at this

And I hear you, and I don't want to put you personally in a difficult position. However, I think there is a very real case to be made that the client is the taxpayers of the community. And as a rep for that client, part of your responsibilities can reasonably be expected to be to look out for the broadest interests of the whole part. Yes, you are going to interact with staff and they will have certain views and things, and that's your primary interaction. But really in the big picture, Your job spending taxpayer money is to look out for the best possible interests of those. And as a planner, I

Yep. A couple of quick things. And I would reiterate that they are doing what we asked them to do. We asked them in a 3-2 vote where I voted against it. Ms. May voted against it. Mr. McVoy, you voted for it. They are only executing your direction, which was to construct the four and a half story garage and move 17 South M Street. That was your direction, sir. So it's a little unfair to kind of put someone on the spot and say, hey, why didn't you tell me my direction I gave you when I hired you was wrong? And I understand you might have buyer's remorse and hopefully we'll get to the best conclu

But Valentina says she can- Because here under scope, it says only the two projects.

understand that completely as a matter of just process it would be good to include in the backup if we're extending a work order the original work order so that we can all reference I did look on online and figured it out but in this particular amendment under scope we only specifically talk about two projects is it a problem that we're actually spending this money on projects not within the scope of what's written here Do we have to update this to have and K Street Garage and that?

Well, I'm just asking in the past where we've changed the scope on a work order, we were told that. we had to go back out a lot of a lot it triggered a lot of things so i want to make sure especially given the the visibility of these projects some of the um legal issues that that are going on i want to make sure we've dotted our eyes and crossed our t's and don't leave any openings to say oh you guys spent city money on something that wasn't in scope so i just I'm not trying to be a pain in the butt on this one. This is truly for protection of the city. I'm okay with us doing this. But do we h

yeah it's not it is purely more of is Glenn decides that, yes, we need to do this i'm perfectly okay with this updating the text to include those other projects if it's not legally required Okay, but I just want to make sure that we're on the record that the intent of this commission to have 10 more work on these other projects.

So I will amend my motion to approve with additional language added to the scope, if legally necessary, as deemed by Glenn.

So amend it with the language to add the other projects and maybe language in there to say, and as directed by the city commission for the scope.

I would like the language to include the specific additional projects that they're working on.

And other related projects as directed by the city commission.

I'm fine with that. I could imagine that if we make it as broad other things that as directed, we might want to come back and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?

I'm going to do that one too because the badger is Wisconsin. Motion to approve.

I just wanted to kind of reiterate from our discussion that we had on Friday with this, you know, it really shows the need for a good solid facilities management plan. And that includes, you know, where do we house our staff and thinking five years down the road. How do we best serve our residents and customers? And I know the city manager's office is working on that. I know he's working with the utility director and so on. So we're glad to see that coming about because We do have a good number of facilities and some of them are underutilized and some of them have been less than cared for. And

So in general, with some of these, I think as a whole, we do have to do a better job of communicating outward on some of this stuff. I think Facebook as a channel is useful to an extent, but there are many, many, many people who... Are fed up with Facebook and just have dropped off it or they're in an age demographic where it's just they don't use it. They don't use it. And whether that's they're older than the Facebook generation or younger than the Facebook generation. Right. It's it's lost a lot of its power as a medium. Our neighborhood associations continue to be a powerful mechanism.

Even them, to get their word out about their meetings and stuff, the ones that are more successful, literally go around and drop a flyer on every door. And, and so I do think we, we need to do a better job of communicating some of this stuff to specifically address the green and clean, and the fines. A year ago or more when we discussed the fines, it was my impression and I felt like it was presented as we were doing enforcement and that enforcement was happening. When we looked at the fees, I remember the discussion going back and forth. It was, well, obviously the monetary deterrent was not

Right. So certainly not to that scale. So it underscores a couple of things for me, at least. One is the importance and power of metrics in making decisions. I think this is an example of where I can openly say that a mistake was made in the acceleration of those fines at the level that we did based on the information that we had, the metrics that we had at the time.

The answer might have first been, let's fix the enforcement problem versus looking at the actual amount of the fines. With that, going through this process, we actually do have very meaningful metrics. We're getting the exact counts and so on, and it shows just how big of a problem throughout our city this issue has been. I've had conversations with several residents on the matter, and when we bring up vegetation, it's not just about the annoyance of having the vegetation out. We actually have full-time crews that now have to go around and clean out our stormwater grates. And that affects drai

Yeah, I have some general comments. I had one specific question. If somebody got back-to-back three of these fines, doesn't that sound a little bit like a repeat offender?

They're not actually down here. So they had their lawn maintenance people just going. So the first time they found out about it was when they got their first utility bill with the fines.

Or can they not put it out on the correct, the landscaper can put it out on the correct day?

My landscaper lives on site and he never shows up.

And I hear very much what Commissioner Segert said about the need to communicate. I also heard the comment from Chip Guthrie, who I guess is not here at this point. I don't know if city manager Perry was working on his poker face, but I'm guessing that he must have said, wow, I wonder if McVoy and Chip spoke with each other. We didn't. But what Chip said was almost exactly what I said yesterday, that it looks like a money grab, and I don't think that's a good relation between our residents and the city. I did encourage city manager that we should point out and maybe we can point it out. What I

And we should, you know, make sure that people know that side of it.

We had a discussion, and I've been having this discussion for probably, I can remember the first time the mayor and I happened to both overlap at a Tropical Ridge neighborhood meeting yesterday. I don't know, five years ago, four years ago, and we both talked about that there was a need for some sort of beautiful city, city beautification. And what I've said repeatedly doesn't make it right, but I think maybe this indicates it might be useful. That should be a very structured, organized, and visible program that we say, who are all the stakeholders who are going to participate in making the ci

Well, Public Works is clearly one because they deal with stuff.

PBSO may be minor on some enforcement issues, might be a partial player. Clearly, homeowners are a stakeholder in this. Landlords might be a stakeholder. various other departments of the code. And that as we roll out a program, that we do do a real rollout of it, that we tell the public, however we're going to do the communication part, what each stakeholder, what we sort of expect and all agree to at least somewhat do, maybe not all homeowners will be on board, but that the community gets a sense that whatever we're doing, whether it's a fee or whether it's an increased code enforcement or wh

I think the information is good, but the actual what is the project? Who are the stakeholders? What is each one going to do? Then the communicating it up is a separate thing. But I don't think sort of what what Commissioner Segers was suggesting that, hey, we need a bit of a plan for our facilities where we put employees and things. I think we need a bit of a plan for this. And then once we have it kind of pulled together, then we roll it out by communicating it. That's my thought on that. I don't know if it's right or not, but that's my two cents. Thank you. I do agree that... You know, it wo

I was interested to see that the the issues or occurrences of this was not evenly distributed around the city. And I don't know, I would assume, I hope, that we were enforcing equally around the city.

So it was a causal thing that that particular area was doing things differently than others. I don't know.

I would also be supportive of the idea of a, I don't know what you call it, but a ramping up of fines that your first fine's a little lower, but if you're a repeat offender, we start getting a little more serious about it.

Can you say that again, what you last just said?

We've phrased that as not that we've made a decent amount of money because that doesn't work well with the crab.

So can I just ask one clarification right now? The folks that go out on Wednesday and Thursday, they're doing two things, maybe more, but two big things. One is they're picking up stuff that's out on days when it shouldn't be out. Right. They're actually picking up stuff.

Yeah. And since they're not running regular routes and things, they're also being a little bit more vigilant on citing people. That's correct. Presumably, there's almost no case where there's a citation, but you're not picking something up. All of the citations are for picking something up. That's correct. And when you're picking something up, Well, it isn't necessarily oversize. It's just wrong day. And wrong day doesn't necessarily cost us more at the tipping station. Correct. Oversize does. Correct. So you're writing citations, some of which are oversize, and you're recovering the actual co

Oh, above the four. Or is it above zero?

So I think one of the questions that we need to educate people on is, okay, so I do my yard work on Sunday. I get it. I can't put it out until Monday.

Where do I put it in the meantime? So in South Palm Park, a lot of our houses, the first 12 feet or 10 feet or six feet is actually public right away. And many people don't realize that, right? And so leaving it even though it's grass yeah even though it's grass no sidewalk leaving it there is technically a violation because you've left it in the public right away um is leaving it up next to my front door safe place right you know um a code violation you know because now i have a debris pile sitting there for an indeterminate uh amount of time right um i don't think we can come up with can you

Oh, it's definitely more than green has to go first. Yeah. But we're talking about over.

Yeah. So, you know, my neighbor has 47 palm trees. I mean, he he pays for yards and yards and yards and yards. You know, he calls the city in advance. Right. He's learned his lesson. He got nailed for putting it in front of my house. I wasn't about to pay the fine. So we need clarity of education of, hey, if you're landscaper or you're doing it yourself, not capable of removing that debris, where do you put it in the meantime? Where's the safe place? So that was one question that came up a lot. All right, I get it. What do you want me to do with it in the meantime? Another piece was 6 p.m. the

Period. But you can't discuss that in the absence of, like, Mr. McVoy does his own yard work.

A lot of days I end up doing my own tree trimming because the landscaper didn't come on a day where they could. And so I do it and get it out on time so that I can get picked up. And then they come and they clean up my mess because I leave. It doesn't look as good. But we we have to give people at least a chance of making it happen for those that don't have somebody.

I don't think we can. We should come to the exact. I think now I think staff could give us a great recommendation on that, but I would agree anytime the day before makes sense, right? That at least gives someone a full data to do the work and get that done. I do want to make sure, you know, Mr. McVoy was saying, you know, that the data seemed to suggest that certain areas had a lot more violations than, than others. I do want to make 100% sure that we are in fact equally canvassing, not just looking for the low hanging fruit. Right. Um, because that, that would be horrible if we're not in a su

What about if it's on the Wednesday, Saturday ones?

Well, and I think the goal is never... We're not aiming for being perfect. We're also not aiming to fine everybody. This should be almost a self-destroying program that eventually gets into maintenance mode, right? It's never going to be 100%. So... You know, if we're at a burn rate of 500 fines a month and this door hanger makes it 400, I think we're still achieving the overall goal of getting out there and correcting this problem. But we're doing a much better job of education and we're potentially staving off other issues that we, frankly, we don't have a great way of communicating. You kno

Yeah, and I think in this starting of the program, as we kind of stumble and get our footing here on it, a credit back just on these two months. And we have staff have a recommendation of that based on what are our actual costs, right? Because if we did 1,100 extra pickups, That's a lot of extra runs to the dump. That's a lot of extra time, a lot of extra gas.

Do some math. The math isn't mathing. It's more than that. I do want to stress that we are getting into some of the nitty gritty of it, but these are more just ideas and suggestions. You guys will know best how to implement the concept, right? I think the concept there. So I do think the credit, I do want to comment on something that I heard a lot in this process which was, don't they know we've been allowed to do this for years? And there are many things in the city kind of like that, right? And feelings. And it cuts both ways, right? It does cut both ways where if it's an annoyance to me, I

So we should definitely somebody should put some thought into what that QR code goes. Well, that's the idea of. broadening the education.

I think tree hat-racking is a huge one. Hat-racking and tree removal continue to plague our city even though the fines are massive.

I'd like to make a motion that we have three member meetings because I just want to point out three zero on everything I wrote down.

Seems like it's working other than, you know, the big fines. And with the fines, I heard the comment of, well, maybe we should give some sort of a credit. That was the word I was looking for. Thank you. You're welcome. For the first two months.

Because if some people get a credit and some people don't, there better be something that we do differently to justify that the later people don't get any credits. We have a massive education campaign, and there's no way that you wouldn't know. Therefore, you're getting the full-on fine and no credits.

I just I think the logistics of that will have to come from staff. Yeah. And Jamie, I do hear you, you know, in saying, OK, yes, a lot of people are aware of it now. But what about the people who are just coming back in October? Right. A lot of people are returning and so on. And do we just continue to exasperate kind of a problem by by not also accounting for them? You know what? It's going to be an election year, and it got me thinking about campaign mailers and so on. And so the cost of sending a letter to somebody is astronomically high. The cost of doing bulk postcard is better, but it's

No, I'm just talking about the price per postcard. It, it wasn't astronomical. And so there could be a good way of getting, you know, a smaller card with QR code that talks about these things doesn't have to be the right thing at a fairly economical rate that we could get out quite quickly. to direct people to an informational page that covers a lot of this initiative. And that would kind of cover us for October. And then that also gives staff time to come back with suggestions on perhaps changing the fee schedule, perhaps not changing the fee schedule, escalations, a more permanent tweak to t

And, and I think given the effort that Jamie's team is putting, putting in, we will recoup that. And hopefully the program will kind of find a stasis in terms of, you know, it's never going to be perfect. But I think that would be worthwhile to do something like that. And I just think we're probably going a little too far down the rabbit hole, but I think Jamie has a good idea of our intentions. I think... uh troy has a good idea and i see tiana nodding in the back um but i think rapid like you know i i not rushed but but but rapid timely education and getting something in the mailboxes i don'

Here's my wish list for the postcard with the QR code.

No, no, no, no, none of that. It does all the things that we've talked about, gives you other information. But here's what I want it to do. I stick it on the magnet on my refrigerator. I stick it on the postcard. I get it in the mail. It's got a QR code. I put it on the refrigerator. My phone knows where I am. I aim the phone at that postcard at the QR code. And it says today is when you put out your.

I'm always doing it the last minute because that's how I am. And it takes me for frigging forever to get to where I am.

So I don't have to walk out and look up and down the block.

What's my report? There was a very nice... fundraiser and birthday party for father frank from the 85 years old from the guatemala maya center uh on saturday which unfortunately was the same day as the maya ikbalams organizations um also festival here but we were down in miami for that for the other one um do i have anything else uh if i think of it we can come back to it but i don't think so thank you sir sir

Not much. Arms of Hope is having their annual gala. I think they've emailed all of us on that, but they do a lot of great work in our city and we're really lucky to have them. And if anyone wants to know how to support them, they can contact them or feel free to email any one of us and we can forward on some of that information. I am excited to see what happens out of the cleaning for South Palm Park. The issue is very real. I think one thing to note is a lot of that infrastructure is part of the sub-regional infrastructure. And it's not just us that has to make that decision, unfortunately. A

So get those in. And other than that, that's it.

I think it's 317. Yeah, but she lives at 310, but it's 317.

Yeah, if you go to the state and the county board of ethics pages, they have links to various videos and online, and then they have external links to some of the other parts that you need to get covering the different areas.

Excellent. It's more fun to go in person. And I found them very-