Planning Board - Regular Meeting

Yeah. OK, sounds good. OK. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming out on a rainy night. I'm sorry that some of you have had to come out two months in a row. But we'll address that later. Anyway, if you all stand for the Pledge of the Flag. All right, let's do a quick roll call, so I'll start with J.R. Joseph Corbison. Daniel.

Daniel Alvarez. Daniel Guerra. Sorry, Danny.

Cristina Ortega.

Daniel Alvarez, did you say hello, too, or not? Yes, Daniel Alvarez. I see you. Your mic is low for us. I'm not sure why that is. And so Michelle is not on. And Gus is not on. All right. People will probably be joining as we go along. Any administrative matters? Marcus is shaking his head no. Tony, anything for you guys administratively? No. Okay. All right, so Marcus, is this the order that you want these items here to present? Yes. In order to make the best use of everybody's time?

Yes, it's the best use. The applicant that is present in the meeting is first up on the agenda. Perfect.

Just like they were in November.

Okay, take it away. So the first item is PB-2025-011, the applicant's auto development LLC. It's a resolution of the Mayor and City Commissioner of the City of South Miami, Florida, approving or denying a special exception application pursuant to Section 20.7 of the City of South Miami Land Development Code, for a large-scale development project for the multi-family residential project known as Somi Walk South Miami on a 1.01-acre development site located at 5959 Southwest 71st Street and 7090 Southwest 59th Place, providing for conditions, enforcement of conditions, corrections, severability, and an effective date. This item will be handled by Mr. Mark Alvarez of the Corradino Group. Thank you. Let's swear everybody in, if you don't mind. Yeah, let's go ahead and do that.

Everybody who seeks to speak on any item on tonight's agenda, please stand and raise your right hand. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? I do. Thank you.

Looks different than Mark, but we'll go with it.

Good morning, Chair and Board. Nick Noto from the law firm of Bills and Sundberg on behalf of the applicant. One of our team members is on his way here. He'll be here in three to five minutes. I don't know if it's appropriate to maybe take the next item on the agenda and circle back to us. I would appreciate if we could have a couple more minutes to let him get here. Up to the Chair.

Let's just see. Next item up. I have no objection as long as, is there someone here for that, for the applicant?

Well, every other item on the agenda, they're all text amendments. No one else on it? Yeah, this is the only applicant we have. So if you want to take that one next.

Sure. Well, if you don't mind, we'll go ahead and take the next one. Thank you. Let's go in order.

So item number two is PB-2025-013, an ordinance of the Mayor and City Commission of the City of South Miami, Florida, amending section 20-3.3. permitted use schedule of the land development code to allow certain medical and health care related uses. And the general retail GR zoning district, providing for corrections, severability, conflicts, implementation, and an effective date. So currently, a majority of the health care type uses that are listed into these permitted use schedule, which is section 20, that's 3.3D and David of the LDC, are permitted in the GR zoning district for reference. The GR district is our properties that are along Bird Road, portions of Bird Road, as well as portions of South Dixie Highway. These types of users include dentists, massage therapists, veterinarians, urgent care facility, and counseling services. but they do not include acupuncturist and a medical office and psychologists. The item before you seeks to add these uses to that district either by permitted by right or by special use. Um, by doing such making such changes, the city will continue to satisfy flumen full objective 5.3, which is an objective that supports vertical commercial areas as well as flume. Flu objective 5.4, which is the same type of thing for us one support us one commercial areas. Also, the change will bring the district more in line with the commercial retail and office land use designation, which is intended to provide for commercial uses as permitted in the LDC. Staff is recommending approval for the item that it be forwarded to the commission for adoption. Thank you.

Okay. Before we talk about it as a board, is there any public comment either in the audience or online? If so, please step to the podium or raise your hand. Seeing no one, hearing no one, I think we can move on to discussion amongst the board. So any questions or comments for Marcus on this one? Marcus, was this triggered by someone who's not in compliance now or an attempt to make us more... I'm sorry, the city attorney was going to say something?

Okay. No, this was triggered by an applicant that purchased a property on Bird Road, and it was found that they wanted to open a medical office. The city tried to work with them either by allowing them to come in as a... Urgent care facility, but with the urgent care use, you need you need a sponsoring by by a nearby hospital, which they weren't able to obtain. They tried to get one from marketing community hospital, but they couldn't obtain it. Um, so the next the next available option is to actually change the code. To to permit their their use to be allowed there.

And I know this would ask you to think back in history, but was there a reason this wasn't permitted out of the gate?

I believe it that I'm. Going off the cuff, I personally do not know because this is how it's always been since I've worked here and I've been here almost 20 years. But I believe that the GR district was probably put together as just purely commercial or retail uses. And since the medical office is a professional service, they felt that that probably wouldn't best fit the character of those areas at the time. But times, they do a change.

And I think, I don't know if anybody else on the planning board remembers it, but we did have a veterinary clinic that came in front of us the last two years.

Yes, you did. About two years ago, it was a cardiology off of 61st Avenue. Correct. I think 7,561st. Yeah. Yeah. And we approved that. Yes. And veterinarians are permitted as special use approval, which that's something that the board feels... these types of uses warrant a special use, we can go that route for this too.

It's not based on my thoughts, I would say that. Other comments or questions from the board?

No, I don't see why we would restrict one type of medical office in favor of another.

Or choose to do an urgent care as opposed to a medical office.

I move to approve as presented.

Second. Any further discussion? If not, all those in action, we'll just go, let's do roll call wise. Yes.

Yes.

Daniel.

Yes.

And Christina.

Yes.

And yes for me too. So, okay. Do we have everybody here? Not quite yet. We'll do it. You're going to run out of time eventually, though. And we will not be taking the fall for that one. All right. Marcus, the third item?

Okay. The third item is PB-2025-014, an ordinance of the City Commission of the City of South Miami, Florida, retroactively extending the previous moratorium on the enforcement of Section 20-3.6W of the City's Land Development Code relating to residential requirements for solar photovoltaic systems, providing for implementation, severability, conflicts, corrections, and an effective date. If you recall, this was a moratorium placed by the commission in April earlier this year on the enforcement of the city's solar panel regulations. That ordinance was 12-25-2525. And it enacted a moratorium for the six month time frame to give the city time to work on its sustainability ordinance, which is before you as an item separately from this tonight. During that process, however, the moratorium did lapse. And so we're asking that the moratorium be reenacted and retroactively put put back to the back to I believe it expired. We have no gaps. Yeah, so then we have no gaps. That's basically what I'm trying to get at. So staff is recommending approval of the item and is available for any comments you may have if you have any questions or concerns.

It would extend this for how long? It would be another six months, I believe.

I believe that's correct, Mr. City Attorney, which he's looking up right now.

Yes, until April 15th, but by that time you will probably see an ordinance repealing it.

Yeah, understood. So, okay. Any public comment on this one, either online or in the audience? Seeing none, I have a motion.

Motion to proceed with an approval.

Second. Who was the second?

Why second? OK, just me.

Yes, you can.

Roll call wise.

Yes. Yes.

Daniel?

Yes.

Christina? Yes. Yes. All right. Oh, that too is holding us up. So we're going to just run through the rest of this and then we're going to get to you guys. I'm kidding. Are you guys ready? Yes. Okay.

So I guess do you want me to reread the first item back into the record?

Yeah, I think it would be good if you would.

Okay. So the first item again is PB-2025-011. The applicant is Alta Development, LLC. A resolution of the Mayor and City Commission of the City of South Miami, Florida, approving or denying a special exception application pursuant to Section 20-8.7 of the City of South Miami Land Development Code for a large-scale development project for the multifamily residential project known as Somi Walk South Miami. on the 1.01 acre development site located at 5959 Southwest 71st Street and 7090 Southwest 59th Place, providing for conditions, enforcement of conditions, correction, severability, and an effective date. And once again, Mr. Alvarez is available to present the project to give the staff report for the item. That'd be great. Thank you.

Good evening, Mark Alvarez with the Corradina Group on behalf of city planning staff. We have reviewed this project, which is called Somi Walk. It's before you tonight is a large-scale special exception. It does include bonus requests and Waivers. I lose that word every time. The location is on part of the block between 70th and 71st Street on the west side of 79th Place. It is just across the street from the Vox. Its primary use is the existing uses there is the roadway hotel and two buildings that are presently office buildings. It does not include the northeast corner of that block, so it's an L-shaped parcel. It is designated on the Future Land Use Map as Transit Supportive Development. It's designated on our zoning as Transit Supportive Development, and it is in the sub-district that we call TODA, Transit Oriented Development Area, which is the most intense district that we designated for the most intense development right next to the Metrorail Station. The context, as you can see, it is entirely surrounded by commercial development. To the north is the Valencia Condominium, which is about 301 units, I believe. To its south is actually the Le Atelier School and eventually will be 6075 Sunset Drive, which will be a 10-story apartment building of mixed use. To its east is the Vox and the county property. Notably, the county property is under county zoning, and as part of the Rapid Transit District, it could go higher than even our district allows. And to its west is mostly Larkin Hospital properties, their executive offices, and the cancer center. Those are mostly six-story buildings except for the Vox, which is, I believe, seven or eight. So as far as compatibility goes, we find this to be compatible. First, it is consistent. It is not above what we have created for the TODA district. When we did that, we considered the buildings that were already there. A lot of these buildings will probably stay for some time, but this is still compatible as a mid to high rise structure at 16 stories. Around it, of course, is still lower buildings, but they're still mid-rise buildings. So we do accept it as being compatible. The only possible exception would be the school, which is we just consider it a use that's there until it becomes something else. The density comports with what we have already designated for the TODA area. And again, the compatibility is based on this is the closest property that's privately owned to the Metrorail station. This is the crux of what we were really trying to do is put this kind of density and this number of people right next to Metrorail. We are also to some extent encouraged that this is to be primarily, it is a residential structure, but it is oriented towards students. As such, we look forward to a younger generation of people than say me, who might be using transit or more focused on using transit and other alternatives to transportation. I will say that I am. So consistency with the district, I did not take my scooter tonight. The consistency with the district, we are consistent in the TODA. We do allow up to eight stories and 16 with bonuses. We do provide that as a multifamily residential and mixed uses are allowed in the TODA. And this is a multifamily use as is presented to you tonight. The density, we allow 150, 200 with bonuses, and this comes in at 171.3 units per acre as a multi-family residential. This will have 173 units within the 16 stories as well as numerous and a strong amenity package. The parking and loading the parking in the TODA is a very aggressive parking rate. We designed it that way when we were creating the zoning district. We wanted to create a district that promoted transit, that promoted alternatives. The parking requirements for this zoning district and this development does comply with the parking requirements. Parking requirements are 0.75 for one bedrooms and studios and one space per everything above that in number of bedrooms. And this does comply with that. And again, that is the zoning requirement. We did expect that to be a very tight zoning requirement. We did that at the time when we were zoning it as a legislative item to support transit, but also with the understanding that people are self-selecting. We've had a lot of debate about this. People don't come to a building that has very little parking if they have a lot of cars. So we know that this will happen, and this is how we see the change in South Miami's downtown. AS FAR AS MAINTAINING LOADING SPACES INDOORS WITHIN THE BUILDING, THERE IS A CIRCULATION ON THE GROUND FLOOR. WE ACTUALLY LIKE THE CIRCULATION OF THIS BECAUSE IT HAS A SORT OF PORT COCHERE AREA UNDERNEATH THE SECOND FLOOR AND THE MEZZANINE, SO A LOT OF THE LOADING AND UNLOADING WILL GO OFF THE STREET, AND THEN IT HAS A THROUGH PASSAGE FOR ALL THE SERVICES, WHICH WOULD INCLUDE THE LOADING, PARCEL DELIVERY, SOME OF THE UBER OR car sharing activities, as well as trash pickup. Um, there's a, we had, we had created a street hierarchy when we, when we designed the zoning district and the street hierarchy was based basically on the streets that are already primary streets such as sunset and 62nd Avenue. But we also looked at streets that intersected very directly, excuse me, very directly with the Metro rail station. And so we had designated 59th Avenue. and 70th Street as primary streets. This building faces to the south, so it actually, its orientation is not to the primary street. It has its back to the primary street. However, when we look at it, and this is something we'll probably have on a case-by-case basis as we go forward, we accept that as actually being the better solution because it creates a building that faces south and does a better job in many ways than if it had faced 70th Street. It also takes some of that traffic away from the Valencia condominiums and places it a little bit closer to Sunset and the downtown. So although that is a small deviation, we accept it without any need for waivers. As far as the open space, there is an open space included in this project. It's the corner of 59th and 71st. It's well situated because it is on the front facade of the building and towards, again, towards the metro rail, towards the most active corner that is in this space. The open space, excuse me, It meets the 10% requirement, and it does have a little above that, which will count towards the bonuses when we get to that section. And I should say there is public open space and private open space in this project, as we will start seeing a lot of projects. Not to get away from this one too much, but the public open space is all that we look at for the 10% requirement, and that does meet the 10% requirement. Um, as far as landscaping, we have gone through this project pretty extensively in counter trees, and it does meet the landscape requirements for that open space and for the number of street trees. A lot of it does occur in around the the edges of the building. There are spaces, 10 foot. I believe there's five and seven foot spaces on the west end of it and ten foot space on the northeast. So in other words, it has a setback and a separation to what could be there in the future and that has been landscaped. That landscaping and that open space does not count as the open space. We don't allow any open space that's not along the street. The only open space that counts is along the street and the project still complies, but they are creating that area as a green area as much as possible to increase the green coverage in the canopy in the city. The building height is at 16 stories. It is below the 201 rooftop height that's required in the district. And again, that is with bonuses. So they are assuming that the commission approves the bonuses. This is compliant with the height limits, both in terms of number of floors and in terms of the height. There is a parking mezzanine level which is below 33% of the floor below it and that is allowed and it was anticipated in the TSTD so where there is a higher first floor there can be a mezzanine that's sometimes used for parking or Additional uses that's that's allowed and it's acceptable and it's part of this project again is completely compliant with the with building height requirements As far as location and massing, the building pretty much complies. I mean, the building does comply with our requirements. It is a fairly large building, but they've done a very good job of breaking up the surfaces and the masses both vertically and horizontally. So it has this sort of horizontal podium. which is not overwhelming. They've done a good job of keeping that fairly low. We always worry about, and something we discussed when we were doing the zoning, to not have podiums that would be very high. So this project, partially through the mezzanine inclusion and keeping that, basically keeping that down. On top of that podium is a recreational or an amenity area for the residents, as well as on the rooftop, there is an amenity area for the residents. Um, with architectural standards, we again, we don't have a vernacular in the city. We do accept the design that comes to us, but we have noted that there's been both in terms of the surfaces and the colors and the form and the and the movement of the walls. There is a lot of articulation and we do accept that as being very much consistent with the code. We do are looking forward to a little bit more detail on the percentage of glazing, but we're satisfied that that will work out as we go through this process. For bonus allocations, the project is 16 floors and it has eight stories of bonus floors. The way our bonuses work is that you would provide, for example, open space. Even though there's a small amount of open space applied to the bonus, it kind of triggers the bonus. It does trigger the bonus. On the open space, it triggers the bonus at a ratio of one square foot above the 10%. Every one square foot turns into 16 square feet to be put above on the 8th through 16th levels. So the open space bonus has been applied past that. It would be all pay in lieu. So they would pay in lieu for the remainder of the open space bonus to two floors and the approximately 20,000 square feet for each floor. I'm not quoting it exactly. And then for every floor above it, there would be a pay in lieu amount for workforce housing as well as affordable housing. And then the building is proposed to be um for sustainability will not be uh applying for lead platinum or gold um and it is and i forget i forget the name i have another slide we'll we'll get to that um that will be a matter of whether we accept that as being in lieu of lead gold or Lead platinum and then the will decide how the bonus will work. But for right now as it's presented to you it would be a paying loop There is a design waiver for lot coverage and And floor heights. So we have two situations. The floor height is a little under what we normally would require for all the floors above the first floor. We find that acceptable. The rationale has been provided in the in the report. The rational basically is that we cause we always look when we look at the waivers. We look to see if there's any detriment or harm caused outside of the building. If there are any effects outside of the building. and we can find no effects outside of the building. There are still 16 floors. We're not going above it on the floors. It meets the code as far as the number of floors in the mezzanine so that it's a little bit lower for the middle floors where we don't find that that waiver would cause any adverse conditions. The other waiver is for lot coverage. There is 85% versus 80% that's required. The building, we have recommended to accept that waiver as well. We find that the building has provided as much green space as it can. It is a very small site. We're accepting that also considering where it is. It's in the most urban, what we anticipate to be the most urban part of the TODA. So we expect it to be very urban. We've looked at again all the criteria. We've looked carefully as would it cause any adverse impacts outside of the building, and we can't find anything that we could identify discernibly as an impact of that nature. So we do recommend to accept the waiver for 85% lot coverage. The traffic impact. They have provided a traffic impact statement. It has been reviewed by our engineers, and we have found it to be acceptable as well. We are in a TCEA, a transportation concurrency exception area. Still, we do look at the impact of the nearby intersections and nearby streets to see if those impacts will become unduly adverse due to the project, and the project would not cause any adverse impacts that were above 5%. So with that, that's a very quick review, but if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them.

And you're recommending it?

We recommend for it.

For the record, Javier Avignon, who was tardy with the law firm of Bills and Sundberg. I'm joined by my colleagues Nick Noto and Alex Simo, as well as the development team, including JC Freire, our architects, our landscape architect, as well as our traffic engineer from David Plummer and Associates. We are thrilled to be here before you. We obtained unanimous approval from the DRC for the project. We want to thank staff for working with us on this. It has been a road. This is the roadway in and we are anxious to move forward in demolishing that structure and bringing forth something that we think the city can be extremely proud of, consistent with the very lengthy process that the city went through on the TSTD ordinance. This, we think, really captures what the development intent is here. So I'll try not to be overly repetitive. I think Mark did an extremely thorough presentation. But that's the location. As indicated here, this is in the TODA and TSTD designations, as Mark indicated. It's within 400 feet of the South Miami Metro Rail Station. We think that's an important fact, especially when it comes to the densification of this area and the alternate modes of transportation from a parking standpoint. Our request, as Mark indicated, is for a special exception with 173 units and 16 stories. We are asking for those waivers that Mark went through as well. Next slide is the bonus floor height. I think as Mark indicated, we are seeking that eight stories of additional bonus height. Two of those stories will come through the public open space. As Mark indicated, and I think just to further put a finer point on it, uh based on the way the code classifies public open space we do have a fairly large uh side you know based on the l-shaped condition side and other side uh as it wraps around that northeast corner that doesn't actually get to count towards open space but we will be using it as open space and as active of an open space as possible so it really does get us much closer to actual compliance without the need for the waiver Mark alluded to it, but just to go exactly knee deep there, this is intended for students and that population. When we applied, the student housing legislation had not yet passed. As you guys may be aware, the city commission passed just last week the student housing legislation, and this is a property that would comply with that legislation. And so the residential land use is that which is primarily for housing enrolled and college students. There are specific designated areas. It's important to note where the commission ultimately landed within the TODA area which is the sub-district that we're in, it only applies to properties that abut Southwest 59th Place or Southwest 70th Street, right? So it's only limited to those rights of way that are directly across from the Metro Rail. Mayor Mrakas, i'm in the tsa district it's for properties that are across the right away from college or university owned property so again a limited sort of area for for this type of use the density coefficient is expressed slightly differently, and so to get to. Mayor Mrakas, The number of maximum bedrooms that are permitted. within the district, you have a coefficient of 3.5 times the number of units that are permitted. The TODA, as Mark said, is the highest density area in the city. It permits 200 dwelling units per acre, and that coefficient would allow for up to 700 bedrooms per acre. There is a minimum floor area required for each bedroom, which is 150 square feet. It's a very specific number and it includes the requirement for a bathroom within each bedroom. As Mark mentioned, there is a parking requirement of 0.5 spaces per bedroom. Where the City Commission landed on that, they kept 0.5 per bedroom in both the TSNA and the TODA, but what they allowed for in acknowledgement of the fact that multifamily parking requirements in the TODA are less then what it is in the TSNA is they allowed for an additional reduction of up to 50% of that parking requirement that the City Commission could approve based on a finding of operations being consistent with the reduction. So where that puts us with respect to student housing is the maximum number of bedrooms that will be permitted for our site would be 723 bedrooms. We're proposing 585 bedrooms. The required parking would start at the 279 on a 0.5 per bedroom basis. And with the maximum number of reductions you'd be permitted to go to 140 parking spaces in our TODA area. We are proposing to provide 194 spaces, and to be clear, what's required under the multifamily, if we were to go multifamily, is 173 parking spaces. This has been accomplished based on some additional tweaks that we've made to the plans to provide for additional lifts to accommodate the additional parking spaces. So I just want to go through our operational plan real quick. The parking stalls are specifically assigned to tenants. So this is not an open garage where all tenants have access. These are rented spaces. And so from a market perspective, when you come in to lease your bedroom, A parking spot would be either available for you to rent or it wouldn't. So you'll have to make your leasing decision based on the availability of that space. The parking garage will be gate controlled and limited to only pass holders for access. And it is a 24-7 valet operation. There's lifts involved, et cetera. So this is intended to be a 24-7 valet operation. We have and will continue to coordinate with a number of different alternate transportation providers. It's very common. I should say that the applicant here is venturing with a student housing operator that has over 100,000 units or 100,000 bedrooms on a national basis. There's a lot of data here that supports the type of arrangements that they make alternate transportation sources, as well as what the typical requirements are from an operation standpoint for parking on site. We are also in conversations with the University of Miami to expand the hurricane shuttle route. So the hurricane shuttle, I think with the critical mass of the existing Vox facility as well as ours, there's a high probability that the city, the university would consider an expansion of the hurricane to add a stop to the Metrorail station. Speaking of Metrorail, the Metrorail parking garage has over 1,800 parking spaces. There are a number of them that are committed to Vox, but there are a large amount of open spaces in that parking garage the Department of Transportation and Public Works provides for a specific monthly pass for college students. So the college pass is $56.25, and you can tack on a parking pass for $11.25. So on a monthly basis, you're talking about $67.50, which is candidly cheaper amount than what most of the parking spaces would probably be leased for for for for on site. Um so there's an incentive there and it's again directly across the street. So quite conveniently accessible. Um again just to go through our quickly our waiver requests. The next slide. So we've got the lot coverage. As I mentioned, we are asking for that waiver. Mark has articulated that the staff is favorable of that. And there are additional pockets that don't count on the code as open space, but we believe would serve that purpose. That minimum floor height that Mark indicated. And then there's also a parking stall dimension that we would reduce. The the length of the parking stall that's the minimum length of the parking stall in order to have double lifts on either side of the of the aisle, if you will, if we didn't then we wouldn't be able to install the parking lifts on both sides. With that i'm going to ask. Our teams architect to just go over briefly some of the project design and then i'll i'll come back to you guys.

Good evening. I'm Omar Morales, principal architect with Forum Group Architects. The office is 6740 Southwest 64th Court, which is literally a stone's throw from this building. I drive down 70th probably four days a week on a regular basis. We're very excited about this project. It's a very challenging site and a challenging program. I'm not going to get into a lot of the details of the program or the design unless you would like me to. I'm willing to answer any questions you might have. I just want to point out a couple of the sort of driving forces that led to the design so that you kind of understand where we came from or how we approached the design of the building. Obviously, it's a dense project. The demand for housing is intense, and the client wanted to develop a certain number of units, and the city also has a very strict limit on the footprint of the building, a 20,000 square foot maximum floor plate. We're able to sort of create this kind of two tower scheme, which is, we call it sort of a Z plan. If you look at it in floor plan, it's two towers connected by a sort of interstitial tower, much thinner, that allows us to front both of the main streets. So we're fronting the primary streets. We think that's very important in this sort of dense urban environment that we're eventually gonna be in here. So that was kind of one of the initial driving factors. The second driving factor was the idea of this open plaza on the southeast corner that would be sort of a launching point for access directly to the metro rail station. When you are standing at that corner, you literally are diagonally across from the main sort of alley between the two vox buildings that leads directly to the metro rail. We thought that was an extremely important location for an open plaza. We later found out that there was a bonus for that open plaza, and we said, great. We planned it that way all along. So that was another important factor for us. And then making sure that we were able to get good sun exposure on the pool deck, multifamily residential buildings, towers like this. A lot of them tend to suffer from shadows, shade on the swimming pool. We tried really hard to make sure that we got at least some of the solar exposure on the pool deck, and we think we were able to accomplish that. Besides that, obviously the roof deck amenities level is very important. We think that's going to be a very active amenity, and we tried to articulate the building with a level of detail and movement commensurate with the scope and the scale of the project. I won't get into the floor plans or anything. They're very straightforward, multifamily, lots of amenities. There's extensive amenities on the ground floor, as well as the rec tech level, and the rest of the building is primarily units, as you would expect. I'm willing to answer any questions you may have, and we hope we achieve your approval tonight. And by the way, for the record, I was here early today.

So we're happy to address any questions are while we know that what was filed was the multifamily project and that's obviously marks analysis is based on that. Um, we do believe we fully comply with the student housing legislation that was passed, which ultimately requires city commission approval. Um, we are intent is to is to there is absolutely zero change that would happen to the design of the building. There's only some minor modifications to address the comments actually with regards to the trash and loading area as well as what I described as some of the changes internally within the parking garage to add additional lifts to actually increase the parking that had been proposed on the current plans that you have before you from 173 to 194. parking spaces. So those are the only changes, and we'd ask to be able to make those modifications between now and commission so that we can continue to move forward and be able to demolish the roadway by February, which is our current timeline.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So before we go, unless there's some really basic questions, let's go ahead and see if there's anyone in the audience here in chambers or online that would like to make a comment. Please raise your hand. I see someone's hand raised. Marcus, I'm not sure who's. Oh, Angie Garcia. And you probably need to swear her in, right?

Ms. Garcia, can you unmute yourself? And we need to have you on camera to be sworn in.

And now I don't see the hand there anymore.

Hello, yes, I'm sorry. Yeah, my camera is not working. I would like to know where would the project start?

Hang on Miss Garcia. I need to swear you in your camera is not working.

Yeah.

Let me see if I can have the the city clerk miss Garcia. Do you have a comment or or is it a question that you have?

It's a question.

It's a question. Yes, up to the chair, if you'd like to allow her to ask the question.

Uh, there's really a time for comment, not so much questions, but if it's brief.

Yeah, I would just like to know when will the project like start.

We'll tackle that 1 happy to address that. So we're intending on pulling demolition permits to demolish the existing structures in February of this year.

Okay, perfect.

And hopefully, nearly thereafter, as soon as we are done with the construction drawings, we'll be able to start in full speed.

Right. Thanks.

Thank you very much. Any other questions or comments? If not, all right. So over to the...

I have a question. What's the reasoning for reducing the floor height to nine foot four from 10?

That's on the mezz floor and it's really just to create a more streamlined design.

So this is purely an aesthetic decision?

So again, we're dealing with a maximum height on the building. And a 10 foot height is really kind of not typical for this type of multi-story, multi-family residential project. We tend to work in modular dimensions of block and that sort of thing. So the 9 foot 4 dimension just works out at a modular level. And it's, you know, sort of more the standard in the market. Doors and windows are designed to go up to 9 foot 4, a 10 foot door. It sort of exceeds the wind pressures and the allowable design pressures become much more expensive. So there's a number of reasons why a 10 foot dimension just really doesn't work for a multi-story building.

OK. Thank you. Appreciate it.

I've got a couple of questions. I think the one that is, I understand the aesthetics of it, but from a practicality is the orientation of the building and then how the garage empties out. So I know there was a discussion about the traffic study. My question is, is the traffic study address specifically changing or comparatively changing that orientation so it's not emptying out the way maybe originally the reg would require? So this empties out to 70th or it empties out to? 70th. 70th. 71st.

71st, exactly.

So 71st is not one of the roads that Mark mentioned, which is sort of designed to be a main feeder, correct? And so while I understand it makes Valencia's side a little less crowded, that road was designed for that, correct?

When we determined primary streets, we really didn't do it by capacity. We were just trying to determine what are the, you know, all roads lead to the Metro Rail Station. So it's not that there's really a difference in capacity so much as it was just something we picked to create an orientation into the downtown.

Could you throw the picture back up of that corner of the... Is that easy to do or not?

Yeah, we'll put it... Do you want yours, Mark?

No, it doesn't matter to me.

Ideally, it's the one with Mark's blue lines, but, you know, whatever.

There you go.

So when looking at this picture, the garage is going to empty to 70th Street or 71st? 71st.

71st.

So that'll also be the main facade of the building, correct? Correct.

Well, they're both treated as, you know, facades, right? So, I mean, I think when you... And then more like aesthetics.

One won't look like the back of the building versus the other.

No, that's not the intent at all.

Okay. All right. And so it'll empty on to 71st. Correct. Which, again, it doesn't have a direct flow out to Dixie Highway. I mean, as you know, in South Miami, one of the big concerns is traffic. And so if you emptied onto 70th, you had a straight shot down to Dixie Highway in that light, which is no prize, by the way. And then the other main line there is the one that's coming up on 59th Place. And really from that particular location, you can only empty going west, correct? That's a must-turn right intersection there at that blue line of sunset and 59th Place. So I'm less concerned about that but you lose a straight shot out to Dixie coming out of the building with the orientation you have right now and I'm just, does the traffic study kind of address that that's

I'm not a traffic engineer, but the way I look at it from an architectural perspective is that what we're doing is we're providing additional stacking for cars coming out of the building. In other words, trying to make that right turn on 70th Street, and like I said, I know the road very well.

Yeah.

That road backs up. If we had an exit ramp with 300 cars trying to exit onto 70th and make that right turn with an intersection right there-

backed in the garage.

You'd be backed into the garage all day. Yeah. So by actually exiting south, it allows you to either go west, go east, come around, get to that same intersection and make a right, or you can go south, you know, into the downtown.

So it gives you more choices maybe.

It gives you a lot more stacking space and... Queuing. Yeah.

Let you go right or left as you come out fairly easily. Any idea how many parking spaces Valencia has?

Valencia? No, but I mean, it's a traditional multifamily, so it would have had whatever was required prior to the modification. Yeah, I don't know.

I'm just curious, because I never see that causing a problem. I've been around that area a lot.

Yeah, I mean, that... and that area has a quite a bit and we had a conversation um with your parking director as well as part of the part of this large-scale process and there are a number quite a number of available on street parking spaces so one of the one of the one of the data points and one of the conversations that will be ongoing is whether there's an ability to designate Um, this area as a residential zone, which would allow additional residents to, you know, to purchase monthly passes for on site for on street parking.

Okay. And my last question, I think, uh, is, is there a way to get to the metro rail station? where you're actually covered. I notice you have arcades to your, at least to the south side, to where somebody can get there on the occasional rainy day.

We'd have to cross 59.

Got that. I'm okay with that. That's the nature of corners. But, you know, from the elements and the sun, is that something that in the Vox building that I can't remember how theirs is set up?

I don't know. They can go through there. Yeah.

I can't remember what their sides are, though.

But yeah, yeah.

Okay, so there's a way to do it's probably not gonna end up it's not right. Okay, that's it for my questions. Other questions or comments from the planning board?

Mr. Guerrero. Yeah, got to get the button to work. No, so I appreciate the presentation. And through the city attorney, my understanding is most of this is as right, other than the ceiling height and the other changes they requested? Yeah, the three waivers. Right. So I don't see really a big complex presentation. I think it's pretty straightforward. and I think they presented it well. I just would say that you didn't include MetroConnect or the new air taxis that are coming in. You should find a way to include that.

Any other comments or questions?

I got one.

Daniel?

Yeah, just a comment. I know you got to look at these things individually.

Can you speak up or get closer to your mic?

And I have it all the way up. Just basically, I know we have to look at these things individually, but with everything just being a two-way street here, right, 70th, 59th, We do have a couple of big developments going up with related in front of us. So me just a block away, um, in front of this building to the south, there's active construction, just the amount of traffic. I mean, uh, med square going up now on 62nd as well. Um, man, it's just, it seems like a lot of cars happening real fast on these two, two, two lane, uh, streets, you know,

Mayor Mrakas, Anyone make a comment or I mean we're you know, we have a full traffic impact analysis it's been reviewed by the city and also by Miami dade county traffic division we we understand the general sentiment, but you know it does it does meet it does meet the standards.

A question for Mark is, when the traffic study was done, does it anticipate these other projects that have been approved but not yet developed within that whole thing? Kind of speaking to Daniel's...

It would only include, excuse me, committed projects. So some of those you're mentioning would be out of that analysis.

But something that was approved and...

Hang on, the traffic engineer may be able to- There you go.

In addition to that, we do add a growth rate to account for any development that will come into this.

Even our growth rate, which seems out of control, whatever.

And just some additional context, under the TSTD rules, there are dedications that are required, and they are required to provide an additional five feet on the north and the south sides of the property. Yeah, thank you for reminding me.

Christina, did you have a question?

No, I looked up Valencia about your question and it says that their website says there's 301 residences and there is 1 reserve space for every unit.

Yeah.

So. I think that's the information.

I mean, I just, again, I'm around that area a lot, and I realize there's a fair amount of cars coming and going, but I've not seen them stacked up that far back. So anyway, any other questions or comments from the board? If not, do we have a motion?

This board's normally very chatty.

The silence makes me think there's room for more discussion.

I don't know if it says room for more discussion or understanding the difference in use. Christine's specific point of Valencia, it's a different product, so you create a different plan when you develop it. I think that it's presented as right. It really doesn't have a big variation to what's here, what's allowed, what's approved. It doesn't really deviate from the other codes that were recently approved by the commission. So I don't know what the hesitation would be. I mean, does the board wanna have further discussion

Look, if I was allowed to motion it, I would, but I'm not allowed to, correct?

No, you are.

What do we decide on that?

No, the Robert's Rules doesn't allow it. I make a motion. I make a motion. To?

Oh, to approve it as presented. I'll second. All right, any further discussion? All right, we'll go down to roll call.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Daniel? Yes. Christina, are you yes?

Okay.

Thank you all. Thanks very much, guys. You're welcome. Thank you. Thanks for your patience.

Mr. Chair, if I could take a liberty, could I ask for a short recess?

Yes. Thank you. We're going to take just a quick break here, and we'll go back at item number four.

So item number four is PB-2025-015, an ordinance of the mayor and city commission of the city of South Miami, Florida, amending section 20-2.3 definition, section 20-3.5 dimension requirements, 20-3.6 supplemental regulations, and 20-4.5.1 tree protection to revise regulations relating to single family development. Providing for corrections, severability, conflicts, implementation, and an effective date. And this item will be handed by Mr. Alvarez.

Okay.

Okay. No, I lost it. Okay. We have for you a legislative item is for changes in the single family regulations. It's comprised of five parts moving throughout the code. This was brought to us by it was a discussion item for the commission and they brought forward these suggested changes that the staff would look into and we are presenting it tonight for your approval. There are five parts the first and I'm going to go through each one separately what the first one would be to modify the calculation of building floor area To also modify the building floor area or if they are amounts for single-family residential to number three increase the maximum height of single-family homes for provide for privacy walls, we'll talk more about what that means and an administrative adjust and Providing for administrative adjustments where we, to preserve a tree, need to change the setback requirements on a building, a single family residential building. So the first is about floor area. This would be to remove enclosed terraces, breezeways, and porches from counting into the FAR. So in other words, an enclosed porch would still, I'm sorry, I said that the wrong way. We right now count enclosed porches, meaning there's a roof or a canopy over it. An open porch would have no roof or canopy over it. It doesn't matter that it's open to the side. We'd make the distinction based on what's over you. So those will be removed from the counting of FAR. So the FAR will become just what's inside of the building and surrounded by walls. And again, in a lot of codes these, I wouldn't say mostly, but there are some codes that include them in other cities. There are a lot of cities that don't include porches into the FAR. they would still remain part of the building coverage calculation. So in other words, they're not part of the floor area ratio, first and second floor, but they are part of the coverage, what it covers on the ground. Number two is about dimensional requirements, and it's about FAR more specifically. So this is to change the maximum FAR for single-family homes. In the lot sizes on the table, there's a table for this requirement in the code. It's section 20-2.5. And it would really relate to the lot sizes ranging from 6,000 square feet to 15,000. So I don't want to say it affects the RS2 and RS3 districts, but it affects those sizes of lots. And it is focused more or less on the RS2 and RS3 sized lots. So it would be for the most prevalent lots within the city. And the idea would be to change, you have the table in front of you for the exact changes, but basically it bumps everything up to three or four percent greater FAR coverage for those size lots to allow for a larger home, basically. We're not opposed to this. We recognize that the market is moving towards larger homes. We see this all the time. There's probably some of the greatest struggles with some of the applications have to do with pervious area, impervious area, and FAR. It's just we have the property here has become high value. And there's a desire to put a larger home on these properties. And staff does recommend to look at this, although we would perhaps look at it more comprehensively. But the basic idea is sound. We would welcome you recommending us to look at it again for the exact numbers and maybe extend it a little bit more. But the concept is a good concept, and we have received this from the Commission in this fashion. Building coverage. Again, the net lot areas would be, this is a dimensional requirement. Um, we've discussed this. This was a recommendation to count building coverage as the area inside the walls. In other words, right now, when we get an application, we look at the exterior walls of the building, and that's our building coverage, including the porches and those kinds of surfaces. Staff is not comfortable with this one at all because it's very complicated. We would probably reject a lot of site plans that come in because most architects are used to looking from the exterior walls. We've had a discussion about it just before this meeting and we recommend that we may do instead is um change the building coverage to a higher percentage, and keep the method that we use for calculating that present that that building coverage the same as it is now. And this way we we can anticipate a lot of things coming in, and we were just going to send them back to the architects and say, No, you have to do this. And by the way, don't include the ten inches of wall. So we will look for, if you wish to recommend us to look at the numerical values instead, we would do that. I can tell you what this would come out to on a, let's say a 2,000 square foot rectangular floor plate, is something around 7.5% difference. In other words, by moving the calculation into the interior of the walls. So we're probably looking at that kind of difference if we were going to look at it as changing the numbers instead of changing the method. I'm going to go through these, and I think there'll, I'm sure, be some questions. The other item, number three, is about building height. The commission had asked us to look at this as well. Right now, we have a requirement for 25 feet of building height for single family. That's measured from the lowest or the

Well, let's see if we put the PowerPoint back up and see if when Mark changes slides, if Christine and Daniel can see it.

Right now it's just black. We did see the PowerPoint, but now it's just a black screen.

Yeah, I think I think our cameras are out for the moment. There we go. We're back on.

Yeah, we see you.

Great. Good job, Marcus.

Do we think we're recording now, Marcus?

The top right shows recording.

I see a hand up down at the bottom right. Christina, you still can't see the PowerPoint?

We don't have it. It's not up yet. All right. Okay. Let's try putting it back up and see if they can see it. And if they can see it, we can... Okay, we're working again.

Continue.

Can you see it now, Christina? Yeah. Okay, perfect.

Fire away.

We're good? Okay, one more night.

It's like an instant replay timeout.

But we can start. I can log in while you guys are doing that. How much is reported?

OK. Mr. Chair, should I continue? So this is to raise the maximum height from 25 to 30 feet. It will be measured the same way. It will be the center of a pitched roof, the medium point between the peak and the eave. There's nothing changed in the methodology. This would be for all single-family homes in all single-family residential districts, wealth one-story and two-story buildings. We're just changing the height, adding five feet. And the reason for doing this is that as we go more and more to the concern that we measure from grade, but as finish floor elevations raise, whether it's because of firm maps changing or insurance purposes, more and more buildings are being built. little higher than grade so we're trying to provide some relief that we could still fit in a Comfortable and marketable two floors in that without having to change our method at this time So if that increase in grit and you know, I can say my question of that increase in grade from like zero to five feet or whatever is

is caused by statute or whatever, changing in flood insurance requirements, et cetera, that's one thing and I get it, but if somebody just wants a taller house and decides they wanna build it up aesthetically, would this permit that as well?

This would still permit that.

Okay. So we're essentially permitting 30 foot heights off of where the thing sits.

Right, and on the flip side of it, and I've seen this in some places where to satisfy a requirement, single family lots get sort of mounded up a little bit. They raise the grade, which also becomes very, actually very ugly after a while when there's a number of them. So there's two edges to the sword, but this is the simplest way to do it. And it's not out of line with what is being done elsewhere. And it's still in line, I think, with what we have in the rest of the city. We have town homes when we start building them at 40 feet. So everything gets a little higher and we can just allow for some free board. So that is the purpose of this. Um, yard encroachment. So there is, we were part of the discussion from the commission was for something called privacy walls, which has now been defined as part of what's proposed for the code and a privacy wall is This is particularly for properties that are on the corners where there's a side that's facing a street. We have had a lot of debates over time about our fence requirements of six foot and after four feet it has to be permeable and 60%. There's a lot of concerns about privacy. This is a concept that would be inside of that, at least five feet inside of the property line. There could be a privacy wall that's attached to the house, and the privacy wall could be six feet, and the privacy wall will be no longer than 50% of the wall of the house that it's in front of. So this is a solution. to the extent that it's desirable and works for certain lots. Some lots may not have enough room. But this is a way to have privacy without raising the fence heights and preserving the look on the street, but still allowing the residents, the owner, to have some privacy. It's a new item. And that's the way that we've never had privacy walls before as a regulated item. So this would be something that's new. And this is how we would regulate it. And we look forward to your comments on that. Lastly, this was motivated by a particular property that is a very large canopy tree. But to develop that property, it's a fairly small property, the setbacks would have essentially created a situation where we would have to trim or remove the tree. the importance of trees, particularly specimen trees, particularly trees that might become... What's the word that we had for... heritage trees. So we wanted to have some relief that if somebody was developing a property, there was a very large tree there, and they needed to move the setbacks around to allow for the tree to stay there without being moved, they could do that. That would be an administrative process. It would be administratively decided by the director of development. However, it would also have to go to the DRB for their recommendations on the same before the new home was approved. So it's designed to basically streamline a process where we don't lose trees and we provide some relief to somebody who wants to build a lot, particularly a small lot, and preserve a large canopy tree.

Those are the five items. The trade-off to that would be correct. If you allow them to move because of the tree, you face the fact that they encroach on setbacks in the back and on the sides, right? Correct. And they're closer to their neighbors, and their neighbors were hoping they would be close to them.

It's something that will be administratively decided by the development services director and That the director would take all that into account We're not providing specific rules on it right now because every situation will be different And again, I would have to go to DRB to me just based exactly on what you said every situation be different Do we need to change?

the ordinance or should they tackle that as an exception request and

We would have to do it as a variance for setbacks.

Unless you tell me this is just something that crops every week, which I would hope it does not because it certainly would change the dynamic. Why not just approach it as a variance request?

This came about with the prospect of an owner wanting to preserve a tree and the city wanting the tree to be preserved. but it being, you know, in the way the alternative was to go through a variance process, which takes several months, costs a fair amount of money. This was trying to streamline that process a little bit easier. There may be ways, if you're uncomfortable with as far as it goes, there may be ways to constrain how far it goes, perhaps requiring that the proponent, the owner, Uh, show how much space the tree is taking up. Um, and maybe that's what they get credit for in the setback area. So it's not a free for all. Um, but you know, we, we tried to make it as flexible as possible to allow for all kinds of designs. If the trees right in the middle of the property, let's say maybe they want to build around it, you know, that kind of thing. We've certainly seen that in other cities.

All right. So before we go further in our conversation, do we have anyone who wants to comment on it publicly in the audience or online? Mr. Gill?

Good evening, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. My name is Gus Gill. I'm a builder, developer in the city. I'm a resident of the city of South Miami. This is something that we've had conversations with multiple architects. The idea about these changes is really more for allowing better design. Um, so on the height situation, for example, um, the idea was to get a little bit of, you know, leave a little bit of the thing of the height because we're ending up with smaller second floors and, you know, a little taller first floors. The house doesn't look right, so from a design perspective, it doesn't look good. As Mark mentioned, right now we're dealing with elevations that a lot of homes are being built a little taller. And the idea of having a little bit of wiggle room there will make for a better design. On the porches and cover areas, that also allows you, a perfect example is if you're gonna tie somebody down on an FAR, on a second floor. A lot of homes that you've seen now have a front porch and it has a second porch on the second floor. So if you, which makes for a very pretty design, if you adding that to the FAR, then you're really restricting the size of the home of what they can do. So you're penalizing somebody for trying to do some nice architecture. So that's the concept behind these small changes that we're talking about. The same thing about the FAR. We're not increasing the percolation area. We're not touching none of that stuff. That's not the idea. It's not about growing the footprint of the home. It's about just better design, having a little bit more Uh, I believe if I'm mistaken when we talk mark, I think we're talking about 200 square feet in total on a 10,000 square foot lot. So it's not great, you know, great changes that might even like even visually impact anybody that you're not. You might not even notice when you drive in front of this home, but it does have a helps a lot of the homeowners that are trying. to get, for example, if you have a two-car, instead of having a one-car garage, maybe you can end up with a two-car garage, and you're not restricting somebody from that design. So that's pretty much the concept overall. Everything else, we had some feedback from different architects that are dealing more with the residential here, and I think that's where these ideas came from, from just restrictions and challenges that they've been having. and that's the idea for this. So I don't want to take any more of your time, but I just wanted you to understand where this is coming from.

Got it. Thank you. So before we go to more discussion amongst the board, are you looking for an approval on this thing, Marcus?

I would like an approval. I was trying to catch Gus's attention. If you could please sign in on the signing sheet, that's all.

What's that? I want to, before we go to public, well, I think public comment is over.

Yeah, he was the only one that I see available. And there was nobody online.

Everybody there is staff, is either staff or a board member.

So we are seeking a recommendation item so that we can forward it to the city commission.

If there are parts of this that are more palatable than others, if you want to split your recommendation, we can certainly do that.

Okay. So questions or comments from the planning board?

Yeah, I have a question, and I think I understand most of it, but in the increase of the FAR, we're saying we're not going to affect permeable and impermeable, and I'd like to better understand what is it we're trading one thing for another to make that work, or how are we juggling the two? And then I have a follow-up comment.

To increase FAR without increasing the building coverage, it would essentially come down to we're putting a little more on the second floor. A little more on the? Second floor. Okay. Basically, what it's going to come down to. Okay. The way it's presented right now with the interior, we're going to try to... at least what we want to do with staff is we want to try to interpret that and use it as just a straight number. We will, before this goes to commission, go through all the numbers. I have some concerns that we want to make sure that when we do the math, the algebra for anything, that we have a building coverage and an FAR and an impervious area and a pervious area that all sort of come together and we don't have gaps or overlaps. But we will check that. Honestly, that hasn't been done thoroughly before we got to this point, but we'll make sure that that all works.

Okay. The reason I ask is I figured that's where you're heading with it, and I just want to make sure that you consider that, which I think is a great change, because I think it's a mistake the way it was written before, is that the eaves or overhangs were being calculated as impermeable, and I think that's kind of silly, because if you have two feet of grass below an overhang. It's going to absorb. It's going to percolate. So that should definitely be addressed. So I'm all in favor of that. I'm definitely in favor of the paint-to-paint calculation of the FAR. I would make that change with technology today. If the architect is still drawing in pencil, he might have trouble. But with the AutoCAD and everything else, they can definitely move that in the right direction. So I don't have a problem with the paint-to-paint calculation on that process. The other question was, you had the, it was the FAR, oh, the height. I would be in favor of that. I think it creates a better opportunity for scaling, and I don't think you're really being imposing on anyone, so I think the height issues. The privacy wall, I still haven't been able to wrap my head around that. If anybody could give us more detail on that, I would love that, yeah.

I'm sorry that I missed that one. So the idea of the privacy wall is, for example, we're doing a lot of outdoor showers. That's one. The other one is equipment, pool equipment. Generator. So this is the interesting thing. I can actually put a wall, as long as it doesn't touch the house by six inches. it's not considered a privacy wall. So at the end of the day, all we're trying to do is making sure that we can attach the wall. If I have air conditioners on a corner and I want to put a wall on it, we're actually restricting the height as well. So it's not like you can just do an eight-foot wall. So that's more the idea. It's more about because what happens if I attach it to the house, now that wall can't be in the setback, which makes no sense because then you have to scoot the house. for those three, four, five feet. So that's the idea about the . That's pretty simple.

Thank you for the clarification. That absolutely makes sense. And then the last item was the trees. I think the intention is to streamline the process and believe in our staff and our development department to be able to make the right decisions on their own. I echo Chairman's concern of case by case, but that would be my only comment on that. I'm not really taking a position on it, but I just wanted to voice that. Thank you.

There's also the aspect that recognizing the cost of a variance. We generally, especially in the last few years, really try to push to make it easier to save trees. So recognizing that the variance is a long process and a costly process, this was one of the ideas behind it to just try to streamline that. And we do have to trust our staff to do what's correct and balance it.

I guess I just don't understand the problem well enough. To protect a tree that would otherwise be affected by the setback, you have to bring the building further away from the property line, right, to protect the tree. So are we saying that we're gonna offset that with being able to encroach in another setback so as not to penalize The builder? Is that the idea?

That's the basic concept, that if it's on a small lot and there's a tree, a very large specimen tree with a lot of canopy, that we can move the house.

In one direction or the other. In one direction or the other, into the yard. To give the property owner the ability to get that space back. Correct.

Without public comment of the neighbor, though, neighbors could be impacted by moving into the setback.

And that may be something that we want to add. If you find there's something that you want to recommend, you may add a process to that. I've never, you know, I'll say my own personal opinion from being planning director, there's a lot of waiver processes that require signatures of the neighbors. Never too crazy about that because neighbors change, but that's one possibility.

But I feel like we're solving a problem for which there's already a solution, however imperfect it may be. But also, what happens if A builder builds a home, takes advantage of this because there's a tree in the way and they encroach into what otherwise would be a setback for them. And then six months later the tree mysteriously dies and now their house is right up against somebody else's and there's no benefit to the city or anybody else because the tree's gone.

I think two things. One is that with this ordinance, there's a part, and I didn't read it before, that would require a covenant of the property owner to maintain that tree for a period of not less than 10 years.

Sure, but under- We're talking mysterious now. But with what enforcement or what restrictions? Because, yeah, I can maintain the tree, but if it- you know, dies, I did what I could, but it's dead. Now I get the benefit of whatever I wanted to do and I don't have the burden of caring for this tree or, you know, I got whatever I needed out of that situation.

And the other part would be the balancing. So I don't think we would ever move a property, a house all the way up to, you know, it's a balance.

But those setbacks are there presumably for a reason.

Through the chair, I think through the years serving on this board and others, one of the things that I've always said is If we want to find a real way of encouraging developers and homeowners that are building their homes to protect trees, we have to find a way to give them another benefit. Because if not, you're concerned about the mysterious disappearance. It's happening before the house builds. We're already dealing with that problem. And I like the idea of thinking outside of the box and finding solutions to encourage maintaining our canopy. I also worry a little bit about the overreach, but I would think, as you said, and how do we work through that, is that they're not going to say the setback is now zero. Is there still going to be something that's functional? But I do like the idea, you're coming up with an idea of thinking outside of the box of how do we protect our tree canopy by giving another benefit.

Well, I 100% agree with you in that there should be solutions for that. But in this particular case, that does impose, I don't know what the right word is, a hardship or an imposition on your neighbor who has no control over whether this is happening or not. So what's the benefit to them? Why are they paying for that? The tree's not in their yard.

Yeah, it's a question of how would the city staff manage that conversation, right, in that process? I mean, look, right now, we passed an ordinance where you can't have a boat in your front yard, but unless you're grandfathered in, so is that a hardship or is it, you know?

Well, no, because that wasn't a burden before. Now, you know, it would only be a burden. moving forward. But in this case, that's a semi-permanent solution to a problem that does affect somebody else. To what degree is debatable, but it does.

I like that we're having the discussion, though. I think it's a good thing. It's a healthy discussion. I don't know if I'm prepared to make a recommendation today on it.

In terms of the privacy wall, and again, forgive my ignorance, but this doesn't allow anybody to build a privacy wall in the front of their house, does it?

No, it's side and rear.

Okay.

And you're going on the assumption that, because I don't think it states it specifically, but nobody's going to go and put a roof on their privacy wall and turn it into a cubby or something. Correct. That would be prohibited.

It's not explicitly prohibited, but we could add that.

Actually, that's a great idea. It has to be open air.

I was thinking the six-inch difference there, that sort of makes it prohibited right there because why do it? But once it's attached...

Yeah, we could add that.

Yeah, I think we should.

Yeah, that's a great point.

Christina or Daniel, any other comments or questions?

Not on my end.

All right. Christina, do you have a comment?

No, I was just trying. I'm not very good at math, hence why I'm a lawyer and not a mathematician. But I was just trying to figure out. I have no objection. I think it's great if people have more ability to, you know, expand their houses, put additions, you know, and whatever it is that we're trying to do to facilitate homeowners, you know, bettering their property. But I just was trying to figure out with the, is it the FAR, that's the acronym, and the impervious percentage. I see here the chart and I was just confused why some of these numbers change and others don't. Maybe I just missed something. The maximum floor area. I guess I'm having trouble understanding the correlation between that and because people are mentioning the impermeability coverage.

And I mentioned that before we go to Commission we're going to check those things but the Impervious the impervious area would be everything that's not on the ground covered by cement as a percent of the lot Cement or a hard surface so wherever the water soaks through Building coverage is where the floor of the building actually so if you looked at it from overhead and what you would see blocked out from the lot that's not the yards. Impervious coverage would be that building plus the driveway and walkways and so forth. And then FAR allows, it's the floor area that includes the second floor. And you're correct, all those numbers have to come together, otherwise we have problems in permitting. And we will make sure of that. I'm not sure that that's quite there yet on those tables.

And just to kind of expand on the math itself, the 0.02 that all of these or most of these changed are designed to fall anywhere from at the 6,000 square foot lot level, it's about a change of 120 square feet total, up to the 15,000 square foot lot, which is about a 300 square foot difference. That's what it comes out to.

The increase, I think the question was coming before, most of the increase would happen on the second floor if you're constrained on the first floor, which we don't, again, this has been done in the past for a reason, so that we have variation, so we don't want blocks, sort of salt blocks for houses. There are houses that are built that way, But as a city, we've decided that we want a certain form and look. So typically, the FAR is not exactly double of the coverage of the building. And that's to allow for that to happen. So you have a balcony or whatever on the second floor, some kind of variation. This would just allow... This would cut into that variation and allow the architects a little more flexibility to design something that still looks very good, but it allows for a little more room on the second floor. But the first floor coverage remains the same? Sorry? The first floor coverage remains the same? For the FAR, yes. And that's what I said. We're going to go through that line by line and make sure everything works.

So can I make a suggestion here? Can we tackle these as four separate items? Because I don't think we're there on all of them. Correct. Would that be all right?

I think it's favorable.

And so my suggestion would be is on, and somebody can make a motion or whatever, but any of the further discussion?

I just don't know through the city attorney, do we need to make a motion that's bifurcated or do we just... make a very complicated motion separating it.

You know what? I think it's better if we take separate, let's do separate measures. Okay. That way you can break it up.

Yeah, but we don't need a motion. We don't need a motion to separate, is what I'm asking. No, no, no, just by affirmation.

Okay. Technically. Where you guys are at.

On the first one, and anyways, welcome to tweak this. I think it sounds like we're generally all okay with this as long as the ratios and the FAR and the pervious, impervious stuff all makes sense and matches up. The intent is clearly to do what Mr. Gill described, which is to sort of make it so there's proportionality at the top of these things as they get built. But that needs some work. So subject.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I have a question about that. Are we in effect trading porch space for interior space?

No.

By keeping the impervious the same and the first floor FAR the same?

We are not including port space as part of that calculation, so we would be...

Whereas previously you were. Correct. So we are trading port space for interior space.

Yeah, that's the way to put it.

I'm not against or in favor, but I think it's important to point that out. That is a factor.

So how does the porch space trade off, though, for interior space, really?

Because they're no longer counting that porch. It's not part of FAR. It's still part of coverage, though.

But it's still impervious.

It's still impervious, which I care about most. Yeah, so the footprint overall is the same, but now you're expanding the building.

I think of FAR as being more about the scale, very specifically, whereas the footprint and, I'm sorry, the building coverage and the impervious is more of an environmental issue.

I think you're also not penalizing a builder for building a bigger porch.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'd still be limited in the size.

Still limited by the building coverage.

Yeah. Yeah. Well.

Right. In other words, if you build a terrace on the second floor a little bit larger, it's not covering the ground.

Sure.

So you could have grass.

But on the first floor, right now, they're counting a covered porch as part of the FAR, and they're suggesting that they no longer will. So your footprint overall would be limited by the impervious, but you can make the house closer to those edges. You can push it out further because you're no longer counting the porch as part of the floor area.

But it does count as a lot of coverage. Right. Right.

You're protecting the house bigger and the porch. But in order to make the house bigger on the same footprint, you have to give up that porch space. So you're going to end up with bigger houses with smaller porches and patios.

Or think about it as a reverse wedding cake. We would have the top be bigger.

Right.

Yeah. which you're not affecting impervious.

No, no, no, at all. I just think architecture, you're going to end up with people with less porches, less patio, more house. I think, in my opinion, it's going to end up being blockier, which...

I don't know. I don't know that I see it that way. But do we feel like... That's how I was seeing it, too.

That's why I was kind of confused. I imagine, like, these blocked homes.

So we could table this part of the item. I mean, this has got... We came into this, you telling us, that it wasn't fully baked. And that's why I was asking about whether we were looking for a recommendation or approval. I think in general we understand some of what you're trying to do, but not wholly what the other implications could be or the impacts could be. So for this one, I would make a motion you come back. We can either make a motion or we can just table it. But come back with more information on this.

Through the chair, that's one of the items that I actually feel the most comfortable with. I don't know if it's because it's my world, but I actually think that this is one that makes most sense. As long as they're going to go back and tie the loose ends on the, overhangs, making sure that we're not, as long as we're not affecting the pervious coverage that we've already, you know, modified appropriately, I'm totally comfortable with the FAR. I don't think it's a concern. But that's my position. I would feel comfortable making that motion.

So let me just give you a scenario. The thing is that the second floor is usually smaller than the first floor. So all we're asking by not counting a porch on the second floor is that the area upstairs is a little bigger. It's not going to be boxy, still not boxy. We still have requirements on a two-story house where the setbacks are greater on the second floor than if it was a two-story house. You have to push the second floor in. So we kind of actually have a wedding cake design right now. And we're not asking to change that. We're just making the top tier bigger. And again, these are like minimum stuff. Like a porch can be the width of the house, like the front porches that you probably see around the neighborhood where you see one downstairs, one upstairs. Sure. So that person, because they did that second floor, they had to reduce the inside of their home. So they might have had half of a bedroom less inside. So that's what I mean. No, I get the second floor part, 100%. This is not like, we're not trying to make anything big, and we're not trying to make anything boxy either. On the contrary, we're trying to make it more appealing.

So can we make this, can we specify that what we're talking about from a porch perspective is on the ground floor, it doesn't reduce. On the top floor, it does. So we're calling both porches top and bottom, which I think is where we're getting sort of crossways here with wedding cakes and reverse wedding cakes. If the bottom porch remains as it has been, which is the defining boundary of the house and counts in the FAR and everything else. And then a porch upstairs potentially could have what we're talking about. It could be a balcony, by the way. It's called a balcony. Just semantically change it.

And it's, for example, it's like somebody says, well, if you add a balcony, they're going to count it. So you tell the homeowner says, well, you know what? Why am I going to be penalized to make my house, put a balcony in the front, two balconies in the front? I prefer a closet. Well, now I have to now reduce the size of my bedrooms. So that's the idea. Again, like you said, this is not impacting the ground floor, the coverage area, the percolation area. No, we get that.

It's a matter of how it's written. But through the chair, what I was going to say is if we overcomplicate it with words, I'm just saying if they're not affecting the lot coverage, I'm not too worried what happens to their porch or doesn't happen to their porch. As long as they don't affect the lot coverage, I'm good with that because of the percolation.

Porches, floor to room.

Yeah, whatever it is. As long as it's not covering more.

If you want to make a motion, you're feel free. I would table it for clarification.

City Attorney, is there a better way to create the comfort level amongst the board to how this progressed, because I think it's a great idea. As we have this multi-generational living, as we have the world evolving and things changing, I think this is actually a really great way of making houses more functional and bringing them into the modern day. You know, and I appreciate the concerns, you know, as long as we're meeting the environmental portion of the percolation and the lot coverage. How can we create that comfort amongst our board?

So I understand. I mean, some of the concerns are conflicting, right? Like some. We've got a proposal before you that has a definition. So let's just take the definition. Let's take one piece by piece. The definition proposes to currently says that a covered porch counts as floor area. You're really only going to have a covered porch. I mean, you could conceivably have an awning or something on the second floor, but really we're talking about the first floor where the building comes out before it, right? That, by and large... only going to be impactful on the front side because there is no wedding cake on the front side. It's 25 feet setback on the first floor, 25 feet setback on the second floor.

It's a room like any other room. Correct. It's called a floater room 90% of the time. My issue is we need to get away from rewriting these things in the middle of the night. is come back to us with language that works, that makes it really clear. I don't disagree with Danny here that functionally, I like what we're talking about doing, but I wanted to say that. And I don't want to give it back to you where it gets rewritten again and it's not what we talked about. So I'd like to see it before it goes to that point. Does anybody feel that they want to push forward? And Danny can make a motion, and we'll see if it flies.

I mean, listen, it's the will of the board, right? I don't want to, you know, if the majority of the board's not comfortable with what we're hearing, I just, I see it very clearly in my head. So it makes sense to me. But if I'm the only one, then so be it. I don't know if anybody's with me. Not to quote a movie, but.

I mean, Danny, I'm a contractor as well. I see it clear as well. I agree with you 100%. I mean, if you want to just table it so that the math is a little tighter, that's fine.

But I mean, I see- I don't think it's just the math. Look, I'm not trying to stifle it. If you want to make a motion, that's the democratic process. Go ahead and do it, and we may get it through.

I would make the motion as presented because basically you're saying they're going to tie up the loose ends, right? So, you know, I would make the motion with board and staff comments.

Were they going to, sorry to interrupt, weren't they going to make some changes? Didn't you say you have an issue with the part of the exterior walls or the interior wall?

So that's a loose ends and that they said they were going to tie up. So I would make the motion with board and staff comments because that's one of the comments.

All right. So we have a motion. Is that a motion for the entire ordinance or just the?

We agreed to break it up, right? Just the FAR.

Correct. The FAR and the building coverage. Yes.

20-3.3. 20-2.3. 20-2.3, I'm sorry. Do we have a second?

Second.

All those in favor? No. Christina?

No.

Danny?

Yes.

Daniel?

Yes.

And I vote no. all right so next one up but again understand the minutes need to reflect this i don't love our streamlined minutes but that we know there's something there yeah invite you to have a question for you

Does this no mean do we, it's a hard no, or do we come back with? Absolutely, that's what I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, we expect to come back. We wanted to come back written. Come back with all the numbers. We wanted to come back written clearly. Okay. With whatever's necessary to make it clear what we're doing, and we're not against it.

Okay, so it's a matter of have them tie all the numbers together. That's right. Everything matches. That's right. 100%. Present to you. Yeah. But you're not opposed to the idea.

Correct. No, no, no, not at all.

Not at all. So it's the will of this board then to table that item as opposed to making a recommendation on that item, on that particular.

Well, that ship has sailed. It's already gone through and gotten rejected.

Right. But is that a recommendation of denial on that? Or is that a... Oh, I see. Yeah.

Or is there a countervailing... We've always handled it as a separate motion. Right. And so it is not the will of the board to deny it with prejudice. We want to see it again.

You want to see it again. We do. How do you do that? Procedurally. A motion to sever that piece. Well, actually, why don't we take all of the... Let's take all of the votes and then we'll have... We may take one or two additional votes. Let me just track what's happening here.

That's fine. Mechanically, this has been a little bit of a moving target. All right. So the second one up is the dimensional requirements on the height. Because I didn't phrase it right the last time. The 30 feet is from the, what's the right terminology, the base? You were talking about from the land stand? From grade. So 30 feet from the roof down to the grade. The grade is on the edges of the property, not the center where they built it up. So that just keeps going up by five feet and then 10 feet and whatever, right? Right. Correct. Okay. It is from grade, right?

It would be the average of that lot before they start doing anything.

Yeah, okay. I just don't want somebody to be able to build a hill in South Miami and then go up 30 feet. I mean, that's just, you know, we're going to... I know we're laughing, but you read about bullshit stuff like this all the time. All right, so do we have a motion on 20-3.5... I'll make a motion. Do we have a second?

Is that a motion to approve it? Correct. Okay. Is there a second?

I second.

Any further discussion? All those in favor? Yes.

Yes.

Christina?

Yes.

Danny? You're either on, yeah. Okay, and yes, so. So for that one, was it 5-0?

5-0. Oh, yes, okay.

Yep. 20-3.6, which was the discussion about supplemental regulation, and this is relative to the privacy wall. Is that right? Yes. We have a motion on this one. We have much discussion.

Chairman, it's a motion with a comment for the roof, right?

What's that?

It would add that comment for the roof. He made a motion.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You added, correct, a motion with a comment that you can't roof it. I'll second that. Any further discussion? If not, all those in favor? Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

And last but not least, the tree. A tree deal. I'm not sure where we are on this one. We like trees. Does anybody have a motion, suggestion on how to structure this differently?

Should this be tabled also?

Maybe my suggestion is to go back and come up with something that keeps the encroachment into the right of ways. whether it's on sides, back, wherever it makes sense, or trying to draw it forward, I suppose. Somebody could come back to you with that.

Or maybe limit it to a percentage of the right-of-way, something that can be measurable.

I don't think it's turning to the neighbors and getting their approval because that's just a recipe for hell.

I also think there should be a measure that, yeah, you're required to maintain the tree for 10 years, but should something happen to the tree, you should have to replace it.

Well, and that's replaced the tree in what way as at the same size or I don't know.

I mean, that's I don't know that that's reasonable. Yeah, but you shouldn't.

Maybe the answer is the deviation from what you're going to get the benefit.

You should have to you should have to pay the price for it for sure.

Well, may I interject for tree removal permits? We require if you remove a tree, you have to replace the canopy of it. Maybe that's something you could do for this too.

Right, but then you put it where you want it.

Yeah, we're looking at preserving that they say they want to save that space.

Yeah, that same location. That could be part of the covenant. If it dies, it has to go back.

You could add a deviation in terms of this works as long as you're going no more than X percentage in one way or the other into a threshold. Because, I mean, the reality is don't buy the lot. You know, you've got a tree there that covers two-thirds of the lot. Don't buy it.

Leave it for somebody who wants it.

But I would say, unless you guys tell me there's something pending here that we need to try to spitball something here, I would say that needs to come back. So we're not going to vote that one down. All right, that needs to come back. Is that right? Or do you want us to?

I would take a, if you, if you want to see it come back, then I have an idea for the next motion.

All right. Is there acclimation that? The other thing I would add to just what we were saying now is I think we're just having an open discussion and kind of maybe hoping, giving some ideas to staff to better draft this. But should something happen to the tree, I wouldn't, preclude somebody from putting back another nice tree and maybe in a better location. I don't know that I wouldn't want to tie anybody's hands on that. There's a possibility to improve something. I'll tell you right now, how many lots have we seen that had a beautiful big tree on it and just before it sold that tree somehow disappeared? I want to get away from that. Let's see how we keep that tree. We got to find a way to incentivize not making the tree disappear.

But the trade-off is encroachment on your neighbor's belief that they have setbacks from you. And so I think you're going to have to tackle that one if you're going to look for a broad. Otherwise, I think it's a variance.

I agree. There's already a method to resolve that.

Does that give you what you need? Yeah, we can bring that back with a proposal, and if you still believe that a variance is the better way to do it, you can vote it down. I think you can probably come up with a proposal that works.

I think that it's a matter of putting some tolerances in. I would like to see it again.

I think it's worth trying to make this work.

Is it a motion to defer? We will. We're going to include that. The last thing is table 2, which is on page 5 of 9 and 6 of 9. That table You want that lumped in with the definition of FAR and building coverage, I'm assuming, because that's all part of the same discussion. I just want to make sure about that.

I think wherever that takes you, it's going to change. It's going to change that, exactly.

So we'll bring it back together? Yeah. OK. So the only motion I would ask you to do is to bifurcate this ordinance, just a motion to bifurcate this ordinance, or bifurcate your recommendation, and move forward with the height and with the privacy wall, and to bring back at the next meeting the FAR building coverage issue and the tree preservation issue.

I'll make a motion. Go ahead. It'll save me time. I mean, it's written as four things here that got jumbled into a discussion.

But I think procedurally what he's doing is bringing back what we did originally. All right, go for it. Yeah, that's why I'll motion that.

A second.

All in favor? Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. So 5-0 on that one. 5 for Kate, 2-2. All right. Thanks for your help. We are not done yet. The fifth one up here.

Fifth one is PB-2025-015, Ordinance of the Mayor and City Commissioner of the City of South Miami, Florida, creating a new Section 20-4.13, Sustainable Development in Article IV, other regulations of the Land Development Code to provide incentives to promote energy-efficient home design, sustainable construction practices, increased climate resilience, and conservation of natural resources. Provided for corrections, severability, conflicts, implementation, and effective date. I believe this title will be started by Mr. Alvarez, but Ms. Suranami Cabrera, the Development Service Director, is present at the meeting and she crafted this ordinance for review. Okay.

Whoever wants to add some color.

But I'll be happy to introduce it, and then she can follow up. Yeah, there's a little PowerPoint that gives the overall. Okay. So our issue, it came out of tonight, earlier you heard about the continuation of the moratorium for the solar panel regulations, which became problematic. And one of the big issues with those is they were very burdensome to people in terms of the cost of them. So that's currently on moratorium. It looks like it will probably be rescinded. The commission instructed the director to look at a broader picture of sustainability. The commission is still very committed to promoting sustainability, reducing energy consumption, and enhancing environmental resilience. So the director of development has worked on this for quite some time and will present more of the details. But the basic thing is that we have two big approaches going on here. The first was to look at sustainability in a very comprehensive manner. So in other words, we're not just looking at solar panels anymore. Those will be baked into this. However, this would be looking at a lot of passive architectural concepts. So it would be strategically orienting the buildings, how they face the southern exposure and so forth, cross ventilation in the buildings. We're actually going back in time to before air conditioning, how we cool buildings and why this guy is still comfortable. Looking at natural shading, again, going back to tree canopy, and maybe we'll come back with something about the other issue in here. to looking into cool roofs and green roofs, to also look at sustainable materials that are incorporated into the construction, onsite water retention, addressing a separate issue, and also revisiting bird safe design at a single family level, because that's actually where apparently more bird strikes happen than higher up. So the first approach here is not to just look at solar panels as a replacement ordinance, but to comprehensively look at sustainability throughout the city for single family residential. I'm sorry, it's not for single family. It is for everything. And the second part of this is to take instead of a... to take an incentive-based approach. So instead of creating restrictions and costs and pay in lieu fees for people who don't want to do these, we would look at having an incentive-based approach to sustainability. So now there will be three tiers of incentives that's based on a point system, which is in your ordinance. Um. So there will be cumulative points for you. You pick from menus of what you are including as a sustainability design or methods or techniques for the construction of a building, and then you would get certain number of points, and you have a certain level of tears of benefits that you would get, and the benefits or the incentives would include permit fee reduction. Always something that's very exciting for a lot of people. Um, expedited permitting and inspections, which is also, of course, if it becomes too successful, they'll still be in line. Um, we would hope for that problem. Um, there will be a building coverage bonus again. And that was there's a footnote already in the last item to allow for the sustainability item. Um sustainability ordinance to have some effect to allow a greater building coverage. Um, there would be floor area bonuses again, going back to what we just talked about and set back reductions and impervious allowances. So it's a set of design allowances that are um balanced so that they don't undo the good sustainability aspects of the construction techniques and methods, and also a number of administrative, or I should say procedural bonuses that would be for expedited permitting and inspections and reduced fees. If Sudami would like to, she's worked on this extensively, she can answer, go through some of the details of how that system works, but this is just an introduction.

Good evening, board members. Saramika Reda, Development Services Director. Thank you, Martin. You did a great job on that, actually. So the idea here was to have an ordinance that would encourage and not mandate energy efficient and climate resilient construction for a single family and duplex, anything that's covered in the Florida Building Code residential. We came up with an incentive system instead of having penalties. We think that this will really encourage developers. We tried to make the incentives worth their while, and I'll go over them briefly, but it's an extensive ordinance, it's new. There isn't anything like this that I have found in Florida. The mayors and other elected officials have been contacted by press to get information on what it is that we're moving towards here. So why it matters to us, we're really trying to change the way we look at sustainability. We want to get away from the idea that we build a home And we don't look at its siding on the, you know, how it's oriented on the side or if porches help heat, keep the heat from heating up walls and the transfer of heat into the interior of the home. We see a lot of homes nowadays that don't have operable windows or really glass boxes that get really, really hot. And then having an ordinance that just makes you feel good because it tells you, well, just put some solar panels on the roof and you've done a good job. When in reality, we know that that really isn't enough, right? Let me see. And then we try to go through some of these. So what the ordinance actually does is it's a point system. This is what we came up with. It's a point system. And what it does is it gives you a menu of items. And depending on what you do, you get points. Depending on how many points you get, you get a reduction in your permit fees. You may get. some flexibility on setbacks things like that what we try to promote which is something that we've seen in homes you know probably before air conditioning became so affordable and everybody had one is that you would design for the climate that you're in right so we're trying to use things like the orientation of the house on the lot so that maybe you have your bedrooms on the east side of the property if possible so that they don't they're not heated by the west sun at the time when people are going to bed they're you know they're on the east side or you have your garage in a way that it almost serves as a barrier for that heat between the house and the western sun things like that so we're using passive solar orientation cross ventilation we're incentivizing operable windows the deep shading porches we're trying to preserve trees If you've ever, and I know that sometimes we think it's not a big deal. It hurts me every time that I see that it seems like we get a site plan into the office where there has been zero consideration of the trees on the lot. It's just knock it all down and design whatever you want. And it's painful for me because if you've ever stood in the shade in the sidewalk, I like to walk barefoot. So when I walk barefoot on where there's no shade, you burn your feet. You go into the shade, it's comfortable. It makes such a huge difference that I think we need to be reminded of that. And I always like to say, you know, that that is a big deal. Just walk your foot on the sidewalk and you see what it feels like. So a house that has that shade from the trees makes a huge difference on how much that home heats up. So tree preservation and adding tree planting to give that shade is a big part of this. Incentivizing cool roofs and green roofs. We don't want to get rid of the solar. We think it's a good thing. We just don't want it to be the only thing. So we did keep some solar readiness or solar panel installation incentives in there. We brought in the bird safe glazing. It might seem silly, but I live in a house that has a lot of glass. And I have actually found little birds either stunned or dead by my glass walls because they do run into them. And last, it's the rainwater harvesting. It would be great to see, you know, us taking the rainwater and having it come back into our, into swales, into bioswales and let it percolate through the soils instead of taking in perfectly good rainwater and having it run down your driveway and into the drainage system in the street when it could just really percolate back into the ground and be filtered naturally. So the points work that... If you have, for example, locally sourced materials, you get, if you have a certain percentage, like 20% of locally sourced materials gives you a certain number of points. If you're preserving trees, you get a certain number of points. If you install the solar ready, you get points. And the points basically give you building permit free reductions, either 15, 25, or 35%. Bonuses in the FAR. There's setback flexibilities. uh, impervious area bonuses. Uh, if you have a green roof, you know, there is no reason why maybe, yo, we, we're not to incentivize green roofs, which are great, right. Uh, environmentally speaking, um, uh, all of it. The way they look is just a bonus, but really they help keep the temperature of the home more consistent and all that. So if you're doing all these things, then we're going to give you points and we're going to let you have more impervious area, maybe on the lot. And of course, something that all the developers like and homeowners is that we're going to expedite your reviews and the inspections, depending on how many points you're able to obtain. And at the end of the day, what we should see is that the residential benefit, the long-term utility bills should be combed down, indoor comfort, You know, a home with natural air is much better than a home that doesn't have natural air coming in. Definitely better air quality. We should be reducing flooding and stormwater runoff, which is a huge issue for the quality of our watershed. We want to protect neighborhood tree canopy. There's a study that was done by Miami-Dade County that shows that South Miami lost quite a bit of tree canopy. And the sad thing is, is that we would love to replace all that tree canopy in public spaces, but there just isn't enough right away for it. So, you know, if you think about it, if you come in and you clear 20,000 square foot lot of some beautiful specimen trees, maybe just two or three, we don't have 20,000 square feet to put them in the right of way. So we want to really encourage in the private lots, keeping these trees and planting additional ones if necessary. I mean, I could go on and on. This is something I'm really passionate about. I'm a structural engineer, but I have a real passion for sustainable building. I think it's the only way into the future to leave something for our kids that we could be proud of. I don't want to take up too much time. It's been a long night, so I'm open to questions, but I hope that gives you sort of an idea of where we're going with this.

Thank you. Is there anybody still in the audience that wants to speak to this? I see no one. Anyone online? I don't think there's anybody of the public there. So any questions or comments for Sarami?

Can you define what a bioswale is?

Yeah, so if you think about just a bioswale, a sloped area where you could really slow down the runoff and almost keep it there so it slowly percolates into the ground it's really just how a swale should be it should um slope inwards and almost carry that water slow down that runoff and then have it percolate that's all it is i was afraid you were going to say that i'm concerned why is that i'm concerned about mosquitoes i would hate to have a bunch of newly minted mosquito farms around town Yeah, no. Well, bioswales is not anything new. I don't think it's a mosquito issue. I mean, you have more issues if you have bromeliads in your yard, right? Nobody rinses them out. They're not made to percolate. This is what a lot of people do. But yeah, I mean, it's not a new concept. It's done in commercial all the time.

No, I understand. We are intentionally encouraging them here.

Absolutely, we are. And the percolation of them, remember, it's not standing water. You know the percolation rate. We have very good percolation rates here. If you tell me we were in Bow Harbor where they have muck. And things don't percolate. That's a whole different story. But these areas here have very good percolation. So I really don't see an issue.

Okay. Well, I was just wondering if that was considered. Thank you. I appreciate that. Also, I feel like there's a ton of subjectivity here. Like, I wonder how... Some of these can be enforced. Even some of the rewards, like 10% faster review time. How do we qualify that? How do we, is that like you get a committed deadline

Absolutely. So we were not able to track these types of things in the past, but we've moved to an electronic system. We're not 100% yet, but we're getting there. And the idea will be that we actually set deadlines now. So let's say, and I just went over this with my building staff. If we have a new single family home, your deadline as a reviewer will be one week. But if you come in with something like this, then we would change the deadlines, right? So that you will get priority on that review list.

Okay. And then, sorry, last question. On the tier three rewards, number four, a maximum impervious area bonus of 10%. That seems counterproductive given that the whole intent of this is to promote green building.

It is. And if you're going to do a green roof, you're going to get and capture your rainwater from that green roof. You're going to get a lot more than that 10% increase on the ground floor.

Right. But the threshold for green is 100 square feet. But yet we're allowing 10%.

No, it's not a max. It's a minimum.

Sure, but if I want to take advantage of this and just do the minimum, if that puts me over the threshold from tier two to tier three, and now I get a 10% increase in my impervious area, that seems like we're working actually in the opposite direction. We're trading 100 square feet for, you know, could be 1,500.

Am I understanding that correctly, or is that? For 1,500, we'd have to have 15,000 square feet. Which is not uncommon, no? Well, considering that most of the lots in South Miami are less than 10,000 square feet.

Right, so 10% of 15,000 would be 1,500.

No, no, no, no, no. It's in the increase in impervious area, not an increase of the lot area.

No, no, of course. So if we have a lot of 15,000 square feet... Of course, but I'm getting a 10% increase. 10% of the already established impervious area? Okay, is that still gonna be more than 100 square feet?

That would be, yeah, so on a 10,000 square foot lot, you are allowed 47.5% of your lot to be impervious. This would be a 10% increase to that. So another 475 square feet. Exactly, that's what we're talking about. Which is four times 100 square feet. You're saying it's out of proportion.

To me, that seems counterproductive because the whole point is to be more environmentally friendly, but then we're increasing the impervious area. I don't know. If I'm misunderstanding that or how that works or how the green roof offsets that, then by all means, I'm not an expert, but just the math seemed odd to me.

No, and that's actually a good point. I'll tell you that we haven't seen anything like this done anywhere. So it's going to be a learning process. for us and getting this type of feedback is exactly what I need. So I'm going to look at that because I was thinking that it would be about the same, but, um, yeah, I need to look at what's a typical, you know, your typical lot areas that we're looking at and how much we'd be giving so that it is, uh, I mean, it has to be a little bit more, otherwise there's no reason, right? Like why am I going to do a green roof? That's so much more costly. If you're going to give me the same amount, a hundred square feet on the ground, Because I put 100 square feet on the roof when it's much more expensive on the roof. But maybe a 4 to 1 is too much. So maybe it'll be like a 2 to 1. And I could, yeah, I would definitely look at that. I mean, it has to be more. Otherwise, there's no benefit because it's so much, so costly.

No, understood. And I'm not an expert in this. I just, it stood out to me. My two big takeaways are there's a lot of subjectivity here. Plant trees so that 30% of West and South facades are shaded within five years. Like, how do we determine that?

Well, arborists are, I mean, I don't see that that's difficult to determine.

Right, so does that need to be qualified, like, at the opinion of an expert arborist, a professional arborist, a licensed arborist, whatever the term is? I'm sorry, my other takeaway is that these rewards, were these numbers calculated based on anything, or was it just kind of arbitrary?

It was as typical as what I see in your typical homes and trying to get somewhere that it would incentivize it, but not go overboard. So it's really right now a let's see how if my first stab at this. is going to work well or not. I mean, I definitely, and I discussed this because I know that Mark had comments also, you know, our plan director had comments and, and I said that, you know, at the end of the day, this is our first stab at this. There isn't anything out like this out there that we could just copy. So this is going to be the type of ordinance that we're going to have to look at what's happened in a year and then go back and perhaps massage it until we get it right.

No, I appreciate that. And for the record, I'm wholeheartedly in favor of incentivizing people to do environmentally responsible building. So I'm not against this in any way. Just those things stood out to me as questions.

And that's great because we really do need that type of feedback. Yes.

This is Jay. I wholeheartedly agree with JR's comments. The definitional stuff, the subjectivity is too much for me. And so I think you've got to really whittle that down. You also have to need to think about the inspections involved in following up to make sure that these things go as you have planned and that you're not going to make more work for your department that you may not want. going out to firt these things out. And then on the impervious, at no point would I trade one environmental benefit for another environmental benefit. So the idea of swapping out impervious coverage on the ground, which in my opinion, probably not shared by everybody else, is one of the single biggest problems we have with developing homes around town. and maintaining the green, maintaining our temperatures, maintaining all sorts of stuff. So I'm all for, you know, if you want to reduce fees, that's your budget. If you want to commit to turnaround time, I wouldn't make it a number. I would just say expedited and I would leave it at that. because you're going to spend time defending that versus actually doing the work. So I think more work has to be done on making it more tight, definitionally, numbers-wise, and we really need to look at the fact that we don't want to do anything that would be anti-environmental, because it sort of would, to me, it would be a very visible dent in what's a really good idea. Agreed.

Okay. And, you know, I had thought that perhaps because of the energy efficiency of the home that we're getting from this installation and because even the heat island effect will be less, right? Because roofs are such a big part of the impervious area on a home that... There was like a trade-off, but I can see what you're saying. Do you want me to remove it completely, which would really hurt me, but I understand? Or do you want to look at maybe the swap being something much less?

I think that my... I don't know the answer to that, because I think it'd be a matter of seeing what else you might think of or come up with, number one. Number two is, I don't know that, does this really need to go for approval here? Because I think this is more of a feedback gathering event. Again, because I want to do away with us trying to rework these things. They need to be closer to perfection, I think.

You don't need to approve today. Any feedback I get, I went to the Green Task Force also. We presented it to Green Task Force. We got comments. A lot of the comments were concerns with mosquitoes and the water and the cisterns, not the actual bioswale. But the idea is that I could get as much feedback as possible. We've met with the elected officials, but very early on, just to see if they were comfortable with something like this. i think they all were comfortable they're all very excited about it but absolutely it's you know to get as much as we can so that once it is approved and in the books it's a really good first attempt at this so yeah and that and i would absolutely say that is the case i mean it is yeah right now fantastic attempt to this because like you said nobody else i've ever seen has offered this kind of thing

Again, speaking for myself, I'd say I'm for it. I just think it's not in a votable form right now. But, Danny?

I mean, first off, I want to compliment all the staff for working on this and finally bringing something to the table that we've been talking about on this board and other boards over and over and over again. It's better going with the carrot than the stick and bringing a incentivized plan as opposed to a penalizing plan. So I think it's a great start. Anytime you write legislation or policy, it's difficult to have it perfect. And that's why we always have amendments and come back and do the tweak bills or the rework. So I think it's a great first look at this, a great start. One recommendation I would make, I think my colleagues comment about the trade off of the 100 square feet for a percentage, it probably needs to be more in line with how we're doing permeable and impermeable. If you're going to keep looking at that item, it's a percentage of a 6,000 square foot lot. And if it's a 10,000 square foot lot, it's a different percentage. If it's a 15,000 square foot lot, it's a different percentage. So it probably needs to follow that same ideology so that it can make sense. Yeah. Um, but I do agree with you that I absolutely, if we had an overall positive environmental impact, uh, and we trade off, uh, another environmental impact for a greater positive environmental impact, I could see your, your train of thought on that. Um, so I, I would encourage it, but I do agree. It's, it's a great start. Probably just needs to be a little bit more polished, but again, commend you because this, this is incredibly comprehensive and I agree. I haven't seen this in any other municipality. that I've done anything in. So thank you.

Thank you. And I'm thinking for the green roofs, I have some other ideas of how to incentivize it. So let me see if there's a way of something that would really work so that people will want to do it and maybe not have it tied to the pervious and impervious areas. I need to think about it a little bit, but I get it.

Yeah, I agree with you, Danny. Like the net effect warrants, you know, the reduction there. But I just think optically, like it just doesn't make sense to me, for me personally.

Yeah, maybe the percentage is just too high the way it's written. I mean, I'm going to do a few cases of different lot sizes and look at some of the homes that have already permitted and see what kind of impact it would have had, you know, on some of the homes that we've seen maybe in the last six months.

You know, I'll just take a couple of cases and work this out.

And to Tsunami's point, we had a big push on this solar panel, solar panel, solar panel, because optically it looked great, but functionally it was not cost-effective, not really productive, didn't have a huge environmental impact. So the optics are one thing, but I'm absolutely okay with, as long as we have a net gain, we can continue that conversation.

Okay. Okay. So I think we've talked this one through trauma. You've got some good information right from us. Feedback at least. I do. I do.

Absolutely. And we'll bring it back. Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much for putting this together because it's bold.

Thank you.

Thanks. Okay.

We're excited. Thanks.

Next item.

So do you want to make a motion to just a quick motion to defer?

Yeah. Quick motion to defer. Oh, second.

Yeah.

All in favor.

Yes.

Yes. Yep. Great. Yeah. It'll come back as soon as Ms. Cabrera has it ready. Yep.

And it's really just to continue work. Okay.

Next item, Marcus. Next item or last item is PB-2025-016, the ordinance of the mayor and city commission of the city of South Miami, Florida, amending section 20-8.5, permitted and special non-residential uses of Article 8 Transit Supportive Development District of the Land Development Code to revise regulations relating to adult entertainment, providing for corrections, severability, conflicts, implementation, and an effective date. This item, I believe, will be handled by Mr. Alvarez, possibly assisted by the City Attorney's Office. I'm speaking to this one.

If I may, yeah. Oh, you're going to handle this one? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'll address. Thank you, Mark.

Mark put together a PowerPoint. Do you want me to load it for you?

Yeah, we'll have it for the maps if we need it.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, maybe just, yeah. So to give you kind of the overview, we currently have a regulation in place when we adopted the TSTD. We had the issue of adult entertainment was not really the main concern of that ordinance. But we provided that it would be a special use and would have a certain distance limitations from any park, school, any kind of sensitive use like that. The basis for something like that is what they call the secondary effects doctrine. The city's allowed to regulate, Nude dancing is a form of expression which is protected by the First Amendment. You are allowed to regulate secondary effects. However, looks like we may have gone a little too far because we allowed it only in the TODA, the T-O-D-A, and required 1,000 feet between any use and those other sensitive uses. And in doing that, what we ended up with is a situation where you can't really put it anywhere. Okay, so we were advised by some attorneys who wrote us a positive letter, but just advising us, hey, you got a problem here, First Amendment problem. And we have reviewed it, and we agree, and that's what has resulted in the ordinance that you have in front of you right now. And what we've tried to do is regulate those secondary effects, but at least provide an avenue for this to be able to occur. So just to kind of walk you through it, the adult entertainment establishments, which include adult bookstores, adult booths, adult motion picture theaters, or new dancing establishments, they would still be only in the TODA. but they would be in a more narrow subset of the TODA, specifically fronting on either Progress Road or Commerce Lane, only accessible to pedestrians and vehicles from any of those streets, so they are turned away from the, I guess, towards the east and south. The structure's entrance and exit could only be, any entrance and exit could only be 300, must be 300 lineal feet from any of those sensitive uses. That's a path of travel dimension. We've got restrictions on the hours of operation, restrictions on signage, exterior paint colors, outdoor lighting, the idea being that these uses can sometimes have secondary effects like affecting property values and crime and those kind of things. We also require private security or off-duty police as necessary. Certain warning signage, specifically in that area. warning people that they will be towed if they park in people's driveways or in front of people's businesses. If they happen to leave their car past the morning hours when people gotta go to work, that is a working industrial area at the moment. And it would require site plan approval by the development services director after getting design review board review for massing, scale, appearance, configuration, parking and site access, the paint colors that I mentioned, the signage and the lighting. And they would have to commit to operational conditions in a covenant recorded against the property. So that's kind of the overview. Happy to answer any questions that you have.

First, is there any public comment on this one, either from the room here or online?

Tough one for me to swallow. It's a block or two from my daughter's school.

Daniel, we are really having trouble hearing you, so if you could say that again, I don't know.

Oh, yeah, just a tough one for me to swallow here. It's literally about a block or two from my daughter's school.

So is that a grandfathered-in issue?

No, you could, I mean, What we tried to do, I mean, there aren't a whole lot of areas in the city that, you know, there's gonna be trade-offs wherever we go. The idea with fronting it on progress or commerce was to have it pointed away from those uses and to require access from that.

By the rule, you establish a 300 foot to the entrance thing. If his daughter's school is a block or block and a half away. It would be from the- 101 feet? Yeah.

Well, it's a lineal path of travel. I think it's more than that. I think it's about 500-some feet. Oh, it's not a straight line anymore? It's not a straight line. It's not as the crow flies. Okay. Yeah, I understand it. If someone were leaving the establishment, how far would they be from the actual place? They're not going to fly over.

So the issue here is that we're trying to avoid infringing upon someone's right to start this kind of business in the city.

That is correct. We're trying to provide reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions while still allowing the conduct.

And the idea here is to change where at once it was 1,000 feet in a straight line. Now we're making it 300 feet along a path.

Well, and providing for all the other restrictions that we provided.

Is the 300 feet along a path the minimum you could have reduced to 1,000 feet in a straight line while providing some place for this to happen?

Conceivably, we could increase that. I'd have to do, we'd have to do, we could do further analysis on that if that's...

I just wonder, like, would 600 feet?

I think 600 feet would be too...

Provide some pocket? Well, it depends on- Because the idea to specifically make the pocket, did we arrive at 300 feet to put it there?

We arrived at 300 feet to provide a reasonable distance from those locations while still fronting, because there are schools in proximity to Mr. Alvarez's point. There's a church right across the street. Yeah, there's a church- Right across 57th. Across 57th. Yeah, you're right. You're right. On the other side of 57th.

And Somi is right around there. I don't know if that's the school you're talking about, Daniel. My daughter used to go there. Yeah. I would agree. That would be... And how does this affect existing adult entertainment venues in the city?

So there's... The only existing adult entertainment venue that is there, you're going to see in about a month, there's a proposal to redevelop that block name.

Through the chair, how do other, and this question's for the city attorney, how do other municipalities not have a problem not having these establishments? So the- Did they violate something and got away with it or?

Well, no, no, no. So let's take a few of the others. City of Miami, Miami-Dade County, they are large enough. that where they can provide restrictions that still open up a reasonable portion of their city area to that, but they're so large that they can tuck that away. So that's how they do that. So they provide for it in industrial areas. What about a smaller? Like IU2. Sometimes it's availability of land. It's the cost of land, it's property values. You know, you could, uh you could try to restrict it further um any anything if you if you you're you could try to push it over to uh i guess to progress and keep it keep it on there but you know that's where it gets a little dicey if you're squeezing it too much you know this is a balancing act i just factors i can think of several municipalities that have none of these uses and so my question is our neighbors

you know don't have any of these uses in their in within their borders and so i just curious how they were able to do this and work sometimes it's property values uh over time uh sometimes it's uh there there were

There were locations just outside of these jurisdictions that it was cheaper to locate it there and outside of those jurisdictions than to sue to try to enter into those.

Aren't we bordered by a lot of jurisdictions that these things could be located into that wouldn't be ours?

Are we bordered by, we're bordered by Coral Gables on one side? Okay, I believe they have one, they have a location in their industrial area.

That's outside of Coral Gables.

When it wasn't out, the alley cat was in Coral Gables.

Yeah, I believe it's still. That's city of Miami. So just outside, that's outside.

So I'm just curious if we're trying to solve you know, relocating somebody. And so maybe you can relocate next to Alicat or something. But I just, I'm trying to force an issue. Is that our concern that we'll face a legal ramification of an existing establishment?

The concern with leaving the law on the books as it is, is the exposure. Now, could we restrict it further than what is being proposed here? You could certainly do that.

So why wouldn't we make it the bare minimum of distance where it makes one parcel available?

You could do that. There is case law that suggests that if you're restricting it to too tiny a percentage, it's the same as saying that it's prohibited.

The city does not have a strong history in winning this battle. You don't need to look at BTs right now where it is to know that's the case. And so I would urge us not to get too restrictive because it's a waste of our money. Do I understand your views on why you wouldn't want it? I get it. But I think you've got to really think about whether you're taking away somebody's ability to conduct a business, whether the real estate people are able to maximize the value of their property. PROGRESS LANE AND COMMERCE, BOTH OF THEM WOULD ARGUE THAT'S AN ECONOMICALLY VIABLE THING. IS THERE ANY LIMITATION TO HOW MANY CAN BE IN A PARTICULAR AREA? I MEAN, I WOULDN'T WANT TO CREATE A ROW OF THESE THINGS WHERE THEY BECOME REALLY POPULAR, COMMERCE LANE. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

YEAH. I THINK WE COULD.

WE DID THAT WITH SMOKE SHOPS. I KNOW THAT. WE'RE PART OF THAT DISCUSSION.

Yeah, I mean, we could provide for a minimum distance between establishments.

Well, and to Danny's point, we're a much smaller town, and so we could say our tolerance is for two. I mean, I don't know how you do it.

Yeah, we can't pick winners and losers in the freedom of expression game, but if someone happens to be first to market, they'll have an advantage.

Through the chair, my... I could see Commerce Lane becoming our own little Wynwood, and none of these establishments exist within Wynwood for good reason, because then you wouldn't have the Wynwood. The walkability kind of disappears a little bit. Although I know we're trying to stick it in some sort of a corner, I would love to see that corner evolve into something great, and I'm concerned that we're again facilitating somebody's Move from one location to another and then we're gonna hinder that location further And you know aside from also now being near schools churches and playgrounds Well, you you also mentioned that some of the barriers for these things in other municipalities is the property value So is it crazy to think that?

Picking a more valuable area would be providing them the opportunity to do it, but also requiring a more significant investment to make it happen?

You could certainly do that. There's a risk. Yeah, there is a risk involved.

I don't know where that place is.

Don't do it. You could certainly open up, you know, to give you an extreme example.

Just trying to think outside the box.

Yep, yep.

Hours of operation.

Yeah.

I mean, the 4 a.m. sounds liberal. So could we restrict that back? I don't even know what our hours of operation like for alcohol.

It's the 4 a.m. with the ability to go to 5 a.m. with basically for good behavior. Right. Yeah. That's the current rules.

But if their principal business is to operate adult entertainment. however we define that, could we not pull that back some, or would they say, well, we serve, I mean, there are places where you can only have this kind of entertainment with no alcohol served, and they've gotten away with that. So, which would be another way to discourage it, by the way. That is another way. And so the two aren't, we don't see the two as being conducive to one another, perspective of civic whatever, you know what I'm saying?

Right, so that's certainly a recommendation you can make.

I want a recommendation that we're not going to end up in court forever on. Right.

So if you want, I mean, look, if you want to restrict the alcohol hours to less than 4 a.m., that's one option. If you want to restrict alcohol altogether, that's another option. I think that might be, yeah, so there's gradients, right? So you could certainly do that. You could say, you know, last call is at 2 or 3.

I'm inclined to defer this.

I have a question. I'm looking at the I was just randomly looking at other municipalities like or cities. They have pine crust and they have a thousand. They have a thousand feet. Are you saying like that? I mean, other cities. I don't mean it's right or lawful, but I mean, they have a thousand feet on here. And then they also have some restrictions on like spacing from one another. I'm trying to see what else they have here, because I agree. I mean, if we can further restricted, I'm I'm for doing that. I also don't really love the word as necessary and number nine in terms of employing private security and off to the police. I mean, like, what does that even mean as necessary? When would that? That's pretty vague. So I don't really like that term. Maybe if we can remove it or pick some other language.

Okay. Okay. So just to answer your question, Christina, the 1,000 feet is not per se the problem. It's the fact that when you apply the 1,000 feet here, you end up with no option.

And we're smaller than Pinecrest.

It's just the distance. So they have an establishment like on 126th Street and US 1 that is there. And the 1,000 feet, I think it's 1,000 feet from any school or church. They don't have anything within that space.

So you're saying that the problem here is really because the I just want to understand the existing structures for adult entertainment. If you put 1,000 feet, it would basically bar them from running their establishment.

The way our current ordinance is drafted, it's only allowed in the TODA, and it has to be 1,000 feet from any church, school, the other uses that are listed there. What is it? Church, school, day nursery, public library, public park. you apply that in our jurisdiction you are um in in the toda there is no location that would work and that's the thing we need to address yeah i think i think i agree with the other board members if we can figure out the maximum amount without you know so you know so increase the the the feet to the maximum amount possible yeah

Yeah, and then take off maybe the as necessary. And I agree with Jay on the hours. If we can, I think nine to four, I mean, that's almost the entire.

I would actually probably take a shot at getting rid of the nine. I would get into an evening thing entirely. And we could certainly justify by the fact that we, because of the way the city's oriented right now, we can't restrict it more than we, Because 1,000 feet, we couldn't do it at all. So we're providing some flexibility, but we don't want this to start until 7 PM or 6 PM. Whatever most of the- After school activities are done. After school activities are done, something like that.

Now- Might I suggest that if we do that, if we do that, that we address it through the alcohol hours, the alcohol service hours?

That'd be fine. Yeah, I think they will naturally address your concern. You'd be surprised it doesn't entirely. But yeah. But somehow to move that opening time back.

Okay.

So ideally, I think like 7pm. So after dinner, but you know, whatever we think we can, we can do there.

Can you restrict their ability to serve alcohol at certain times without applying that across the board to everybody else?

Well, the alcohol is not the free expression. The free expression is the dancing.

But can we say that you can't serve alcohol at this time, but everybody else can? If you're exercising your free expression.

Well, first of all, you're allowing the free expression. Now, you're highlighting something because we have to We'll have to review the secondary effects because that's what we can regulate. Yeah. Okay, so we have to connect the dots between the effects.

That's not fair because that ruster I can see.

Yeah, so we just have to figure out where that line is. But to your point, you want to push back the...

the hours as far back as possible that's a great way to do it yeah so so miami-dade inside within their legislation it says they justify the limitation of license like the license to sell alcohol by saying it's to prevent the occurrence of criminal behavior and undesirable community conditions normally associated with these establishments so there's probably some case law out there that

um if you look at this is my the city of miami i'm sorry in their ordinance they cite that so i'm trying to look through it nobody must have read it yeah i i know christina christina i know that uh in tampa there are places there that allow adult entertainment but do not allow alcohol that's right they have some very specific things yeah Palm Beach up? So I think we could take a try at regulating the alcohol hours in there.

Okay.

I think the rest of the stuff seemed the loiter piece, private security. I agree with Christina. I don't know how you make that absolute in terms of the private security, off-duty police. I think as necessary, unfortunately, it's probably all you can really legislate in there unless you want to go to a square footage or number of patrons or something like that. yeah or maybe maybe it's an operational plan that has to be reviewed by the police department something like that yeah that would be put something like that in there that'd be great yeah just something that's not so um up to it just it's very broad i don't know the design review board i see has got themselves inserted in there so that'll help um yeah so

I think it's justifiable to say that because you're so close to these elements that otherwise we can't keep you away from, like, your hours need to be completely outside their hours of operation with some sort of buffer.

Yeah. I think that's fair. And I'd try to pull the 4 a.m. back. Our city generally doesn't function on a 4 a.m. schedule. I mean, you know.

Correct.

So, any other thoughts on how we would tweak this? Do we think we have it to a point where we can support it?

Well, I think there's some legal questions that have to be answered before we could.