Okay. That's enough. Okay. No, because four people make the decisions for the CEO. Okay. That's an issue for another day. Let's just get this meeting over. Okay. Good evening. Welcome to the city of North Miami Beach Community Development Agency budget meeting of September 10, 2024. Could we get a roll call please? Board Chair Evan Piper. Here. Vice Chair Phyllis Smith. Board Member Fortuna Smuckler. Present. Board Member Michael Joseph. Board Member Daniela Jean. Board member Mackenzie Fluramond, board member Jay Chernoff. Here. Okay, thank you. Okay, next this meeting has the opportunity for the public to comment. So if there's anybody here that would like to come forward and make any comment, please do and Let the record reflect that nobody has come forward Next item is approving the minutes so this I'm gonna and this is to approve the minutes of August 27th 2024 We have a motion. We need a second. Please second. Okay. All in favor say aye Okay We have a motion. We need a second please. Second. Okay. All in favor say aye. I say no because I wasn't here. Okay. Only one opposed so Board member Smith a board vice chair Smith Is is a no so we're three one Okay first item. CRA 2020-409 approved fiscal year 2024- 2025 budget. What you read. Okay a resolution of the Chair and Board members of the North Miami Beach Community Redevelopment Agency approving the fiscal year 2024- 2025 budget authorizing the executive director to transmit the fiscal year 2024 2025 budget to the city of North Miami Beach and Miami-Dade County authorizing the executive director to take all action necessary to complete the approval process for the fiscal year 2024 2025 budget with the city of North Miami Beach and Miami-Dade County and providing an effective date. This budget that you have before you, I have printed out at the very last minute a extra large sheet, which I think is more readable. I was looking at this on my computer for most of the time I was working on it and I printed it finally and it was very small. So I think this is actually not that. So I can get into it if you'd like or let me know how you want to proceed. Okay, so I guess for right now, maybe that might be all we need if you could just give us the highlights. Yeah. Okay. And with note version and we'll take it from there. Okay. So, this budget remains fairly similar to the budget last year. There's some projects. Money has been expended. For example, the sewer project, the subject to sewer project on 163rd is a big infrastructure item that we did spend all of that money as of probably before we even printed this budget right about the time we printed this budget. So we've, that's moved forward. Some of the other big infrastructure projects such as Snake Creek and the two park projects, the tennis center enhancement design and Taylor park enhancement design and rehab. Those did not move forward this year due to difficulties with the brown field remediation and on the tennis center potentially the idea that a public private partnership may be incoming into that space. I have carried forward those monies into this year's budget to be able to continue to offer the CRA's ability to offset some of the planning costs for those enhancements. So I think we all are in agreement that both of those properties are going to need to have something really dynamic and amazing happening on them. And I'd like to, you know, make sure that the CRA has our foot in the door in terms of planning so that we can offer that service as soon as the city is ready to take that step. So those are, continue forward in this budget. Our salaries and related is about the same as it was last year. It's gone up. We did give everybody the cola rays and Diana got a little bit of an extra bump because she's taken on significantly more responsibility and has passed several of the certification programs that the FRAA offers. So I put extra in there this year for that. The professional services is the same except we have an extra line item for policy consultants that is things that I've noticed last year the city had ideas about is things that I've noticed last year, the city had ideas about potentially rezoning certain areas or amending the code for areas within the CRA. And I'd like to be able to offset some of that cost in the CRA boundaries. So for example, right now we're working on a update or a first draft really of the outdoor dining ordinance that would sort of dictate how restaurants that have a large sidewalk outside may or may not use that space, how much money they'd have to pay to the city to get a permit and etc. Like cities like Miami Beach and Miami and you know other cities in the county have these outdoor dining ordinances so that's what that policy consultant line item would be used for. Pretty much professional services pretty much remains the same other than that. We didn't spend all of these line items last year but I'm keeping them about where they were. were, I think RMA asked for a 3% raise, so that's also, and that was approved at the last meeting. Let's see what else, the street team, I think, is something that is pretty exciting. We just start that up as soon as possible in the new fiscal year. I have also a line item that I've put in there at the boards request, some of the boards request for community safety enhancements. That would be $300,000 that could be used in cooperation with the police department to offset some of the cost of the new residents that are coming in in these large developments like Lasal or, and, you know, in an ongoing basis North NNB place and Skygarden. These, these all have tiff tiff agreements with the CRA. And the city is, of course, not receiving the tax value that's being generated by those buildings. So in an effort to offset the sort of vast increase in population and not vast increase in policing budget. I'm trying to sort of do a test run for how can we how can we set up a enhancement to the community safety to make sure that our areas stay safe. It could also include things like lighting, cameras, and private security, so it's not limited to policing, but I put it in there and I can come back to you with the one or more programs to take advantage of this line item. So I have a question about that. So the policing would mean a police officer that would exclusively patrol any area that's CRA. It could mean a police officer for just the CRA areas. I've also in the past in other CRAs I've set up as a particular special unit that targets a certain type of crime. So for example, in other cities where there's, you know, drug market or something on the street, we can set up a particular task force that's funded through the CRA to specifically go after the street drug market or prostitution or- My concern is that if we have a police officer which is exclusive to that area, so an area which is in the CRA, and let's just say that there's a major, major problem going on where all units have to leave where they are and go to that. Yeah. Is that office going to be allowed to leave? Yes, so I can speak to that. So for example, I'm not sure how North Miami Beach's police force is set up. But when I was a commissioner or council person in the village of Elportal, we had a cooperation agreement with Miami-Shore, City of Miami, and actually most of the local police departments around so that whenever there was an emergency that needed more than the local police force, all of the officers from the area could come and, you know, we had a shooting one time and an officer from, I think this can park was the first officer to arrive on the scene just because the Elport Hall officer was on the other side of the city. So that wouldn't affect something like that in general, if they're doing their patrols, they would sort of need to focus on the CRA area, of course. But if there was an incident, that's acceptable to go outside the boundaries. Hi. So let me continue the street team, the community safety enhancements. I know Commissioner John had asked to see if we could do some sort of a fix for 163rd Street. I think that's a good idea. sort of a fix for 163rd Street. I think that's a good idea. A lot of people that I've talked to in the community really feel like it's important. I think that's a phased project and a large project, but it's also a project that we can start right away. She had asked for something like street pole banners on 163rd. I think cleaning up the private properties, shrubs and greenery on the street might be good to do at the same time. I do have a line item for 163rd Street. This is sort of down towards the bottom, but, sorry, I lost it. 163rd Street Street Skate Planning, so that would be things like if we're going to do a project on 163rd that really actually seeks to fix some of the sort of built-in problems there, and I know the city's been working on this for many, many years, but I'd like to have the CRA be sort of like at the foreground of that project, working with public works and working with FDOT and the county as well. So I did put money for that. I also have money for branding like the street poll banners, the way finding signage if the city should desire to revisit that project. It's still in there. I have a code compliance vehicle that is, I know that the city has read down their code compliance officers and hired several new officers. I think there's a short fall of vehicles in terms of code compliance right now. I don't think CRA ever purchased the truck that Elycia is using. And I think it would make sense if you know the city had the city's truck in the Sierra could then go out and use some of our funding to purchase another vehicle. Then I still carried forward the Westixi Highway improvements. These were projects, a project that's been ongoing for many years as the county plans the widening of Westix, the highway. I think a big sort of impetus for this was how do we get people from the new hire riser, mid-rise eight-story building, or across the street to the businesses, where they can shop. That's important. And part of what the CRA would end up doing is installing crosswalks and sort of safety measures for people to get across the block there as well. As I think we need to sort of mitigate the damage to the trees that's gonna come from that project. I'll look for a question on that. Yeah, wouldn't you do that with the planning of the expansion on the road instead of tearing it up once it's looked down? Yeah, so before the construction begins, this would need to start. And I've spoken, I've been in contact with the counties engineers on that project. And they're focused right now on still acquiring the last pieces of right away that they need to widen the road. I've also, what they've said is, we'll design the crosswalks at the very end of the design process, but before construction. So that's when our sort of efforts would come in. And I did get in a little bit of a back and forth with them about what is the county's plan to remediate the tree damage that's coming out of this. Because I think we all know as you drive up Westix, see highway right now, it's actually one of the most beautiful streets in the city and partly because of the canopy of those trees there. And many of those could potentially be cleared to make way for the wider road. So part of what I was suggesting to the DOT was, or not the DOT, the county's engineers was, that they should remediate as much as possible of the canopy, and then if possible, maybe the CRA could work with the private developers to further extend the planting area for trees into some of the swale areas that are owned by the private developers or business owners, property owners, I should say not developers. So that's that. Let's see, I put a lot of money in trees. I've been hearing the board express interest in trees. This is something that at the last CRA I was at, I had a fully GIS mapping done of every tree in the CRA, as well as every planting space for new trees and use that going forward to remediate trees that were having problems. I know the city has a tree, a tree plan and desires to be sort of like at the highest level of tree care. That's great because it's a beautification. We just had a meeting and they were very concerned with the trees and the new buildings that are going up. So yeah, and I think you know the tendency for new buildings is to plant sort of young trees, which I get it, but it might make sense for the CRA to go in and look at, is there a way to sort of, you know, get an enhancement to those, those sort of basic standards that the city has, plant bigger trees, and also take care of the trees that we've have planted already as a CRA, as well as, you know, the 165th Street on the south side of Michigan Park. I think we've been talking about that block between the library and the singer building a lot. And, you know, I keep visiting to see what what it looks like during the weekends, what it looks like during the day and the evening and I really think having some trees there to sort of protect the families to make it nice to walk back and forth on that street might be a pretty effective use of a small amount of money because we can add trees fairly and expensively and from my understanding and my reading, it's one of the highest returns on investment a city can be making and it's you know, it's built environment. The grant programs, as you know, those are sort of ongoing each year. I've refunded them. The micro grant program, I added a little more since we've been getting a lot of interest in that. The housing affordability, this line item is because the county has put in a request for all CRAs to spend at least 10% of their budget on housing affordability. I know I've been hearing the board talking more and more over over time about, you know, what's work like, how do we get workforce housing in the city? How do we keep people in their homes? How do we fix up some of the older buildings? All of those things are could be served by this line item and also, you know, if there is a particular developer that's coming and saying, look, I wanna build a mixed income building, I wanna build an elderly building. All of those things can be served by these affordable housing line items as like it could become a grant as sort of an infrastructure grant or an impact fee grant for that type of development. I think it really depends what the board wants to use it for, but I have several projects that I think may end up wanting to produce buildings that are of mixed income or, you know, below market rate. And I think this is going to be a really important line item to have as a reserve and an offering when those developers are ready. The Lassoil Tax Increment is there. The Aura will not see it this year, so they won't be up for next year's budget. And I did add another grant, which is a change of use grant. This is something that I'll bring back to as the board to approve, of course, but I wanted to sort of put it out there just as the idea. So many of the businesses that are in the city are, and I talk to the property owners all the time, I talk to incoming business owners, and one of the huge difficulties is changing the use from one type of business to the next. For example, right now I'm working on a building on 160th Second Street and it's an old hospital and they want to convert it. Some new tenants are looking at it. They want to convert it into a junior high of a private middle school. I think, you know, they seem like they are very authentically interested in the city. They're from the city. They grew up here. They went away to get their PhDs and came back. And so as we're walking through the property, you know, the things that are occurring to me are like, what does it take to change the use beyond, you know, there's the rehab has to happen, of course. But when you change a use, it has to bring everything up to the very most recent code. And that can be incredibly expensive right now. It turns up project that maybe was $300,000 into a project that's over $ million dollars easily. So that idea with that grant is because we're trying to help the market sort of lift itself up in North Miami Beach. How can we reduce the friction that is caused by bringing things up to code, which is good. How can we reduce that friction for, you know, if a property wants to go from being a, you know, a car, a break shop to a break fast shop or something, right? So those types of changes are possible, but they're expensive. And this would aim to reduce that friction. As for, I think that's the highlights really. The singer building is in here, could go either way as a, as a, I put it in as CRA offices. If the singer building ends up going a different direction, we could reallocate that money for a different office or rehabbing a building to serve as an office. I know there's some changes going on across the street at the PSA, the water department and the building department are figuring out what's happening with that building. And I also know that it's a little getting a little crowded in there. So it might be useful for the CRA to try to start to find another property we could just lease a property and fix it up for ourselves too. So that's really, I guess that's where I would leave you at. Our TIFF revenues went up by 17% this year, which is good, not as good as last year, but last year was insane. And I think that'll continue through into the next year too. The question I have is, you know, the person or that you're talking about to help you with code and so on and so forth. The city is embarking on hiring a zoning director. So a new zoning director, wouldn't that be the person that would help you with code? And, you know, being the CRA would gladly help you if you needed certain code for 160. For the CRA area? Yeah. The zoning director would definitely have to be part of that process. I think the way that it's currently working, the zoning director has a lot of their own projects going on right, and they have a lot on their plate. And so what I can do is say, how can I help? And you know, if they say, look, I'm, you know, I think we should do this and I think we should do this and we kind of can come to some kind of agreement about who might be the best individual to do a particular piece of code because people do have sort of specialties and on the urban design elements and there's people that are focused on the ground level community developments. All right. I got it. So, the idea is just to sort of augment what the city is doing within the CRA. And really, you know, for example, this ordinance for outdoor dining, it's really sort of 99% encompassed by the area of the CRA, but if the city should eventually desire to have outdoor dining, for example, on 19th Avenue, up near 180 second, like if they wanted to do that too, then it could be sort of taken and remodeled for that fairly easily. So I think it kind of improves the city's opportunities to do stuff outside the Sierra as well as fixing problems inside the Sierra. Thank you. you know fixing problems inside the Sierra. Okay. Through the chair, I, I'm, there's a lot of questions I have about this, but the main thing that you covered that I'd like to say is $300,000 to do the streetscape on 1603rd Street. It's a county road and really, we only go to 15th Avenue. So unless we coordinate with the city, I don't know if that would be money just utilized for a temporary fix. And my comment about the whole budget is that I think we've given a lot of direction that we wanted more use of the money to bring back money, more projects. And so when I hear we don't have enough room, we're hiring more people, we're hiring somebody for this and we're hiring something for that. It wasn't what my direction of the CRA, what I had meant it to be. So, you know, looking over where the money's spent, a dribble here, a dribble there, it really starts to add up, and then there's not a lot of money left to reinvest it into something that will bring a project in and make a difference in the city with income to the CRA. Well, I think I think that if I could through the chair, address that. The projects that are going to bring the most money are projects that let the cities, businesses flourish. So I think what that looks like, maybe there's different ideas about what that looks like. But for example, in the last, in the last annual fiscal year, we had two large developments that were trying to move towards what the city has approved in terms of their getting a shovel in the ground. For me, that's probably the single most impactful thing the CRI can be doing is if the city's approved projects, we need to help them figure out how to get them out of the ground. In terms of city-owned land and right-of-way type projects, public type projects, we do have actually a fair number in this budget, but the way that I'm trying to be realistic with the way the money is going to be spent, and I've seen millions of dollars set into a project for years on end and it never gets spent because there's projects take time to develop and are slow. If a project can go quickly, I'm totally willing to move money into it. For example, the the subject to sewer project that we did last year, that is something that I think can move fast. And I think, you know, I'm hoping that that breaks ground very shortly and starts getting these businesses so they don't have to pay fines every month to the county. But in terms of projects that I think, you know, we're going to make a big difference, Snake Creek, it's not, it looks like a dribble, there's, it's's gonna have to be fully planned out with traffic engineering. We've gone through South Florida Water Management District, sort of commentary already. We had to change a whole lot of that project based on a new dam that's coming down near, or a new pump that's coming down near, or a new pump that's coming down near the dam on Snake Creek. But that project is going to be pretty impactful. It has connection between the 10th Center and the library area that's not connected currently, the city has thousands of new units that are slated for development in that area and no parks right now. And so it will also include planning for enhancements to the parks on each side. So that would be like activating enhancements to two places like the property next to Mishkan Park where the all-wors memorial is right now. That's underused. I go there all the time. There's very rarely anyone there. And the last time I was there, there was somebody sort of like taking a shower in the war memorial. So our idea is how do you activate that space? How do you make it a place where like families, children, kids and adults can all go and gather there. So that's part of this project that's called Snake Creek. I'd love to talk about some of the projects that are too tentative to put in this. But I have been in discussions with some property owners on 163rd to do development of their properties, assembled properties. I think, you know, a lot of the way that our budget works is by doing these tiff agreements. And so you won't see that in the budget until after it's done. But I'm totally willing to, you know, like revise the budget if you think there's something that we should be focusing on that we're not. I would love to think about how we get a public parking garage somewhere on 164th Street. I don't have that planned because I don't have the property in mind yet and I don't know how much it would cost. A lot. Yeah. I mean, I think it would probably have to be a collaborative project with the city and potentially the property owner. And as we've all discussed in previous items, the city has sort of tools at its disposal. They can do zoning changes. They can do, you know, things like that. The CRA has other tools at our disposal. We can put, we don't have very much money to put grant money in, but we can do these tiff deals that are, you know, fairly, fairly beneficial to development if that's as which is. Okay. Anybody? Anybody else for any other questions? No. Move to approve. CRA 24-09. All right. All in favour say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Opposed. Okay. I'm going to record to show that vice chair Smith is opposed and it passes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So moved. Yep.