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The Challenge

The Miami Beach City Commission has given the green light to the city manager to use his powers to enforce the noise ordinance and other quality of life issues affecting residents. To avoid even the perception of selective enforcement, the manager’s challenge in such an undertaking should be treating every offending club and bar in the city with an equal hand.  

A.C. Weinstein
Columnist 

Back a couple of years ago when the City of Miami Beach played host to the Microsoft convention, residents of a beachfront condo complained to the new city manager Jorge Gonzalez about the loud music that was entertaining the conventioneers at a city-sanctioned party on the beach. In an interview with the manager about that ruckus, Gonzalez admitted that one of his greatest challenges in his new post is to balance the needs of a vibrant tourism industry with a sophisticated and expanding residential community.

There may be a few areas to criticize the manager, but Gonzalez earned high marks for recognizing early the unique challenge of trying to manage the success of the Miami Beach he inherited. Real estate was booming, new residential buildings were sprouting like corn stalks in a heavily fertilized field and, at the same time, a number of new entertainment and club venues were digging in to capitalize on the city’s coup d'état of attracting a younger resident and visitor population.

Hotel porches on Ocean Drive that, not too long ago were little more than outdoor waiting rooms for the nursing home set, suddenly were live music venues for the overnight tourist and over-the-causeway crowd. In less than a decade, Ocean Drive’s historic but crumbling flop and crack houses were under renovation and then preserved and transformed into a collection of one of the great architectural achievements and attractions for the new resurgence in tourism.

While the visitors played and danced on Ocean Drive, the city’s residents found the pre-renovated Lincoln Road more to their liking. After the city spent more than $20 million to upgrade the Road (including the $250,00 roach and another $75 million on two nearby tax dollar funded convention-style hotels), mass tourism jettisoned toward its newest incarnation. The city had every right to tout Lincoln Road as one of its greatest triumphs.

Just when everything was coming together, the tragedy of 9-11 pulled the plug on the airline and tourism industries across America. And now a new city manager and a new mayor with a new commission had to figure out, along with a dipping national economy and the possibility of a full-blown war, a plan to maintain Miami Beach’s ten-year economic surge.

To everyone’s credit residents, city government and the local business community pulled together and, according to numbers tallied by tourism bean counters, Miami Beach led just about every other place in the nation in bouncing back. Real estate is still booming and residents are enjoying improved parks and other public spaces. Even the tourists have returned to the South Beach party.

At last week’s commission meeting, Gonzalez had to be reminded about the Microsoft party and barrage of noise complaints from the beachfront condo residents when similar issues regarding Opium and other music venues were being discussed. Granted, the Microsoft noise issue was different, being a brief special event it was gone the next day.

What was discussed at last week’s meeting is far more permanent and expanding. Gonzalez and the commission are now facing what the manager understood during the Microsoft beach party. His greatest challenge in the years ahead - how to manage Miami Beach’s success – the traffic, trash in the street, large numbers of revelers and a noisier town. .

As new residential buildings rise with more and more indoor and outdoor music venues overlapping their neighborhoods, it was only a matter of time before the clash of tourist business and resident quality of life would reach to the boiling point. That time is now at a slow simmer and moving rapidly toward a rolling boil.

Well, at least where some clubs and bars have been thriving too close to residential neighborhoods. Some of those venues may even be right inside those neighborhoods. And so the noise, traffic, trash, broken bottles, street fights and all of those negative spillovers from the entertainment venues are literally destroying the quality of life within and around adjacent residential neighborhoods.

Residents living south of 5^th Street have now organized to complain about the pounding music and hordes of people spilling out from a club that’s just too close to their homes. Further north in South Beach, residential neighborhoods just west of the Ocean Drive-Washington Avenue entertainment corridor also are struggling with the negative impacts of similar spillovers: Street noise, traffic, drunks urinating on stoops and in doorways, fights, broken bottles, etc.

Every Saturday and Sunday morning residents living in the neighborhoods just west of that entertainment epicenter have to remove the trash, bottles and some rather indescribable objects from their front yards, hedges and doorways. Folks in the tourist business who depend on large numbers of people to fill their venues will say that’s what Miami Beach is all about. Some residents are now expressing a different point of view. 

The commission is trying something new to deal with the clubs and bars in South Beach and other parts of the city. Last week the commission unanimously voted in a show of support to put the needs of residential neighborhoods first. The manager was given the green light to enforce the noise ordinance and to come down hard on all of those negative impacts that spill out from the clubs and bars into the residential neighborhoods. 

The manager’s challenge will fall upon his ability to enforce the rules fairly and equally across the board for every club and bar that negatively impacts any residential neighborhood, not just for the wealthy condo dwellers that have organized with legal counsel south of 5^th Street. No one can dispute the fact that the noisiest street in Miami Beach after dusk is Ocean Drive between 5^th and 11^th Streets. It’s no secret that the louder the music from the clubs and bars the larger the crowds it will attract.

And maybe all of that should be on Ocean Drive, which has evolved to a strip that’s far more popular with visitors than residents. But to avoid even the perception of selective enforcement, the test of fairness will be in protecting residents in any neighborhood suffering the negative impacts to their quality of life. Enforcement for one should apply to all. That will be the city manager’s greatest challenge.  

Anchor Garage RFP Update 

Since his arrival a few years ago, Miami Beach’s Director of Procurement, Gus Lopez, has been praised by the city and press for bringing a high level of professionalism, integrity, and for instilling new measures of reform into his department. Lopez is charged with opening the proposals that come into the city via the competitive bidding process. Lopez also tosses bids that are not in compliance with the city’s request for proposals’ requirements.

As director of procurement, Lopez has advised both the city manager and city attorney’s office that, in his professional opinion, “the city’s parking department (Saul Frances) response to the Anchor RFP is not responsive and not in compliance.” All City of Miami Beach officials should think about that.