The SunPost: The Mouth Piece of Henny Penny (Whoever That Is) 

Dear SunPost: 

Re: Your October 9th editorial, “Ouch.” 

In January 2003, the Miami Beach City Commission, inspired by an audience of more than 300 angry and sleepless residents, instructed the City Manager, in a unanimous resolution, to use every legal tool he needed to stop excessive noise coming from Opium Gardens and other clubs. In April, the commission told the Chief of Police that it wanted him to form a special quality-of-life patrol to stop loud auto radio noise, public intoxication, the soiling of our streets and sidewalks with human waste and sidewalk prostitution.  Following that, the commission later passed a popular ordinance banning new outdoor entertainment establishments in South Pointe.

In parallel actions, the Planning Board made it clear to club operators and hoteliers that it would not authorize conditional use permits for outdoor entertainment for businesses which are too close to residential buildings. (The closely-followed case in point was the Skybar at the Shore Club.) Then, a review of regulations governing the issuance of Special Event Permits to ensure that promoters did not blast residents out of their beds was initiated by the city manager’s office.

It is this drift of political events which has prompted a campaign of expressed concerns by the SunPost and a small wave of complaints by hoteliers, club operators and promoters.

The city’s instrument of noise enforcement is the county noise law, Dade 21-28. This ordinance authorizes the police to make arrests, if necessary, to enforce provisions of the law. While the text of the ordinance protects residents at any hour of the day against “loud, excessive, unnecessary or unusual noises,” the so-called prima facie standard, known as the “plainly audible standard,” is almost always applied. Specifically, between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., noise is prohibited that is plainly audible at 100 feet or more from its source.

Recently, at a city-sponsored workshop to explain how the county noise law would be implemented, a calculated hue and cry was raised about arbitrary, capricious, unconstitutional, cruel and unwarranted arrests (!) by the police under that law. It was alleged by entertainment industry spokesmen that this new enforcement policy would cause CEO’s of famous hotels to be carted off to the county jail, that enforcing the law would cripple the city’s economy  and that the arrest policy would ruin the personal lives of some of the city’s most outstanding and creative people.

Maybe you didn’t notice, but all of us out here are big boys and girls now, so we recognize the familiar voices of financial self-interest. But what about the voice of the SunPost, the people’s tribune?

To deal with enforcement issues, it seems that the SP’s editorial page writers decided to seek expert advice from their outside consultant, Dr. Henny Penny, the well-known astrophysicist whose most famous scientific research paper predicted, as you may recall, that the sky would fall down. According to Dr.Penny, if Dade 21-28 were implemented in ways proposed by the city manager, we will have to build more jails. But most important of all, she predicted that malicious condo dwellers would institute a plague of false arrests of honest, hard-working, upright business people, crippling their businesses, ruining their reputations, and leaving a shameful trail of broken lives behind.

Well, come on. First, the city manager was under no obligation to hold a workshop to survey public opinion about the formulation of purely administrative rules. He did that purely as a favor to the business community. Second, Dade 21-28 has been enforced for years, so there is nothing new about it, nor is it news to anyone who knows the City Code, that the city manager has always had the power to suspend or shut down the businesses that habitually violate city ordinances. Third, though the law authorizes a police officer to make an arrest, Code Compliance is the main enforcement mechanism, and since Code Compliance has the authority under Chapter 30 to enforce county laws, it regularly enforces that law by means of civil citations, not arrests.  (Before we go any further, arrests for Dade 21-28, invariably take the form of a ticket, not handcuffing.) Fifth, if an arrest is made, it is the lowest form of a misdemeanor approximately equal to drinking in public, sleeping in the park or on the sidewalk, doing graffiti, or, say, urinating in public. Lastly, citations under Dade 21-28 are not authorized or issued as Henny Penny said in your October 9^th editorial, “…if a code compliance officer deems a place too noisy.” Dr. Penny conveniently forgot to mention that the 100 foot/plainly audible legal standard must always be applied.

Now, if you can get Dr. Penny off her butt to do some real research, she will surely find that the last time a club or hotel employee was arrested by a city police officer for excessive noise is lost to human memory. Second, she will discover that those now crying loudest against a policy of arresting people for excessive noise and similar misdemeanors, didn’t raise a peep when the police quality-of-life patrol began making arrests for loud car radios, public intoxication, and urination in public. Actually, they demanded that such arrests be made and they were! (I looked at the police records every Monday morning for weeks on end.) She will also discover, though nine months have passed since the city commission told the city manager to get on top of the Opium Gardens problem, that the city has produced a lot of apparent motion, but, in fact, Opium’s lawyers, are slowly, very slowly, dragging the case through three courts. So much for the myth of the city manager’s arbitrary, capricious, awesome and terrifying power!

It’s time that the SunPost’s editors openly agree that in a democratic society, the selective application of a law, either by suspending certain of its parts or by focusing its full application on specially targeted sub-groups, is plainly wrong. Furthermore, I think that the SunPost should permanently retire Henny Penny.  If you don’t agree with that, at least the SunPost could take a small constructive step by making Dr.Penny sign any future editorials that she prepares for the SunPost.

Morris Sunshine

 Trainspotting: The Anti-Bay Linkers Last Hurrah 

On September 8 the City of Miami Beach County Commission opted for progressive urbanism over the politics of No! and voted to link Miami Beach by streetcar with downtown Miami. But instead of adjusting to the forces of progress, the advocates of status quo have become more shrill. In fact, things got downright bizarre at the September 25 MPO meeting.

Not content with just turning down the progressives’ plea for finding ways together of implementing the plan, the “No!” crowd chose a strange stratagem instead. First they employed the old tried-and-true method of delay by proxy. Turns out, nobody wants a concrete people-moving Stonehenge here on the Beach with all those monstrous pylons, steep stairways and weird, overhead buses. The people spoke loudly against it, and down it went.

When that gambit failed, it was time for more familiar disruptive methods: grabbing the microphone and droning interminably. Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez impatiently imposed a time limit, then was angered by the first speaker who threatened a lawsuit. Bad move. Had there been a sergeant-at-arms this person might very well have been ejected—not the best way to get your point across. Nor did the next anti-Baylinker further the cause by overstaying his turn at the podium and rehashing the politics of No! The mayor silenced this with the observation that he didn’t need political lessons and he sure didn’t appreciate finger pointing. Then, following an articulate presentation by a streetcar proponent, it was back to the same old same old. The next young lady’s lengthy screed saw their whole position crumble as the mayor’s patience finally wore out. Now in full boobird mode, the last unfortunate actually got the microphone plug pulled because she wouldn’t stop talking! Miami politics as great theatre strikes again.

You can’t blame them, though. After all, last March, this kind of thing worked. But against a savvy MPO board the reaction faction’s game plan just wasn’t going to fly. In fact, you might even say, they got “derailed.”

Jeffrey Bradley