By Rebecca Wakefield

It is safe to say that Morris Sunshine is hung up on noise. He does not love it. It confounds and irritates him, which is a problem given that he lives in a popular tourist destination world-renowned for its raucous nightlife.

For the last couple of years, the city of Miami Beach has been wrestling with the question of how to balance the essentially incompatible desires of condo residents and the hotel and nightlife industries in South Beach on this issue. After much obsessive-compulsiveness on both sides, the City Commission in December took a crack at some noise regulations that would allow peace and harmony to return to the village once more.

The main issue for residents like Sunshine is the obnoxious revelry pumping through the windows of their nice, quiet condos until the early morning. Residents felt they had little recourse because the city wasn’t really tracking complaints, and business owners were weaseling out of any real consequence by manipulating the city’s ponderous code enforcement process. Meanwhile, industry reps, such as Greater Miami & the Beaches Hotel Association President Stu Blumberg, warned that stricter regulation risked becoming in effect “an anti-business ordinance.”

Thus it was amazing that a compromise was made December 7 at the commission meeting. On January 11, the commission will have a second and final reading of the proposed ordinance. The idea is that businesses would get “courtesy warnings” (i.e., warnings with no practical effect whatsoever) if code inspectors take it upon themselves to advise the businesses they are creating too much noise, but the warnings would be deemed official if a resident called to complain.

A hotel or nightclub could get up to six official warnings in a year (plus four extra ones for special times like New Year’s) before having to worry about hiring somebody to go down to City Hall to hassle the bureaucrats. After that, each violation of the ordinance would result in penalties, from $250 up to $5,000, plus the suspension of business for two weekends for the fifth violation. If the business still proved unruly, the city would think about really suspending or revoking its license, maybe, after a bunch of meetings on the subject. Also, the commission majority (4-3) conceded that noise that projected out to the ocean or Lummus Park didn’t count, officially.

Both sides seemed sanguine at the time. Then South Pointe activist Frank Del Vecchio, who is not a noise fan, thought about it. He thinks that in specific residential areas, such as Belle Isle, Sunset Harbour and South Pointe, the allowable number of official warnings ought to be reduced to three, as proposed by Commissioner Saul Gross. Del Vecchio is also concerned that at the January 11 meeting, commissioners might further liberalize the ordinance. “The pendulum went much further to the clubs than we thought,” he said, referring to the ideas that code inspector-generated complaints don’t really count and neither do noises that carry toward the ocean. “[Commissioner] Jerry Libbin swung it the other way. He suddenly went to an extreme on allowing many warnings. We’re asking for a real balance.”

Del Vecchio is concerned that hotels will hold loud parties in de facto nightclubs on their pool decks and cites the commission’s approval this past July of changes in event guidelines that might allow the hotels to do that without getting special permits.

Blumberg argued that the ordinance as proposed on December 7 is balanced, given “the competitive world we deal with,” in terms of events in local resorts, from Broward to Miami. “If a group comes down and wants an outdoor function and you tell them, ‘You can have it, but it might get shut down,’ you lose that piece of corporate business.”

Blumberg added that outdoor parties have been going on in South Beach since before Prohibition, a fact prospective condo buyers should have considered before moving in next to a big hotel. “You try to coexist,” he said, “but there are going to be some situations.”

This is a difficult question for me. The conflict here is between privileged people, residents who can afford to live on Ocean Drive, and hotel or club owners who make a living parting fools from their money. Who can relate?

Not so long ago, I was the sort of person who thought it would be cool, not to mention time-efficient, to live above a bar. I never did and wouldn’t now, but my sympathies do tend toward the party crowd. I like a good party, bass booming. However, I wouldn’t want to live next to one. I got a taste of residential angst a couple of years ago while living in South Beach around Seventh Street and Meridian Avenue. Granted, it is a slightly less tony neighborhood than Ocean Drive, but it is still a noisy street at times. I witnessed the same sort of excess and dysfunction on a smaller scale. Sometimes I miss the transvestite hookers, though. They were pretty entertaining.

The city does not have an easy task balancing commerce with community, especially when Miami Beach is still growing up and not sure what it will be when it does. From a purely political perspective, commissioners just need to weigh the value of industry money versus resident votes (assuming enough of them vote here). The larger perspective, though, and why I more or less side with the residents, is that Miami Beach seriously needs to get a handle on itself.

We need better planning, zoning and meaningful enforcement on a host of issues, and it needs to be consistent. We need more parking, parks and public transportation, among many other needs. There has to be a long-term perspective on livability, or the very assets that make the local economy hum will degenerate just as they have in the past.

There is a more romantic solution for those residents tired of fighting endless political battles. I’m envisioning the opening scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in which middle-age corporate raiders literally crash their building into a rival company and take it over. Imagine a swashbuckling Del Vecchio fighting his way past the velvet rope at Opium Garden or Nikki Beach, elbowing the DJ in the mouth, then slowly, deliberately, turning down the music.