City Commission to Decide on Tennis Courts in Flaming; An Open Letter to the Mayor and Commissioners

Dear Mayor and Commissioners:


The Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association urges that you move forward by finalizing and implementing the Flamingo Park Masterplan and its Tennis Facilities within the 17 court footprint adopted by the City Commission, approved by the Historic Preservation Board, and recommended by the City Manager.

We fully support the very good plan that resulted from over 18 months of meetings, workshops and hearings guided by Wolfberg Alvarez, CIP, Parks and Recreation, your Finance Committee, and the City Commission.

We fully support the Administration’s analysis and recommendation to move forward now within the parameters of the existing adopted masterplan.

We urge you to fashion a reasonable, realistic solution that will enable tennis players – whether seniors, adults, or our students – to play on appropriate surfaces on courts in the City. But tennis facilities in Flamingo Park ought not to overwhelm other aspects of the park – active, passive or aesthetic. That was the point made by Planning Department staff and the Historic Preservation Board in considering the Berger Plan and the 22 court proposals!

We urge that you fashion a solution without compromising the balance of uses and aesthetic value of the Flamingo Park Masterplan.

Sincerely,

Denis Russ
For Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association

Public Hearing before City Commission on Short Term Rental -- Scheduled for Wednesday, May 12, 2010, 5:00 pm

The City Commission has scheduled the Second Reading Public Hearing at 5:00 pm on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 on the Short Term Rental of Apartment Units / Townhomes.

The proposed ordinance precludes future additional operators to rent their properties short term and also sets a criteria to allow certain existing short term rentals to continue.  While there has been great difference of opinion on the issue, our Association has been consistently in support of such a compromise. 

While the final proposed Ordinance and staff recommendation is not yet available, it is generally thought that the proposal will be generally within the parameters previously stated and will be supported by the Association. 

Commission Meeting Scheduled to Discuss Flamingo Park Tennis -- Let them know: Seventeen is ENOUGH

At the City Commission meeting on Wednesday, May 12, 2010, Item R9K is a Discussion of Amending the Flamingo Park Master Plan relative to the Tennis Center -- including the number and composition of the tennis courts, the design of the clubhouse and the total footprint to the new tennis facility.

The Administration memo can be accessed at  http://flamingomb.org/2Q2010/CMB_Flamingo_Tennis_Courts_5-12-2010.pdf

The conclusion and recommendation of the Administration is

A determination of the type and number of courts to be built is needed in order to proceed with this project.  We are at 100% drawings on the 17 courts and have been unable to proceed pending a final decision on the number and type of courts to be built.  A change in the configuration of the tennis center (and tennis center building design) will require new design drawings to be developed and further costs and delays for the implementation of the Master Plan.  The Administration recommends affirming/approving the current Tennis Center design and location and the current footprint of 17 courts.  A final decision on the complement of hard versus clay courts will allow us to proceed with the next steps in the project.

At our meeting on Monday, May 3, 2010 the Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association reaffirmed our support for the currently approved configuration / footprint of 17 tennis courts.  Please take a moment to write a note to the Mayor and Commissioners in support of our position and be sure to show up at the Commission meeting -- Seventeen is ENOUGH.

Meeting Notes -- Mon, May 3, 2010, 5:30pm -- What are your Ideas on Outreach and Marketing??

The Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association met on Monday, May 3,2010, 5:30 pm, at The Seymour, 945 Pennsylvania Avenue.


The Agenda followed the assignment of our designated subject areas and leaders.

Preservation and Planning

1. Short Term Rentals in Flamingo – Discussion was led by Jeff Donnelly.

There was extensive discussion of the history and current status of the issues. It was recognized that fundamentally there were strongly held positions on both sides of the matter: Some wanted no restrictions; some wanted no short term rental. A compromise was fashioned based upon a criteria including several factors, i.e., dates of operation, status of violations, tax reporting, etc. In moving forward it is generally recognized that the details of the application of the criteria is really in the hands of administration and Commission.

It was broadly agreed that the current proposal before the Commission is within the compromise agreed to earlier. It was understood that those who seem currently to be excluded would continue to seek protective status. The Association would continue to advance the compromise position.

2. Alton Road Overlay District – The discussion was led by Mark Needle.

There continued to be broad support for the Alton Road Overlay District as advanced by the Planning Department staff and considered by the Planning Board. The Association supported the following propositions:

 No variances should be permitted.

 Maintain the 4 story above-ground height limit with the understanding that underground parking would not be added to the building height.

 Aggregation beyond two lots is conditional, subject to a determination by the Historic Preservation Board that a proposed design is compatible with adjacent structures.

Flamingo Park Masterplan and Improvement Projects


3. Flamingo Park – Tennis Facilities – Discussion led by Wanda Mouzon.

There was extensive discussion of the status of Flamingo Park Masterplan and project implementation, particularly regarding the number and configuration of tennis courts.

Representatives of the Miami Beach Tennis Players Association explained their position of needing to maximize clay courts. The position of the school was described as seeking to play on hard courts at Flamingo Park.

The Association agreed to continue to advance its existing position to limit the number of tennis courts to 17 courts based upon the plan approved by the Commission on Sep 9, 2009 and as subsequently approved by the Historic Preservation Board.

Other Matters were carried over to the next meeting, including

-- Flamingo Neighborhood Street Improvements

-- Crime Prevention and Safety / Pedestrian Safety Project

Outreach and Marketing

Finally, it was agreed to solicit ideas for expanding the base of Association members and participants and to spend some time at our next meeting developing an Outreach Action Plan.

Randall Robinson strikes an ace in his message to the City Commission

From: Randall Robinson
Date: Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 8:49 PM

Subject: Tennis

Dear Mayor Matti Bower and City Commissioners:

I am excited to be writing to you today because I believe you have the ability, through the item on the Flamingo Park Tennis Courts, to bring lasting improvement to two of the areas of Miami Beach I hold nearest and dearest: Flamingo Park and North Beach.

The holding of USTA Florida Orange Bowl Tennis Tournament between North Shore Tennis Center and Flamingo Park would bring attention and economic benefits to North Beach's growing appeal, while reducing the pressure on the Flamingo Park tennis facility to expand.

I cannot say it better than the Historic Preservation Board "that the adopted plan [for Flamingo Park] fits the need for a balance in varied recreational facilities and green open space respite in a way that respects the original plan for the park." 17 courts is enough! Please support the community in its desire to formalize the precious central, accessible, open space they have fought for for so long. Miami Beach's most densely populated neighborhood needs the open space.

Speaking of 'balance,' I urge you to do everything in your power to make the USTA Junior Orange Bowl Tennis Tournament a citywide event and spread some of South Beach wealth and exposure to North Beach.

Best Wishes,

Randall Robinson
Urbanist

Wanda Mouzon sends the message to City Hall: Diversity of Activites and Design Aesthetic Should Guide

Dear Mayor Bower and Commission,


I just read this interesting article and wish to share it with you. The statement that I found especially relevant to our Park renovation and our cause for the preservation of open green space is this:

" Studies show that depression correlates with the lack of access to green space, a plight of many inner-city residents; the physical isolation of suburbanites; and the immobility enforced on those who cannot drive but have no transportation alternative."

http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/how-urban-planning-can-improve-public-health-11408/

Let's not allow the disease of sprawl to infect our City OR our Neighborhood Park! The ad hoc aggregation of single-use projects and functions in a city OR in a park are contrary to creating communities that are socially diverse, environmentally sensitive and economically sustainable. Just as sprawl consumes land, is unsustainable, favors social inequality and causes traffic problems, allowing Flamingo Park to be largely consumed by single-use activities will do the very same thing!

Thank you for keeping this in mind as the final decisions are made concerning the Park. Please remember as well, the design elements and components that create the most beautiful and most enjoyable parks in the world. (that I shared with you all in an earlier email) These two items should be the key deciding factors.

Wanda Mouzon


How Urban Planning Can Improve Public Health

Miller-McCune Online
News and Options

April 28, 2010

A growing movement looks to change development patterns — as a matter of public health.
By Jonathan Lerner

Atlanta's Broad Street is often cited as an instance of urban planning that worked to created a sense of neighborhood.

(Courtesy of Congress for the New Urbanism)

You hardly need scientific research to pinpoint objectionable aspects of suburban sprawl. The big-box commercial jumble, the lifeless cul-de-sac subdivision, the traffic, the sameness — all are plain to see. Disagreeable qualities of half-empty downtowns and deteriorated city neighborhoods are equally visible. Still, people don’t usually think that the things they find aesthetically objectionable about their neighborhoods might literally be making them sick.

Yet a growing mass of scientific evidence does indicate that how places are designed and built can cause and complicate grave health problems for individuals and whole populations. Depression — the clinical kind, not the aesthetic and cultural malaise that sends people vacationing to, say, Barcelona — is one. Studies show that depression correlates with the lack of access to green space, a plight of many inner-city residents; the physical isolation of suburbanites; and the immobility enforced on those who cannot drive but have no transportation alternative.

As for cars, they don’t just spew pollution and trap people alone for wasted hours. They cause accident injuries and  deaths. Moreover, unwalkable distances and the culture of automobility encourage sedentary habits, contributing to obesity and diabetes and other illnesses. Plowing up farmland for new subdivisions at the metropolitan edge not only diminishes local food supplies and reinforces industrial agriculture — with negative implications for nutrition and resource conservation — it also forces those who must “drive till they qualify” for housing to need a car for almost every household member. Those automobile costs, usually overlooked, have exacerbated soaring rates of foreclosure and suburban poverty, with unhealthful knock-on effects like stress, displacement and homelessness.

Many examples beyond these lead to a conclusion: The crucial questions about how we build focus less on aesthetics — important as that is to our well-being — than on public health, in its broadest sense.

City planning originated, around the turn of the last century, out of concerns over health problems created by filthy slums and industries. Then the fields of public health and planning came uncoupled. Public health took on a mainly biomedical focus on individual genetics, biology and behavior and how clinicians could affect those, and on a narrowly biological approach to epidemiology and evidence. Meanwhile the planning of built environments was hijacked by the car.

Now the fields of city planning and public health — pushed by economic crisis, climate change and green technology, among other factors — are converging again. This month, the Congress for the New Urbanism was set to hold its national convention in Atlanta; it was organized with help from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the theme “New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places.”

The convention is hardly the first effort to address the relationships between urban form and health. The World Health Organization’s Healthy Cities movement was initiated in 1988; among other things, it encourages attention to health inequalities, participatory governance and the health considerations of economic and urban development. Some 1,200 European cities and many in Canada and Australia participate.

Back in the U.S., the Local Government Commission, an organization of elected and community leaders, government staff and planners and architects, adopted the Ahwahnee Principles for Resource-Efficient Communities in 1991. (The principles were named for the Yosemite National Park lodge where they were agreed to). The principles targeted the dysfunctional qualities of sprawl-pattern development; these ideas came to underlie the New Urbanism and Smart Growth movements. Meanwhile, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Active Living Research program supports extensive research into the urban form/public health nexus. The CDC’s Healthy Community Design initiative does the same.

Dr. Howard Frumkin, special assistant to the CDC director for climate change and health and co-author of Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities, actually calls the Congress for the New Urbanism “a public health group. By promoting walkability, mixed use, connectivity and civic space within communities, we know more and more, based on emerging evidence, that CNU is promoting public health.”

To anyone who thinks the New Urbanism makes sense, research conclusions on how built environments affect health can seem self-evident. For example, studies have demonstrated that neighborhoods with shops, schools, libraries, workplaces and homes within easy walking distance tend to support higher levels of physical activity and have lower rates of obesity. Public transit use has a similar effect on activity and fatness. Research has indicated that exposure to nature may improve attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, and that people with access to parks exercise more.

Like, duh. “So much research is proving the obvious,” says Ellen Dunham-Jones, associate professor of architecture and urban design at Georgia Tech and co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. “But once you get the numbers, you can hopefully get policy changes.”

Research into the connection between urban life and public health is, however, also creating surprises. As an example, Dunham-Jones points to studies showing that compact communities reduce overall vehicular emissions — but that people who live next to highways and heavily trafficked arterial roads breathe in more emissions. “It may be healthy for the community at large but not for you,” she says.

Pinning down the implications of such research subtleties remains a challenge. Frumkin identifies two still-poorly understood correlatives of built environment: “We have reason to believe that community design and building design have impacts both on mental health and on social capital. Social capital in turn is a very important determinant of overall health.”

The plans for New Urbanism towns sometimes depict circles centered on retail areas, with radii labeled as the distance of a five- or 10-minute walk. But landscape architect Dee Merriam, a CDC community planner, says that even walkability, a seemingly unambiguous value, needs scrutiny. “The basic metric we’ve been using for urban design has been the automobile scale, and the walking scale is a totally different metric,” she says. “What is the distance of a five-minute walk? It’s probably very different for a young athlete than for an elderly woman or someone with toddlers.”

Merriam says more investigation is also needed into green space, despite its known health connections; Dunham-Jones agrees, saying that research has raised complex questions about trade-offs. “Cities would prefer to have one big central park to maintain, than to have a whole lot of little parks. To really get people jogging, you need a big park. But to get little kids to go play, it’s much better to have a lot of little parks,” she says. “We can improve health by doing all sorts of things, but we’re not at the point where we’re maximizing dollar investment.”

Some new efforts to find design solutions for health challenges involve food. Ideas range from turning abandoned space in declining neighborhoods into urban farms — projects like this are already under way in Detroit and elsewhere — and allotting space for community gardens in new developments. There is even a vision of “agriburbia,” where entire neighborhoods are landscaped with orchards and cropland that could feed people in and beyond the development while providing local employment opportunities.

A recent design workshop addressed another piece of the healthy living puzzle: multigenerational or “lifelong” communities, where people can continue to live actively as they grow old. Specialists on aging, developers, planners and architects tried to envision the transformation of parts of metro Atlanta, reiterating the “must-haves” of New Urbanism — transit and walkability, mixed uses, multiple housing types — but describing how such elements could better accommodate the aging with, for example, shorter walking distances and shuttles to transit stops and shopping areas.

So the Congress for the New Urbanism, the CDC and others are taking important steps to address the cause-and-effect relationships of built environment and public health. But for towns and cities to be less damaging to health, those connections must become more universally acknowledged by health professionals, designers, planners and the decision-makers and developers for whom they work. Moreover, for the environment to support better health, public consciousness has to change. Individual choices will have to sustain healthier patterns of development, and political support will be needed, too, because some of the proposed changes in development demand big cultural shifts, particularly around auto use.

Many advocates say what’s needed is a holistic view that considers health, the environment, social relations, political processes and the economy as part of the development process. Jason Corburn, associate professor of city and regional planning at University of California, Berkeley, and author of Toward the Healthy City: People, Places, and the Politics of Urban Planning, insists that architects and planners “need to recognize that they’re part of governance,” since a healthy city should invite open participation in its political processes, planning included. “This is not to say that design is not important,” he says, but that it should be just one piece of thinking relationally about multiple influences upon health.

One tool that helps government officials identify such influences is the health impact assessment, an evaluation
process similar to the environmental impact statement. Such health assessments are a relatively new phenomenon in the U.S., but several dozen have already been conducted, and the CDC is actively promoting their use. While there is a legal basis under environmental protection laws for evaluating health impacts of proposed projects, the officials responsible are often unfamiliar with the HIA concept, or can feel that it deals in types of evidence not traditionally considered valid in making development decisions.

But traditional thinking has produced the sickening built environments most Americans now inhabit. Even  “progressive” ideas won’t necessarily change them. For example, if everybody owned a car that drove 100 miles on a gallon of gas, the country would burn less oil — but sprawl would still be encouraged, and the population would continue to grow fatter, sicker and more isolated. It may be possible to influence the public to choose transit over cars; entrenched attitudes toward tobacco were changed after all. But to change transport habits, America needs to provide transit systems and walkable destinations as practical options, and that’s where the architects and planners come in.

Flamingo Neighborhood Meeting -- Monday, May 3rd, 5:30 pm -- AGENDA

Meeting Notice
Monday, May 3, 2010, 5:30 pm
at The Seymour, 945 Pennsylvania Avenue
Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association
Building and Sustaining Our Quality of Life

Please note that our meeting on Monday will begin at 5:30pm


AGENDA

1. Communications Program -- Tammy Tibbles Young  -- postponed

2. Planning / Zoning / Historic Preservation -- Jeff Donnelly and Mark Needle
Alton Road Overlay District; Short Term Rentals

3. Flamingo Neighborhood Street Improvements -- Judy Robertson
Euclid Avenue; Street Trees

4. Flamingo Park Improvement Program – Wanda Mouzon
Tennis Courts and Facility

5. Safety / Pedestrian Safety Project -- Aaron Sugarman


The Historic Urban Neighborhood in South Beach
from Washington to Alton / from Fifth to Lincoln
All Residents of the Neighborhood are Invited to Attend and Participate


Other Meeting NoticesMon, May 3, 6:30pm, Shane Water Center -- Mayor on the Move
Tues, May 4, 8:30am, Commission Chambers -- Design Review Board
Wed, May 5, 5:30pm, 21st St Recreatn Ctr -- Park & Recreation Facilities Board
Fri, May 7th, 9:00 am, Commission Chambers -- Board of Adjustment

Mon, May 10, 3:30pm, 1755 Meridian Av, #200-- Transportation & Parking Committee
Mon, May 10, 5:30pm, Commission Chambers -- CIP Oversight Committee
Tues, May 11, 9:00am, Commission Chambers -- Historic Preservation Board
Wed, May 12, 9:00am, Commission Chambers -- CMB City Commission Meeting
Thur, May 13, 3:00 pm, TCD Conf Rm 555 17 St -- Special Events Neighborhood Review
Thur, May 13, 6:00pm, MB Conv Ctr, Rm C220 -- Design Workshop - Convention Ctr Masterplan


Denis Russ Direct Line -- 305-672-4782
Miami Beach CDC -- at The Seymour
945 Pennsylvania Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Denis@MiamiBeachCDC.org