Residents Get Their Way on Shores Comp Plan

The Miami Shores Village Council voted 3-2 last month to adopt a comprehensive plan that complies with residents’ wishes of maintaining their village’s single-family residential character.

The new comprehensive plan designates the village’s downtown corridor along NE Second Avenue for restricted commercial uses and the Biscayne Boulevard corridor in the southern part of the municipality for general commercial uses, each with a maximum floor area ratio of 1.5. The general commercial area is purposely prohibited from being adjacent to any single-family property.

Also in response to public outcry, an empty lot at 10500 Biscayne Blvd. has been restored to a multifamily designation rather than mixed-use, as previously considered. And density for the area adjacent to and owned by Barry University will be capped at 13 units per acre, the result of an agreement to accommodate a proposed development of townhouses by home construction company Lennar.

In total, slightly more than 3% of the village’s land, or 36 acres, is available for commercial uses.

The plan was approved in a 90-minute meeting Sept. 11, 2023. Just last December, a meeting on the same issue lasted about three times as long. Back then, residents lined up to speak one by one over a two-hour public comment period to express their opposition to the former plan favored by the previous council, before three new members were elected in April 2023. That plan was too high in density for hundreds of residents’ liking.

Since then, residents have remained vigilant but pacified, due to commitments by Mayor George Burch, Vice Mayor Jesse Valinsky and Councilmember Jerome Charles to reverse the direction in which the village previously seemed to be headed. In June, the three new members made clear that they intended to deliver on that promise.

Majority Turned Minority

Councilmembers Daniel Marinberg and Sandra Harris, both incumbents from the previous council, have also stuck by their words – only now, they find themselves in the minority. Both voted against the newly adopted comprehensive plan last month.

For starters, Marinberg expressed concern that the approval process for the new plan was being treated as a second reading, despite significant changes having been made to it since the village’s first vote in December.

“Here we are now moving to rush something through on comments that we received from reviewing agencies related to what’s a completely different plan, to just have it potentially get challenged and come back in front of us and start over from square one,” said Marinberg.

The plan reviewed by the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity was that of the previous council, which Marinberg and Harris both approved. Since then, the new council has made revisions in density that may no longer conform to Miami-Dade County and state standards that require all municipalities to provide housing stock for its projected population growth.

“What is growing is the amount of people living in households, but not the amount of structures that we are providing as options,” said Claudia Hasbun, the village’s Planning, Zoning and Resiliency director. “So by state statute, we have to provide for housing options as well. We might run the risk of having to revisit all these issues in the future.”

Marinberg has also repeatedly advocated for those residents whose properties will be rendered nonconforming by the new plan, which allows a maximum density lower than what is already built in some areas of the village. He made another failed attempt at the September meeting to increase density from 20 dwelling units an acre to 31 units an acre, which was in place before an erroneous amendment in 2018 changed that without proper notice.

He said he had additional substantive concerns about the new comprehensive plan, but decided not to share them after feeling pressured to end his comments and call the vote toward the end of the September meeting.

With that, he made his vote, saying, “For a vision that has no vision, no.”

Ethics Concerns

The vote did not occur, however, before Marinberg had the chance to raise ethical concerns over promises Burch, Valinsky and Charles made before they were elected to the council earlier this year. Specifically, he criticized a PAC endorsement by Miami Shores United, formed by residents who led a petition against the former comprehensive plan.

In Marinberg’s eyes, the endorsement was solicited in exchange for solidarity with those residents who favored lower density caps throughout the village. The accusation was in part fueled by public commenters who reminded the new councilmembers before the comp plan discussion that they were elected specifically to vote a certain way.

Harris concurred, even asking the council to postpone its vote until the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust can opine on the perceived conflict of interest.

“Part of the reason I’m so quiet here is because I already know the three votes are bought and sold, so why speak?” asked Harris.

She later said that she intends to submit an ethics complaint on the matter.

Live Local Act

Aside from the conflicting views on the council itself, new legislation passed in Tallahassee earlier this year is also proving to be a formidable obstacle in community planning throughout the Biscayne Corridor.

The Live Local Act, or SB 102, allows developers to usurp local land use and zoning restrictions on any commercial, industrial or mixed-use property if they agree to designate at least 40% of its units to affordable housing for a period of 30 years.

To curb the bill’s effect, the village decided to rename some of its mixed-use properties to a new designation now known as “community residential,” but concerns still linger.

Municipalities are concerned that developers who utilize the Live Local Act will be able to bypass the typical review process for site plan proposals, which require a public hearing and subsequent approval by both the planning and zoning board and lead governing body. This may lead to a purely administrative process, where, in Miami Shores’ case, only Hasbun will have the authority to review and determine whether certain plans adhere to the Senate bill’s guidelines.

For that reason, Hasbun offered two additional options for the council to consider when crafting its comprehensive plan, both of which would be higher in density and therefore more attractive to a developer.

“The goal of the planning and zoning board was to ask, ‘How can we make it enticing for a developer not to use the Live Local Act?’” said Hasbun.

The council majority ultimately decided neither to adopt one of the alternatives nor to address concerns related to the Live Local Act within the comprehensive plan – at least not yet.