SPRING 2016 VOLUME 4 ISSUE 2

City Manager’s Quarterly Report
Cultural Growth in 2016
Christopher J. Russo
City Manager
Our City has always
been guided toward
a sense of class and
excellence, seeking
to go further and
do more. As the City
has matured, current
leaders continue to
demand a high quality
of life for its residents.
Before it became a city, Sunny Isles Beach was just a small
unincorporated community commonly called Sunny Isles, located between the
Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway in the northeast quadrant of Miami-
Dade County. Although a neglected, crime-ridden sector of Miami-Dade County,
transiently populated by retirees and tourists, its few activist citizens had another
vision for this naturally beautiful urban environment on the water. Once the home
of many notable motels, including the Castaways and the Golden Strand, where
the Beatles and Babe Ruth famously visited respectively, they saw its potential.
The incorporators believed with proper attention and planning, this area could
become a unique, walkable, urban high rise, beachfront community, at a time when
most development was expanding into the suburbs.
In less than two decades, the City of Sunny Isles Beach is no longer exclusively
a retirement or tourist destination, but rather, home to beautiful, architecturally
significant buildings populated by an ethnically diverse, international population
that predominately reflects cultures from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Canada,
and the Middle East. The City now boasts eleven gorgeous public parks, a newly
constructed K-8 public school to serve a burgeoning influx of young families, and a
growing range of services for the community.
Our City has always been guided toward a sense of class and excellence, seeking to
go further and do more. As the City has matured, current leaders continue to demand
a high quality of life for its residents. This has become part of our mantra of “world
class” services and programs. With the approval of the Mayor and Commission,
the Sunny Isles Beach Foundation was formed as a separate, private, non-profit to
administer a permanent charitable endowment for the citizens of the City. It exists
to promote quality of life through cultural arts and creative government initiatives
designed to incite and inspire engagement of the City’s diverse population. Its
focus is on creative public space and place making, the infrastructure to do so, and
enhancement of the overall culture of Sunny Isles Beach.
In furtherance of this effort, the City of Sunny Isles Beach and the Foundation have
partnered to hire a consultant to develop a cultural master plan. A cultural master
plan will assess the City’s existing resources and create a strategy (a 5-10 year plan)
to leverage arts and cultural opportunities, and establish a process to address the ever
changing needs of the community to maintain the high standards that have attracted
so many residents to our City. By hiring an independent consultant, the City plans to
develop a vision for the creation of its own cultural identity that will guide the City
and Foundation to work together in a synergistic and effective manner. The plan will
assess the City’s current resources both physically and financially, it will develop a plan
for growth of the cultural arts, and include recommendations on opportunities for
future collaboration through strategic partnerships, alliances, cultural organizations,
local, state and national grants, and identification of other high-level funding sources.
The City has selected a master plan consultant, AEA Consulting, based out of
New York. They have 25 years of experience with strategic planning for cities, special
government districts, private and public foundations, museums and leading cultural
organizations. Some of these include the emerging arts districts in lower Manhattan
and Downtown Brooklyn, the creation of Global Cultural District Networks with
the New Cities Foundation, Dallas Arts District, Bring Back New Orleans, the
James L. Knight Foundations Miami Arts Challenge Assessment Study, and the
Wolfsonian-FIU Strategic Plan. We believe with their local and international
experience and exposure, they are particularly suited to undertake this study for our
culturally diverse community.
The study will take approximately nine months. Stakeholder input will be crucial
to its success. Please participate in every opportunity provided to you in regards to this
study and plan development. This is your City. Help us make it what you want it to be.
We’ll keep you informed as the City of Sunny Isles Beach continues to seek innovative
approaches to creating improved quality of life for its visiting and permanent residents.
Christopher J. Russo
City Manager
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