VERO BEACH — The Vero Beach City Council voted to lease a city building to the Youth Sailing Foundation for $25 per month and finalized its selection of Wayne Coment as city attorney at $120,000 per year.
The day-long meeting began with more than one dozen representatives of the Vero Beach Police Department and several members of the public making empassioned and sometimes histrionic pleas to stop a planned demotion of nine police officers.
The demotions would save nearly $90,000 and, combined with the elimination of the deputy chief position and some other cuts would reduce the police budget by less than $200,000 or about 3 percent of the $7 million police budget.
The Youth Sailing group will enter a five-year lease with the city to occupy a waterfront building at the City of Vero Beach Utilities wastewater treatment plant. The $25 per month the group will be charged is expected to cover electricity for the building and the club will pay its own water and sewer bill.
Mayor Pilar Turner said the Youth Sailing Association should be given a good deal because it “provides a service to our community.”
The group has agreed to install a firewall and make some other improvements, at its own cost and by using volunteers, to bring the structure up to current building code.
In the matter of the city attorney, Acting City Attorney Wayne Coment’s contract was amended and approved and he was sworn in as the city’s newest charter officer by City Clerk Tammy Vock.
Coment will see a pay increase from $102,000 per year to $120,000. In October he took a pay cut from $107,000 to $102,000 as part of across the board reductions in pay for top-salaried employees. Coment will not be receiving a car allowance and the city saved potential moving and temporary living expenses of several thousand dollars by hiring from within.
In other matters, the city council voted to reduce the speed limit on residential streets to 25 miles per hour. This applies to residential public roads except for county and state roads like Route 60 and Highway A1A. The measure was the result of numerous requests by neighborhoods to reduce the speed and the city wishing to avoid the cost of individual surveys and traffic studies for each neighborhood.
Only Central Beach resident Joseph Guffanti spoke out against the speed reduction, calling it “an archaic approach to traffic control.”
The council also approved a 30-year agreement to provide water and sewer services to the Town of Indian River Shores at the same rates as are charged by Indian River County Utilities. The measure, which would leave most city residents paying a rate of 20 to 40 percent higher for utilities than Shores residents come October, passed by a 3-2 vote with Mayor Pilar Turner and Councilwoman Tracy Carroll dissenting.
There has been no proposal put forth to switch all of the city’s ratepayers over to county rates, though City Manager Jim O’Connor said, “Yes, we could do that.”
O’Connor said the city expects to be operating service to the Shores at an approximate loss of $9,000 annually, where under city rates plus a 10 percent surcharge, the city profits between $1 million and $1.2 million per year from the Shores. Indian River Shores utility bills represent $3.3 million annually, or about 20 percent of the city’s $17 million budget for its water-sewer utility.
The agreement will now go back to Indian River Shores to grant the franchise to Vero.
