On December 13, 2023, at the request of Mayor Steven Meiner, the City Commission referred the subject discussion item (C4 R) to the Land Use and Sustainability Committee (LUSC). Commissioner Tanya K. Bhatt is the co-sponsor of the item.

On February 26, 2024, the LUSC continued the item to the May 1, 2024 meeting. The item was deferred at the May 1, 2024 LUSC meeting.

As noted in the attached referral memo, the item sponsor has requested that the LUSC discuss the maximum infrastructure capacity in the City for water, sewer, electrical and other utilities, and public facilities, and how the City could better use modeling or updated data relating to projected future utility demand in connection with project approvals and legislative efforts relating to development.

Provisions for infrastructure for new development are guided by the requirements for concurrency in Chapter 163 of the Florida Statutes, specifically Section 163.3180, entitled “Concurrency.”  This section requires that local governments adopt level of service (LOS) standards for specific types of infrastructure, and mandates when that infrastructure needs to be available to serve new development.  The section also provides for the following regarding sanitary sewer, water supplies, and potable water facilities: 

Consistent with public health and safety, sanitary sewer, solid waste, drainage, adequate water supplies, and potable water facilities shall be in place and available to serve new development no later than the issuance by the local government of a certificate of occupancy or its functional equivalent. Prior to approval of a building permit or its functional equivalent, the local government shall consult with the applicable water supplier to determine whether adequate water supplies to serve the new development will be available no later than the anticipated date of issuance by the local government of a certificate of occupancy or its functional equivalent.

The statute does not mandate LOS standards for electricity or gas, as those are generally provided by private entities that maintain their own requirements. 

The statute requires that the LOS standards be adopted in the local government comprehensive plan and be implemented through the Land Development Regulations of the City Code (LDRs).  The City of Miami Beach’s 2040 Comprehensive Plan provides several policies that require coordination with the Miami-Dade County Water and Sewer Department (WASD).  These policies were most recently updated on January 20, 2022, as part of the state-mandated update to the Water Supply Plan, which entailed coordination with WASD and the South Florida Water Management District.  The City’s Comprehensive Plan contains the following policies related to provisions for infrastructure:

POLICY RLU 1.2.7 WATER SUPPLY

The City, through the land development regulations will coordinate the land uses and future land use changes with the availability of water supplies and water supply facilities.

POLICY RLU 3.1.2

Land Development Regulations pertaining to concurrency management shall be amended to reflect Ch. 163.3180, Florida Statutes and this policy. No development permit shall be issued unless the applicable Mobility Fees and public facilities necessitated by the project (in order to meet level of service standards specified in the Policies of the, Recreation, Public Schools and Infrastructure Elements, and the Water Supply Plan) will be in place concurrent with the impacts of the pursuant to the regulations established in the Land Development Regulations. The requirement that no development permit shall be issued unless applicable mobility fees are paid, and public facilities necessitated by the project are in place concurrent with the impacts of development shall be effective immediately.

POLICY RLU 3.3.2

Requests for development orders or permits shall be coordinated, as appropriate, with Miami-Dade County, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, special districts, the Regional Planning Council, the Water Management District and state and federal agencies. Special emphasis shall be placed on conformance with the Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve Management Plan and by achieving Biscayne Bay Shoreline Development Review Committee review of 100 percent of applicable projects.

POLICY HE 1.1.7

Maintain the potable water, sanitary sewer, storm sewer, transportation, solid waste, and recreation facilities above the level of service standards established in the City’s comprehensive plan in all areas of the City so that there will be no restrictions due to inadequate infrastructure or public facilities on the location of housing for workforce, low and moderate income families or any other category of housing.

POLICY HE 1.2.5

Maintain the potable water, sanitary sewer, storm sewer, transportation, solid waste and recreation facilities above the level of service standards established in the Infrastructure Element of the City’s Comprehensive Plan in all areas of the City so that there will be no restrictions due to inadequate infrastructure or public facilities on the location of housing for workforce, very low, to moderate income families, manufactured housing or any other category of housing.

GOAL INF 1: PROVISION OF INFRASTRUCTURE

Provide for potable water, sanitary sewer, drainage and solid waste facilities which meet the City’s needs in a manner which promotes the public health, sanitation, environmental protection, operational efficiency, and beneficial land uses and redevelopment patterns.

OBJECTIVE INF 1.1: PRIORITIES

The City will continue to provide potable water supply, sanitary sewage disposal, solid waste disposal and drainage services to meet both existing and projected needs as identified in this plan through coordination and implementation of those projects listed in the Capital Improvements Element. All improvements for replacement, expansion or increase in capacity of facilities shall conform with the adopted policies of this Plan including level of service standards for the facilities.

POLICY INF 1.1.1 Continue to participate with Miami-Dade County WASD through program cooperation with the Virginia Key Wastewater plant, the Hialeah/Preston Water Treatment Plant and the Resource Recovery Plant and continue to accept wastewater from municipalities north of the City of Miami Beach.

POLICY INF 1.1.2 Continue to monitor established guidelines for private collectors of solid waste and recycling; continue to provide for policing, servicing and collecting of oversize wastes.

POLICY INF 1.1.3 The potable water network is an interconnected, countywide system, therefore, the City will cooperate with MDWASD to jointly develop methodologies and procedures for biannually updating estimates of system demand and capacity, and ensure that sufficient capacity to serve development exists. The City will prepare and submit a Water Conservation Plan to the County at the same time as the City submits the updated 10-Year Water Supply Facilities Work Plan.

OBJECTIVE INF 1.2: INFRASTRUCTURE REPLACEMENT

Potable water supply, sanitary sewage disposal, and solid waste disposal services shall continue to be planned and provided in conformance with the Resilient Land Use and Development Element of the comprehensive plan.

POLICY INF 1.2.1 Continue to plan and provide infrastructure to serve redevelopment activities, including infill projects, as directed by the City Commission.

POLICY INF 1.2.3 Continue the on-going program to repair and replace existing water, sewer and storm sewer lines through the utilization of bond funds Community Development Block Grant funds and other available funding sources, particularly obsolete and undersized water lines.

OBJECTIVE INF 1.5: LEVEL OF SERVICE STANDARDS

The City shall continue to maintain and provide potable water, sanitary sewer, solid waste disposal and drainage facilities at adopted level of service standards to ensure that adequate facility capacity is available for proposed and existing commercial and residential developments within its jurisdiction.

POLICY INF 1.5.1

The following City-wide Level of Service Standards shall be used as the basis for determining the availability of facility capacity for residential uses; the systems shall be able to provide/accommodate at least the minimums specified:

Facility/Service Area               Level of Service Standard

            Sanitary Sewer Facilities           Sewage Generation Standard

                                                                  140 Average gallons per capita per day

            Solid Waste Facilities                Solid Waste Generation Standard

                                                                  1.275 tons per capita per year

Drainage Facilities                    Design Storm Standard

per Storm Water Master Plan as updated from time to time.

Potable Water Facilities Water Consumption Standard

                                          156 Average gallons per capita per day

The average gallons per capita rate applies to the year-round standard, while the peak gallons per capita rate applies to the City during peak tourist period due to the significant seasonal influx of temporary residents.  The City uses a multiplier of 1.2, which gives a 20% increase in population to estimate required services and facilities.

The following City-wide Level of Service Standards shall be used as the basis for determining the availability of facility capacity for non-residential uses; the systems shall be able to provide/accommodate at least the minimums specified:

Hotel:               75 gallons per day per room

Office:              0.084 gallons per day per square foot

Retail:               0.18 gallons per day per square foot

Industrial:          0.084 gallons per day per square foot

Restaurant:       65 gallons per day per seat

                                    School:             12 gallons per day per student

The concurrency standards identified in the Comprehensive Plan are implemented via Chapter 3 of the Resiliency Code, entitled “Concurrency Management and Mobility Fees.”  This chapter provides for reviews of level of service as part of the Building permit process as follows:

3.1.3 Concurrency mitigation and mobility fee review

Concurrency mitigation review and mobility fee calculations shall be provided upon filing a request with the applicable review department. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the provisions of this chapter shall not be construed to restrict applicable review departments other than departments of the City of Miami Beach from establishing alternative review procedures. Applicable review departments for developments in the city shall include the following:

a.     Potable water: Miami Dade County and Miami Beach Public Works Department, as applicable.

b.     Sanitary sewer: Miami Dade County and Miami Beach Public Works Department, as applicable.

c.     Solid waste: Miami Beach Public Works Department.

d.     Stormwater: Miami Beach Public Works Department.

e.     Recreation and open space: Miami Beach Planning Department.

f.       Mobility fees: Miami Beach Planning Department.

g.     Public schools: Miami Dade County Public Schools.

PUBLIC WORKS UPDATE

Background

Public infrastructure serves as the backbone of a well-run municipality, and typically, as infrastructure ages and the needs of the growing city expand, existing infrastructure requires rehabilitation and upgrades. Such is the case with the City’s water and sewer utility.

Recognizing the increasing need to strategically invest in the water and sewer utility, the Public Works Department retained Hazen and Sawyer in 2018 to develop Water and Sewer Master Plans that included developing city-wide hydraulic models and a capital improvement plan that prioritized projects over a 25-year planning period with a focus on executing the first five (5) years as critical needs. The capital plan included both rehabilitation projects and capacity projects and was adopted by the Mayor and City Commission via Resolution No. 2020-31211 on March 18, 2020.

The Water and Sewer Master Plans are intended to be updated every 5 years to address the following:

(1) Update and recalibrate hydraulic models.

(2) Update the capital improvement plan with the City’s completed projects and new priorities.

(3) Update population projections for the next 25 years consistent with industry standards; (4) Update the next five-year critical needs plan for projects to be implemented immediately.

The Public Works Department has submitted budget enhancement requests for the funds to update the City’s Water and Sewer Master Plans as part of the FY 2025 budget process.

Analysis

The city receives potable water from Miami-Dade County through 4 connection points at the main causeways. The city also transmits sanitary sewer to Miami-Dade County’s treatment facilities via a force main under Government Cut. The city’s redevelopment and population growth is ultimately limited by the County’s ability to provide potable water to the city and by the County’s capacity to treat sanitary sewer received from the city. However, the city is already significantly built out, and therefore has limited opportunities for significant population growth.

Population Forecasting and Future Water and Sewer Demands

The City’s Water and Sewer Master Plans calculate future water and sewer demands based on population forecasts for residents and transient population of employees and guests. Population within the City is forecasted conservatively in the 2019 Master Plans based on the following table:

Population forecasts are then translated to water and sewer demands based on historical average water consumption rates. The calculated water and sewer demands are average daily demand flows calculated over the 25-year planning period. Multipliers are applied to the average daily water and sewer demands to represent maximum daily demand and peak flow demands based on County and State Standards. These demand sets are evaluated within the hydraulic models to run scenarios that assist in evaluating the City’s infrastructure.

Infrastructure Evaluations

The City’s water and sewer infrastructure is evaluated in several ways. For water infrastructure the criteria considered includes physical condition, age of infrastructure, pressure, velocity, unit head loss, available fire flow, potable water age, flow capacity, and booster pump station pumping capacity. For sanitary sewer infrastructure the criteria considered includes physical condition, age of infrastructure, infiltration and inflow, pump station wet well water level exceedances, pump station runtime, and pipe capacity.

Any locations in the City’s infrastructure that does not meet level of service criteria is then prioritized based on the consequence of failure and the probability of failure to create the capital improvement plan. Some of the level of service criteria used to evaluate the system is listed in the table below.

Future Evaluations

The city-wide sewer hydraulic model focuses on the pumping system and force main system and did not originally incorporate any of the gravity collection system. The city’s gravity sewer infrastructure is an older system that is installed at shallow depths and at flatter slopes and does not meet current design standards. The city’s current Master Plan recommends rehabilitation and/or replacement of the gravity system in segments, and the city has been addressing the recommendations by neighborhood via Neighborhood Improvement Projects.

It is not recommended to add the entire gravity sewer to the model via the proposed 2024-2025 Master Plan update because this effort would indicate that much of the infrastructure has met its design life as it may be undersized and likely needs to be replaced. This is already recognized in the city’s current strategy. Additionally, the gravity sewer system is being added to the hydraulic model on an as needed basis for private developments, Public Works projects, as well as Building permits. In most new and re-development permits, the adjacent gravity system will need to be replaced, upsized, and/or brought up to latest standards.

Scenarios in the hydraulic model that maximize the City’s population density to analyze all infrastructure would require additional modeling evaluations. The additional evaluations would require direction from the city on allowable floor to area ratios, allowable maximum redevelopment building heights, expected future land uses of existing vacant parcels and redeveloped parcels, expected tourism, etc. A demand set would be calculated based on this information and the City’s infrastructure evaluated in the hydraulic model. The results of the evaluation may identify very long-term capacity issues that the City would need to address prior to allowing regional areas to redevelop to a specific demand.

Financial Impact

The Public Works Department has submitted budget requests in the amount of $500,000 to update the Water and Sewer Master Plans in Fiscal Year 2025. If the gravity system is added to the hydraulic model to complete targeted improvements and to provide additional modeling scenarios to evaluate long-term capacity issues, an additional $500,000 would be required. This would be a total financial impact of $1,000,000 for the updates to the Water and Sewer Master Plans and hydraulic models.