Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Comprehensive Plan Public Input topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Riviera Beach holds final public session on comprehensive plan; staff will summarize comments for council
Summary
City staff and Councilman Glenn Spertus asked Singer Island residents to review a near-final comprehensive plan draft and record priorities; staff and consultants will summarize public input before the plan goes to the council and state review.
City of Riviera Beach officials held a public meeting on Singer Island to solicit a final round of public input on the draft comprehensive plan before city council consideration and state review.
The comprehensive plan sets the city’s long-range policies on land use, environment, infrastructure, parks and capital improvements, according to Clarence Sermons, director of development services. “This is your last opportunity for our comprehensive plan,” Sermons said, adding that the plan is the highest-level governing document the city uses to guide zoning and other policies.
The city’s planning team and consultant CGA Consultants have worked on the draft for about 18 months, Assistant Director Scott Evans and Principal Planner Suneet Simon said. Simon described a wide outreach campaign that included surveys, community meetings, business open houses, door-to-door visits and targeted events. “We’re at this phase where we’ve been hearing from some of you all,” Simon said. She urged attendees to review chapter summaries at themed boards in the room, mark priorities with colored dots and leave written comments or scanned submissions for staff to collect.
Simon said the planning team tracked changes with underlines and strikeouts in the draft so commenters can see what is new, removed or moved. Sermons and Simon told residents that staff will not forward every individual comment verbatim to the council; instead, planners will compile a summary of recurring themes and “hot topics” to present to the council as part of the adoption packet. “This is an opportunity to be like, actually, this needs to be a little lower,” Simon said, referring to land‑use and height concerns.
Councilman Glenn Spertus, who arranged the meeting on Singer Island, described the document as changeable between adoption cycles but harder to amend thereafter because most text amendments must move through council and state review. “Every word in this document is subject to the review and approval of this community before we take it for adoption,” he said.
Meeting organizers left full text chapters and QR codes for residents to read the draft at home and submit written feedback. Officials said the compiled summary will inform the council’s hearing on adoption and be part of the public record when the city transmits the plan to state reviewers.
The session closed with table-based activities for land-use, environment, transportation and other chapters; staff invited attendees to prioritize items and add brief written comments for planners to aggregate.
