Ricky Arriola, another city commissioner, said at the group’s emergency meeting: “Closing things cannot be the way the city does business. It’s embarrassing and it just shows that we don’t know what we’re doing ”.
Arriola also said that the city should start planning for the next period of greatest movement. “We were taken by surprise this spring holiday and we are going to go straight to the peak of Memorial Day weekend.”
Companies about 30 miles north in the city of Fort Lauderdale are monitoring developments in Miami Beach. “We have been watching very closely,” said Dan Lindblade, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce, on Sunday night. “We will do whatever is necessary to ensure that the same situation does not happen here.”
Fort Lauderdale dealt with similar problems during spring break in the 1980s and early 1990s, until the city and businesses decided to make some changes, he said. An important change: hotels started to charge more money for rooms. “We are not serving a class of less than $ 150 a night,” said Lindblade, adding, “We are from $ 300 to $ 500 a night, and this is a different class.”
The effect, Lindblade said, was remarkable. “It is a family-oriented atmosphere,” he said, “and it has been great for our economy.”
Apparently not discouraged by the police presence on Sunday night in South Beach, two men without a mask, in their 20s, wearing shorts and rubber pants, took turns sniffing white lines from a postcard. Around the corner, a group of policemen stopped calmly, talking and shouting for people to go home.