The Miami Beach City Commission has a plan to assign off duty police officers to each bar and club along Ocean Drive.
The plan is for each bar and club to have an off duty cop at the businesses past midnight if alchol is served. The cost would be $350 per night, per club from 5th to 15th Street. With this in place, closing time can be 5 am.
A first reading passed and a second reading is expected to pass in January.
I often wondered why that wasn't done in the Grove rather than our closing time change to 3 am from 5 am. I still maintain the time change is what killed the Grove and I wonder if it wasn't really about the noise and fights and that the time change was meant to do something else. I'm not sure what, but the easy solution would have been to demand more police presence rather than kill a whole industry, which killed a whole entertainment district.
More on the Miami Beach plan here in The Herald.