City Council - Regular Meeting

Greetings, friends. City Manager Wilson Hooper here with a preview of next Monday's Brevard City Council meeting. The meeting will begin with a proclamation recognizing National Public Works Week. After that, we'll hold our normal public comment period, where members of the general public are offered three minutes to address the council on a topic of their choosing. Next, two public hearings will be held. The first will be on the proposed FY27 municipal budget. If you wish to learn more about the budget's contents, a link to the recommendation is below, or you can watch my presentation to council at the last meeting on YouTube. The budget, as proposed, maintains all service levels and enhances them in the public works and fire departments by adding additional staff people there. It gives all city employees a compensation adjustment to keep them ahead of inflation. and it pays for all this with certain small increases to commercial refuse fees and a 2.5 cent tax increase on all properties, which equates to about $85 for a property valued at $350,000. The second public hearing will be on proposed changes to the various chapters of our Unified Development Ordinance that deal with nonconformities. Nonconformities are features of properties which, you guessed it, don't conform with our zoning rules, either because the feature or condition in question was built before the law was established, or the property's underlying zoning district was changed. Nonconformities are not violations, they're grandfathered in, so to speak, so they're allowed to legally exist as long as the property's use and condition aren't remarkably changed. but our current rules are unclear as to when and how a property must come into compliance with the code when it changes. These proposed changes to the code will update and clarify the types of changes that would trigger the conformity requirement. The recommended code changes have been approved by the planning board and staff think they strike a good balance between individual property rights and the community's larger planning goals as expressed in the unified development ordinance. Next council will be asked to take a series of ministerial actions. Approve the April 2026 tax settlement report. Approve a bookkeeping amendment to the Roundabout Capital Project Fund. Approve a bookkeeping amendment to the current year budget having to do with lease payments for the Brevard Police Department facility on Commerce Street. And approve three sets of recent committee minutes. Next council will be asked to take action on the public hearing items from the last meeting. The first was on a proposed voluntary rezoning of The Hub Bicycle Shop in Pisgah Forest to the new Gateway Mixed-Use Zoning District. The second will be on proposed changes to the Unified Development Ordinance adding regulations for data centers. If you're interested in the particulars of those regulations, I again encourage you to watch the Planning Department presentation from the last Council meeting that's on YouTube. Next, Council will be asked to take up three items of new business. The first will be on a proposed change to the City's fee schedule, changing the daily entrance fee to Franklin Park Pool from $2 to $3. That fee hasn't changed in over a decade, and this change will take a little burden off the taxpayer whose taxes are involuntary, by the way, and place it instead on the voluntary users of the pool. Second, Council will be asked to consider the content of the City's request to our legislators here at the beginning of the General Assembly short session. Our previous representative, the late Mike Clampett, asked us to submit both our funding request and our policy goals in a formal letter at the beginning of each session. Our newly appointed representative, Anna Ferguson from Jackson County, we don't really know how she operates, so I'm going to ask council to make their legislative request official Monday night and send them to her to use as she sees fit. Finally, Council will be asked to consider a resolution asking the Transylvania County Board of Commissioners to consider a small county-wide property tax increase to support the hiring of additional staff at Brevard Fire Department. We're doing this because the Brevard Fire Department is jointly funded between the City and County because not only does it provide emergency coverage within the City limits, but also to the rural Sylvan Valley 2 Fire District. As I mentioned earlier, the City budget does contain extra money to fund our share of the new staff, But the county has asked the governing board of all its partner agencies, including us, to include such a resolution alongside their budget request if the requests are more than 2% higher than last year, which our request for three new staff people is. We calculate that the tax increase in question would be about a tenth of a penny on their tax rate. As always, all the same information that we send to council is available for viewing at the link below. I hope to see you Monday night.