Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

All right. Again, want to welcome everyone to the Cowell County Board of Commissioners meeting this evening, March the 23rd, 2026. I'd like to welcome those in our audience here as well as those who are joining us now by multimedia in various forms. And so, thank you for tuning in. Our first order of business is having our invocation. And we have with us this evening, Pastor Eric Thomas from Metobrook Baptist Church. So, Pastor Thomas, if you'll come to the podium and lead us in our invocation, and we'll follow that with our pledge of allegiance, and Commissioner Jeff Branch will lead us in that. So, welcome. Welcome to our community.

Thank you. I moved from West Virginia two months ago, and it's a blessing to call this home. Now, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pause at the start of this meeting to recognize that all governance comes from you. As these commissioners gather to deliberate and decide matters impacting our county, we ask for your guidance upon them. Equip them with wisdom beyond their own as you promised in James to those who ask. Strengthen them to uphold truth, protect the vulnerable, promote justice, steward resources faithfully. Let no decision be made by pride or selfinterest but in humble submission to your will. Guide this body to serve the people and glorify your name. In the name of Jesus I pray. Amen.

Amen. Everyone face the flag. Salute. Pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right. Thank you, everyone. Are there any amendments to our agenda this evening? No amendments. All right. Do I hear a motion we adopt the agenda as presented? So moved. Any other discussion or comment? All in favor say I.

I. Any opposed? That motion carries. And I will make an announcement. Commissioner Labro is absent this evening because his daughter is having uh one of his grandchildren. Uh and so he wanted to be present with that. And so he uh wanted me to make sure and let everybody know that's where he is. And uh sometimes we feel like family takes precedent over some of the things that we are trying to accomplish here. And this evening is certainly an opportunity for him to be with his family. And I appreciate that in him. All right. So, since we've uh moved into our agenda items, the first item this evening is a proclamation. And we are doing this for line worker appreciation day. And I know that uh Robin is with us here this evening from Duke Energy. Did anybody else from Blue Ridge come? Oh, okay. All right. So, uh, y'all want to come up here together and I'll read this proclamation, uh, in honor of our line worker appreciation day.

And Robin always wants an opportunity to speak. I I know you other gentlemen might, too. But anyway, why should we speak when she can't? And we're all friends. We even stand beside each other. Yeah, looks like a whole lot of money and electrical bills standing there to me. Well, I will I will just say thank you so much for recognizing the work that our linemen do day in day out. Uh they work very hard and in challenging conditions and we appreciate just one time a year to recognize them and say thank you for the work they do. Yes, ma'am. It's the least we can do for them. That's right. Absolutely.

So, I'll read the proclamation. and it reads, "Whereas on April the 10th, 2013, a resolution was passed in the United States Senate to recognize April 18th annually as National Lineman line worker appreciation day. And whereas the profession of the electrical line worker is steeped in personal, family, and professional tradition. And whereas line workers are often first responders during storms and other catastrophic events, working to make the scene safe for other public safety officials and to expedite the return of vital electric power to our communities. And whereas these brave men and women work with thousands of volts of electricity high at top power lines 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, risking and sometimes losing their lives to keep electricity flowing. And whereas line workers are often faced with dangerous conditions far from their families as they work to construct and maintain energy infrastructure throughout the state of North Carolina and the United States. And whereas line workers must use their technical knowledge, physical strength, ingenuity to achieve success in challenges they face every day. And whereas the Conwell County Board of Commissioners thanks these skilled and heroic line workers who bravely brave hurricanes, ice storms, snowstorms, floods, and other natural disasters to maintain our community's energy grid. Now therefore, be it proclaimed that the Cell County Board of Commissioners do hereby proclaim Friday, February the 18th, 2026 as line worker appreciation day. And do I hear a motion that we adopt this proclamation this evening?

I make a motion we adopt this proclamation. All right. Any other comment? I will say that on April the 18th for our traveling public and anybody that sees a line worker out, stop and give them something to drink and tell them thank you uh for what they do for us. All right. And so with that, I'll call the question. All in favor signify by saying I. I. Any opposed? And that carries unanimously. So, thank you folks again.

Chairman Church, if I could say one more thing real quick. Yes, ma'am. Um, I can't go through talking about linemen and line workers without recognizing the fine job that Cwell Community College does here, right here in this own community. They have an exceptional program that is statewide recognized as probably I'll call it the best. I'm sure Dr. Ports would agree with me. Um, others might dispute that, but I call it the best in the state. and that we have gotten some excellent excellent employees from that particular program. So, thank you for supporting Cowwell Community College and their line worker program. Absolutely. So, one time was wasn't it like everybody come out there had a job almost at

just about it the only time I think and Dr. May speak otherwise the only time I think they haven't is when it's been by choice that they wanted to do something else. Yeah. Being that you Blue Ridge boys don't want to talk, we want to appreciate you for all your service. Yeah. Thank y'all. YEAH.

All right. So, with that, we'll move to item two this evening, which is a presentation, a national social worker work month, and Crystal Henderson and Britney Coffee are here. And welcome ladies. Good evening. Good evening. So, I'm Crystal Henderson. I'm a child protective services social worker with Cwell County. And I'm Britney Coffee. I work for adult protective services.

So, we're going to talk to you guys a little bit tonight about what it looks like that we do. And I thought I would start just kind of talking about, you know, for for us a lot of times it feels like in the court of public opinion, we're wrong no matter what we do. Um, you know, I think a lot of times the public has sort of the wrong idea. I know Mr. Potter shared with us several times about before he was on the board that he used to think at DSS we just kind of give away free phones, free food. Um, a lot of times you don't really hear about anything we do as social workers unless there's a crisis or a tragedy. We're often seen as the people that take your children, not the people that step in and hope that we're making the best decisions for families. And a lot of times when thing goes things go wrong, we're the first ones to blame, too. A lot of times people that we work with or people in the community, they don't see all the hard things that we do that really try to keep families together because at the end of the day, we don't want to remove children from families. Families, you know, children should be able to stay with their parents and we want that to happen. And but a lot of times we're not wanted. We show up at people's houses and they act like we're the FBI, the police, and the IRS all rolled into one. Uh we see a lot of angry parents. We go in houses where the people are using actively using substances. We go in homes where people have a lot of weapons. We go out and work with folks that have these significant mental illnesses. And you know, I would say 50% of our week we we're probably bet on that we're going to get cussed, but we stay because fillings aren't our priority. It's about the safety of these children. And so we go our into, you know, a lot of people go their entire lives without seeing some of the things that we do. Social workers are often called many things such as advocates, counselors, problem solvers, but the one thing that captures us is a hero. Um, but we're not your typical hero. We're not wearing a cape flying around um seeking all the

recognition. We're usually your unseen heroes. Um, it's our quiet acts of kindness and the compassion that each one of our social workers at DSS displays and embodies that isn't known to many. And even on the hardest days, it seems a little we can make the days a little brighter for our children and our vulnerable adults that we interact with each day. So, just to kind of put things into perspective, um, Cowwell County social workers drove 301,481 miles in 2025 to do home visits, uh, to keep children and families safe. A lot of times things that we do is we'll take people to their very first therapy appointment. We'll often set with kids at the hospital that don't have anybody else to sit with them. We have teens and young adults that we sit down with and we help them fill out job applications. We help them apply for college. We've helped them get driver's license. We've helped them to learn how to open up a bank account or apply to benefits because they've not had those people there to help them to do those things. We have to do a lot of hard things. You know, we have to go and tell parents it's not okay. Your home's not safe right now and these kids can't stay here. We have to do that in a way that we can maintain rapport with them so that we can continue to work with them to try to get them in a place where the kids can come back. There are nights where the phone rings and suddenly at midnight we're trying to figure out a safe place for a child to go. We've called placements at at 10 o'clock at night before because kids just need somewhere to go. We've called relatives before in six counties that nobody's talked to in 10 years to try to locate a safe place for these kids. A lot of times we're setting with kids in emergency placements or kids that without placements at our office. And sometimes it's just for hours, but sometimes that's days at a time that we're sitting with kids because they don't have anywhere to go. And then while we're working with families, sometimes we have to get up and testify against them, knowing that these parents love their kids, but love doesn't always

keep them safe. We have to recognize the decisions we make are going to impact this family and this child for their entire life. You know, a lot of us have bachelor's degrees or master's degrees, and we spent tens of thousand dollar, tens of thousands of dollars on our education, but we've all ended up in situations where we're helping families clean houses, and we're punching roaches down the sink drain. You know, we've taken parents laundry with us home to wash or back to the office. There's been times that we've had conversations where we've talked a parent into going to treatment the same day they found out that their spouse had been lying to them and saying they were in treatment when in reality they were shacked up with somebody else, you know. And when I was a child, I can remember this and and you don't hear it much now, but when I was a kid, I can remember them saying like about the mail service, you know, the US Postal Service, that that quote about neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. And so that that very much speaks to what we do too. You know, we had two pretty big snowstorms in January and that was kind of a little bit unheard of here. And during the ice storm, we actually had a worker that had to park a car and walk over a mile to get to a house because the vehicles wouldn't make it down to that road because our job doesn't stop. Just because the roads are bad doesn't mean that children are in danger. Children are not in danger. Then during the same ice storm, we actually removed a child and a worker had to carry that child and that child's belongings up a steep driveway in the dark that was covered by ice because our cars wouldn't go up it, but still that child needed a safe place to sleep. There's days that we go home and we text our spouse and say, "Bring me a trash bag to the garage because I got to throw these clothes away." Most of the time, we have an extra change of clothes or extra shoes that we just keep on hand in our office because we know there's going to be a time that we're not going to be able to wear that again. We walk into situations that I think most people just can't imagine. We go into homes there's

no power, there's no running water, there's no floors in some of the homes, significant pest infestations. We go into places where people and their children live in tents or live in cars. We're immersed in the community, I think, in a lot of places that most people tend to avoid. And there's a whole lot of paperwork at the end of the day, too, that we have to do. But the best tool that we have is our ability to walk with people in some of their hardest moments. As a team to include our director, we are making life-changing decisions for our most vulnerable adults daily such as life-ending decisions to remove intubations, do not resuscitate orders or to begin hospice care. We consult and make major medical decisions and give consent for amputation or to begin or end cancer treatments. We make decisions or give consents for major surgeries from being completed or not due to the procedure being deemed too risky for our adult. Oftentimes you'll find our social workers delivering food, water, and incontinent supplies, and even medical equipment to our vulnerable adults. We have assisted with bathing and cleaning disabled adults who present to us in person, at DSS, or at their home. Um, you can often find our social workers making our adults breakfast or a sandwich because during a visit we find out they haven't eaten anything that day and we're washing their dishes and making breakfast and making eggs or whatever else they ask us to make. You'll find that we become a handyman sometimes when we're out there. We'll take trash to the end of the road because their mobility issues do not allow them to do that. We have put alarms on the door to aiding the families to keep their adults from wandering so they know where they're at. And we enter and exit many homes throughout this community that we get to be the face of a smiling face to them. And so sometimes even through all that

effort, we still have to remove people from their home because we can't keep them safe there. So there's been times that we've had to give children baths. We've had to give people lice treatments before. Sometimes we have to go out shopping because everything in their house was not safe for us to take with us. So, we've taken someone that has no belongings. And sometimes we even spend our own money because it's in the middle of the night or it's just the spur of the moment and it's it's such a need that we just go and do that. And then once that happens, then we have to track down birth certificates, figure out medications, maybe where school this kid goes. And we do that all within a matter of a couple hours. And so think about like the most important thing to you. Like what thing in your life means the absolute most to you. Once you figure that out, think about us coming in and we take you and then you have to give that up. You know, that happens a lot with our foster kids. And so there's a lot of times that our foster workers, your foster care workers, they'll go to these kids' graduations, they'll go to their ball games, they go to dance recital because they know that they're that consistent person that this child's always had. We celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, holidays with our aging community. We provide a listening ear, a familiar face, and a warm smile during difficult times. And we often sit with those at the ending stages of their life so they're not by theirel and so they can pass in peace with somebody there with them. And so I know if you go on the call county website you can see the job description of a of an investigative social worker but I really don't think it really encapsulates what we do on a daily basis. You know one day you're investigating a report then you're helping a parent find a bed for a child and then you're explaining court orders to them. I think we might be the only job where somebody cusses you on day one for doing your job and then hugs you six months later for doing the same job. We walk into homes that people often never see and we have conversations that a lot

of people avoid. Now decisions we make have enormous weight to them. We carry stories that are heavy, complex and deeply human. We advocate for those that may not have a voice. We listen without judgment and we care without conditions. We celebrate small victories and wins for our adults and childrens. And we do not do this job for praise, but for the lives that we impact each day. And we do that because every child and adult in this community deserves someone that will show up for them. So we do it when it's hard. We do it when it's thankless. We do it when the roads are icy or they seem uncertain. We're the ones that show up every day. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you for coming.

Thank you, girls. I think um and you're right. There was a time where I didn't understand nor appreciate my social worker and what they did. And that was only because I didn't know what you did. Over the last seven several years, I've learned and I've got gained a lot more appreciation for what y'all do. It's amazing. Um, everybody can't do what you do. You're chosen for that position. And I challenge our commissioners to educate themselves on what you do because I think when they understand it, they get a good grasp of it, they'll feel differently. Just out of curiosity, how many adults do we are we do we have in our guardianship today? Ballpark

55.

That's what I thought. I don't think our commissioners understand that when they come in our custody at DSS, they have sole guardianship. She mentioned it while ago when somebody gets to the end of their life, that young lady right there and that social that social worker team are the ones who have to make that decision. That's a tough decision when it ain't your family. So, I challenge you guys to understand it because they do some amazing work. I'm proud of you. Thank you for all you do. All right. Next, we have our second reading this evening for our ambulance franchise with Serge the non-emergency medical transport and Trevor Keys here with us this evening.

Good evening. Welcome back. Second trip around. Second trip around. Uh just to recap from last month. Okay.

Coal County is seeking a ambulance franchise with surge non-medical non-emergency medical transport for non-emergency transports to doctor's offices, discharges from home to um give a little bit of ease on our 911 system. And any questions from our last reading? Um they've met all the requirements for the ordinance and um have license and are ready to go. All right. Does this have to be a public hearing? So, we're just doing the second reading. And any any questions from any of the commissioners?

I got one question on behalf of Commissioner Lro because he asked this question in the previous reading about the insurance. Um, did we get that? Yeah. The updated or the one that's end date is in the insurance was updated. Perfect. Yeah. Thank you. Sure enough. All right. So u with this this evening we have to adopt it. So do I hear a motion that we adopt this ambulance franchise agreement as has been presented now for the second time. I'll make a motion that we adopt it as it's been read.

All right. And this is with Serge Healthc Care Ride Solutions LLC doing business as Serge Non-emergency Medical Transport. All right. So, hearing that motion, any other discussion or comment. Thank you for coming our way. I'm sure that it's going to help help our EMS quite a bit and we certainly do appreciate you coming. And I'll call the question. All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? And that motion carries unanimously. So, thank you again. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you.

All right. That leads us then to our consent agenda. We had a short agenda this evening with uh certain certainly not a light agenda in the sense of the gravity of it, but we do appreciate everyone being here for that. And I'll turn our meeting over to our county manager, Mr. Shane Fox, for our consent agenda this evening.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Um start with number four, five, six, and seven are all budget revisions for our health department. Number four is with our child fatality local teams. That's an additional $548 come from the state of North Carolina to Cowell County. Number five is with our health, food, and lodging. An additional $6,962 to assist regulation of food and lodging again from the state of North Carolina to Cowell County. Number six is through our maternal and child health department for maternal health. an additional $1,614 coming from the state of North Carolina to Cawwell County. And then number seven, the last of our health department adjustments, $2,967 coming to the family planning section of our health department. All four of these are due to the adjustments that the state made at midyear to provide additional revenue to Cell County. Um, no match or no additional funds needed. This is additional revenue only coming to Cowell County within the four of those. Number eight was a additional $10,000 grant we were able to receive on thanks to the genie of Duke towards our sewer study. Um this past um month or two we've talked about our airport utility study, most notably a $50,000 grant from North Carolina Railroad. This is $10,000 in addition to that $50,000 grant to pay for that sewer study. Again, no match required for that. So again, $10,000 to the county. Number nine is a resolution. Uh this is for part of our 2526 budget that we're currently in. And this resolution is to abide by the state requirements for our opioid spending. So this is just an official resolution to be passed along to the state to allow them to know how we're spending our money within this 2526 budget. Number 10. 10 is an audit contract extension with Martin Stars and Associates out of Hickory. And that is for the 2526 audit. So, the June 30th, 2026 year um audit that's um soon to be finished up.

Number 11 is the approval of a contract extension with HDR Engineering. This is for our costful water tank project. That project is now concluded. Um this is to allow for $22,000 to be moved within that project. Not an additional $22,000, but money within the project already approved to be moved to pay towards the additional cost for HDR as a part of that um project. Again, that is now complete. Number 12 on the next page is the amendment to the CWell County Council on Aging bylaws. This is a request from the Cowell County Council on Aging, and this is part of your requirement to accept um the um request for changes. Most notably, the adding an addition of the membership removal portion, which now allows if you are to miss consecutive meetings, three I believe in a row, then you would be removed from the um council. and then changing the word um elderly to older adults are the most notable changes within number 12 there. Number 13 is the appointment of two members of the Cawwell County Child Fatality Task Force. Terara Swanson with EMS and Roger Crosby with law enforcement. Those two positions as EMS and law enforcements are required positions within that task force. Number 14 is to name me and replacement of the former county manager to the Cwell um the appointment um to the Cwell Lenor Rail Transload LLC. And then number 16 is the approval of your regular and close session minutes from the February 23rd, 2026 board of commissioners meetings. With that, I'll entertain any questions you might have.

All right. Anybody have any questions for the consent agenda? Do I hear a motion as we adopt it as been presented? I make a motion we present it as adopted as presented. All right. All in favor say I.

I. Any opposed? And that motion carries. And that brings us then to uh this evening. Uh we're going to enter into a close session. And I'll make the motion that we go into close session pursuant to North Carolina General Statute 143- 318.11A3 and 14318.11a4. And this is uh some uh legal advice that we're going to be getting uh within the close session. And then we expect to come out of that close session with a couple of items that we're going to possibly approve after we talk with our attorney about that this evening. So with that, I'll call the question. All in favor signify by saying I. If you're ready to go into the closed session,

and any opposed? And that motion carries. And again, we will do anticipate coming out of that with a couple uh things to approve this evening. So, thank you again for everybody being here. I don't know how long the close session will take. You're certainly welcome to stay around, but if not, we'll see you next time. Thank you.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Thank you, Blake. Thank you, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. While you're here, I was going to get off your Oh, thank you. Yeah.