Common Council - Regular Meeting

All right, we'll officially call to order the regular meeting of the Charlestown Common Council. It is 6.30 p.m. on August 3rd, 2020. This meeting is being live streamed by Under Production Multimedia. We'll begin with our Pledge of Allegiance. If you could please join.

Thank you so much.

Tonight our invocation will be by Pastor David Downey from Fairhaven Baptist Church. Pastor, do you want to come forward?

Let's pray. Father, we love you tonight. We do thank you for our country. We thank you for the freedoms that we have, that we can be together. We thank you for our town. We thank you for the men and women that serve on this board. Father, I pray that tonight that you would guide their minds and their hearts as they make decisions. Lord, I pray that you would help them to make decisions on principle, not on preference. God, I pray that you would just guide and direct in the future of our town. Lord, we love you tonight. We thank you for loving us. We ask all this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.

Thank you. Thank you. We'll have our roll call. Bill Bertram. Here. Ronnie Blevins. Here. Shannon Elder. Here. Brian Hester. Here. Chuck Deaton. Here. Let the record show Mayor Hodges and Director Donna Coomer are also present, as well as our two attorneys, Perry McCollum and Michael Wilder. We have an agenda that's been provided. Do you retain a motion to approve? I'll make a motion. Motion by Ronnie Blevins. Second. Second by Shannon Elder. Any opposed? Hearing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That is unanimous. You have your standing business, which includes the approval of the meeting minutes from the July 6th meeting, the current claims, and the payroll allowance docket from June 29th to July 26th. Entertain a motion to approve. Make a motion. Motion by Ronnie Levin. Second. Second by Shannon Elder. Any discussion or edits on those items? Hearing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That's unanimous. For public comment tonight, we have one person signed up. Sarah Zender, if you'll come forward and give your address. We do need a timekeeper. One of the attorneys would want to keep time there. I just want to verify. Do you remember where it was?

Three minutes. Okay, it'll be short and sweet. My name is Sarah Zender. I live at 227 Pebble Road Drive. And over the past couple months, I've gotten a chance to speak to a lot of people in Charlestown, several of you all. and people are wondering what do we do now in regards to the data center being built, and what we can do now is put forth a moratorium of some substantial timeframe that isn't six months, that isn't a year, that is some length of time that we can look at long-term effects. So I just wanted to come today and ask of you all to do as long as we legally can. Thank you so much.

Thank you. All right, tonight I'm happy to introduce a new legislative youth advisor. This summer I received applications to fill Mercedes' place since she graduated and left us, which they have a tendency to do. And it was a competitive process, I must say. I had more applications this round than we've ever had and they were very competitive. I ended up interviewing three individuals for it and The young lady that kind of rose to the top is with us tonight for her first appearance. If I could call for Claire Paxton. Welcome, Claire. Claire, in her application, Claire said that she was proud that she spent her whole life here in Charlestown and has attended school since kindergarten. She loves the city and believes it's one of the best communities that we could ever live in. She has a career plan in some sort of public relations and wanted to expand her civic engagement, servant leadership, and to show how amazing our town is. She has a big goal to attend 10 mission trips before she graduates high school, and she's going to achieve that goal because she's done seven and has a couple more already scheduled. She is a student council member. She's on the SAIL team, WPMQ radio and TV program. She's attending the NextGen program. She's been the wrestling manager and just recently was assigned the football manager role as well. And the thing that really made Claire stand out is she had a very clear platform of what she wanted to accomplish as our legislative youth advisor. In addition to attending meetings and giving updates about the school, Claire wants to work with the city's staff and media, partner with the high school and the other schools to get people in Charlestown to come out and support their student athletes across a multitude of athletic opportunities. So Claire, welcome. These are the members. I think most of them know you. You probably know most of them.

but we're glad to have you if you have anything that you want to say the floor is yours hi thank you for having me thank you for this position and uh so far school has been going great and i think we're all doing good and i just want to say that our first football scrimmage is this friday we have another one next friday and then the battle of 403 all of charlestown is ready for this one so show up and show out absolutely thank you claire

We'll see you every month for different updates. We appreciate you.

Okay. Thank you so much. Congratulations. Thank you.

That's a thought of a good coach right there. Right, Gracie?

Tony's going to plug in for himself on the coaching.

I know I'm probably not supposed to say anything because I should be biased. I didn't know who was applying, but that is a great student. A wonderful human being, and she'll do a great job with us. 100%.

There you go. Council President approved. Thanks, Claire. Thank you.

All right.

For Mayor's comments tonight, I have printed for each of you a draft of the budget. I want to stress that this is a draft and to make sure that you understand that it will change. I just wanted to stick with our schedule, and it's been my practice for years to provide a draft in August, give you the month to look over it, Give us time to make any edits that we need to make. We have the first reading in September that still allows time for any additional edits that might need to happen. And then we will advertise and have advertised our adoption and final approval of the budget at our October meeting. So it gives us a couple of months to work through any issues. I will point out that there are a couple of reasons this budget will change. One is that we have not received the miscellaneous revenue amounts yet from the state that is something we depend on the state to provide us and donna and her staff checked again this morning and it was not there so we won't no we use last year's we use this year's numbers this is a placeholder but we don't know what those revenues will be until we get those numbers from the state that's one thing that will change the second thing is that this past general assembly the state assembly passed house bill 1001 this a multitude of things revolved around housing and the building department but one of the most significant things that it does affecting our budget is that the building department's revenue fund or non-rewarding fund that all of the permits and fees go into our local ordinance always allowed us to use those funds for code enforcement activities which included mowing costs that needed to be mowed or salaries for code enforcement, other supplies for code enforcement. It allows us to use it for safety concerns throughout the city. We use it for our MS4 program and then of course for the building department. The new legislation says we cannot use it for anything except directly related to the building department. So there will be some impact on the general fund as we move items around. I have an email out to the State Board of Accounts to find out if we can still use it for MS4 since Part of the MS4 role is inspection. That's the large proportion of what they do. I have not heard back from them as of today.

We did forward it to them again.

We asked them about two weeks ago. I've heard nothing. And so I asked Donna to follow today and she, they hadn't sent, we still had her. So I'll update the budget when we have that information as well. And then the third thing is we received a letter a couple of weeks ago or I guess late last week or the week before from the county They are anticipating passing a resolution to increase the EMS income tax rate. Currently it's at .04. They can increase it as high as .2. So if they go to the maximum, if they raise it by 16, .16%, then it will have a very significant impact on our income tax. Because as you know, the way that's Fueled is based off of the piece of the pie there bigger piece gets smaller So we are waiting to see the full impact on that and I will be attending that meeting on August 10th to try to get more information before our September first reading So I don't know what their anticipated increase is yet I don't think they know that yet either. The letter was very vague. It just notified us that they're going to increase it They just don't know by how much so Hopefully they'll get those numbers soon and we'll get some more information.

As you get changes, will you send us an email? Yes. Okay.

Yes. As I find out the pieces of this puzzle, I will send an email and keep you informed about what we know. And then my hope is that over the month, by September, I can have a more accurate version.

Well, that way, me personally, just keep up.

Yep. Happy to keep you in the loop. If you see anything on there that you have questions about, just feel free to ask. I'll honor myself for looking. Thank you. Yep. All right. But in my comments, I'll open the floor for council comments.

Hey, it is the beginning of school, so please make sure that you're driving safely around the buses, stopping when you hear the red signs around. Kids are out early in the morning and sometimes they're half asleep. So just please be careful and drive around the schools. And it's going to be a great year. I think we're going to have a great school year. Our numbers are up at the middle school. I don't know what they are at other schools, but people move in town. We're up about 50 kids this year at the middle school by itself. So just please keep her out on the kids.

Just to kind of piggyback also on some of the schools, we've got a whole new administration staff at the high school. So if you see them, I'll talk to a couple of them while I'm taking my kid out there. They're real happy, real proud to be there. So we'll see them at football games and stuff, and I'm sure they'll be excited. Good deal.

All right. We have no public hearings today, and no old business will move straight into new business. At this time, I'll invite forward our building commissioner, Tommy Jackson, to discuss the advisory plan commission's moratorium recommendation.

Good evening, everyone. As you all are aware, we had our meeting on July the 20th. And a couple weeks prior to that, I sent you all a recommendation, an explanation of recommendation. At that time, I recommended that we place a moratorium on the data centers and battery storage units. And at that meeting, Harold Goodlett, made a motion to approve a moratorium, and then the Planning Commission voted unanimously for that. So since that time, I think Councilman Deaton has been working on a moratorium, so on behalf of the Planning Commission, we recommend that a moratorium be placed on the data center. I'll leave it up to Chuck to explain what he had.

Yeah, Mr. Deacon submitted, Donna, he submitted a request to be put on the issue. So was it to be in your sponsorship? Is there anything you want to say about that, Chuck?

Well, I've kind of written it down. Either way, I don't go off on a tangent. But pretty much the purpose of the proposed one-year moratorium is not to stop progress nor intended to reverse the approval of the data center. It's already happened. The decision has been made and we'll work to ensure the project complies and all the recommendations from the commission, I heard all those and I know you heard them and I think everybody in the room's heard them at that point, so we need to make sure we follow through with those. But I feel as elected officials, especially in this body, we have the responsibility to protect long-term interests of our residents. Data centers represent a unique type of development with impacts that extend well beyond a single property and can affect anything from utilities to infrastructure and land use decisions. One year moratorium will provide the city the necessary time to gather facts, consult with experts, review best practices from other communities, and evaluate our orders to make sure that the safeguards are put in place, not just for us, for everybody as we go forward. Making informed decisions for me are the most important thing. I don't want to go based off of a recommendation or I think this is right. I want to know the fact. And there was a lot of facts that we still questioned through this process. We did approve one small data center, and I think the appropriate time now is to pause, evaluate what that is going to do with our community, and develop a thoughtful framework with any future proposals. I have talked with Mr. McColl, Mr. Wilder, Mr. Hester, Treva. I've talked with you. I've talked to a couple outside attorneys. And I've talked to other couple of council members, especially Shannon, where she's, this is in her district, you know. So it's not a rejection, it's just a pause. Let's figure it out. We'll start with one year. If we don't get where we need to be in one year, then we need to continue. We'll work to that in another year. But we need to get something started now, that way tomorrow we don't have another thing sent in to you. uh with that said unless you want to bring it up first i want to make a motion to pass ordinance 2026 or 12 which is a one-year moratorium to any future data centers until we look through second so i have a motion by check deacon and a second by brian tester open the floor for discussion on this issue i would like to see at least um

Honestly, we don't know the long-term effects from this from other data centers and sometimes we don't know that until later down the road. So, I would like to at least see three years. So, I would like to make a motion that we can change one year to three years.

I believe that the way it's written right now was to because we're in the process of updating our zoning.

Correct. Correct. We're updating it now. We've actually addressed that. Shannon's on that board with us and we're actually can you provide some insight on where you are with that process right now uh we're about i think what they say about two months away yeah presented uh presented to the planning commission which recommends it to the council so talking with the attorneys i'm not i don't disagree with having it longer than normal by any means but talking with these two gentlemen and outside attorneys i i think

I've seen litigation and looking at some stuff, litigations happen whenever you try to do a long-term moratorium. Talking with people, I think if you at least start with the one year, you can make that ordinance go on to another year and continue as long as you're working on it. But I would hate to do a long-term moratorium when you turn around and somebody says oh they don't know what they're going to do for three years they can settle their hands for two and a half and at least we're doing something we have to work through i don't want to settle and i want to know what's going on i want to know if they're not a good use for charlestown we just need a man on the year or we go to another year and we go for two years or we go for three years i think i think starting with a one year and moving as we go would keep us out of like harm's way i guess you could say

As long as we can continue, in a year we don't know exactly what we know, we can always extend it. I think Ronnie's on the right page, but I think that doing a year, and then a year we don't know, let's extend it.

Is that a question you want to ask the attorneys?

Can we do that? Yeah, I don't think there's any prohibition against extension, as long as you... place the right language in why you're doing the extension, what the purpose is, a legitimate purpose for the community. So I don't think that would be an issue.

Well, I was going to say the whole point of the moratorium is to buy time ultimately to fix the zoning. Moratorium is not a long-term solution. The zoning is the long-term solution. So we all buy time with the moratorium.

When do you expect the zoning to be done?

she said the other day it'll be about two two months and that will come before this council before the plan commission and then council before the end of the year so within the one year moratorium great so even if that zoning is done there still may be more to be done about data center right and we now have a year to do that so we're not trying to rush this into two months you know you see what i'm getting at i know they're talking about it probably but i i mean still one year i think would be

Well, that's the good thing about that ordinance. It can always be upgraded. It's a living document. You're on there, though. But I think there will be some good chances for us to go visit some areas that are all over the United States. They're suffering the same thing that we are. And I think there's some opportunity for us to actually go out to where they're, you know. This particular one is small. I understand that. But, you know, we've got to look at it. where can the big ones go well technically there's really no place for a big one to go here but there could be a smaller one you know around 100 000 square feet and that's where a lot of people are starting to have problems so if we can actually make some visits to these places and talk to some of the experts that's what we need so we have a motion on the floor to amend

the ordinance to a three year moratorium. I would need a second in order to move that forward if you don't want to, unless you want to stick with the one year. I need a second to make that amendment. With lack of a second, the amendment fails. So right now the motion on the floor is for the one year moratorium to allow time for the UDO to be done. Are there any other comments about this? the one year.

What is the timeline for building this one that we've got going?

They said from the time they bring the ground it was 18 months. No more than 18 months. They're not giving their permits though the conditions that the APC put on they're not receiving their permits from the city until they provide the environmental study and assurance that they will do the pre-blast study before they blast. Once they get those items

Yeah, you've already submitted for the permit. We just won't give it to you.

And I think Toby actually just sent an email today to them to confirm that because they asked why they got their permit. She hadn't said he was confirming with them why. And then Tony passed that on to the head of the company that has come to all the meetings to Kevin to say you've got to get the environmental study before you get your permits. They have their state design release, but their local permit has not been issued until we get those documents. Okay. All right. And then if we need to, we can extend this one. Okay. Any other comments? All right. I will call for the vote. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Considering that it passed unanimously and it is an ordinance, I would entertain a motion to suspend the rules and consider this on second reading tonight. Motion. Motion by Chuck D. Second. Second by Brian Hester. Any questions on the rule suspension? Hearing none, all in favor say aye. I will add just as a point of information for you that I have been in touch with Chuck as your representative on the redevelopment commission and Jill Sager who manages that for on our behalf and tomorrow night at the redevelopment commission meeting the commission will be asked to move forward now on getting design on the enhancements to High Jackson Road that funding will come from the tax revenue that the city receives from the data center. I received a lot of feedback from residents out there when I was meeting with folks one-on-one, especially the house that is right on High Jackson, the closest proximity to this site. But their number one concern was High Jackson Road, and it needs to be made more pedestrian and safer overall. The city, we are going forward now with some enhancements with the signage to the school area now that the paving is done to increase awareness of the crosswalks and all those orders. But I think it's worthwhile for the commission to move forward and spin on the infrastructure and improve that road all the way down to where we end down there at Chatelaine Park.

We talked about that. couldn't think of anything better right now to kind of get started with you know i mean no i don't think this place is going to bring traffic but a lot of other places are so i think enhancing that for like you talked about you brought up our schools and our residents and everybody else and at some point that's when we're going all the way through so i think i think you're on the right track it was on our five-year plan and this looking at the projected revenues from this i think it's wise to go ahead and rank that up so

That said, I'll call for a vote on the second reading. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That is unanimous. Moving on to the next item. This is Ordinance 2026-0R11. This is an additional appropriation ordinance in the amount of $48,455.50. This is to allow for the purchase of a replacement vehicle for our police vehicle. Chief's vehicle is on its last leg, literally, to replace, it would need an engine replacement at this point, and I want to let the council know that both of our previous chiefs have really held out on this vehicle. When they were getting their other vehicles for their department, they always put themselves last. And this time it's gotten to the point where it's not working. Chief has no vehicle. And so the funding for this appropriation comes from the River Ridge money that we received We originally wrote the budget. We factored in $200,000 because if you recall, we had that pilot agreement in place then. Well, then they scrapped the pilot and gave us the regular service agreement, and it was $50,000 more than we had appropriated. So we are appropriating that $50,000 to accompany this vehicle. This vehicle's purchase has not been approved yet. Upon the funding, it will come to the Board of Public Works, and we will approve. Chief's been asked to get three or four quotes on that. He'll bring those to the Board of Footworks. What you're asked to do tonight is just appropriate the funds to allow that to happen.

Well, I would love to see our Chief flinched on it down Highway 3, but I'll make a motion.

I have a motion by Chuck Deaton, second by Shannon Elder. Any questions or discussion on that?

If he's going to learn to park, he needs to know that he's parking in my spot. I'm sorry about that.

All in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That's unanimous. Since it is unanimous and we would like to get this to the Board of Public Works as quickly as possible, I will entertain a motion to suspend the rules and do this on second reading tonight. I make a motion. Okay, you do. All right, I'm giving that one to Shannon. Second. Seconded by Ronnie Glevin. Any discussions on the suspension of the rules? Hearing none, all in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That's unanimous. And then on second reading, can I get a motion for 2026 or 11 on the appropriation of the police vehicle? Make a motion. Chuck Deaton makes the motion. Second. Second by Robin Williams. Any questions or discussion on that? Hearing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? None. Thank you. Chief, you're one step closer to getting a vehicle. All right, that is all our business we have on the agenda tonight. I just need a motion to adjourn. I make it. Motion by Chuck Deaton. Seconded by Shannon Elder. All in favor adjourn and say aye. Aye. You better not be opposed. We are adjourned. Please be sure and sign for Don.