Town Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to our June Town Council meeting. Thanks for those of us joining us in council chambers as well as those joining us on YouTube. We will move right into the agenda with first up our agenda adoption. Is there a motion on the floor to approve the agenda? Motion on the floor. Is there a second?

Second.

Lee, you want to pick? All in favor? Aye. Thank you. The motion is carried. At this time, we will have Mike Thevenin lead us in our invocation this evening.

Thank you, Mayor. Let's pray together. God, we thank you for an awesome opportunity to live in this town. God, we thank you for an opportunity to come together as citizens and to lift up the concerns of the citizenry. God, I just ask that you bless us this evening with wisdom. Guide us as we make decisions tonight. And, Lord, as always, we pray for a peaceful, respectful evening this evening, and we just pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Would everyone please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. We do not have any special presentations this evening. So we will move into the public comment portion of this evening. Just a reminder, anyone requesting to address town council may do so during this. Oh, I missed you. I'm sorry, Ellie. Ellie, it's not. Oh, there we go. Sorry. Capital Improvement Project.

Hi, good evening, everyone. I won't take up too much of your time, but I am excited to present our new capital improvement map. It's similar to our development map. So we're going to unveil something that I think will be very useful for council and residents alike. So when we launched the development map last year, we thought we adequately responded to the questions of what's happening in my neighborhood, what projects are underway, when will they be completed. And while that map has been highly successful, we knew we needed to go further and create something similar for our capital projects. So this new CIP map, it's going to be dynamic, it's accessible, it's designed to bring the pipeline of our projects to life. And so rather than expecting our residents to dig through spreadsheets or budget reports, this map puts information directly in their hands, in your hands, on your phone or on your laptop. And it offers a clear picture of where our tax dollars are going in our community. And I believe that this effort reflects our commitment to transparency and our belief that an informed community is an engaged community. So excited to share with you tonight what that looks like. So if you've seen the development map, the template and the format is very similar. You'll navigate to the story map via our website or a direct link. You'll click on project pins around the map and view details for each of those projects. Details include budgets, funding sources, resident impacts, and proposed completion dates. And we do recommend that you bookmark the page and check in frequently for updates as projects progress. But I will say it's pretty easy to get to from our website. So we're going to do a demo. It's actually a screen recording. So I'm going to talk over the recording as it runs through. But you're welcome to follow along on your phones because it's live on our website right now. If you navigate to our home page and scroll down to our community link section, you'll see a button. And I will demonstrate that right now. So here's our home page. Scroll about halfway down the page, you'll see a capital improvement projects link red under community quick links so here is the site looks just like our development map on your phone you'll see the map above and the projects below but on a laptop or desktop it's right and left so you can click and drag to move the the map around you can zoom in zoom out And you'll see lines and gray pinpoints on this map. The lines are our greenways and transportation projects. The pinpoints are the individual projects. You click on a pinpoint. This is the parking lot expansion. You'll see the budget, an estimated completion date, the project need, which is what we came to council and asked for your consideration during the budget process. the approved description, the impact residents will receive when the project is complete, and the strategic goal that that project meets. As you scroll down the page on the site, you will see a narrative about how the CIP is funded, the budget priorities of our council, and then how this meets our quality of life and our mission, vision, and values. If a resident or council has questions, they can of course call the phone number that goes to our customer service, or they can email a new CIP email called townprojects at harrisburgncu.gov. there's multiple staff who monitor that inbox and we're happy to answer any questions related to CIP there I will note that this currently only has our FY 26 projects on the map but once the FY 27 budget is adopted tonight we will include those projects this week and with that I I welcome any feedback, compliments, concerns. If you have any additions or changes, let us know. I do think this could evolve over time. So if you want to see something different, just let us know and we can make those changes.

Ellie, is there a place on the app to locate that? Because when you said pull it up, I had the app pulled up.

We can certainly check into that. OK. Yes, ma'am.

I know we just try to direct a lot of folks to that. So I didn't know if there was another easy button we could add. Yes. I will check with Casey. Great information, though. It's nice to see everything in an interactive map. I think that's worked great for Quick Harrisburg as well. Good. Glad to hear that.

There might be a chance, I'm looking at this, it's wonderful, to color those pens as to something that's active and inactive or underway, especially if you start getting things that haven't started yet, maybe a green or a yellow or something. And then at some point in the future, I know it's not related to the town. We get a lot of questions about things they may think the town is doing, like over here on Moorhead. I don't know what the heck they're doing over there. But what is that? I don't know. But to even flag those as non-Harrisford projects, you know, it's a Duke Energy thing or it's a... you know, housing development or something like that. But I can see this thing growing. You'll have plenty of work to do in the future, I guess.

Thank you. Yes, agreed. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you. Any comments or questions or concerns? All right. Well, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Ellie. Now, let me get right back on track. We will move into the public comment section of tonight. Anyone wishing to address town council may do so during this time. Please state your name and address for the record. You have three minutes, so please be respectful of everyone's time. If your comments exceed three minutes, please be sure to send us an email at council at harrisburgnc.gov, and we'll be happy to address anything that was not able to be addressed tonight. So we will go first to our sign-up sheet, and first we have Rosa Culver Sims.

Good afternoon. As my calculations, this is Groundhog Day four or five. And you know, when I left here the last time, I started thinking about some of the issues and things that have played and that the black community has fought for. And I thought about Reverend Martin Luther King. and John Lewis crossing the Edward Pettus Bridge. And I know that they probably had to talk to people a lot when they were crossing their bridge time and time again, because people were probably a little weary and was wondering how many times they had to do so. So as I was thinking about that, I came across a song.

From too far Where I started from Listen, this is what she said Nobody told me That the road would be easy I don't believe He brought me this far To leave

He didn't bring us this far to leave us. Now, again, if I've gotta keep coming back, and we've made some headway, and that's good, but it's not quite over yet, and we're gonna keep going, and I'll keep being here. You notice I don't even say what my name is, and I don't sign my address in, because by this time, you all know who I am, because I've been here enough. And the other thing that I want to address is that when I come, because I've been here so many times, there's a level of respect that I am due. And that means that when I'm standing here speaking, I expect that level of respect and attentiveness to what I'm saying. I expect you to look at me because I am a citizen in this town. And I voted. and will continue to vote in this town. So you don't sit here and look down while I speak because you don't want to hear what I've got to say. If you don't want to hear what I've got to say, do what you need to do. And I will gladly stop speaking. But as long as I come here, I expect the level of respect that I'm giving you. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Sims. Next up, Johanna Baco. Just state your name and address for the record, please.

Johanna Baco, 824 Juanita Drive. And I'm here, again, in support of Dr. Erin Banks and her recognition as mayor pro temp. And I was fully prepared to come here tonight after looking at the website and say thank you. Thank you for doing the job and closing the loop and respecting your voters and your fellow councilwoman. And that's much more enjoyable to do. And I was looking forward to doing that and sitting down. But unfortunately, the process has not been closed. And there's no recognition here in chambers. Frankly, I just don't understand that. I do not understand that. I wish we could have a dialogue and I could understand that. But I'm here asking, within my three minutes, for you to close that loop and recognize your colleague for the recognition she deserves, she earned from the voters. And please, please do what is right And so I can come back here next month and say thank you, and that be the end of it. And we give the recognition that is due to our colleagues. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bako. Tina Hodges?

Tina Hodges, 3606 Sherrill A Lane. Good evening. Tonight I am urging this new council to consider changing the UDO to allow for backyard chickens. This is a request on behalf of all Harrisburg residents who desire and deserve the freedom to responsibly keep chickens. Currently, owning chickens in the town limits is prohibited unless your property is two acres or more. This is an outdated 25-year-old ordinance, as towns all around us allow backyard chickens to some degree, Concord, Charlotte, and Kannapolis. to name a couple. I am proposing that the council change the UDO to allow for those who live on a half acre or more to be able to own up to six hens, no roosters, and an enclosure. This is similar to the Kannapolis ordinance, which I have given you a copy of in an email. This includes no permits, which just act as deterrents for residents and extra work for your code enforcement officer. Oversight would just be complaint driven, as it is already for nuisances. I started a petition that has reached over 250 signatures in one week. According to the petition website's own analytics, 70% of all signatures are local with stated zip codes. specifically over 80 from Harrisburg, including two current council members, one former council member, and our representative, Brian Echeverria. People do not want the freedom, excuse me, people do want the freedom to feed their families and manage their property how they see fit. Just as I have neighbors who have basically cemented their entire backyard with pool houses, extra garages, and extended living areas, I should have the right to have a small coop and run in my backyard, which is all that is necessary for a small number of chickens. And by the way, which yard do you think contributes more to rainwater runoff issues, mine or the concreted yard? Because this is a new council, I should reiterate the many benefits of backyard chickens and how they promote sustainable and organic living, which has become a widespread desire for companies and citizens alike. Aside from the obvious provision of fresh eggs, chickens consume food scraps that would take up space in landfills and turn and in turn create excellent garden fertilizer. They also reduce the need for chemical pesticides as they eat many garden pests. And keeping chickens promotes outdoor activity, self-sufficiency, sustainable practice, offers companionship, and an awareness of where food comes from. In addition, the National Association of Realtors found in a study that a property with backyard chickens can sell for up to 10% more than a comparable property without. And we all know that allowing chickens would have no effect on homes governed by HOAs. I'm asking for this matter to be put on the agenda, discussed and voted on. The petition I sent each of you proves this isn't an individual, me, demanding a change for selfish desires. When you consider the number of citizens who support this, how it is permitted in surrounding towns, essentially causes zero nuisances, has zero public health concerns, creates self-sufficient residence, and offers organic healthy food sources to families. This matter needs to be considered, and a change needs to be made. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Hodges. Jamin Bryant Heron.

Love and peace. My name is Jamin Brian Heron, community organizer and Cabarrus native, and I'm representing the Black Political Caucus of Cabarrus County. I'm speaking tonight because the public deserves clarity and consistency from its elected leaders. Dr. Aaron Banks was unanimously appointed by the council to serve as mayor pro tem, yet we have observed that this is not being publicly recognized in the role. Her title now appears on the website and she has a name badge, but does not appear on the dais like everyone else's title, even after many community members have spoke and requested this change over the last several months. The question is why? Why is her title being ignored? Why are community voices being ignored? Who is responsible for carrying out this decision? Is it the mayor or the city manager? Is this a dictatorship or a democracy? The people have voted. The council has voted. You are failing your responsibilities and wasting our time with petty politics. When an elected body votes unanimously on a matter, the public expects that decision to be respected. If there is a reason why Dr. Banks is not being recognized as mayor pro tem, the community deserves a clear explanation. If there is no such reason, then the council should honor its own vote. The concern is not simply about a title, it's about transparency and accountability and public trust. Residents should not have to guess who's who. This causes confusion as to what we are to do if the mayor is not available. Who do we turn to? Representation matters, our voice, our vote matters. Dr. Banks and Councilwoman Glover, we see you, we love you, and we thank you. Leadership is not always easy, especially when challenging longstanding racial bias or advocating for perspectives that have been historically been denied. My hope is that the next child of color watching these meetings will see and know that they too deserve to be recognized, respected, and heard. My hope is that the path will be easier for them because of the courage demonstrated by you two serving today. No one should have to fight harder for the same level of recognition and respect that others receive automatically. But as we come up on Juneteenth celebrations, we know we have to constantly fight for our freedom, our rights, and continually tell and remind folks we are free now. We are equals. We owe it to future generations not to allow ourselves to be treated less than, not to be silent. I respectfully ask the mayor and council to explain the status of Dr. Banks' appointment and what steps will be taken to ensure that decision made by this governing body are consistently recognized and implemented. Thank you for your time and service to our community. God bless you and your decisions. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. That concludes public comment. We will move into consent agenda. Is there a motion on the floor to approve consent agenda as presented? So moved. Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Motion is carried. Thank you. Next up, we have communications. First, we've got Mr. Donovan.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I have a quick manager's update for you. First, there was one direct question in public comment on is it the manager's decision on what goes on the dais? And just to answer that, it is not. Staff doesn't have any say on who presides over this meeting, and the person that presides over this meeting does the seating and the nameplate. So if we can clear that up, that may be the only thing that I heard that hadn't been cleared up. Also put this in an email to all of council, I think end of January, early February, around that time frame, explaining the dynamics of that. Town attorney then opined. maybe a month later, explaining those dynamics even further. So all that information is out there for anybody that wants to look at it. But from a staff standpoint, this is an elected official issue. We work for the elected officials and not vice versa. So we won't comment on it any further with respect. Some of the other stuff we got going on, though, if we look back over the last month, we look at May just kind of at a glance. We've got a lot of cool numbers to look at, and I've decided to kind of put this on the screen for us just as a matter of record. Each month I will kind of address these and announce them, but I like this new format, and hopefully you guys like it as well. when we look forward at what public safety's kind of wins and things that we did over the past month north carolina gold safety award this is the first time ever that the fire department has got the north carolina department of labor award at the gold level that's for cutting workplace injuries last year that's something that hr and the fire department have worked really hard on over many years I would say going back to 10 years' worth of safety committee meetings on analyzing every single workplace injury that we get, and they have finally gotten that gold award, which is honestly quite amazing for a department that does everything that they do and puts themselves in so many instances where you can get unintentional injuries. Also, huge savings in, I won't steal all of the thunder from our departments here, but property value savings. We had a couple of major industrial and commercial properties that fire department was able to respond to very quickly this month, saving millions of dollars, as you can see here. 10 plus incidents including those two major fires just within days of each other. And then our mutual aid and readiness we did deploy out to Pamlico County plus did the land search and SART Topo training which our folks are constantly out doing lots and lots of training. Chief Wooten will address that later on when he gets on here if you have any detailed questions on exactly what a lot of these trainings are because they're quite amazing when you get to see what our guys do on a daily basis. We look at kind of building the community. Development pipeline remains, continues to remain strong. And we are really starting to see that flip from that primary residential stock in our development pipeline to, you know, we have one of our largest industrial Developments in review now, 160,000 square foot of industrial space and the Farmington retail buildings are starting to go up in a quicker and quicker pace. Multiple neighborhoods can reach that full build out stage of asphalt placements. You're starting to see those come online. Our economic development team was able to go out to Las Vegas and in front of 25,000 attendees, they were able to pitch Harrisburg at that ICSC retail conference, trying to get our name out there and explain to people what we have to offer as we try to attract retail to the area. CIP continues to move forward, Cambridge Drive, extra extension on back creek that we were able to approve at the last meeting and the oakley sidewalk out to bed and you guys saw the beautiful new park monument sign is live Everybody's been down on the turf fields. Saw the ribbon cutting for that. And we also got done with the splash pad, all the new equipment. So we upgraded the equipment on the inside of the building there, added air conditioning in there so that that would not have all the condensation, rusting, everything. Of course, some other things went wrong. As soon as you fix one thing, something else pops up. But continuing to move forward at kind of a record pace there. No news, we are in a drought still, even with all of the rain. But we were able to really address those May 15th when we went into that phase two water restriction by reaching out to our community, educating the community. We saw a great response from the community. We didn't have a lot of the troubles that some of the other communities had with enforcement and some of the heavy-handed approach to it. Our folks responded. We really saw that no panic messaging pay off. The Public Works Department, this is multi-years in a row, but recertified this year as a SHARP-certified Public Works Department, and we're given by the Department of Labor as well. We're one of only six public works departments in the state of North Carolina that has that designation. Quite an achievement when you consider that's everybody, right? That's from Charlotte down to the smallest community. There are only six in the state, and we're one of those. Our strong financial position continues. Our cutoffs are all the way down to 39 now as our auto drafts grew in the water department of 200 additional accounts. And our interim audit came back clean with the staff referred to as model examples for other communities. As you look ahead, we have tons of events, which I know the mayor will get to in her area. We're really focused on the 4th of July. From here until our 250th celebration, we'll be all hands on deck. It's not just our Parks Department that does that. It's our Public Works. Really, everybody will have over 40 deputies at that. Our entire Fire Department will man that. All of our front office will be out there with walkie talkies manning cash registers texting each other the entire time trying to figure out where where each other at so that we can make that event go as smooth as it's ever gone really happy with the plan that we have we've already distributed over a thousand wristbands to our residents and they'll be able to continue to come here to town hall and get those between now and then the uh continuing to monitor those drought conditions it's approved quite a bit i would anticipate if the rain continues as it has been that we'll be getting out of that pretty soon but we it took about six months to get in we're not going to get out you know six days i think by the end of summer as long as the weather cooperates we should be in pretty good shape And then finally, at the last meeting, we had quite a long conversation about the Food Creek Greenway project. We have met with the vast majority of the homeowners out there. Those meetings went fantastic. Brian, John Young, and myself went out. We were able to meet with everybody in their living rooms, go out and walk the backyards, walk the greenway, look out there. um you know really those those homeowners understand that you know the projects coming through the biggest concerns were privacy and security which are very fair concerns and so we've taken all of those notes back and our next step would be to create the preliminary engineering we'll have the the alignment that meets all of those households We'll then kind of cost that out, go back out, meet with those homeowners one more time before we move that into our standard design. So that is now on its way. I'll stop there. I have a bunch of other notes here, but I still have the budget to present tonight. But I'll take any questions if you guys have them.

Any questions for Rob? They're saving them up.

Robin, I asked you previously to the meeting about the walkways back here in Harrisburg Park. Those walkways are still listed as

private but i think you had a an alternate answer i guess a better way to explain it than i probably could but yeah we'll we'll take a look and make sure they're properly marked there's there's kind of two definitions of private when it gets into infrastructure so there's publicly owned right so that's that's the stuff that we maintain and those those are what most people consider public common open space in a neighborhood is also public even though it's privately owned so there could be a neighborhood and if you have let's say a playground in your neighborhood unless you have a key fob gated scenario where you you know have some restriction that's public property it's not you're not trespassing so there are some trails that are maintained in HOAs that are common open space throughout the town common open space is open for anybody in the community it could be a visitor it could be an owner they're open to the public so I hope that helps clear that up but you know there are some neighborhoods that will you know label it either you know owned and maintained by such and such HOA or they may say privately maintained that doesn't mean they're closed to the general public you can you're allowed on common open space in neighborhoods, as long as you're not doing anything that you couldn't do anywhere else in public. Same as being in the parking lot at any other publicly owned area. Thank you. Or commonly owned area, I should say.

Any other questions for Rob? All right. We'll move on to Finance Monthly Report with Brian Lee.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

Have your finance report as of the end of May with one month left in the fiscal year. Tax collections up 1% this month to 102% of our estimate. So we should see one more month of motor vehicle collections and settle in a couple hundred thousand above that estimate. General fund overall revenue is at 99%, and so we should come in right at 100% on the year, so really good revenue news for the general fund. The water and sewer fund is at 97% collected, so another great year for the water and sewer fund as well, as that should tick over 100% this month. And then the stormwater fund is exactly on target at 92%, and so again, that's going to be another fund that comes in right at 100%. So really good information or really good status there for our revenues. For departmental expenditures over operations, we have no concerns as we look down through all of these departments. We're heading into our last month, which is essentially spending cutoff for non-mandatory items. So we don't have any concerns as we head into that period. And the same story for all remaining general fund departments. They're all just in really good shape from 60s to about 80% there. The enterprise funds are in the same shape as well, with the water and sewer fund at 79%, and the stormwater fund at 74%, and salaries across the town at 83%. So no concerns across any of the categories of expenditures or any of the departments. And now moving into our project dashboard, here's a look at our single year projects. So we have two that are at 95%. And this was as of the end of May. As of today, these are actually finished out. So we'll show you pictures of those next month with the landscaping added in. That was the last item that both of these needed. But you can see here the internally illuminated Harrisburg Park and YMCA sign that looks really fantastic. And then our other monument sign on Rocky River Road that's also had the power hooked up and is illuminated now as well but like I said they've been landscaped and so those are finished off as of right now another project that was taken care of this month where the splash pad updates that Rob mentioned so you can see the new surface coat there there's a new slide pad that's longer than the one that was previously there and then a lot of updates to the ropes the stanchions umbrellas all those sorts of accessories in there so that's ready to go for the season now Here's a look at our multi-year projects in design. Rob also mentioned the Oakley Drive Pedestrian Facility. We had this bid opening on the 4th and we had seven respondents, which was our, I think our best bid opening in probably two or three years, maybe even since the pandemic. So that was really good to see that much interest in one of our projects. So we got really good results there and we should be bringing that contract to you next month for consideration. Food Creek Greenway, Rob also gave a great update there. I don't think I can really add anything, but that project has certainly picked back up steam. Here's a look at our multi-year projects under construction. Add a little movement here. Rob also mentioned Cambridge Drive Extension, so here's a picture of it finished and open. You can see the sidewalk is also closed off right there, if you can see that. We're waiting on some handrails, so that's the last 5% of this project is some safety handrails there. next to the culvert but also wanted to point out that it it connects into this greenway which goes on behind these homes and so our last leg that we plan on doing is we have an existing greenway that ends about right here and so we'll bring that up to the sidewalk and have that be a connection of two existing greenways there so a lot of good connectivity here coming into town center The next project is a parking lot expansion at Stallings Park. This was an internal staff project where Public Works brought the dirt over from Harrisburg Park, was able to grade it into the old pond at Stallings Park. That has been seeded, and grass is growing there. So the last step is we're going to bring in gravel and make it an overflow parking lot. And lastly, the 2026 annual sanitary sewer rehab. A lot of work up and down Moorhead Road and some of the side streets has been completed there. The last phase of this year's project is upgraded monitoring systems at all of our pump stations. So a really big improvement on the monitoring capabilities that we'll have at all of those. And so that'll finish off the project for the 2026 rehab. Here's a look at our equipment projects. We had two move to complete this year. The first is a side-by-side for the deputies, and the second is the dehumidifier project at Stations 1 and 2 that the fire department performed. Here's a look at our vehicle projects. No movement this month on the progress side, but we did, as you can see, pay for a lot of services on the left side there. And our professional services projects, the only one to report on this month is the fiscal year 2026 audit. They did come out in May and tested our transactions from July through April, but also really focused on internal controls. So they were looking at our payroll and personnel files, our involvement in the pension system, our utility billing practices, and then of course testing our grants and debt service. So a lot of things hit there, and then they will be back in September and October to finish up the audit for the full year. And I would welcome any questions you may have.

Brian, the people hauler wagons, are they going to be here in time?

We sure hope so. I have not heard anything in a couple weeks. I'll look at Jim. Yeah, we haven't heard that they're not on schedule.

What was that?

those wagons that'll be used for the fourth so they better be showing up any other questions for brian thank you sir thank you next up we have our law enforcement update with lieutenant helms good afternoon mayor councilman

So for our month of May report, law enforcement related activities, we are at 4,793 for the month of May. As you'll see as we go into the next slide, we had quite a few additional security checks this month, bringing us to 2,904 above our average of 2,079. So lots of crime prevention. Traffic stops are a little bit down from our average of 1,027. We were 851 in May, and that's in part because one of our traffic officers was injured in a training class. He's going to be out hopefully back sooner than we expected, but it's still probably going to be like mid-July, maybe late July. He had to have a surgery. Non-emergency response times are doing well, 617 with an average of 646, so always trying to keep that below seven. And trends in special activities, crimes against persons are slightly down this month, as well as crimes against property, so that's always a plus. White-crawler crime, fraud financial crimes are up just a tinge, not much. Vice crimes as well, and crimes against society, and non-reportable. of just just a touch our trends and special activities uh again um as we're seeing trending month to month uh crimes against property is our our biggest uh crime trend uh with the larcenies and thefts and things of that nature and then non-reportable crimes as you can see over there with our death investigations and things of that sort that don't actually amount to a criminal defense The second largest chunk, crimes against society, and then coming in third, crimes against society at 19%. And as always, is what we hope for remaining low, crimes against persons at 11%. So this is year to date, the top number total. On the right-hand side of the slide there, crimes against persons were at 40%, crimes against property, 95%, white-collar crimes, 39%, and vice crimes, 48%. Crimes against society, 72, and unreportable at 82. So overall, really not looking too bad, especially with the crimes against person, which we always want to keep that low. Probably as we look, as typical years have gone by as we get into spring, some of those property crimes tend to spike a little bit just because more people are out a little bit later and things like that. It's not so bleak and miserable and freezing cold at 3 a.m., so I guess it's a little more enticing to get out there. But hopefully we will keep that at bay, and that is it. I'll be happy to answer any questions if you have any.

I do have one question. Yes, sir. The electric bikes, is that considered a vehicle and do you have to have a helmet and do you have to be of age?

We're still navigating through some of the legalities of that. There is a little, I think some of the traffic county unit guys did some research on that, but We're still trying to figure out how that actually applies, like where you actually can legally ride those and do you have to have a helmet and all that. So hopefully I can figure all that out by legal definition and have you have an exact answer next month.

Yeah, I think it's okay. I see them riding around the neighborhood. That's cool. But then I saw them up there on, you know.

roberta road and cutting in and out of traffic with no helmet yeah and that's the thing it's not so much a problem for well i guess it could be a problem for motors but it's more of a safety concern of the folks riding those things because you know that thing's not going to win against a you know a 2 000 ton car or a truck or something like that so we definitely want to make sure that a everybody's doing it legally but you know b that they're

doing it as safe as possible with those things and my understanding is they get up pretty fast as well so i don't really know about the speeds of those things but i've been told upwards of 30 miles an hour for some of them so that's that's pretty good top speed is supposed to be 32 miles an hour yeah to that and there's two types there's the types with pedals that are you know electric assisted and there are the types that are like little mini bikes with an electric motor And I think those are the more dangerous ones.

I believe so. That's pretty fast to Paul. Nothing really protecting you. But I'll start looking into that and see if I can come up with the actual legalities of all that.

So does that mean we should disregard the information we got last year from Captain Miesmaer? Because he talked to us at length, and some of them are technically motorcycles.

that unless there's been a legal update or something changing the legislation to those um but i will check on that too just to see i would say what he sent out would be accurate for the time being but i think there has been a couple of updates because i think this is becoming not just you know a local problem i think this is becoming a statewide issue as well especially in bigger cities where there's you know more of them and more traffic and things like that so

If you guys did have a point of view, it might be helpful to get a reminder on the website. Like, you can ride this in a neighborhood if you have a helmet and if you're over 16 and if it doesn't go over 32 because it sounds like we don't know the rules. They're definitely not street legal, but...

yeah we're waiting on some additional guidance because they've just become so cheap that everybody has them and generally these are you know these are cheap import things like the the ones that are um you know they have a serial number and they're they're governed up to 32. our initial guidance on those was those are not street legal right those are you don't they're not a dirt bike that's why they're governed everything under that You don't need anything, they're not a motorcycle, you don't need a license, you don't need a title, but then again, you shouldn't have those in the street because they're a toy. Now things that go above that, those were considered, they fell under the same electronic rules as golf carts. Once they got above that, then they had to be street legal and licensed and yada yada yada. There has been so many of these variations that i don't think the state has a great statute on it so we're waiting on some some guidance on these ones that are they're kind of stuck in the middle so i don't think we can do some legislation coming out sometimes and again there's lots of different types yeah kind of started you know popeds were not regulated as much as they are much different yeah

We can probably link this, because back on April 29th on the Facebook, Cabarrus County Sheriff's, they did post something from UNC School of Government, and it's a nice visual that will explain.

Yes, and I can't remember that verbatim, but that should be the most correct.

It is. Yeah, it talks about ages, if it exceeds 750 watts. There's some pretty specific things on there that they had at the time, so maybe we could link that as well.

Yeah, there's some recent guidance on it. And we'll get something. We'll figure out what the latest is. Regardless of what the law is, I would still encourage parents. I've got young kids. My kids rode their e-bikes around the neighborhood and stuff. These are very dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. There's a lot of kids that ride out into the road. They think, hey, this is a safe neighborhood. That's great until it's not. cars like to park on the side of the road kids like to come out of sidewalks in between cars getting a ticket getting in trouble that's the least of our worries these kids are going to get hurt i've seen several kids recently get hurt and be hospitalized and worse so you do have to be very careful on these i would just caution parents regardless of what the law is you know be careful with kids on e-bikes playing in roads and It can certainly end very badly, as Lieutenant said. Going up against an automobile, there's no chance.

I have one additional question with regards to when you're doing your neighborhood patrols. It being summer, we see a lot of the golf carts out. So the question there is, I know in my neighborhood, there are 12, 13, 14, which really shouldn't be driving. Do your officers engage with those kids, or is that?

Yes, if we see them. Those are very specific, too. Those have to be registered with the state. uh have a registration plate attached well if they're going to be street legal the only kind of gray area we run into is when it's not a you know state maintained road where there's you might not necessarily have to have a license or be registered to ride on that but those are pretty few and far between so it kind of it becomes street dependent or road dependent on whether we can actually enforce anything that or not but we usually try to get out with them and just make sure especially that they're driving safely if they're if it's an area where that's permissible but yeah we can certainly stop them and call parents to come get them if it's a uh legally made or street uh state maintained road i mean i know we had a child or a teenager i think it was in abington last year that got seriously hurt yes fell off and there were some other factors involved with that too that shouldn't have been but

And then we see it in our neighborhood where I'm at. And it's kind of crazy watching them whip around. And they're invincible at that age. Until something happens. Thank you. Yes, sir.

Any other questions for Lieutenant Helms? Thank you, sir. Next up, we have our fire department update with Assistant Chief Wooten. The master of the slides.

I actually get to present to you tonight. So good evening, council and mayor. I will be doing the fire department report for Chief Dunn because he's out of town. Our fire marshal activities for the month, we did do our quarterly community safety for our Stop the Bleed class. That's where we teach the lay people how to actually put on tourniquets or something like that for our community safety. We did have a fire station tour at Station 2 and a couple at Station 1. As you can see, the inspections of fire extinguishers are typically the violations that we're always going to have. They make up the largest violations this past month of the inspections that he was able to complete. For the month of May, we had 296 incidents. It's 1313 for the year. We're still looking good on all of our 90th percentile times. Our turnout time goal is one minute and 30 seconds. We're at 124 last month. Our 90% unit travel time is the time they check and route till they get to the scene. We're looking at a goal of six minutes on that. We're right on track on that one. And dispatch to arrival, our goal is 7 minutes and 30 seconds. And we were able to do it in 7.08. OK, so a couple of things we want to talk about on this, as Rob alluded to earlier. We did have some significant fire loss this past month. So there was $2 million in fire loss that we had. But we still saved 98% of the property in contents because we had a very large fire savings due to a small appliance fire in a large commercial building, which I'm going to go into right now. So the biggest thing we want to get out of this is smoke detectors work. So I want to paint the picture for you. On May the 29th, 2 AM at the fire station, asleep in the bed. Bam. Lights come on. dispatched to a commercial fire alarm, 7201 Caldwell Road. This building is 139 square feet, type 1 construction. So type 1 construction is all concrete, concrete floor, concrete roof, concrete walls, complete concrete building. It has a sprinkler system, and it has an alarm system, which were recently inspected and tested by our fire marshal's office a couple months ago. All were working. The crews arrived on scene, made access to the building with Knox box keys, thought they smelled a little bit of smoke, something didn't seem right, quickly located this fire that actually was in the water heater. The smoke detector in this room had activated and notified them of an alarm at 2 o'clock in the morning. The property loss estimation tool for the national property loss tool we use said this building is valued at $60 million in property and $40 million in contents. So in this one call alone, we saved $102 million of property and contents value. so our fire marshal wanted me to make sure that we really point out that we need to emphasize that this illustrates the importance of having and maintaining fire alarm and sprinkler systems in our commercial buildings this is the second one of these type of calls that we have had this year with significant fire savings the other one was the doctor's office that we were alerted to early in the morning same type of an incident so very happy about that i'm happy to answer any questions you may have on those

I've got a general question, and I'm not certain that we are impacted, but from your seat looking our direction, there's been a lot of chatter about Department 410, I guess it is.

Oh, Squad 410 with the county? Yep.

Are we supplemented by 410 in any way?

So 410 does not actually come to any of our calls on an automatic assignment. We have used them in the past when we've had a working incident recently this past month with an incident where we were going to be tied up for a long period of time. We had them come and stand by at one of the stations to answer any calls for medicals. That area and that program really benefits more of the eastern part of the county where it's more rural, and there's not as many people that are staffed during the days. Our fire department is adequately staffed, and we have Concord Fire Department in Kannapolis as well that can come close by as well as Charlotte to come help us as far as partnerships and stuff. So we won't see a big impact of that being gone, but the eastern part of the county may see.

Is that close to Bethel?

Midland comes in with us on that side. Flow Store Fire Department is volunteer, and they do have some staffing, but they would help out a department like that who has limited staffing, but we assist them as well, too. So I don't know that we won't, from Harrisburg's perspective, see a huge impact of that service not being provided by the county anymore.

Thank you.

I also saw in their meeting that they have some people who are SWIFT.

water trained I was just wondering do we have any openings in our fire department or we currently I believe we are getting ready to have two members I think it's gonna come out in this two-week report as I just saw some of the bullet points from the administration chief we have two positions that we're getting ready to make offers for lateral transfers I'm not aware that either one of them worked for squad 410 for those two individuals I And I know we have a new vacancy that will probably be coming up. We've had someone turn in their resignation. We expect it in the next week or so. So there may be an opportunity, but they would have to go through the process of hiring process for any candidate we would look at anyway.

Right. Okay.

Any other questions?

Thank you, Chief. Okay. Thank you.

Just a couple quick mayor comments tonight. I really want to thank our town staff and the council for the hours and hours of budget workshops and conversations that we've had. I feel like each year that process gets streamlined. And I know for our admin, they're like, yeah, it's because we're doing a whole lot of legwork in the background. So we certainly appreciate that. It's very interactive and we can really tell the difference up here when it's presented. So thank you guys for that. Looking forward to seeing everyone at our next Rockin' the Bird concert. That is this Saturday at Harrisburg Park. There will also be a tent set up for our residents to get their July 3rd and 4th wristbands for the event. So that's another great opportunity to grab that before this comes up. I also attended the Atrium ER ribbon cutting last month. They officially opened May 18th. It's off Bruton Smith Boulevard, kind of at the entrance to Embassy Suites. Thinking that's going to help with some of the congestion that we are having at the Harrisburg ER. We've heard there's been three and four hour waits there. It is a full service ER department. It's quite impressive. They built that in six months. Hard to believe, but that's a quick, easy access for our residents as well, instead of the one back on Rocky River. HIAC Fan Fest was a lot of fun. Kudos to our communications department for getting the word out. We actually had several. Harrisburg residents attend and came up and said, hey, we heard about this because of the communications that were out. So they had a great crowd show up for that. And we certainly enjoy supporting our local businesses. So that is all I have. With that, we will move into council comments.

So I'll start. At the end of May, actually I believe it was the middle of May, because I sit on the North Carolina Board of Trustees, we had our national conference in Savannah. where we really focused on national trends of what we're seeing across our municipalities. We know entering a municipality is really expensive. So in that, we spent a lot of time talking about the importance of aligning policy for our first responders from the angle of providing support and reinforcements for our first responders, because they do see a lot of trauma in general and we had a very deep dive conversation just about how that trauma impacts our life expectancy so just ensuring that we are able to bring those supports back to north carolina as we are working towards that and then just on cyber security the importance of it making sure that we are as tight as we can be with that we understand that ai is just is growing and it's a monster that is We don't want to make sure, excuse me, we do want to make sure that we're always ahead of it. And then lastly, we talked about climate change and some of the trends that we're seeing. I will say I was very proud to see that our SWIFT water rescue team was in the presentation that they showed. I was like, the first person I saw was Captain Meesner. like I was like wait those are my people so that was really nice to see they did not name us specifically but they did after I made sure they knew that they were from Harrisburg so it's really good to see that we are on the national stage being recognized and ensuring that we're bringing policies and procedures back here that will one try to keep our rates low and And I said that in the wrong order. Take care of our people first, and then try to keep our rates low. So yeah, that was fun to see and hear. We did have our mental health advisory board meeting last week with the county. And the behavioral health center, the Stephen M. Morris Behavioral Health Center, Hopefully, weather cooperating is set to open July 28th. That is a very tentative date, again, all depending on weather. We are very hopeful that it will be open before school opens. But it's really nice. They've stopped doing tours for now because every time they do a tour, they have to clean up. It slows progress. So we put the goal of getting that open. But once it is open, we will not be able to do tours to protect folks' privacy. I talked with Rob about this. a very high level but also we um in savannah we discussed a way to use those opioid settlement funds across our community in more of a preventative way and not just reactionary because part of the behavioral health hospital is funded by the opioid settlement so um those are just things i'm happy to bring back and as a final rob i should have asked this when you asked for questions earlier But when we were at City Vision, we talked with John with the microtransit and what that could look like to help fill some of the transit gaps in Harrisburg. So when we get that set up, if you'll just follow up with me and let me know what that was like, because he did a solid job explaining how that looks in South End and other places.

your cyber crimes you know Monroe recently I think was Monroe sent out money via direct payment and they had never sent money to this company previously directly like that it's always been a check and the vendor even came out and said we've always had a check but as you said the AI the bad actors came out and I say it's Monroe it was one of the smaller communities in the near here so it is a real issue last month I didn't get a chance to thank Park and Rex for a great Rocking the Bird we had I don't know how you guys managed to pull it off but we had the weather just at the right temperature and no blinding sun and nice breeze so thank you guys for that yeah order it up for the next this next one as well the other thing though i will point out is i've had a few folks reach out and i've noticed it myself and keep forgetting to mention it when you go to the website on a mobile device just pull up the schedule I know on iPhones it's jumbled, so you don't see it. Now, I at times will flip, and I have seen it, but it doesn't always flip. So you may just check it one additional time just to see if that's been cleared up or not. I went out there about two weeks ago and forgot to mention to you guys.

um and then lastly i got the opportunity friday night to celebrate with the mayor and watch her firstborn be wed so congratulations thank you i'll go next um so may was a busy month for me as well i attended the cabarrus health alliance grand opening the new location in concord i think that will be um it was a really a great way to reinvent that space to be very useful for the community. And it's an old mill that's in Concord, closer than Kannapolis for us. But I think it's a great resource. I also spent some time in Raleigh at a training talking about co-governance. And I think it was important because it talks about the shared power between electeds and the community. And it was a way of how we can work together. And it's not an us versus them, but a way that we can work with the community that was very, very important and informative. So that was nice to talk to others around the state and some folks from Tennessee and Ohio about how they're doing that. I'll also have a reminder. We have Juneteenth here on Thursday, June 18th, from 5 to 8 at Harrisburg Park. I invite everyone to come out and to celebrate. It's going to be a great experience. We have vendors and food trucks and all the things for everyone. So we welcome everyone to come out to that. Our neighbors in Kannapolis and Midland are also hosting Juneteenth. And we purposely scheduled ours so that we don't conflict, but we can all support each other. Harrisburg will be on June 18th. Kannapolis will be on Friday the 19th. And Midland will be on the 20th. So I invite everyone to come out and support that. And last but not least, I will be remiss if I don't mention the information about the mayor pro temp. And I just want to say thank you to Rob for putting it on the website and for updating my lapel pin. I appreciate that. I know that during this meeting we talked about Harrisburg being known as the model community and all of that. And I take pride in being from Harrisburg and being here representing Harrisburg. And it's a real shame that I have to, this is six months in and I'm still talking about the mayoral title not being on the dais. It really is. Um, and, um, and I acknowledge that, um, Rob, you said that it's not your decision and it's an elected decision, but I'm just as to the question that was asked in public comments is why did it change from what's been done 15, 20 years ago? Like we didn't make a decision here for the council to change the diet. So why has it changed now? And so I would hate to think that we're playing party politics or doing anything that is, um, um, with ill intention, but that's kind of what it's feeling like. And so I hope that eventually this is changed more sooner than later. But we're not acting like a model community. We're not being transparent and displaying trust and honesty in the behavior that we're seeing. And so it is my hope that we will rectify this issue and have it be done. Because someone asked me today, don't you think it's a distraction? I said, absolutely it is. But I'm going to continue to talk about it until it's resolved. There was no need for anything to be changed other than what has been happening before and for the change to be so abrupt. and so seems to be backhanded, you just wonder why. And it doesn't feel good to be sitting here every month talking about the same thing. And is this the low-hanging fruit? Of course it is. So let's fix this and move on with the budgeting and the other things that we talked about today. But I'm going to continue to talk about it until it's resolved.

Thank you. Any other council comments? OK, with that, we will move into our public hearing portion. And first up, we will have Rob give our fiscal year 2027 budget ordinance, tax rate, schedule of fees, and capital improvement plan.

All right, I'm back up. I am not going to make everybody sit through 40 minutes, again, of the detailed budget. I promise. I do have a abbreviated version this evening that I'll do here from the dais. First of all, good evening, everybody. I am proud to present the final manager's recommended budget for fiscal 2027. This has been posted on the town website for the past month and it's also been available for inspection for anybody that wanted to come here and inspect it at town hall. The headline on this is pretty simple. There is no tax increase. This is the third year in a row for that. This is a smaller town budget than last year. And the long-term commitment to operational excellence includes an increase in quality in many of our departments and a commitment to the same services our residents have come to count on year after year. The general fund overview, the budget's been prepared with that tax rate, as I said. You do see service levels remain consistent overall. You will also see some targeted increases in the economic development efforts, as well as planning community development and continued investment in public safety, with the first two really having the effect of diversifying our tax base, making us much less reliant on residential property taxes so that we can have more commercial and industrial share that load with our residents. new budget request examples focusing on that that economic development also investment in strategic acquisition and expansion of our park facilities and then the ever-present transportation issue that that tends to come up year after year after year The general fund, you can see the revenue that comes in, 61% of that comes in from property taxes, with nearly the remainder, the additional 32%, in intergovernmental, that is mostly sales tax that comes in, that's distributed throughout the county, and comes here to us as a proportion of our ad valorem. The natural question then is, okay, that's what's coming in. Where does it go? What do we spend our dollar on? So we have the typical $4,000 tax bill here for easy math at home. Of that $4,000 tax bill that a homeowner may see, under 1700, 1,663 to be exact, comes here to the town. And that splits out in the percentages that you see there. With the largest share, a third of every dollar that you pay in property tax goes to fire EMS services, 20% to law enforcement. 18% over to Parks and Recreation. And then you see all of their services, streets, environmental protection, planning, engineering, all the other services that we do make up the remainder there. What does that mean for the typical property owner here in town? Well, at $0.41 for a home valued at $350,000, that means $1,435. And you can see the various levels of taxation depending on the property asset values. for the water and sewer fund again service delivery expected to remain consistent and best in class we we take a second position to no one i think when you look at all of our benchmarking across every aspect we've committed to competing at the highest level providing the best services that we can provide and doing that at a better cost than every one of our peers that's a lofty goal We hit that goal on every single metric from top to bottom throughout the organization. Back in 2023, the council adopted that water and sewer rate resolution that identified incremental increases annually rather than waiting four or five years for rates to need to be adjusted and then throwing a 15, 20% rate on our residents. We're recommending that again this year, the 5% water and sewer rate increase. That accounts for the 5% increase that's passed on to the town through Wasak and the city of Concord for both sewer treatment and water. We really have no control over that, by the way. Those are going to be passed on. Those are costs they have. We pass that on to our customers in kind. So what's the big picture? Total proposed general fund expenditures of $36.3 million. That's 2.9% less than fiscal 2026 with no cut in services. If anything, we're pushing the envelope forward. The three main operating funds, if we count general fund, water and sewer, and storm, is $51.9 million. That still comes in 2% less than we had in the previous year with our three largest investments. Transportation improvements of nearly $8.4 million. $12 million in public safety. That includes police and fire. That's 53% of every dollar we bring in in property tax goes directly to public safety and police and fire services. And $9 million in parks, facilities, and improvements over the next year. I think when you look back at the process that we had this year, you'll see a thorough, transparent, and engaging budget process. We were able to speak with lots of members of the community. We had lots of great conversations with the board. The staff had tons of great conversations back and forth of how do we build a better mousetrap? How do we continue to lead the industry? How do we outperform our peers in service levels and do it at an ever decreasing cost? Over 25 total hours, including tonight's public hearing, will have been spent on public engagement. We're proposing to maintain the existing tax rate for the third straight year, $0.41 per $100 evaluation. All of our service levels are expected to remain at that high level, and we meet our adopted vision, mission, value, and goals across the board. I'll reiterate because I do think it is very unique. I don't see any other community doing it. We're continuing to find ways to be more efficient, to set department goals, to set efficiency standards, and our staff is second to none. And you'll see our general fund reduce spending 2.9% this year without reducing any service and continuing to attract the best talent that we can. And this budget has been made available to the public. It's been here on the town website and for physical inspection for the last month. Tonight we are going to have our public hearing where the public will have final opportunity for comment. after which we will have the opportunity to vote on the budget it is my recommendation this evening i think when you look at when you look at our budget we meet our goals we've been responsive to the community every time they've brought something to us we're very responsive to the to the board This is a group effort. I don't think any one person on this dais has more influence than the other, and that's a good thing. I don't think any one resident has any more influence than any other, and that's a good thing. And our staff does this as a group. And we start this way back in, you know, some of this starts in September. So our folks are looking forward to it. I'm getting to the 4th of July and getting right back on budget, I'm sure. But this takes a year-long effort of measuring. We're very proud of this budget, and we're proud of what the town does with the investment that the community is willing to make in us. With that, I'll answer any questions that you have, and I'll also be available if there are any from the public.

Rob, you said third year, 41 seats. Reasonable. But for the life of me, I have my notes written. And I can't seem to remember. $0.41 now. What did we agree to? How many years? Was it a four?

We're on the four-year revaluation component. So when we looked at this, when the county had lovely revaluation process that we were all able to experience. The question at that point was how do we address previous inflation and then how do we create some stability for our residents moving forward? People don't want to see tax whipsaw. If you're going to set a tax rate, set it. We'll get to the next reevaluation and we'll adjust. But similar to the water rates, you just don't want to see huge increases like we saw in that reevaluation period. So we looked forward to the next reval, which are always four years. So we looked forward four years, committed to that tax rate. We're able to deliver on that even though inflation is not cooled as much as we would like it to have cooled. Particularly the municipal cost index is significantly different than the consumer price index. We're about a point and a half above that. We tend to lag the economy in general. So I think now, Brian just mentioned, we got our first decent bid that we've gotten in six years. So we're hoping to see that trend forward in this year. But we've seen that that municipal cost index stay high stay pretty sticky and our prices have remained high particularly in the labor market as we as we kind of navigate that but Four years is what we've committed to and and we intend to stick to that is We're three years and so Is the values and maybe this is more for Brian or the home values?

We're not hit here on the East Coast as much as West Coast and Florida right now. So I think our values are still somewhat level.

Yeah, we've tended to look at those. They're pretty level. I don't think we can count on a reevaluation in the positive direction at the next reval I would imagine it was timed pretty much the worst case scenario for a homeowner when it was done in Cabarrus County Mecklenburg-Iredell they did a year before they kind of caught it before it hit the peak and They'll also be doing it before it hits the trough. We're gonna go peak to trough and so what does that mean for harrisburg well our property values maintain much better than the county as a whole or the region as a whole and we have a lot more new property so it stays a little more stable but i would expect single digits either way if it goes up it would be single digits and i believe if it goes down it'll be single digits thank you rob i do have a question um i was looking at over some stuff today is the second floor uh changes that are having happening here is that in this budget it's because i couldn't really tell that's a multi-year project okay so um we have a capital project fund that has those ones that that go out multiple years so short answer is yes but it's in you have to look in the capital project fund for multi-year projects the ones that Finish up within 12 months Those are real obvious on the on the CIP because you're approving in those year But if you were to prove something this year that say was a three-year project that would then go into a capital project fund as a pre-funded project and

Can you briefly, just briefly, tell us where we are with that?

We plan to bring you a contract next month. We plan to bring you a contract for kind of what I call phase 1A next month. So we have architect engaged. So we've hired the architect. As you can imagine, we're in closets. And we've got people stuffed everywhere here on the first floor. They can't go anywhere. we can't just kick everybody out and then redo the whole building and then bring everybody back in so the plan is to go upstairs in kind of an intermediate phase 1a get everybody upstairs do the downstairs be able to relocate some of those folks back downstairs and then touch up the upstairs for whatever changes that you would need but We do have a preliminary plan to have that in July. That's where we're at right now is bringing that first phase in July and then starting construction thereafter.

OK. Thank you. Any other questions for Rob before we open up for public hearing?

Rob, just one quick comment. If you can go back a few slides there where you talk about the, no, go back one.

Which one? I'm sorry. Forward? This one? Yes.

I think one of the things I think we see in government that spending increases go up and I just one of the things I want to do was tell you guys in the staff our general fund we cut spending 1.1 million dollars and the total operating budget down $1.5 million versus 26. And I just want to thank you guys. I think when people sit here, the government, and you talk about government overreach, I just want to give you guys kudos for not staying level, but actually for the staff, too, to decrease the budget needs that you had. And we were able to cut that down, so thank you guys for that.

And we appreciate that. Our staff works really hard at our innovations and efficiencies. We spend a good amount of time on that every year. Our goal is never to hit a budget number. And our folks know that. We don't have like, hey, this is the number we're going to hit. Our goal is what's the service level that the community expects us to provide. That comes first and foremost. And then we'll provide that in the most efficient manner that we can possibly do it. If that's a little bit more, it's going to be a little more. But our folks work really hard at looking at every line item of kind of building it as a culture of just innovating, doing it better. Which ways are we going to implement technology? This is very unique. It's not, like you said, in government. It tends to not go over as well. You don't have as much control over technology. kind of the profit-loss side of things. Our profit is quality of life, and we're never going to give up on that side of things. But it doesn't mean that you can't do it in a better way. And our folks reinvent that every single year. We don't rest on the laurels. You'll see our Fourth of July this year will be better than it was last year and better than it was the year before. And next year will be even better than that. But we'll still try to find ways to make that the most efficient process that we can.

And I think our goal up here is not for you to have to work on shoestring budgets, because that hamstrings your creativity. And creativity is something that we value. I think, at least I do, value up here on the dais. You guys are creative. We have a very small, compared to the neighborhoods around us, very small staff. And you guys do an incredible job. So I just want to say thank you for that.

We thank you for that.

All right. With that, I will open the public hearing. We did not have anyone sign up. However, if there's anyone in the audience that would like to speak to the budget, if you'll raise your hand and we'll call you to the front, you've got three minutes to speak. Just want to make sure, last minute. All right, with that, the public hearing is closed. Counsel, are there any additional comments before we move into the two separate motions?

I'll share my appreciation. probably the easiest this year but Ellie your eyebrows tell a story and I never move so many times this year sorry sorry to single you out on that one but you know probably this is the most active one that we've had in a while And it was active good. It wasn't like, you know, the cats fighting. It was all positive. I think we were all aiming for the same direction and we learned a lot from one another. So very good exchange. And again, as Mike said, the creativity coming in lower is in my opinion, unheard of. You'll still get beat up. I don't care your government and they're going to say, well, if you saved that kind of money, you should reduce my taxes and people don't understand how the taxes actually work and how much that really hurts you in the long run. But that's for us to explain. So we'll do our best to make sure that they understand it. But to all the staff, the department heads, thank you. Rob, thank you as well.

All right. With that, we have two separate motions. The first motion is to approve the fiscal year 2027 budget ordinance, schedule of fees, and capital improvement plan as presented. Is there a motion to approve?

Motion.

Is there a second? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion is carried. Thank you. Second motion is a motion to set the tax rate for fiscal year 2027 at 0.410 per $100 valuation and to authorize collection by the Cabarrus County Tax Office. Is there a motion on the floor as presented?

So moved.

Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion is carried. Congratulations, guys. Thank you so much.

Thank you again.

We do not have any old business this evening, but we do have several items under new business. Monterey is going to join us for a bit. First up is the consideration of appointments to the Planning and Zoning Board.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. As the Mayor mentioned, tonight I will be presenting the appointments for the Planning and Zoning Board. Just to provide you guys some background for the evening, we do have rules of procedures for the Planning and Zoning Board and the Board of Adjustment. To provide a background on how the process goes, every year we open the application process for applicants. We receive them between the beginning of April and the end. In May, we conduct interviews. The interview committee is made up of several liaisons for the town, Councilmember Mike Thevenin and Councilmember Cattell and myself. And then in June, you will hear our recommendations, so this evening. P&Z is made up of a seven-member board, including one ETJ member plus one ex-officio member. The terms are for two years. We have three terms expiring this evening, Susie, Jeremiah, and Eswar. And we have one term vacated midterm because Mr. Leake moved. So tonight, just to kind of touch on the recommended appointments, some items of note. Jeremiah is currently serving on the Planning and Zoning Board and does coach youth athletics for the town. Heather Sweat, she is a corporate real estate manager and recently went through the Harrisburg Citizens Academy. And then James, otherwise known as Jim Eskew. He is a 12 year resident and is deeply invested in the community and is noted as a chairperson of the Friends of Harrisburg Greenways. To cover the ETJ appointment, the current ETJ member did not seek a reappointment, creating a vacancy effective at the end of this month. In accordance with the rules of procedure, staff is currently coordinating with Cabarrus County to identify an ETJ representative for appointment. We have received an applicant and the committee did interview them. They appear to meet all of the qualifications for that role and we have submitted that application to Cabarrus County and are working with them for consideration. If these appointments are acknowledged tonight, this is what the Planning and Zoning Board roster will look like after the end of June. So with that, that concludes my presentation. And I will take any questions before we move to the motion.

Any questions for Monterey? All right. With that, we've got a motion to reappoint Jeremiah Norberg to the Harrisburg Planning and Zoning Board for a two-year term, to appoint Jim Eskew for a two-year term, and to appoint Heather Sweet for the remaining one-year term. We can do all that as one. Is there a motion to approve as presented? Second. Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. Motion is carried. And Monterey is going to stick around with us for a little bit for consideration of appointments to the Board of Adjustments. Yes. Thank you all very much.

I will be going over the Board of Adjustment next. So we follow the same process as you recently heard for the Planning and Zoning Board. Just to provide some background on the board structure itself, it is a five-member board, including one ETJ member plus two alternate members. This board is a little unique in that per the general state statutes, the terms are for three years. We have three terms expiring, Ian, Michael, and Brandon. To provide some noted information, Michael is currently serving on the Board of Adjustment. Jason Gaddis serves on quite a plethora of boards, but the Board of Directors for Harrisburg YMCA and the Harrisburg Business Network. Jeremiah recently also completed the Harrisburg Citizens Academy and is a youth athletic coach. So as you heard about the ETJ member, per the Board of Adjustment Rules of Procedure, one Board of Adjustment member must also serve as the ETJ representative on the Planning and Zoning Board. So since the Planning and Zoning Board ETJ member did not seek reappointment, the corresponding ETJ position on the board will also become vacant at the end of the month. Once a new Planning and Zoning ETJ member is appointed, that individual will also be appointed to serve the remainder of the existing Board of Adjustment term. If these appointments tonight are recommended and approved, this will be the proposed, or excuse me, this will be the roster going forward at the end of the month. And that concludes my presentation. I can answer any questions.

Any questions for Monterey on Board of Adjustments?

All right, with that, we have a motion to reappoint Michael Branham to the Board of Adjustments for a three-year term and to appoint Jeremiah Robinson and Jason Gaddis for the Board of Adjustments for a three-year term. Is there a motion to approve?

So moved.

Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. The motion is carried. Thank you, Monterey. Appreciate it. Thank you all. Next up, we have Jim, who's going to present for the consideration of appointments to the park and Recreation Advisory Board.

My turn. Good evening, Mayor, Council.

Good evening.

It's a pleasure to be up here in front of you folks. presenting a slate of residents for our two advisory boards. First one we'll go with is our Park and Rec Advisory Board Appointments. A little information about the board, it's an eight member committee. It has seven regular membership seats and one ex-officio sustainability. Four terms there are expiring, Zach Bowman, Fred Belante, Hannah Butler, and Mohamed Elibi. Terms for the advisory board are two years each and the max number of consecutive terms a member can serve consecutively is two for a four year total. Zach Bowman has applied for reappointment to a second and final two year term. Fred Belante, Hannah Butler, and Mohammed Idlibi have reached the end of their second terms and are therefore ineligible for reappointment. As far as advertising goes, the vacancies were advertised via the town social media and website from April 1st to the 30th, 2026. And during that time, applications were received. Five applications were submitted for those open seats and all resigned within the town of Harrisburg. So recommendations, Harrisburg Town Council Member Latricia Glover and myself recommend the following applicants for reappointment and appointment. I will also like to stress that those looking for reappointment were reviewed, those new applications were interviewed prior to this presentation. And so to reappoint, the first one is Zach Bowman. He's a Financial Crimes Associate Manager for Wells Fargo. He's currently serving as Vice Chairman of the Advisory Board, and he would like to continue to serve Harrisburg and be a liaison for the voice of the residents. New applicants up for appointment. The first one is Martavis Monty Page. Monty is the owner of Page Fabrication, LLC, and he would like to help shape the very important role that parks and recreation play in Harrisburg. I will say that Monty has been a long time volunteer coach for us. One of his references was Aaron Kegley-Parris, our recreation manager, so he comes well known to all of us. The second one is Caitlin Thomas, and she is the owner of Caitlin Thomas Design and Photography. Caitlin has a strong interest in being actively involved in our community. She strives to help promote growth and meaningful change that positively impacts Harrisburg residents. And our last appointment, a very familiar name, Micah Cash, he's a self-employed visual artist and photographer. Micah previously served four years on the Hatch Committee and two of those years as chairman of that committee, and he's currently the ex-official member of our advisory board. He wants to continue to influence the many great programs that Harrisburg offers to its residents. And our last appointment is Susie Schoonmaker. She is, I'm asking for you to appoint her to the ex-officio slash sustainability seat. She's a retired and is also current HOA president of Holcomb Woods. Her reason for serving is she's previously served two years on the town's planning and zoning board, enjoys her community involvement, especially during the current growth spurt. She believes a thoughtful, well-planned community is a happy one. This is what our roster will look like for the upcoming year, for fiscal year 2027. You'll see we have three current members that are in the middle of terms. Cheryl Baker, Courtney Haynes, and of course Brett Crosby, who is our YMCA appointee. Then you see the next five, Zach Bowman, Monty Page, Caitlin Thomas, Micah Cash, and Susie Schoonmaker, all being appointed, hopefully, to new two-year terms. And appointed out to Latricia Glover as our council liaison. And with that, I'll take some questions if you have any.

Any questions for Jim?

Then I'll move forward to the motion.

With that, is there a motion to appoint Zach Bowman, Micah Cash, Martavius Page, and Caitlin Thomas to the Harrisville Parks and Recreation Advisory Board for a two-year term and to appoint Susie Schoonmaker for a two-year term as the ex officio sustainability member? Is there a motion to approve?

So moved.

Is there a second? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion is carried. Thank you. Thank you for that. Jim, we'll let you continue on with our consideration of appointments to the Harrisburg Art, Cultural, and Heritage Committee Advisory Board.

It is a pleasure. Harrisburg Arts, Culture, and Heritage Committee, which we all refer to as Hatch, is a seven-member subcommittee on the Parks and Rec Advisory Board. Four terms are expiring. Dwayne Lott, Whitney Miller, Larissa Mervin, and we have a current vacancy from a resignation that occurred back in late February. Terms are two years each and the maximum number of consecutive terms a member can serve consecutively is two for a four year total. Larissa Mervin chose not to apply for reappointment to another two year term. Duane Lott and Whitney Miller have applied for reappointment to a second and final two year term. Vacancies were advertised similar to advisory board during the month of April. of 2026 and the applications were received during that same time period. Two applications were submitted for the four open seats, I'll get to that in a minute, and they reside within the town of Harrisburg. Recommendations, Harrisburg town council member Dr. Aaron Banks and myself recommend the following applicants for reappointment. Again, these were both reappointment applications. They were reviewed by Dr. Banks and myself actually during one of our meetings back in, I believe, May. Dwayne Lott, his occupation is a senior bank examiner, officer of the Comptroller of the Currency. He currently serves as chairman of Hatch and he would like to continue to serve Harrisburg and expand the arts and cultural opportunities for its residents. Second appointment recommendation is Whitney Miller. She's a school social worker at Cabrera Schools and she has enjoyed her involvement with Hatch over the past two years and wants to continue to grow awareness of the heritage, the arts, and cultural opportunities for all Harrisburg residents. I do want to make a special note that two catch committee seats remain open and we will continue to advertise and recruit possible candidates for the committee in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully come back here in the next month or so to get a couple more appointments. This is what a roster for Hatch will look like for fiscal year 2027. And you can see that Dwayne Lott and Whitney Miller are being reappointed hopefully with your vote. We have the two vacancies and then we have three current members who were appointed last June. Carly Cornett, Cameron Moore, and Nellie Macharia. As I said before, or mentioned her name earlier, Dr. Erin Banks is our council liaison. And with that, I'll take questions for Hatch appointments, if there are any.

Any questions for Jim on Hatch Appointments? All right. With that, is there a motion to approve the reappointments of Dwayne Lott and Whitney Miller to a two-year term in Heritage Committee starting July 1 through June 30? Is there a motion to approve?

So moved.

Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thank you, Jim. Motion is carried.

Thank you all.

Next up, we have the consideration of contract with the Eagle Carports for the construction of the public safety storage building. Welcome back, Assistant Chief Wooten. It's a double whammy tonight. I can tell you. I get to see you twice in one night.

I mean, this is great, right?

OK, so this should look new. This should not look new to you. You have seen this in your budget. fiscal year 27 workshops. It was a request through council to try to expedite this process so we can store that new UTV that the sheriff's office got. So the request is to approve the funding to purchase and construction of a public safety storage building behind fire station number one and the building is going to be used to store the equipment for both the fire department and the sheriff's office and it's our recommendation to approve the requested fund the public safety storage building project. A little bit of background on it again. This is the current building that we have now, which is pretty much falling apart. You can see it's got some roof leaks, some major structural issues, the woods rotting. We constantly get dinged with safety violations when our ocean safety lady comes by to check our stuff out. But again, we in the sheriff's department kind of need a place to put some stuff. So the thought is to put this in the little red square you kind of see over behind the station. That's the gravel kind of area where we have some trailers and stuff parked behind station one right now. So really close proximity to the sheriff's office and the fire station. You can kind of see the cost breakdown over here on the left. And that does not include taxes and stuff. So the total project's $102,000, which is exactly what we had discussed in it. And the allocation cost is about $75,000 for the fire and $27,000 for the sheriff's office. So that's a rendering of what the building would look like. And then the recommendation would be to approve the request to contract with Eagle Carports for the construction of the public safety storage building and the related fiscal year 26 budget and project ordinance amendments. Is there any questions? I will answer any questions you may have about it.

I feel like we talked about this so long ago. We have. It should be a question.

All right. With that, is there a motion to approve the contract for?

Second.

Second.

All in favor? Aye.

Motion is carried. Thank you so much. That's pretty good, right?

Good job. Good job.

Build it tomorrow. They're ready.

Next up, we have resolution for the North Carolina Senate Bill 445. Rob's going to update us on some happenings there.

I get to go three times tonight to outdo Chief Luton. Originally, when we published the agenda, we had a resolution in opposition of Senate Bill 445. I am pleased to say that's not going to be the recommendation tonight. And I'll walk you through a little bit of why. And so our community can kind of know what we do when these things pop up. So what was at stake for Harrisburg? Senate Bill 445 was written as an omnibus bill. It started out as just a hospital bill, and it was completely stripped and replaced with a land use bill. And so what did that look like? That was residential by right that would force the town to allow housing, including multifamily of five units or more, up to 60 foot tall in any zone, commercial, business, industrial. without any, say, from a residence or the town board. So no public hearing, no conditions, no development agreements. Also required mandatory accessory dwelling units. So townwide, any residential property would be able to add a secondary accessory dwelling unit, rent that out. Town would have no control over parking, conditional zoning, unit size. You can imagine in some of our neighborhoods how much chaos that would cause. um you know we we didn't have to look far to see like how our residents felt about those types of things we just did the one harrisburg survey in late 2025 managing the effects of growth were the residents number one priority for the next five years with 86 percent saying the town already has enough housing completely 92 want new developments to address the impacts that they're going to have on the infrastructure So we reached out on this bill. And when you look at this map, this is something that we had created internally. What would that section 13 in Senate 445 have meant to us on the ground? Every area that you see here on red is not a threat to us anymore. But this was what was at stake. Every area in red could become residential by right. That did a couple of things. Obviously, oversaturating our infrastructure, taking away our community's decisions and choices, allowing 60-foot units to go up right next to single-family homes anywhere in these areas. But it also gobbled up all of the area that we've targeted for diversifying our tax base. We've spent a lot of time and effort in the economic development realm, and what Raleigh had done by proposing this bill was say, forget that. Your economic development zones aren't for economic development. That's just more residential properties that are going to be forced on you without a say of your residents, without a say of the town board. May 20th was when this started. This bill was just the hospital bill on May 19th. On May 20th, the House Committee rewrites the entire bill, putting sections 13 and 14 in there out of whole cloth. On the 27th and 28th, we were notified by our legislative advocate that we had hired back in April that this was basically put into a committee amendment. And we responded by briefing Representative Allman and reaching out to our local delegation. We prepared impact analysis. We briefed the Cabarrus Economic Development Corporation. And Lumen Strategies engaged on the ground with our delegation in Raleigh. By June 2nd, we had the House amend the bill. Population thresholds were added. Harrisburg and Cabarrus County are now exempt from the entire bill. So this week, 445 did pass the House with our delegation's support of that. And it now moves on to the Senate for their concurrence. But once again, everything that we had talked about in the previous slides has been removed. And Caveras County and Harrisburg specifically are no longer included in that. It really only affects now seven large counties with large cities who actually support this bill. They like the flexibility of not having that public hearing process for high-rise apartments, and they have plenty of commercial and industrial in most of the cities, so that's really not a concern for them. Lost my place here, sorry. Anyway, when we reached out to Representative Allman on the 27th, he had committed to raising that section with House leadership, which he certainly did. Lumen Strategies engaged the full delegation as they were going through their committee meetings. we prepared all those impact statements so they'd have them in hand some of our council members reached out directly to our delegation as well and that helped that helped quite a bit that gets their attention to know that our residents you know that they're against this and ultimately they're there to represent our residents and they need to hear that from our residents and before that they'll hear it from our board The EDC also was briefed on this and reached out as well and supported us on it, as well as the municipalities and central and regional council governments all took a position on this and started lobbying right away. What does the bill do now? Well, basically, every county over under 275,000 is exempt. So Cabarrus County as a whole is out. And even the counties that are over that, the cities under 50,000 are exempt. So we're nowhere close to reaching that anytime soon. However, the county is not too far from hitting that 275,000. So cities like Kannapolis and Concord, once the county reaches 275,000, they would be affected by these provisions. We're recommending, again from a staff standpoint, not taking a position on it but staying diligent right these bills come up like that and our residents don't have time to review the legislative agenda our council doesn't have time to be honest our staff doesn't have time we're running the city That's why we employ the advocacy that can keep us up to speed on it and then we kind of have a quick triage group here in the staff that can get these bills digested come up with a strategy and mobilize our next step after this if this would have not have been Remediated with our local delegation would be to reach out to the residents put the local delegations emails and phone numbers on our social media, educate them on the bill and let them know who to reach out to so that they can express their opposition to the bill. Fortunately, our local delegation came through. They were very responsive. They were able to get this bill changed. I'm pretty sure all the other local delegations throughout the state that weren't in those seven counties did as well. And so it was quickly changed within a week. We'll keep you, as we have been, apprised of all the bills that come through in the short session, but we are never in any shortage of risk or danger when the legislature is in session. The strong lobbies out there, the Builders Lobby and other special interests, have a very effective pathway to get bills pushed pretty quick. and they really don't like home rule they don't like communities making decisions for themselves based on how those specific communities want to operate they want one set of rules that covers the entire state and they're always in the benefit to the benefit of a developer i've never seen one come through that helped a town they're always something we're pushing back against so we'll keep the council apprised of that keep the community apprised of it as well and we're really proud of the the quick action that lumen strategies our local delegation and our staff were able to get on this particular one i'll answer any questions that you have on that but at this point no recommendation for the resolution in opposition any questions for rob I just want to ask this is open-ended question had we not had lumen this happened a year ago with our I think this would have passed I think it would have passed they voted on it in less than a week right so I'm not sure yeah even with central I know we didn't have enough time between our meetings to really activate everyone as quickly as I was it I was educating large cities that this would even happened there were many managers that had no idea that this bill came through um this happened so quick that our you know our our group at the league didn't even have time to to react they weren't able to make it to the committee they didn't have a briefing the county commissioners association um was like the like us and them were like the only two that i know that had a briefing submitted to the committee You know, everybody was really reacting, but I think if this happens a year ago, this bill passes, we find out about it a few weeks after the fact, we're kind of fighting in the Senate to get it adjusted because it does have to go back to the Senate since it wasn't what the Senate sent the House. The Senate sent the House a hospital bill. they got back a land use omnibus. So they still need to review it and vote on it because it wasn't what they sent them. But the short is I think it passes if we don't have legislative adequacy in Raleigh and that our staff is on this and has a process to react.

I'll just encourage everybody on council to make sure that you're on school governments so that you subscribe because I get an email every day with bill updates and this was in an email that I got May 21st so I would just encourage everybody to make sure you go there is like I was I'll share it out to make sure that everybody has access to it but they provide updates Separately, so we don't necessarily have this to worry about in this moment, but we do have the property tax levy to worry about. So where are we with messaging and a stance on that?

We have nothing to react to yet. We have a Speaker of the House and a Senate leader who say they're going to do it, but that's all they've got so far. There's nothing for us to oppose if we were going to oppose it. I would imagine that that is not by accident. I think it's very difficult to oppose something until you see the details. You know, we have put positions out on this to our local delegation before. You guys have all met with our local delegation. Cities prefer, I would say cities, Harrisburg prefers to continue to do what we've done, which is run an excellent community. We have one of the lowest tax rates amongst our peer groups in the state. We have one of the lowest tax rates amongst our cohorts in the region. We provide better services when we benchmark against all of our peers. And we do it at a very – we have an exceptional value. Nobody touches it. When the auditors come in, we get nothing but accolades of how – we are a model citizen. They'd like to use our processes to go to other cities. When we met with the governor's office, we got the same thing. Hey, we love what you guys are doing. We'd like to see that scaled across the state. We hate being lumped in with others. That being said, there's a lot of folks throughout the state that aren't in that boat. And so it's very hard for every one Harrisburg out there that has a great council, that has a great community, that has a good staff, that has the momentum going in the right way, that the legislature wants to step in on some of the counties that have not done that and some of the cities that have not done that. Our position has been we want to work with the legislature to make sure that whatever is on the ballot, that residents understand what they're voting for, and if something were to pass, that we are then part of the working group that decides what the devil in those details are i think that's very important to every community as you move forward is that even if there is something on the ballot that says hey the legislature gets to decide how you decide to tax yourself locally then okay that's step one step two is what are those details Residents have just as much say on that through their local representatives, Representative Vollman, Representative Echevarria, Representative Campbell, Senator Miesmer, whoever would win the general election in November. These folks still represent you, and it's very important that we and the community let them know what we'd like in that. And that's a long-winded answer, but we don't have anything to react to yet.

But I don't agree with that, Rob, because we have an email that came to us that says that they approved putting it on the ballot in November. So what are you saying? Putting what on the ballot? They don't have the details out of there. Right, but we've always known that, and we were told that there would not be a number necessarily there. It would just be the point of submission. doing something? Is that why you're saying that?

That's exactly what I'm saying. We have nothing to react to. They're saying, hey, we're putting this on the ballot. Putting what?

I mean, I hear you, but our residents don't hear that. Our residents hear, oh, this is an opportunity to lower our property taxes, not understanding what the implications of that are. So that's why I think one way or the other, there needs to be a message of what that could be either way.

I definitely hear that. I think we would have to make assumptions and say, as a city, and we can do that. We can say, here is what potentially the legislature could do and what that means. And we've talked about that internally, right? If you set a cap similar to what California had done, right? Let's say we adopt the California levy mechanism. California had to see the schools rescued by the state. They were run locally, and there was billions of dollars of shortfall year one. The state had to come in and take over ownership and pull that out of the locals. You can see a direct crime correlation in California between when they did their levy tax adjustments and when their crime issues went through the roof. Subsequently, you also see their population start to decline. Every penny of a property tax value comes back to the local community 100%. We saw it tonight, 53% of that goes to public safety. That's salaries, wages, trucks, equipment for people that go to the house when you call 911. The rest of it, and we can go back to that breakdown, goes to picking up the trash, paving the roads, and park and rec. That's 90% of every property tax dollar that we spend in those categories. Public safety, transportation, solid waste, parks and recreation. So if we were to adopt a California model, you would have to cut those areas. And if 50% of it's public safety, there's no way public safety is safe from a California-style property tax. There are other states that have done it well. And so if you model it after the Texas model, Harrisburg would be fine. Other cities would struggle mightily. I think you would see other areas of the state struggle. We've never exceeded the Texas model numbers, and so Harrisburg would be fine. So I think, again, back to we could take a position that we just don't think the state legislature has a say in it, but that would be the only position that I think we could take from a data standpoint. They're not going to give us details. We're not going to be able to tell our residents this will happen. We could model California. We could model Arizona. We could model some of the states that have done this and shown what it would do here. North Carolina is very heavily reliant on property tax to pay for transportation and public safety. don't see a way that you put a cap on that that doesn't doesn't affect those but there there are creative ways to to get there I just statewide I think it's a problem Harrisburg will be a little bit better off than most but not everybody's so fortunate what message are you sure

That we should be able to determine what our tax rate is.

Are you putting it out on social media and stuff?

No, I've not done a public statement. I'm not saying I won't, but I haven't. I mean, it's concerning.

It'll be interesting to see when the elections start. This will be a November ballot initiative. You know, we go over to our neighbor in Charlotte, right? You've seen the kind of back and forth with police and fire and salaries and stuff. Here, those are property taxes. And there's no if, and, or but about it. So I think a lot of folks don't realize the implication of telling locals you can't – tax yourself how much you want to get the services that you want. We've explained that to our local delegation. We think the best person to decide how they want to run their local municipalities are the people that live there. If the people on this board make a mistake, people will be here at the next meeting. They don't get to drive to Raleigh. They don't get to take a day off. People will come here in the evening and hold this board accountable. I've seen it for 20 years throughout my career. It doesn't take long. And guess what? You're never more than two years away from an election. So if you don't like what the people up here are doing, it's right around the corner. And people run, and the people here in this community are able to run for these seats, and they can be here. to run for the state legislature, it's much different. These are partisan elections. They're gerrymandered throughout the state. They're very difficult. And then you have to go to Raleigh and work. So I think those decisions are best left here. However, there are problems that the legislature has to address. I don't know that we're going to stop that part of it, but I certainly want our residents to know what the effects would be.

But you opened with the statement that we will never win no matter what I advocate, no matter what you advocate. For now, the way it stands, it is having the general population believe that there's a path to have a cheaper tax bill. So no matter what I advocate, what you advocate, what Rob or this whole town advocates, we're never going to win that argument. Now, if they come out and we can poke holes in what they're showing, then it's worth getting out there and saying something about it. I've looked at it 10 ways to Sunday, and I'll throw stuff out quite often. I did with the other items. I actually paid for ads to be out there to say, hey, contact these guys because this is not good for the community. But on this one, Just kind of rode the middle of it for now until we hear it.

And I hear that. And I've talked to several people across the state, and we all agree that what we experienced with the tax revaluation was awful. I mean, and it really hit us in Harrisburg because our property values were so high. we don't like to see those extremes one way or the other but the other side of that is is this is the only option that's been discussed across the state at length at any measure of a conversation it's just this amendment and again it sounds good but when you get to the meat of what it could be what the out what you know what the outcome could be for our community As a municipality, we should be concerned.

Yeah, depending on how it's done, it can have an effect. Anytime you ask anybody, I mean, this isn't right, you ask me, hey, Rob, do you want less taxes? Well, I write yes. Yeah, I want zero taxes. That'd be great. If you then say, oh, but, you know, your kids aren't going to have, you're going to have 70 kids in your elementary class. I'm going to go, well, no, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't want that. Hey, do you want less tax? Yeah, yeah. Do you want potholes all up the roads and you want to sit in traffic for an hour so that you can't get from point A to point B? Well, no, I'm not voting for that. So nobody ever wants to tell the full story. That's a great part of these budgets is that we get to tell that story. And then our communities get to react to that story and come here and say, we endorse that. or we don't. We don't like this or we do like this. And you can look at our budgets. They're transparent. They're open. And I think that the I trust democracy. I think our local residents are smart enough to say, hey, if I don't like something, I can go open the book, I can go question my council members, and I can get action. Our residents have proven that time and time again, that they'll engage and they'll make great decisions. legislature has arguments the other way that i can't really make an argument against i think if you look at the state auditor going around kind of making the noise that he makes in some of these other communities it's clear not every community is as well run as harrisburg is so i think we have to be cognizant that Our voice might not be the loudest in that room. For every one Harrisburg, there's 10 or 12 Rocky Mounts or folks that have been in the news lately. So I think we have a limited amount of pushback. But we can always educate our residents if we know what's out there. But right now, it's just.

When you say if we know, that means like a number attached to it.

Or just the meat of it. They're not giving you the meat. Is it a rabbit or is it a cow? There's absolutely no details. But I feel like by having lumen, we're really keeping a finger on the pulse there. The minute they announce any sort of... Details, I think we'll have something to react to because right now we don't even they want to do something but we don't know I'm and this is separate but like the they want to do tax amendment to I mean Yeah for like sales tax and we really here in Harrisburg depend on mm-hmm ncdot to be funded so that they can fix our roads or like dmv to be staffed appropriately and things like that how's the state going to do that if that passes that's kind of well there is a number attached to this yeah but that's you know that's separate that's not something that we as a town should take position in but i i do want to as soon as those details come out and lumen is aware then i want to know that right i think councilwoman glover's point is they're not going to give us any

They're just going to put on, hey, do you want a cap on property taxes in November? And everybody is going to go, well, yeah, that sounds great, without anybody saying what that might mean to a community. I think our challenge in Harrisburg is telling, what does that mean? Well, it depends. How do they structure the cap after they get permission from the residents to put a cap on? Because they don't have permission right now. There is a cap. It's $1.5. But, you know, a penny and a half. How would you say it? $1.50 per hundred. Good math. Yeah, 1.5%. um is the combined cap that the counties and municipalities and everybody can can have on a single property so we know it'll be lower than that

So if they're going to lower that, we're going to find every town is going to fight with the county for like, oh, we want a bigger piece?

Oh, yeah, everybody rush in and see. The proposals I've heard floated out there, but nobody will put anything on paper, is an increase in total valuation cap. So if we collected X amount this year, you can have X amount plus 2% for next year. and you know look at us for the past this will be our third year going into it we've got x plus zero x plus zero x plus zero for for a third time and we're gonna go that same x plus another zero next year pending any you know major change in in in economics but we've planned on that for so under those cap provisions we'd be fine but then when we get to that to that year four and you might need you know eight percent well you can't because you're stuck to two so it's going to force you into incremental annual maximizing which is what's done in Colorado it's what's done in Arizona you know I I think I think those decisions are best left to the locals but that doesn't look like that's on the horizon what I've done is volunteer to be part of any work group that is formed so we've asked them to to add some town managers to to whatever group decides how these caps are implemented if it were to pass And that way we can advocate for Harrisburg and the communities like ours.

I mean, essentially, we could advocate and educate. We're okaying a blank check with no details. So is that what you want? Before you vote yes or no on this, would you like to know what the meat of this is? Okay, well, they're not giving you that. So are you still comfortable letting Raleigh decide that? And I think that's the message.

We should be able to make a determination of what is the best for our municipality. Because we're dealing with overreach, with down zoning. We almost dealt with it with Senate Bill 445. I don't see any harm in establishing what a levy could do. Just so that people are aware. And y'all can frame up the language. Y'all do a fantastic job with communication. No, we could come up with it.

I think we need a little work group here with the council to understand what that position is. It's easy to take a position to say we're opposed to a blank check to Raleigh to make local decisions. I think the board would all agree to that. How we then define it is going to get some pushback from our legislators to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're not being honest. You're making an assumption. So I think that takes some work with this group to say, what assumptions do we want to make that we feel are fair, that we feel like we can characterize if we're going to take that position?

And also push back. We'll put a number to it. Mm-hmm. Be transparent. Like, this isn't hard.

Yeah.

This is the same group who still have to budget. It is true. Right? So how transparent are they going to be?

passing the budget well there's lots more discussion coming on that because there's multiple groups involved with trying to navigate and the biggest everybody's like educate educate because again lower taxes everybody absolutely yeah but it's just what the repercussions what are you willing to cut what are you willing to go without but all of these revenue things that they've talked about which interestingly

property tax revenue is not revenue that they use for the budget that's our revenue but all of these revenue discussions have hinged on the budget right these are budget negotiations so when a budget is finally passed you'll you'll see that three and a half percent income tax which That's going to be difficult. That's going to be difficult on how do you pay for schools, how do you pay for roads at the state level. But if that's what they're going to do, then residents will get a choice on that.

Especially with all the work they still have to do in the eastern part after the hurricane, it's just going to be tough.

You know, Rob talks about Boliak and going to Rocky Mountain. Rob and I have had several conversations about this, but probably the funniest piece of all this is that the worst-run department is the NCDOT. Who do you tell? Right? And they can't clean their own house, but they're good about cleaning everybody else's house.

And my priority is Harrisburg.

Yeah.

I think we share that here, which is why I will continue to advocate that we have some messaging around these constitutional amendments and how they could directly impact us.

I'm here for it.

Thanks, Rob, for that update. Action items. I had just written down a couple of things for the CIP, the app easy button. And I think Chris mentioned about maybe color coding the locations of in progress to look at that. What else did you have?

I had one note for Chris. That we wouldn't put other organizations' projects on there. We'll try to update people as much as we can but I just know that one is a nightmare.

We had issues.

James, can you yell at me? We had issues just recently on the Duke project where they just mobilized out without telling us. And we had to stop. And it would never be up to date. And it would kind of be fraught. But we can see if we can have some parallel pushing of information. But I did have that. And I'll see if we can get it on the mobile app and then get the different statuses color coded up.

OK. We do not have a need for closed session this evening. So with no further business, is there a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second?

Second.

Multiple seconds. All in favor?

Aye.

Motion is carried. Thank you so much.