Town Council - Regular Meeting

Oh, yeah. How dare you not speak to me?

Good evening. I would like to welcome everyone with us in council chambers for our July meeting and as well as those joining us via YouTube tonight. We are happy that you are all here in the oppressive heat, as someone just said up here. At this point, we will move into our agenda adoption. Is there a motion on the floor to approve the agenda as presented?

So move.

Is there a second? All in favor? Aye. Motion is carried. Thank you. At this time Councilman Thevenin will lead our invocation this evening.

Thank you, Mayor. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for the privilege of serving in this community. We just ask this evening, God, that you give us wisdom. God, help us to listen well, speak with respect, and make decisions that eventually promote the good of our whole town and the well-being of all of our neighbors. God, again, we ask that you remind us that we're here to serve with humility, integrity, and a genuine desire to seek the common good So, God, we ask you to bless the meeting this evening, and we pray it all in Jesus' name.

Amen. Amen. Would everyone please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance? We have a couple special presentations this evening. And first up, we will have a presentation by the Cabarrus County Sports Hall of Fame. And we would like to welcome Easy Smith with us this evening. He was a longtime coach, I believe 30 plus years at Concord. So welcome, Mr. Smith. We're glad to have you here.

thank you mayor thank you council members distinguished guest madam clerk I appreciate the opportunity to come I am now the chairman of the Cabarrus County Sports Hall of Fame and we you have a packet in front of you I'm not going to spend a lot of time on our history because I am in a limited amount of time people that know me usually say I don't breathe the first five minutes I speak so I'm going to be brief as I can As we began the Cabarrus County Sports Hall of Fame in 2011, we came up with a mission statement, a vision, and a purpose. And Tony McClamrock was the founder. It went through nine years. They inducted 93 individual members, five state championship teams. Very successful. Then COVID hit. Two and a half years, nothing. Then Tony got sick, passed away. Another two years, nothing. So in late December of 2024, a group of people contacted me, said, Coach, can you help us get it relaunched? I said, Sure, I'll be glad to set up a meeting. I did. Next thing I know, I'm on the board and I'm chairman of the committee. So be careful what you volunteer for in life. We met, and we took 20 business leaders, and we started over. It had a great foundation, but I needed to do some painting. I needed to add a washer and dryer, and I needed to add things to it. I needed to layer to the foundation. We redid our bylaws. We came up with different aspects that we were going to do. We formed six committees, and we eventually became very successful. We started a fundraising program in July. of 2025 with the goal of getting $35,000. The Cabarrus County Commissioners gave us the arena. So the next time you go to the arena, you go in, you get to see our big display. We put up a huge display. It is one of a kind. We've had people from the National Junior College Hall of Fame all the way through other halls of fame in North Carolina come and say, Coach, how did you do this? So I am meeting with people, explaining. I don't want to spend a lot of time on all that because all of that is in your folder. We did fundraising. If you'll look in the second packet on the last page, you'll see our different levels of fundraising. So we raised a lot of money to have a banquet, put the wall up, do this and that. We got a W-9. We applied for a 501 and what ended up happening, we had one and then it kind of disqualified us so they put us on back hold. Now ours is pending. We have several people ready to contribute money to our organization, but we're having to wait for that. What I did in January, after we had our last banquet, we now have 107, we inducted 14 and five more teams, we have 107 individuals in the Cabarrus County Sports Hall of Fame, which you can go to the website and check them. We have a QR code there that you can flash up and see everything about them. We have 10 state championship teams. This year, we're gonna put another eight living, six deceased, and 10 more state championship teams in December. We have the money to do that. But I started an initiative in January because I saw the need for us to give back to the community. We were asking a lot. We were asking money. We were asking time and effort. So what we did, we earmarked $12,000. There are 12 high schools in Cabarrus County, eight Cabarrus County schools, A.L. Brown, three private schools. We were going to give $1,000 to each school. My committee said, Coach, let's give $500 to a girl, $500 to a young man that's going on to further their education. If you go to the next to the last page in your folder, you will see our wall of fame. Then you will see our initiative. It's a letter we sent out to every principal. I met with every principal in AD in Cabarrus County and Kannapolis, laid out the plan, and they had a committee that selected their winners. So with that, we came up with 22. Now, Covenant Classical decided to wait till next year, and I promised them they could have four instead of two. Since we were skipping this year, we would hold that $500, two scholarships, $1,000 for them to next year. The reason I'm sharing with y'all today, I met with the Concord City Council and mayor. and we had a great conversation. I talked to them about a partnership. You see, the purpose of this scholarship is to not benefit the Hall of Fame, it's to benefit our young people in our community. You all know about how funding goes and the impact it has, not only on the economy, but on the students per se. I want to emphasize that by you supporting education, which you already do, I know you give money to the school system, you can lead into a more skilled workforce. It's going to pay off years down the road. It doesn't pay off dividends immediately. It's kind of like being a teacher. If you're a teacher, you don't get in it for the money. But what you do, you get your 30 years in, you sit at home, they pull this lever, money comes down, and I can go have biscuits and coffee and not have to worry about it. So you spend a lot of time investing. That's what I'm asking you all to look at tonight. When we're addressing the local workforce needs, we can find co-op programs and internships within this community that will provide students with the opportunity and experience to fulfill the local demands of this community, specifically in Harrisburg. I want to tell one quick one. The city of San Diego partnered up with some universities there. They created an initiative to align educational programs that help the job market and enhance the employment for their graduates. So they jumped right on this. And this is kind of where I am. I'm trying to get a partnership, not only with local businesses. I can get the businesses. Let me tell you something. I've done this a long time. I'll be 73 in December. I started when I was six. promoting Concord High School and Concord Athletics, and now I'm promoting Cabarrus County Athletics. We're a separate entity from the school system. We are separate on those two things, so I want to make that real clear. But my whole focus now is about the young people of the community in Cabarrus County Sports Hall of Fame. I know local governments allocate a specific portion of their budget to education. Give you a little stat here. The National Center of Education Statistics reported that local governments, like yourself, contributed 45% of the total public elementary and secondary school funding. 45%, that's a lot of money that you give back, and I'm so happy that you do. Local government initiatives demonstrate the importance of community engagement. You see, we're stakeholders. Everybody in this room, everybody at the council, the mayor, me, we're all stakeholders. Parents, educators, organizations, we all foster an ownership and accountability to these young people in our community. And if we can get better effective educational programs, it enhances the job opportunities. A couple of things, workforce readiness, civic engagement, and overall well-being promotes future generations for success. They become a credit instead of a liability or a debit. If we explore how local organizations, nonprofits like us, and residents can come together, we can elevate education in such a more meaningful way. Families, businesses, civic leaders, we all have that great responsibility. I want to kind of end with a couple of things. One, education connects people. Everybody in this room had education. And you were able to bond and connect with people. My dad had a saying when I was a kid, easy, it's not what you know in life, it's who you know. But I got a little sidebar for you. If you don't know something and get education, you'll never know somebody. He was so right. You know you bond, you connect, you reduce inequality. And we prepare these individuals for tomorrow. when we as community invest in education we define this opportunity and collectively we strengthen i'm going to stop and i'm going to end with a quick story and then if you have any questions i'll be glad to answer them get emotional 1965 i was 13 years old my dad pulled me over he said come here son sitting out on the steps, he said, five years from now, you're gonna graduate from high school and you're gonna have to make three choices in your life. If you're a good enough student and a good enough athlete and you earn a scholarship, you can go to college, get your education. Mom and I cannot pay. We cannot pay. My mother was a medical secretary and my dad was superintendent for a construction company. College education was a dream. So I thought that. I said, well, what's number two? He said, you stay here. You work with me at 13 years old. I knew how to form up a building. I knew how to lay concrete, lay bricks, pour it. 13, I could do it because my dad was a master carpenter and a master bricklayer. He said, or number three, you can go to Vietnam and you can defend our country. And I'm going to tell you, go back and look at 1965. I wasn't real smart, but I knew what was going on in Vietnam. And I knew working for Dad was going to be trouble, because I never was going to be as good as him. So I started studying, and I studied, and I studied. And I earned a scholarship to the University of South Carolina to play football. And I played four years, got my degree. Was a pretty good player. Went on. Went to Florida. Taught four years in Florida. Became Teacher of the Year. Came to Concord in 1980. In 31 years, I served Cabarrus County, Concord City, and Cabarrus County schools as a head football coach, athletic director, and a teacher. Without the education, without the scholarship, I wouldn't have been there. You might have seen me out here on the road somewhere at 73 years old laying bricks or something. Or I might not have made it through Vietnam. Only the Lord knows that. But I can tell you what scholarships do. Now my proposal to y'all, and I hate to throw a number at you, but I'm gonna give you a number. I've met with Concord, I'm meeting with y'all. Tomorrow night I go to Mount Pleasant. August, I go to Kannapolis and Midland. That's five. If the five municipalities of Cabarrus County could find $2,500 in their budget, that would pay for our scholarships every year. Now if not, it's fine. I can find it. But I want the city of Harrisburg to be as big a part of this as any corporation, any business, any lifetime member. I want y'all to take that into consideration. I don't want an answer anytime soon. I told Mayor Teague that she and I would sit down. I'd lay out anything she needed. If you want to come to one of our meetings, see what we do. We are bound and determined to help this community from one end of Cabarrus County to the other end, east and west, become better. I want to make the young people of this community respect what education's about.

So that's my five-minute speech.

Can I answer any question? Was it five minutes? Did it take five? Did it take more? Give me a time.

I was not timing you. I was enthralled in your conversations.

Good. Hey, county commissioners gave me 15. City of Concord said, Coach, when you get tired, sit down. So I wanted, Tim told me, and thank God for Tim, Tim said, Coach, you got five minutes. Now make it brief. I was like, Tim, I can't do five minutes.

I think you did it. I think you pulled it off.

Tell me, can I answer any questions or any concerns or any thoughts you may have about this?

I have two things. The first one is you did really well. I haven't known you for as long as I have. You were really brief. I'm very proud.

You passed that on because my whole 14 committee members said you cannot do it.

I'll make sure they know you did. The second thing is I didn't know you were a Game Cop.

Yeah, I went down there, started four years, and got my degree. I tell people I graduated in three years at South Carolina. The first year I didn't do anything but chase girls and have a good time, play football. Then the next three years, I had to get 120 hours, so I really buckled down. I met my wife. She had graduated in three years, had two masters, a six-year degree, and a doctorate. She was principal at Wolf Meadow. She wouldn't let my kids play sports if it didn't make all A's, so I had to buckle up.

Was Sunshine your quarterback?

Ron was the backup quarterback. Our quarterback came in with me in 1972, Jeff Grants. He was a two-time All-American. Jeff got hurt his junior year. Ron took over, and he's alluding to, remember the Titans, the quarterback, Ron Bass, who I've been friends with. In fact, I just talked to him last week. He works for ABC affiliate in South Carolina. But he said, please tell everybody that Bertier did not kiss me and I did not kiss him. And that I was a man's man. I said, I will pass it on. I said, do you want me to tell you they kissed me? He said, shut up. but yeah ronnie was officially in the record but yeah we're just we're so excited about what we're doing and like i said no matter how much or how little we have four lifetime donors that have given us ten thousand dollars we're having a meeting uh july the 30th with the Cabarrus Foundation Chairman, Cam Crickshack, who is gonna come in, look at our amount. We have, we're gonna split it in half. I'd like to take $24,000 and put it over here in education. That way, if something happens to me tonight on the way home, they've got two years already for scholarships. Because they're not going to have anybody go out and do what I do. They just, they're not. And nobody, anybody that knows me, I told them I'm going to run this like I ran my football program. It's going to be elite, wide open, and I'm going to be passionate about it. I am totally sold that we can help these kids. And we gave out starting, I should have said this, On April the 29th, we gave out two scholarships at Concord High School, and then we went to A.L. Brown, Coxmill, Hickory Ridge, went to all the schools, and by May the 22nd, we had given out 22 scholarships. And they are filling out the paperwork, we're writing the checks, that's what that last page is, telling you the student ID. I just tried to give you some stuff so you could see. I wasn't selling you a load of I guess it's a good way to say it.

Well, thank you, Coach Smith, for your presentation tonight.

Mayor, thank you very much. God bless y'all. And hey, if I can do anything, my number's in there, my cell, my email. All you got to do is call me. I love breakfast. And I will even buy. I'll charge it in the Hall of Fame. Thank you very much.

Fantastic. Thank you, Coach. That was a great way to kick off our presentations this evening. Next up, we've got Jim Spina that's going to present this year's Harrisburg July 4th celebration. Hope you're coming to us with some much needed rest after.

Coach's energy now. Not enough. I'm done.

I'm not supposed to follow that up, right?

Thanks a lot.

Good evening, everybody. Mayor, council.

Let me get to where I got to go here. There it is, let me go back one.

Okay, again, good evening, Mayor, Council. It's a pleasure to be here to offer to you a recap of our July 3rd and 4th celebration of a couple of weeks ago. And so right off the bat, I'm gonna kick off. The first thing we wanna do is make sure that we thank our sponsors, our volunteers, our vendor staff and of course you folks everybody chips in together to make this a memorable event this year's event certainly was memorable so kudos to all of all of you and all of our sponsors excited that we have that kind of buy-in So let's talk a little bit about our goals for this year's event. We went through an awful lot of meetings and got together to come up with some things we really knew we wanted to look at. And obviously the first and foremost additional focus on safety. So what you saw out there were new physical barriers to entry, a no-uncompanied minors policy, new ticketing procedures with an admission fee for non-tax-paying residents, also free admission for our residents here in town. New entrance down at Harris Depot Park, giving us a third entrance as compared to two in the past. The fireworks that were moved to above in the YMCA parking lot, thank you to the YMCA for allowing us to do that. I think everybody can agree that was a really impactful move, really made for the fireworks to be really a more special event for us. And it was with two unique shows with a new vendor who I thought did a wonderful job. Additional programming between the bands, we got Sigmund Theatrical to get up and enhance some of the programs they've done for us in the past. Really this year focusing on the history of our country and also the opportunity for us to highlight our veterans. We've not really done as much as we probably should have in the past, so we made it a very distinct focus on making sure they got the recognition that they all deserve for their service. And, of course, use of fields 1 and 2 opened up with moving the fireworks that gave us that opportunity to use that for food and entertainment. With that, I'm going to introduce our communications director, Casey Nestor. She's gonna come up and talk to you about our outreach efforts.

Hi, good evening, Mayor and Council. To communicate all of these new initiatives and goals that we had for our festival this year, we did several outreach efforts leading up to the July 4th celebration. The first was our printed flyers in our May water bill, and that was to communicate our new entry wristband policy. So that was our first big communication effort. Everyone in Harrisburg who has a water bill got a flyer in that water bill with our new wristband information and how to get their free wristbands before the event. We followed up in June in the June water bill with that same information. We also included the event schedule, parade information, the new Stars and Stripes shuttle, all encompassing more details about the July 4th event. So that was our print efforts on social media. We did have 23 Facebook posts and 20 Instagram posts related to the July 4th event. And some of those were paid social media advertising to land on some of the accounts that don't necessarily follow us. And then on the digital front, we did have a dedicated website landing pages. If you go to HarrisburgNC.gov, you did see that button right there shown on your screen, July 4th. If you click that, it took you to all things July 4th. So we had parking information, wristband, food vendors, amusement rides, sponsorship information, parade information, a lot of information to share. It was easily accessible right on our website. harrisburgnc.gov homepage and we also did a special edition of our e-newsletter so everyone who has already subscribed to our monthly newsletter got a special July 4th edition and that was sent on June 29th, 2026, the week right before the festival. To briefly go over some of our social media content and highlights before the event. So we did highlight a lot of our new features coming to this year's event. This was highlighting our flyover. We did a reel showcasing our July 4th viewing location, our firework viewing locations, excuse me, because we did change the location of our fireworks, shooting off site this year we wanted to make sure that we communicated with people who weren't necessarily in the park that hey they could still see the fireworks from these viewing spots around town i know before you know you could see them from veterans park or more that side of town this year it was in a little bit of a different direction so we had jerry at our communications manager put together this reel showcasing our firework viewing locations And then parking, that's a big question before the event, where am I gonna park? We wanted to emphasize that parking is free, no parking in the park, and we do have shuttles and a new feature to park this year at the public shopping center and take the Stars and Stripes shuttle. So this was just a brief overview of some content we did before the event. And going into our social media engagement and numbers during the event. So this is between July 1 and July 4. You can see that our celebration generated massive traffic spikes to both our Instagram and our Facebook accounts. On Instagram specifically, we did have 313,000 views to our account. On Facebook, 362,000 views. On Instagram, we did have 6,100 content interactions. So this is people liking, resharing, commenting on our content that we were sharing related to the festival. And on Facebook, we did have 2,300 link clicks. A lot of that link clicks was the wristband policy. Directing them directly particularly to get the wristbands ahead of time or to our website to see how they could pick up wristbands ahead of time So just overall an emphasis on how effective our social media channels are to use during an event like this to get information out ahead of time And I'll turn it back over to Jim Thank You Casey

The social media outreach has been pretty crazy, right, to see that. It's pretty impressive. Good job, Case. Thank you. So, of course, our big goal we talked an awful lot about was our safety and security for this year. And our goal is to provide a safe and secure event. Of course, those are for all of our events, right, our Rockin' the Burgs, all of our Halloween, our Christmas, right? But this one especially, the numbers really demand that we always try to do the best we can every year. And so some of the things we came up with was all minors must be accompanied by an adult. And some guests may be required to show a valid photo ID to verify age. And we did have a challenge. In full transparency, the challenge was that the minors attended, more unaccompanied minors attended. attended than intended. How is that? That's kind of tough. Which is obviously going to be a focus area. We'll drill down on that going into future events for sure. Let's just find a way to be a little bit more efficient in that area. Entry points and wagons. This year, as I mentioned earlier, we had the Harris Depot entrance, and you can see where that is at the top of the picture there, then the Simms and ZMAX on the side of the picture. We did have some challenges there. Again, we have hilly gravel, Terrain coming out of Harris people up into the park Which is difficult for pedestrians and golf court carts and also the event exodus the numbers the sheer number of people leaving all at the same time Just prevented a wagon from returning to public slot. It was very difficult So again another thing to drill down on next year, you know, if they're a different route a different way to do that That we think the third entrance point is important. But how do we how do we better? How do we be better that going into the future? Ticketing and wristbands, this is pretty impressive. Thank you to Brian for providing these numbers. Our wristband sales were $132,000 total, which is a 27% increase in our revenue. Pre-sale in May and June, we found it to be highly, highly efficient. And really, I had remembered saying in the beginning of the year that if we had 10,000, we would be really doing well, and we had to end up with well over that, coming into that. Resident veterans, 8,703 wristbands, non-resident, 3,201. And our event gates showed, you know, during the event, our resident amusements were 817. Non-resident admission is 9,175. And non-resident for amusements, 2,136. All really good numbers. I think our ticketing, by and large, worked the way we wanted it to as far as especially the pre-sales. So now some numbers. This is all based on PLACER AI data that we've recently were able to gather. Thank you, Ellie, for helping with this stuff. You can see the last five events, 22 through 26, you know, 24,622, but then jumped to 30,000 and stayed pretty much level all across the board as we've gone through the last four years, last four events. And obviously you can see the July 4th, the blue bar there is obviously our very busy day. One of the things I found interesting on this was that in a couple spots, the parade actually out due July 3rd. So that's probably interesting to just show the popularity of that parade and what it means to the people of Harrisburg. Visitor zip code origins. This is another really interesting data dump here. You can see that Harrisburg residents in 24 were at 15%. They've now jumped to 18% this year. So we did get more of our residents on site and at the event, which were one of our goals. We really wanted to make sure we could get more of our residents involved. You can see Concord at 22, 24, 25 going backwards, stays pretty steady. Charlotte as well, 23, up to 28% last year and then back down to 24% this year. So we did have a little downward spiral there for them. And then we look at the all others, 37, 34, 36. So pretty steady in that route as well.

Jim, is that cumulative for the third, fourth and parade? Yes, it is.

Correct. Correct. Excuse me, visitation by distance. You can see some of these. These numbers are locals less than five. Those are our neighbors, right? Those are our direct neighbors. Harrisburg people 35% in 2020. 35% basically 36% 2425 and then the jump to 38% this year. That was really a good good indicator that we have more Harrisburg people involved. And then you look at our regional, local cabarrus neighbors and you know concord and canapolis those folks 56 percent 24 and it's dropped to 49 percent this past year this this this event and then of course our out of town our plus 30 plus miles people from new york ohio the eastern part of the state wherever else it came from has actually gone from eight percent and 24 to 12 percent almost 13 percent this year Event schedule, just going to really quickly put this up for you to kind of have if you want to look at it. One thing I will mention is I thought our entertainment, our bands and our entertainment were fantastic. Really great choices for what we were hoping to get. I did want to call attention to the additional elements. that we added to the event, which was our Lima Lima flyover. I think the flyover was fantastic. I think everybody loved that. A lot of us just kind of gave us chills to see that happening at our event. Yard games, serve yourself, go down and play it down on the turf. Roaming characters, including the Green Army men, Lady Liberty, Uncle Sam, and Spirit of 76 Band. But the big thing for me that I'm really proud of is the the honoring of our veterans. I think we really did it well, and that's something we're going to make sure we do every year and really pour as much of our energy into that as we can. The other interesting part of this is the event ending on July 4th at 10 p.m. I think was a really smart move for us. Some pictures of the flyover, some of our characters, the veterans on stage, just very, very happy with some of the pictures. Then this picture, and we've got to get this, I said to Sean tonight, we've got to get this thing framed and up somewhere in here. That's just a great picture, great photo. So then I'm going to show the event layout. This is just in case you want to refer back because the next three slides are going to kind of be a heat map placed over the top of this. So the first one is from our 4th of July effort from two years ago. And then you find some really interesting things on this, right? From two years ago, you can see here's fields three and four, right? This is where the amusements are. And this is the top part. A lot of people get in here for the fireworks and things of that nature between the library and our splash pad and playground. These are our two biggest for two years ago. You can see these were kind of steady over here on field five. All right. Then you go to the next in 25. A lot of the same, you know, pretty steady up here. Again, 15K. This thing ballooned last year from, let me go back. I think it was 13K 25K. in 24 to 15k last year here on the music field but we're going to see something interesting here as we go to 26 as you see that right here where I'm placing is where our gates were and it looks like a lot of people obviously everybody had to come through there so you're going to get a big count there but it looks like a lot of people stayed right at the top of the amphitheater lawn and hung out there that a lot of it is because I think they just got through the gate said, hey, this looks good. Let's stay here. You can see that the amusement portion dropped to, you know, 8.1K. So more people did get up in here than in the past. And that also might be attributed to the fireworks. People may have said, that's a good spot for the fireworks over the top of the amphitheater. Let's sit right there and do that. So I really love these heat maps. They're going to play a huge role as we go forward, as we begin to really talk about next year's event, trying to pay attention to, you know, where were people? You know, we didn't give as many people up here as we thought, but again, the turf is very hot in the summer when you have 100 degree temperatures, 105 temperatures. People are not going to go on that turf. So those are some things that we will learn from this heat map an awful lot as we go forward for planning.

Jim, it could also be the entertainment. I mean, people, they are just locked in.

We've had some good entertainment in the past, still didn't have these kind of numbers, but it's a combination of both for sure. So quickly a debrief so I can kind of get this thing rolling forward and give you guys a chance to ask some questions if you have any. What worked well? The expanded use of fields one and two gave us some space. It was hot, but still gave us space to spread out if we needed to. The flyovers, right? We know that that just was a huge addition. The relocated fireworks, another huge addition. And the new programming on the stage was well received. And the wristband presale created seamless entrance for our residents. We know we made it easier for residents to get into the park. What were the challenges and the lessons learned? The no unaccompanied minors policy did not have the intended impact. And I spoke to that earlier. The Harris Depot entrance, again, we spoke about this, proved to be difficult for pedestrians. That's something we'll need to take a look at. And the front gate ticketing lines for non-rentals were long on the night of the 4th. One thing we know, an event the size of July 4th is going to have lines somewhere. Before we did the ticketing in the past, you know, Brian always talked about his lines getting the wristbands, right? You're going to have lines, right? But we want to minimize those as best we can. We want them to move better. We want them to be less impactful on people getting in. That's something we also will drill down on as we go forward. And with that, I thank you again for your support for this event, administration support. Lee and Robert, great. And I want to thank, you know, Public Works, the gang, all that do the extra things to help our Parks and Rec staff have this huge undertaking that was really a memorable event, and we really, I think the community enjoyed it. So with that, I will take any questions you might have.

Jim, how old are you? Vendors, how did they respond? I know we had a lot of vendors out there. Were they happy they're going to return for us?

Sean, I think we had happy vendors, correct? I think they were happy. They made some money.

Yeah, we moved some from the third to the fourth that were down from one and two that we just weren't able to get people down, so we relocated them for the fourth, and that's really helpful. So all I've got is positive feedback.

Great. Yep.

Jim, I think it's important, though, like, while you appreciate us, we genuinely appreciate you all, because you all have worked on this since July of 25, and you make it look really good, you know, very seamless on the third and fourth.

Appreciate that. It's a town-wide effort. I mean, Parks and Rec, it's our responsibility, and we do the lion's share of a lot of it, but... It's a town-wide effort, believe me. We have our meetings in here every couple of weeks as we get close, and we have every department, fire's here, law enforcement, Lisa sits in on those, Brian sits in, everybody. As much as I'm very proud of my staff, and I told them that on Wednesday when I came in, to pull off that kind of an event, but I really want to thank the entire town because it's a town-wide effort.

Jim, how many people you think with our contractors, volunteers, staff, I mean, Tina's got a whole team. How many people do we have out there working?

Oh, we're at 100 approximately. At least. At least 100. I mean, for sure. Tina had 30 or so out. Mike Curtis has a dozen. Our staff, we're at 15 strong.

And Sheriff had?

Sheriff had four. Actually, that's right. If you count the Sheriff's, 40 plus, Josh, right? 50. 50. So we're probably pushing 200, I'm guessing, by the time we're done.

Fire, EMS, the whole thing. So huge, huge lift by the team. know we added several things like jim mentioned them in there but just think of the we added five or six things we knew flyover it was you know something completely new we moved to the location of the fireworks until why first time we've done that first time we've ticketed and actually checked entry first time we've ever done that first time we've ever done wagons Here, first time we've ever used Harris Depot as a public entrance. First time we opened field three and four at this location. One and two. We expanded the entertainment offerings. We used to do two. We expanded that out to four. Moved vendors around. Moved parking around. you name it and I you know before I came to the town of Harrisburg I've been here 10 years now I didn't run events that's I'm a boring engineer we don't do events but in my time here we've consistently gotten bigger and bigger and more complex events and the amount of effort it takes to put something like that on is incredible there are so many things that go wrong behind the scenes constantly And you're just constantly fixing these little snafu. Nobody knows about them and they just all work out. But I have learned over a decade that that's just how events work. And there are no events that go off as planned as you go through them. But I think our staff just did a phenomenal job and all the partners and vendors. we obviously had the the issue the last three minutes there with the unattended minors and you know taking off and kind of ruining it but as you know at least one council member said and several other we're not going to let five minutes define the entirety of really three events over two days with tens of thousands of people doing things that honestly nobody in the region does nobody's ticketed yet nobody's doing this type of event for a fireworks event and it's become a regional draw i think you saw the number you know 12 percent are out of town out of the region that means more than one out of ten people in there aren't even may not even be from north carolina let alone the region so we've really become a regional draw but everybody's families coming in from all over the country and this is their first experience and I think it's a first-rate experience and and we did a phenomenal job I think we're gonna crack down on the unattended minor issue I think that's become an issue throughout the country really but it's something that I think will take you know tight look at how did we get we i still think we we drove it down significantly i think these numbers would be five or six thousand people higher if we didn't do all the things that we had done this year but looking forward to next year we've got to find out where where were those issues how did we get so many unattended minors in there because i think if that if that issue doesn't arise i think we we end that two-day event and we go wow hit it hit it on the head right we knocked it out of the park but we do expect those types of things and big events like this so job well done I think you know our staff being expected put on an event like that is the expectation but it shouldn't be it's it's really above what towns our size should be capable of doing

To have all those new things all in one year was, we talked, I remember in February we were in Lee's office and I was saying, we got a lot of new stuff here, guys. Let's have some grace as we go through it. And we did, by and large, right? I mean, we found some little things, like Rob said, a lot of things behind the scenes that nobody really knows. We know it. We fix them and nobody knows the difference. Flyover timing was perfect. Oh, my gosh. That was incredible.

Flyovers were great. Good luck next year with that.

Thank you. you know even in conversations about addressing safety because ultimately that's what we were trying to make sure we're able to do celebrate safely we were nervous about what this fee was going to look like and we see it didn't impact it at all no people complained about it but they paid it yeah this was our second highest attended fourth of july of all time yeah

And we charged for it.

I'll just say, this was my first experience here in Harrisburg of July. And I've got to admit, it was impressive. It was impressive. The staff, I mean, from, you know, just everything. You can tell it was very well thought out, well planned. And we had hiccups, you know, here and there. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. My family enjoyed it. So, I mean, well done all the way around. And I emailed Rob the next day and was like, hands down, like tell staff, everyone, like job well done. So, I mean, we'll get better, you know, and that's what constructive feedback will get better, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself, so thank you.

And I thank you for that. And I think we actually got better from last year to this year, even with all the new, I mean, we did improve from last year to this year with all of those new, all the new hits that we had to kind of deal with, right? And so we just expect to get better again next year, for sure. And with record heat. Stop, easy, easy.

And with record heat.

I'm sorry?

We were concerned that the record heat was going to drive down those numbers a little bit because people were just a little nervous about being out, but it did not. It did not. No, they were not.

I wasn't sure.

I don't know who picks the bands, but they were phenomenal.

Yes. Well, we work with Tina. You've met Tina. Sean and Mackenzie really sit down and come up with a bunch of options. We kind of narrow them down, and we get with Lee and Rob. We all kind of. find out what we want, you know, try to find, Tina knows what kind of bands we need for July 4th. And so she sends a bunch of them our way and we go from there.

Tina was directing traffic parade day. She was everywhere.

Tina's become part of the family for this event, for sure. Any other questions?

Fireworks were amazing. I've heard so many good feedback.

They were impressive. Lisa, our fireworks guy, he was impressed. I'm happy. Once Lisa, they were great, I'm always happy.

And on that fireworks point, another point to make on this, our staff was out there. doing test shots at night to see where those spots are. Like when Casey mentions, hey, here's where you can view it from. It's not like they're guessing. I mean, literally Lee and Jim and Casey and Michael Anderson, the photographer, are out there letting off test fireworks to do it. So there's really no stone left unturned when we do this. You signed up for the wrong one. You're up here doing the boring stuff. Yeah, it was interesting.

And behind the scenes I saw fire, you know, guys out there running around making sure they're picking up all the ambers immediately. It was just... everybody's so attentive like every maintenance worker every worker like IT like I see Jim James out there driving around and fixing things like I stress James out on the third and fourth you guys are just absolutely amazing Ryan and Stephanie were in golf carts driving everybody around checking on things that really is a team effort all hands on deck well job sir great thank you so much any other questions I could stay up here but you do

I got comfortable over here. You and I are tag teaming this one, so.

Third presentation is on the proposed temporary dog park on existing town-owned property.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

Good evening.

So Jim and I are going to run through a brief presentation with you to discuss this concept of a dog park in Harrisburg. This is something that has come up on and off over the years. We've recently gotten more and more traction on people being interested in wanting us really to evaluate areas and options for doing this. So we thought, let's go ahead and get something together and get it before you. So one of the things that we wanted to mention is we've got a lot of different projects out there, a lot of things that we could bring before you. Why are we bringing a dog park before you this evening? So right now, as you're aware, Harrisburg does not have a single public dog park. The nearest municipal dog park is at the Weddington Road Bark Park in Concord. I was trying not to screw that one up. And that's roughly about 10 miles away. So we do have some of our residents that do go out there. There's just not a place here locally. Farm Hill Park is one of the parks that Jim and I were actually out there Friday morning. And there was probably about 20 people out there with their dogs walking around the tracks out at Farm Mill Park. So it's definitely something that has a desire to have here in our community. This has been a recurring request, as I mentioned, not only from our residents, but also town council. We did have a few brief conversations during this current year's budget process about this. And our parks master plan actually had that specifically identified as a request that our residents were looking for, and they specifically were saying that they would like to have some place that's centrally located to town to have this. One of the things I wanted to kind of get out of the way to mention is why now? This is obviously bringing a project like this before you. The month after we adopt a budget seems a little different. Again, this has been something that we have been working on and off, and as the momentum was building towards the end of the budget season, we really started putting some stuff together. We were getting excited about getting something before you. but the timing the budget had largely already been put together and so we wanted to make sure that we were doing the proper due diligence try not to rush something before you that didn't have us go through all of our our steps to make sure we're going to put something a good quality project before you so we went through the site evaluations lay out options cost operations you'll see throughout this presentation I feel like we really put a lot of effort into getting something before you that is a good quality product. Again, tonight is a discussion. There's not necessarily any type of action that we need from you this evening. There's certainly the ability if you also choose, but this is really a point of getting this information over to you and gauging your interest and seeing if this is something that you would like for us to continue to move forward with. So the site that we're specifically looking at, and the next slide's gonna show you more detail what that site is, but it's the current site on Harris Depot Road where we currently are parking people July 4th, the empty two lots that we have there that usually have houses on them. so that property was purchased back in 2022 and that was for a future fire station one and administration facility right now we don't have specific plans of when that's going to be designed and constructed this was again something that we had discussed during budget season this year and we weren't quite ready to actually put down specific dates so we have a piece of town property that is just not being used very much right now two days a year we use it for parking and it's very valuable to have it out there but the rest of the year it just sits not being used we go out we mow it we maintain it but it's not getting any other benefit out of it So when we looked at all of our other parcels, you know, because one of the things that when we went into this, it was this idea of do we try to get before you a permanent dog park or more of a temporary dog park? Permanent dog park you're looking at probably half a million dollars plus purchasing land to put it on That was going to be a big big ask Right now we know we have a lot of interest in it, but we've never had a dog park in Harrisburg before so having this these parcels available to us that have very minimal amount of site work to actually get them usable as a dog park just seemed like a logical point of saying let's get a temporary idea put in place that would have reusable pieces of equipment that we could move into another location or even if we so choose in the future to make more of a permanent facility we have that available So these here are the 4 lots that you can see that we have purchased again back in 2022 for the fire admin building and so you'll see lot one a lot to you or the 2 along Harris Depot wrote that we're talking about what made these really attractive is right now as you're you may be aware that on lot two here there's already half of is a gravel parking lot this is where we identified as a location for the parking lot so we already have part of it already uh graveled there's already a driveway to get access into the site so we don't have to worry about doing anything with that the big open field there to the northwest of that site that's where we're proposing the dog park location to you this evening the dog park we're going to give you three different options of showing you some different ways to look at it none of the options are going to take up that entire lot so it'll probably take up something in the lines of like this kind of it has the ability to expand if we wanted to but the important thing is there it will continue to allow us to use it for July 4th it won't we'll lose some of the parking out of there but we'll continue to be able to use parking on the outside part of that as well as the parking lot the gravel parking lot that we're proposing as part of the project as well And this preserves the long-term purposes, does not stop the fire station and admin building from being built and put in that location. It is built or is designed as a temporary facility, so we don't impede that from any future development that we may have in the future. So with that, I'm going to pass it on over to Jim, and he can show you some nice graphics and give you an idea of what it looks like.

Thank you, Lee. And hello again, mayor and council. One of the first things I want to bring to your attention though, is that over the next three slides, if you look down at the bottom, it says concept rendering for discussion. This is not exactly what it looked like. This is just for us to get it down and get an idea and give you folks at least somewhat of a visual. It's not a fully designed park. It's just, this is what we think ballpark gives you a good idea. So over the next three slides, please keep that in mind. So this first one is a basic concept. It's 18,000 square feet. Also, all three of these will also allow for a small dog area and a large dog area. Okay, so that won't change regardless of the concept. So this is a basic concept, about $75,000 to put it together, 18,000 square feet. The fencing is all black vinyl-coated chain link fencing. The gravel parking lot is for 20 to 24 vehicles. Basic water stations, minimal play pieces, and just basic signage, basic clarifying that it is a dog park. It is the lowest cost path to a functioning dog park concept. The next one is option two. It's kind of a middle-of-the-road one for us, about $100,000. It's a reasonable middle ground. And it's 18,000 to 22,000 square feet. Again, large and small dogs. The difference here is a little bit different. It's a fencing. It's got a crossbuck wood fence with mesh. Similar to what we have in our parks. If you go pull into Harrisburg Park, you'll see the cross box with the wood, the mesh on the inside of it. And then that's on the forward facing, the public facing streets portions of that. And then on the middle would be a black chain link fence separating the small and the large dog fence, dog parks. Gravel parking's a little bit larger for a few more vehicles. A couple of shade sales to get people out of the hot Harrisburg summer sun. Some moderate play package, full seating, so we have some areas for people to sit. moderate signage, notable deviation from standard. So it would have a permanent facility signage, but still consistent with Harrisburg brand. This looks and feels like a complete community amenity. The final one is about $125,000. It's an enhanced opportunity. It's 30 to 33,000 square feet. It's the largest of the three concepts we've presented to you this evening. It's got the same fencing with a cross-block wood fence in the middle would be a black chain link. Gravel parking a little bit larger. It does have an extra water station, expanded play pieces, richer landscaping, also higher quality signage closer to what we put in most of our facilities now and all of our facilities. Again, it's the strongest public-facing version of this concept. So when I put them all three side by side, you'll see option one, two, and three, right? Really the only big difference here is the size of the park with the fencing and like the shade and play from minimal up to expanded. You know, everything else, parking's kind of roughly the same, you know, a little bit as you get bigger. But really the park size and the fencing chain, the differences in the shade and plays. So operational considerations. Temporary is temporary. You heard Lee speak earlier of the fact that Fire Station One has got kind of preliminary plans to go there. So we want to make sure this can be temporary. We also can make it permanent. If something changes, you decide to put Fire Station One somewhere else. We can probably keep this here. Does it conflict with July 4th? As Lee said, no, a little bit. We'll lose some parking, but we still can use it for some of the parking there. What happens to the materials later if we decide to move it? Well, we would move them along. We would move the dog park to another location potentially. Some fencing would be relocated or reused based on the ability for us to get it out of there. So all this stuff can be moved. What will it cost to operate? Our best guesstimate is that it won't add an awful lot to our plate. We should be able to be absorbing the parks and rec budget as we go long term. Maybe add a little bit come budget season based on what the usage is and see what some of the maintenance costs would be based on how often we're in there. Who maintains access and safety? Basically, it's simple. It's a public park. We will put the hours on similar to other parks. We will take care of it the same way. It will be signed, covered for liability, all the things that we need to make sure that the dog park has the rules and are prominently posted. And does it affect the long-term plan? Again, we're speaking to, right? It doesn't impact it. Fire Station 1 needs to go there in five years, seven years, ten years, whatever. We can hopefully get this thing picked up, move somewhere else, and have those dog parks elsewhere. And an illustrative path forward. How long is this gonna take? If you kind of start with the scope layout and procurement prep all the way down to the landscaping and punch list and inspection, about 10 to 14 weeks for a lot of that. And then by the time we get everything together, if expedited 12 to 14 weeks, if for some reason you decide tonight we're gonna move forward, we would hope that sometime October we should be open. Even if we go with a conservative schedule, it's November, right? So it just depends on which direction you folks point us tonight, and we'll take it from there. But we expect a lot of this work is going to be done internally, right? Outside the fencing, we can do most of the other work ourselves. to get it up and running. So we really feel strongly that we can fit that 12 to 14 week schedule. And with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Lee, and he's going to bring up.

Thanks, sir. Hey. want to reiterate here this evening that there's no fiscal impact tonight unless Council so she was to move forward with actually putting this project forward the important thing that we want to get for getting over to us actually see what you could do again we showed you 3 different options that scalable anything from the base model of the 75,000 up to any increment that you would so choose up there. I would say that when we're looking at about 125, you're getting about the max of what a dog park would benefit from in the temporary capacity like this before you start moving into the big jump of a permanent dog park. So we kind of gave those parameters, but anywhere in between, anything that you would be comfortable with is there. So I also wanted to make sure you all know again we put a lot of effort into trying to make sure that we were giving you something that we could afford and that had some good fiscal responsibility with putting it together these ongoing operating costs are what we identified that you can see there i won't go through each individual one but It was going to be between $7,500 and $17,000 we feel is a conservative estimate. Probably going to be on the high side, but especially in year one. But we were estimating about $12,000 a year that we feel this current year we'd be able to absorb into the park's budget. Again, most of those costs would be back-ended later into the year as your investment and all the site costs, everything up front. You won't have to do as much maintenance until you get back. plus the timing of the year, if you choose to move forward, now we're gonna have a dormancy period of not as much landscaping and other stuff during the winter time. So with that, there's three options that we have available for you this evening. The first thing is to use this as what it is is a concept presentation to you and you can choose to ask us to come back in the future at some point and give you more information and and everything but if you do want to move forward we always want to have that option available to you we got two different motions here that would facilitate us moving forward as a recommendation if you choose to move forward the option two again that's the middle of the road that's the one we feel rep represents really well what an amenity in harrisburg standards will look like but certainly anything that you so choose we can scale it appropriately the first motion here on the left is if you want more time you can give us a dollar amount and tell us to move forward with more fully designing a plan at that dollar amount, and we'll come back to you in the future with everything that you need to do to sign off on it. If you decide tonight and say that this is something that you feel like we're giving you enough information that you're comfortable with moving forward with it, the second motion does that. It actually directs us to move forward with the dollar amount that you choose, and then we'll be able to bring back budget amendments to lock in all the costs associated with it. So with that, happy for Jim and I to answer any questions that you may have.

I do have a couple of questions. By the way, 43% of the households in Cabarrus County have a dog. At least one dog. Fun fact. I'm not a dog guy, so I don't know. Will people really come to a standalone dog park? And do we have an example of that? I see people out walking their dogs at Frank List and they're Are they there for the walk? Are they there to bring the dog to commiserate with other dogs? Is this a thing, I guess? I'd hate to build this and have it sit empty because, no, I just want to take my dog for a walk, and I walk him around the neighborhood. I don't need to go have him jump through barrels or whatever they do there. Do we have an example of a standalone dog park which is like our splash pad?

uh the the weddington one that i mentioned in the presentation if you actually go and take a look at that it is very similar in the basic look to ours and now it has the chain link fence so it doesn't have the nicer fencing but it'll be more similar to our base model i don't have the specific usage numbers of that part individually but that is one again i'll We have residents that travel from Harrisburg to that dog park in Concord to bring their dogs to to do their thing. I've never actually my dog would not do very well in the dog park. Thank you. We bark at all the time, but they keep their dog in his purse. Yeah.

I was just gonna say I love the idea my dog I have two big dogs and they probably won't do well either but but I don't know I just feel like a hundred and something thousand dollars for something temporary it concerns me and so that's my you know because in how How temporary is it? Is it one year, two year, three year? And to then spend it again to do something else, that's my concern is spending that much money for something temporary. I don't know if that's the best way to do it.

So temporary and what we present you tonight is 5 to 7 years. Again, it would be there as long as the fire department doesn't need to use that property or we decide to do something else with it. The important thing that we want to make sure that came across was most everything that we're putting into this part is going to be reusable into another location. So if we have this location and we decide there's another spot that we like better, We'll be able to use most all of the fencing that we put in place. All the play equipment that's there will be able to be reused. The shade cells, the park benches, all that will be able to be picked up and moved to where we want. The only thing that is like true sunk cost would be the cost of the actual water stations where we're having to run the water lines in. That's very minimal. parking, the gravel parking lot, that because it will continue to be a pervious space that will allow water to get through, we can leave that as it is and not have any negative detriment to that part of the park.

I love the idea. A couple of things in the preliminary drawings. Can we not have the entrance and exit right on the highway? That would be kind of a bad thing if a dog got to the shore or got away. I know that's preliminary. The other thing is that I know that there are things that have to be done on a weekly basis at dog parks. I know they need to be sanitized to prevent parvo and ringworm and kennel cough. And I know this because I've got a house in Florida that's across the street from my dog park. I assume that's in the cost estimates, the operating cost estimates and stuff, okay.

Yes, sir. Again, I think the 12,000 that we put in there is generous. We've never operated dog parks, so we're going based on all the industry standards that we've seen based on the square footage that we presented to you. So we feel very comfortable that any of those types of things will be in there. I'm sure the reality is there'll be something that comes up as we're operating it that was something we didn't think about. but I don't think it'd be anything significant that would impact overall any material number that the mouse would provide.

And we when we were looking at our parks master plan we did not have this funneling into an existing part correct?

It basically mentions that we don't have one we should consider one doesn't really say where. Well, most of our, almost all of our master plan doesn't get specific with spots. It just says these are things that your community, whether it be the survey or whatever, or based on other communities, this is a facility you need to think about.

I think it did show the over elegant she actually provided me the the information but it it were the survey asked North Central or South I think over 30% actually preferred the central location of the town has been a location for part.

So like Chris, I don't have any pets. My question is, though, in other municipalities, does the dog park typically stand alone from a regular park?

You can find them both. You can find them stand alone on public property. You also can find them in larger parks that have the space for that. So it just depends. We don't have that space inside our parks, so we had to find a place that would be suitable for us to put one up. Okay.

I want to say first of all kudos for thinking outside the box proposing this location I think that's great it's the entrance is off of the Harris Depot so not on 49 so I think it's you know that and what is it school circle or whatever that Street is I think that's that's just amazing I do like that it's really close to the other park, our main park and the Harris Depot Park. So for maintenance people, I think it's going to be great. They just, you know, drive up like a few feet and then they're right there and they can, as they're going to the big park, they can probably take a look, make sure everything is good and move on. So I see how you could kind of incorporate that into existing. I think this is, I've been hearing about needing like dog park even before I got on the council as I was running like back in 21. There were people requesting and asking because people want to go take their dog. I do like the second one the best because you have seating on both sides. It's not so much about, okay, I'm going to bring my dog, but I also want to sit and relax and chat with other people and connect and socialize. I think that's a big part of it. Have some shading. I think that's a really great idea. And I think... don't we have some money in the council budget for like special projects? That may be like a really great opportunity for council to make a difference, like an immediate difference if we move forward with this. I do want to mention that council smith wasn't able to be here but he did send an email to all of the council saying that he fully supports it and he mentioned the weddington park and he mentioned when he is there he's running into a lot of harrisburg residents because people need that um people that do bring their dogs to like dog park they even i know there's some breweries in nota wherever that have like little dog park areas I think that's a really great idea I think at least the second one so we have the seating and I do like that the outside is a little bit pretty as far as temporary I mean we don't know when that's going to be built if it's going to be in that exact location there is that daycare center immediately across from it so I'm sure they'll be happy to have the dogs there for a while rather than all the you know, noise from the fire station waking kids up.

No, I think the question, five to seven years seems like forever. So if you spent that amount of money over seven years and you ripped it off, and by the way, at the end of seven years, you're going to want new benches and new fences. We're all real about that.

Well, you know, the reality of it is that it can be permanent. if we decide to do something different in fire station one, right? So it's not necessarily like temporary fencing, right? It's fencing that, you know, so yeah, it'll take some regular maintenance and bench changes and different things and that kind of stuff, but it could last as long as it needs to.

and the reason we took the approach from a staff standpoint of having a lot of repurposed materials and things is that it could be permanent i mean there's it's it's highly likely that you could have a dog park on that same lot as a station one it's a it's a huge space and there are other examples of that locally where dog parks are on public property with public safety facilities there But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have scars from some former council members who may be in attendance tonight about don't put stuff in and then tear it right back up and put something else in there. So when we talked about this from a staff standpoint, we've gotten a lot of requests from the residents. through our parks master plan. I've gotten requests from multiple board members, current and past members, about having a public dog park. There are some private ones in neighborhoods and stuff that you can get to. And so when we looked at it, it's like, we've never done this. would not recommend saying hey let's go build this big luxurious dog park and nobody tends it i also wouldn't want to make it you know too small and not nice enough that you can't have an effective one so this was kind of trying to to shoot that middle ground looks property that we already have repurposed materials that we could relocated on site or to another site if it's a very successful dog park and look over 5 to 7 years. This is a small amount of money. I think we had 50,000 make the bathrooms pretty at Holcomb and you know this is about half of about twice that that cost so low low cost high impact. I just became a dog owner five years ago, six years ago. So I can appreciate the, does anybody go to dog parks? Does it, you know, I'm not a, or was not a dog person. And then my wife forced us to get a dog during COVID. um over my objection and now i'm full dad dog he comes to work with me sleeping in bed with me miles and i are you know thick as thieves and i'll go anywhere without him so i i do frequent these dog parks and i have since learned that most of them are standalone there there are lots that are in larger parks but when I take my dog to a dog park usually that's all we can do I can't drop them off and then go do something else and I can't take them from the dog park and then take them somewhere the dogs aren't allowed so you tend to go there sit read a book answer your email from your council members watch the dog play and then go back home so I think it's a good project we've got a lot of requests for it It's low cost. It's something we could move on quickly if the board chose to, or we can take any feedback, revise it, and bring it back.

Can we go back and look at what the options were for the motions, please?

Which one? The one that had the three. The pictures?

The other way, closer to the end of the presentation. The options for the motions.

Oh, I'm sorry.

for which option yeah but we have to attach a number to it so option one two or three the second one yeah yeah I I think my

you know, note on this would be do it, do it right. You know, like we did the bathrooms, right? Just a little bit more to make it a little bit nicer. It's going to be here ten years from now. And if we could get a look and I think you brought up a great point about Are we going for the dog or are we going for the owner? Because I want to sit here and read a book while my dog hops around. I don't want to sit in the blazing sun. I want to have a place to sit. So let's make it comfortable so we get good attendance. And I would ask you too, is your dog park in Florida well attended?

It is. It's very well attended. the only thing that i don't see here there's there's plenty of plenty of restroom room area for the dogs but not for the humans yeah um so they want to consider it i just increased our budget you can't well it did bring allowance has the um the porta potties or something like that

One thing I'll point out is we strategically turned the dog park the way it is because if you ever get a chance to drive by over there, this is very similar to the tree line that's actually there in that back part. And so this would incorporate that entire tree line in the back where you could have however many benches or picnic tables that you'd like back there. There are a few trees that are up here towards the front, but then we would supplement it with the shade cells, but definitely so the entrances are accurately placed.

They are because you wouldn't want it on the parking lot.

You may want to consider man traps. where there's two sets of gates, this does it. Double gates, yeah.

It's hard to see. There is double gates in there. The concept rendering didn't come out as good. But you would walk through that primary one, and then you'd have a holding area where you would actually go into the larger dog or small dog area.

As far as human restrooms, Harris Depot Park has restrooms, right? So if you really needed to use, you could probably... Well, we know our... You're probably not there. I don't think you're there that long.

You may need to wrote that as long as they're on leash.

I just have a quick question about the fence heights. Are we looking at because I know that you get a large dog in that big pen and you got a little mini dog in the one next to it that could be edible. that would uh that would i didn't know what we're looking at as far as fence heights on that or if you have some little kids over there with their little little dog and you're separating german shepherd or a big pit bull or uh how would how would we the separating fence the black chain link is six feet yeah and then the uh the uh wood block the uh crossbuck wood fence is five feet the outside also

The one that's across the street from us, they don't separate the dogs at all. And there's not really ever a problem. I can say that I've never once heard of an issue with the dogs. Small dogs can be just as aggressive.

Part of that is liability insurance stuff would probably be better off. I know we'll be better off if we have a separate small and large area.

Will there be lighting?

not at these proposed price points no ma'am so and will there be a time like a closed time like you know kind of like at the park like shut down or would it be how how would that did you say that yeah it'll it'll it'll mimic our other park hours right so most of our park hours basically are sunrise to sunset mostly right depending on this one which for sure because there will be no light so um

and basically that you want to be careful maybe with lighting too because it may create more people coming there than you really don't yeah i don't know if you want to like i mean i've never gone to a dog park my dogs just don't go to dog parks but are they typically at dog parks or is this i mean do you normally see that i don't know like legs okay most of most are not yeah they're usually closed until some you know until sunrise they close at sunset okay

It could be a noise issue at night, too. You could have a noise nuisance issue at dog parks.

They also do really neat combination stuff, right? Like we've got a Ferris County Animal Rescue and they do adoptions and stuff. Or they could do adoptions at the dog park. They could do events. Like ours in Florida, they do that. They use the dog park and have events. They do dog adoption events and stuff like that. So it actually is a pretty neat addition to the community.

Well, it sounds like if we, I don't know, I'm ready to move forward with it right now.

Jim, you have to hold the doggy Olympics.

Yeah, and then there's dog fireworks on the floor.

I couldn't hear you, Chris. Doggy Olympics.

We've got somewhere to send people.

Sure. Doggy Olympics, you know, doggy Halloween, doggy Christmas.

Doggy Halloween? If you did that, people would come. Jim, could you forward back to the motions?

Yeah, I think your original thought was the direction only that the hundred thousand option would y'all be able to get that back just like next month is that overzealous do that and see what all that entails more seating options yeah but now that you know this council is fancy should we do like 125 yes you know

If you came back and said for another 25 you could I think for the most part Lee has that in this presentation with the extra 25 can we move forward with the second one tonight it seems like we like it we presented to you is very representative of what those can you show us the picture of the second one again or the third one which one no no the second night i don't know much bigger yeah so the size of that one too yeah at least this one because it has the the double gates and so forth and the outside matches our other parks i think i think this is great right there if we want to move forward with this and that will give them enough time to build it before cold you know period starts

so what's the time frame if we go with the motion for you guys to continue come back to us next month is that still on target for in October or does that push it I think you add a month to the schedule that you think we'd look at November probably by then but that's

This also depends on weather and vendors. The beauty of this is the only real vendor that's gonna come on site to do a lot of work is the fencing. The rest is deliver, we put it together, we get it out there. We get public works to come in and do some utility work.

And I know you guys just did this big event and then in the fall we're gonna have other events that we're gonna restart. So now it's kind of like, There's no downtime anymore. We're keeping you busy.

Can we look at option three just one more time?

It's considerably bigger.

Yeah, it's more square footage.

But it's not more seating.

And certainly, again, from the seating standpoint, we can put as much as you like. The seating is actually pretty cheap in the grand scheme of all this. The fence and the landscaping are the two parts that are really going to be pushing the cost. In this one particularly, you'll see the monument sign in the front is a little nicer. It's got the stone base compared to the second option. So you're upgrading that. You've got some additional signage, the additional parking, as mentioned. The size is a big thing to go from, 20,000 to over 30,000. is a big thing now. There's nothing that says that we can't start at 20,000 and if we get a lot of, we can shift that fence over and take advantage of another 10,000 square feet or whatever we feel. So there's always that option because we're not gonna use the entire space at this point.

I'd like to see you guys come back with with both of these if you if you're authorized for 100. Hey, but for another, let's just say this thing last five years, five grand a year for the next five years will get you 33,000 square feet, rather than move a fence or try to retrofit it or build it twice.

or make the most impact with the option to that's less square footage but not that more seating right yeah I was going to suggest that what what if we came back with that square footage but with the ants yeah yeah so you mean yeah but I'm sorry yes you know you have a couple of ABC building works that would give us

The signage is going to be more expensive if we go stone base. But if we go smaller, maybe we can do that. Some of those amenities would be able to be enhanced for sure.

I think we would be able to do that. Right, and our esteemed new planning director is quite the aficionado when it comes to dog parks. She's offered a lot of her help with the play packages and how we can set that up.

I'll be glad to turn this over to her if she wants to.

So if can you get back to the motion page. So I know I've heard from a couple that would like to see this more refined for the August meeting. So could we keep the motion on the floor for the direction only motion?

But I'm sorry. Was there not a conversation like after that to say that this is pretty well drawn out and we would just talk about adding more benches. So then if that's what we're going to do, we could just do.

Yeah. Should we? I think we haven't seen that smaller footprint.

The option to put with the extra stuff. But we can just say, okay, you know, not to exceed 110 and then have them now that they have our input because we want more seating.

Yeah.

and then we'll get where the funding sources and all that and that second piece okay i would say go big i like the big one and the reason i like the big one is because owners are going to want to throw balls and frisbees and stuff like that for dogs right i mean you're going to want to interact with the dog especially if you don't have like a huge yard this becomes a great place to take the dog and get the dog some exercise so so i i would i would do

And we still have to it still comes back to council for approval. So if you want to see what everything looks like.

if i may i i would focus on what scope do you want right the the 100 versus 125 is negligible compared to the the general cip that the board adopts annually and we're talking 20 million dollars worth of cip annually um if you want to see a 30 000 square foot dog park i would i would go for that if you if you like the smaller you know half acre size i i would go for that if you like um the upgraded monument sign versus the the standard wooden sign and the additional landscape we want all that we just don't want to pay for it but you're barely paying for it right i mean we're talking if you're spending 100 125 those are those are numbers that if if i think if our staff came in here tonight and said 125 or 150 it still wouldn't move the needle on those two. I think the scope is really what's important because you can obviously go too big. I mean, we've never done a dog park and you can go too small. So just finding out from the board kind of scope would we want to go if if we're going to do this that's that's the first one and it sounds like the board wants to do something so if we're going to do a dog park what is this what is the scope of it and what do you guys want to see and then we'll bring those details back with the budget amendment and everything yeah so if i understand this right even with the second one you will be bringing back for the budget amendment it still has to be a

yes and it's anything over 50 has to yeah so I say we go with the second one and should we do not to exceed 125 because you know extra seating and whatnot and make sure that there's enough space I'd like to put that motion forward okay what about liability something happens

We'll have a sign appropriately that is the liabilities really with the dog owners, that they have the liability of their animals when they're in there.

We've already, Jan has already checked a little bit too.

Okay.

And you know, we always tell people it's no different really than the playground. You sign the playground, you go out and they do their thing, right? It's a very similar thing. We try to put as much back on. The users, we all know that something happens and who knows where it goes.

yeah and we already have the land so this is really really cheap so if we were going to do option to motion motion to direct staff to proceed with development of temporary municipal dock park Harris Depot road and school circle property at a project budget not to exceed a hundred and twenty five thousand and bring forward any required budget ordinance amendment necessary to implement the project

so everybody get with that does that capture the idea that they would come back with okay they have to three up yeah yeah okay yeah motion one twenty five second Sarah second Chris Chris just wait a second yeah so I have a question yeah I'm sorry because I read that to say that they can just move forward and do it am I wrong no they have to bring back budget ordinance amendment

But I think that's giving them the... Ryan, where are we?

The way that motion's written, a budget amendment would have to be brought back. But if you're all in agreement with something tonight, you can always make a motion with a related budget amendment, and it could just be done tonight.

but we want to see the direction only motion would be the one if you want to tell us X amount of dollars and to come back with an updated concept and everything that be option one if you get if you move forward with option to the move forward option that allows us again give a specific dollar amount but we would begin getting quotes and all that still bring back the budget amendment to council but all of the motions of us getting the quote setting up the actual work would begin

And I think that's what we need. We need the actual numbers and everything. So I think that's what we need.

Direction only motion would be the one you all want to make. And are we looking at a specific size?

Well, hold on. Hold on a second, guys. Hold on. Let me reel it in here. Council already made a motion and already had a second. So we're going to have to dispose of that motion one way or the other. So we're going to have to vote on it or amend it or take it down. Similar to what we do with our projects, I think what the council's asked for here is neither of these motions, they're looking for a goalie log. So hey, we want to move forward, but we want you to bring back not just the final cost, but the final concept too. So I would recommend doing that. with the understanding we're we've got a motion on the floor we're not we're not to go build a dog park without bringing it back to the board and when we bring it back for the required budget amendment it may not be 33 000 it might not be 20. it okay there might be gotcha an area in between there that we look at but don't go over 125 000. i i think i captured that correctly yeah but so you've got the motion but we're amending that motion to include what you just said I don't think it's necessary. I'm just putting it on the record that that's what we'll do.

I think for clarity, we need to restate the motion so that we're clear on what we're doing.

Then we'll have to go through a whole set of parameters.

No, you have to do as amended. Are we changing what we just said?

No, we're not changing. He just said it in plain language what the second one says.

So read it again, please.

Why don't you... have the person who made the motion withdraw and withdraw a second and start over. That would be better than amending it.

Yeah.

That's it.

Well I have a question before we do that because I see right here any required budget ordinance necessary to implement the project which says they're coming back They're coming back with actual numbers like if we just do the first motion they're going to come back with some pictures with some benches but the numbers are still not going to be certain with the second one they're going to come back and now that they know we're looking for more seating and more shading and more benches they're going to bring that and they're going to say this is exactly how much it's going to cost and we can say no and then we can say no yes or yes but add this and add that right we can do everything you asked with the motion that's on the floor yeah if you want to amend it to make sure that we do it has to come out before we do render yeah we'll be coming back but with more certain numbers that's what I I want to see because like how much is that fence gonna cost if that's what that motion means okay

keep the motion as stated we have a first and a second all in favor any opposed motion is carried thank you guys thank you very much thank you I think we confused ourselves talking through that. Thank you for your patience. We will move into the public comment portion of this evening. We did have a sign-up sheet, and we have a couple names on here. So please, when your name is called, state your name and address for the record. You have three minutes. If you were unable to cover all of your comments in three minutes, we ask that you send any additional information or comments to council at harrisburgnc.gov. That comes to everyone on the dais. First up, we have Jim Eskew.

Jim Eskew, 8010 Lacoma Court. Thank you, Mayor and Council. Good evening. I'm here on behalf of Friends of Harrisburg Greenways. We actually have some other friends here in the audience tonight. And I wanted to introduce our Junior Explorers program. So this is a new program. It's designed for kids ages 10 and under. who are curious about learning more about what Harrisburg Greenways have to offer. And it's very simple how it works. There's no cost to participate. It's comprised of a series of simple, fun challenges. For example, spotting landmarks or picking up litter, sketching wildlife that you might see All the details are on our website. And assuming you have completed all of the five challenges, you will then receive an official Safari hat and a personalized certificate. In addition, you will get a free kid's scoop of ice cream at Rocky River Coffee, and each additional time you visit Rocky River Coffee with your safari hat on, you'll get another 10%. So we thank Rocky River Coffee for being a great community partner. If you have kids, grandkids, we'd love if they can take part. We'll have a social media campaign launch tomorrow. If you can give it a like or share, it helps more people learn about the program and increases visibility of Greenways and Harrisburg, which are such a great asset for our community. So that's all I had. Thank you.

Thank you Jim Maurice price. Welcome former councilmember price it's good to see you just make sure you state your name and address for the record.

We're very smart just 5, 0, 9, 6, sunburst lane. And I would like to start by reading from Paul's letter to the Galatians. For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. But through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. But. If you bite and devour one another, watch out that you're not consumed by the other. If you look at the subject matter, I'm here for one reason, and that's Harrisburg. And it's really pretty simple. I've been here for nine years. Six of those years have been the most difficult in my life. There's a little town in south central Arkansas. It's named Harrison. And I'm talking to a young man, and he said, for decades, we have been trying to shed this reputation because it's known as the most racist town in America. For decades, they've been trying to shed that. I saw a media flyer a few months ago. Call to arms is what it really was. The NAACP is going to be here. the media and all that type of thing. And so I tuned in to see what the issue was. Because I know racism up close. I mean, I've been shelving through the back of the bus, seeing the white and colored bathrooms and water fountains. I mean, Brookfield Zoo in Chicago had the very impolite people come into our apartment and inspect as fathers and husbands gathered their things to run and hide. Race riots in junior high school. I know racism, so if it's here, how did I not see it? Because for lack of a better term, I was on the inner circle, served with the council, worked closely with the staff. How did it escape me? So I tuned in to see what the matter of cause was, and it turned out to be nameplates and titles. And this is what concerns me, what the man said. Once you slur a town like that, that reputation is hard to get around. And this town is not that. Of the nine years I've been here, I said six have been the most difficult. And the things that pulled me out of that dark place was community. Community. And I've heard, you know, a lot of people come up here and they read excerpts from Martin Luther King, who, by the way, in 1967 said, I believe, I've marched my people into a burning building. But the one thing that echoed the most was not addressed, and that's character. Character, character in this community. And I can tell you some folks on the staff who represented the city that would not tolerate that activity. But when your ideology becomes your identity, you have nowhere else to go. Everything becomes discrimination. This is my town. I love it. I have found peace here. And I will meet you at the front door every single time. It is your desire to slur this town. The people who represent it are the communities that are here. I've said my piece. I know I'm not the most diplomatic. I should have given you the if you need a space, space, go. But now we know where we stand. So if you have no questions of me, I'll go back and sit in my seat and I'll be quiet.

Maurice, if I may, would you consider running again?

Six years ago, I was asked that question, and the short answer was no. These guys always looked like they stepped out of business weakly, and the most uncomfortable place for me is in a suit and tie. Yeah, I have things to lend to the town. I have some expertise in certain areas. But the short answer was no. But I watched a man from the church up the street walk across Veterans Bridge with a flag that says Harrisburg has racism, too. Wow. Now I'm your man. Don't need a suit. I have no problem with righteous confrontation, none. So if it's true, I'm your man. I'm in the fight. But if it's not true, well, it sets up the agenda to come in here and tear down our statues and burn flags in the street and spit on the police. Well, again, I'm your man. I'll have to wear a suit, and I have no problem with righteous confrontation. So the short answer is no, but never say never.

Thank you, Maurice.

You're welcome.

And last, we have Rosa Sims.

Good evening. You have a very nice smile on your face, Chris. I am not going to be long. You all know why I'm here. And we are still waiting. At the very least, we should be given an explanation that actually makes sense as to why it has not been changed for Dr. Banks. At the very least, the explanation we've been given about it causing confusion or it sets up a hierarchy does not make any logical sense. The people in Harrisburg, by all my accounts and conversations, are well-educated people. And we would understand an answer that truly made sense. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Sims. That concludes public comments. next up we have our consent agenda is there a motion on the floor to approve the consent agenda as presented is there a second all in favor motion is carried thank you our communications first up we have our town manager good evening mayor council

few quick updates for this evening you know we're just getting to communications and we're 45 minutes hour 45 minutes into the meeting so I'm not going to belabor the point all night but I do want to give an update on the budget and the legislation and how it has impacted us and what we're looking at moving forward so those you on the council already know those in the community may be getting news that the state finally passed a budget for the first time in over three years so we were excited more way than one on that the most exciting part of this budget was the first time we'd gotten direct capital allocation so Harrisburg received 225 thousand dollars in direct allocation from our local members so we reached out to them and thanked them for that we lobbied hard for an allocation for infrastructure and they were able to to allocate that to us the other things going on were several bills that went through that are going to affect how we operate Several of those bills were already acted on. Obviously, the governor signed the budget. He also signed several other bills this week and vetoed one of those. We do expect lawmakers to return at the end of the month. So they haven't gone home. There's still plenty of legislation for us to look out for. But around the 27th, we expect more votes to come in, including a possible override of that one veto. Some of the top impacts that we should be aware of as a community and as a board, the parking minimums were eliminated in this budget. So we will have to, on all of these things, really look at our ordinances, look at our operating procedures, and find a way to operate uniquely the way we always have, understanding there are different ways that we'll need to operate. So parking minimums were eliminated as part of H162. it's easier to sue towns now over zoning decisions as well so the appeals to board of adjustment got lots of revisions there so staff will be taking a look at revisions we need to make to both comply and to adjust to how things come through board of adjustment The one veto was the public camping bill that was vetoed because the bill restricts homeless encampments and the citation used was this was an unfunded local mandate, which it most certainly would. It requires us to enforce a bunch of additional laws locally associated with homelessness and homeless encampments so we do expect some votes on on overriding that considering the support it had to get passed in the first place home-based business rule limitations also have gone into effect so this would affect folks that run businesses out of their homes. It restricts the town's ability to ban most home businesses as well as heavily permit the low impact home based businesses. This isn't something we we run into a lot, but I do anticipate that there could be. some finagling done by those that aren't necessarily running legitimate home businesses and try to expand that power and put us into Rich's corner a little bit more on enforcement and those trying to claim exemption from it. Some major changes on contracting rules as well as DEI restrictions. This has been one of the hottest topics for local municipalities. The elimination of the statewide minority women owned business participation goals as well as revising town procurement policies and bid documents. That all needs reviewed and there's already guidance out to us on how to comply with this. as well as barring cities and counties from allocating funds to any dei initiatives and this isn't this doesn't have an intent provision in it so it becomes really difficult to do some of the things that we're all just really accustomed to doing and so i think when they pass broad bills like this we do need to reach back out and and understand how they expect us to implement it some of the normal things like harassment training that every employer has to do from a federal level then conflicts with state laws on being able to mention some of the things that were banned from discussing so you know these these create quite the workload for us but our staff is well prepared to jump on it as well as one additional change that was relevant to us that we discussed if you guys recall we discussed the electric bikes and scooters that are running all over the neighborhoods after that meeting we sent out the guidance that that we had at the time about how we enforce that and went through the Sheriff's Department on the current guidance that's all changed now we now have three classes of e-bikes that this law creates the town keeps authority to regulate on the multi-use paths and the sidewalks but the streets are a state statute and it sets the default to 25 mile an hour limit when it's not posted So we'll dig into some of that and figure out What we need to do locally to adjust all of these bills and there are several bills still pending There's still a regulatory reform act. We're used to just always being a regulatory reform act that we're pushing back against This one would mandate the the residential use in some commercial districts the ADU allowances limit local development conditions we've gotten some of that revised so for instance the residential and commercial districts was raised to a hundred thousand population so that didn't affect Harrisburg however I think we'll continue to make sure that those numbers don't get revised down to include us as they go and reconsider this, as well as a bill for de-annexation that would create a statewide process for property owners or the town itself to remove sections of a town out and de-annex. Finally, truth in taxation bill. This is another one that i'm not sure you know we'll talk to our local representatives these most these are mostly things that we already do and it creates a duplication or a financial impact to the residents into the town by forcing things like send a direct mailer out for a public hearing that you're already having and so in order to save money the goal there is to force us to spend twenty five thousand dollars to directly mail things to people's house if you guys check your own mail like I do you know you might go weeks before you open that one that's not really important there or my wife might set it on my desk and then we argue over how long it's been on the desk she told me about it I said I didn't hear it all that kind of stuff so I hardmail just doesn't work that's why we do e-newsletters that's why we do The phone notifications, that's why we have an app. So I think some of these create an additional regulatory burden that actually costs the taxpayer money without really having the impact. For instance, if we go back to our last reevaluation, what we would have had to do is have a couple more public hearings on the reevaluation. Well, we had 25 hours of public hearings. would 27 have captured the couple people that didn't know? And I don't know anybody in this town that didn't know we were being revalued in that year. So I don't know that it has the impact, so we'll continue to lobby against those. But I will say, with all this being said, I think our investment in having professional advocacy in Raleigh and having kind of boots on the ground there to keep us informed quickly, to help us draft bills, to tell us who exactly is is you know maybe pushing a bill how it's going to affect us certainly paid dividends we ended up getting a direct allocation and we're able to influence at least six or seven bills that I was able to count but I think there are dozens of bills that we had input on that would have been worse had we not been reaching out on it so With that, I'll take any questions on the advocacy part, but I think our staff has covered all of the other things tonight, and you still have several from economic development, public safety ahead of you.

Any questions for Rob? All right. Thank you, sir. Next up, we have Brian Lee with our finance report.

Good evening, everybody. I have your finance report as of the end of fiscal year 2026. So you can see tax collections have reached 103% of our estimated budget, so about $500,000 extra in our tax collections, mostly from motor vehicles. The general fund also at 103%, so a really great year revenues for our governmental activities. the water and sewer fund at 106 and the storm water fund right on target at 100 um a lot of that in all of these funds is i'm not patting myself on the back but it's investment revenue that we purposely um budget conserved very conservatively for and then get to enjoy the extra revenue here Looking at departmental expenditures over operations, you can see all of our departments here landed in the upper 80s or in the 90% range, and the same across most of our other general fund departments. The average department came in at 86% of budget utilization. We still have about 45 days where invoices will come in for services and goods that we received prior to the end of the fiscal year, so I anticipate we'll end up somewhere around 88%, 89% on the fiscal year. Salaries townwide reached 90%. Same thing there. We have one payroll that will get accrued back during the audit. So we'll end at right about 93 or 94%. If we think back to last year, that was 87%. And so we did purposely try to tighten up that salaries budget. And so I'm pretty happy with the results there. Moving on to our project dashboard, you can see our single-year projects here, mostly completed for the year, and we have four more moved to complete during the month of June. Before those, though, we have the warning light at Station 3 that shows about 20% complete. The construction contract was approved at last month's meeting, and then we have the easement documents on the consent agenda tonight. Once all of those are executed, we'll be able to move forward into construction for that, and it should not take very long to get those poles installed. Two projects that were moved to complete in June were the Branded Gateway sign on Rocky River Road on the right side of the screen and the Harrisburg YMCA sign on the left side. Last month, the only thing that those needed was landscaping, so I just wanted to show the completed pictures of those here. And then two other projects that were moved to complete last month were the ADA sidewalk program. The last remaining item in this was to install some handrails along the sidewalk stairs, and so those were done, as well as some splash pad updates with the painted surface and then some of the accessories that was finished off in June. Here's a look at the multi-year projects in design. We have two here. The Harrisburg Rail Trail is about 35% complete. Design is continuing along. And the next step will be to coordinate with Norfolk Southern. They've got to review our plans. And so when the plans are ready for them, we will have to bring back a budget amendment and a contract. for their participation in the project. This is something that is expected any time you cross or go under a railroad. They're going to have to review and approve that plan. But the cost for that is unknown at the beginning of the project. We've now narrowed that down. And so once that's finalized in the next month or so, we'll be able to bring that back to you. And the other here is pedestrian facility for Oakley Drive. That one is moving into construction. That is on the agenda tonight. And so that project should be taken care of pretty quickly. Here are the multi-year projects that were under construction this year. Not too much movement in the month of June on those. But the ones that we have grouped up at the top in yellow, we'll roll those over, obviously, to next year's report as well and finish those off. Moving on to our equipment projects, we have three that are rolling over to fiscal year 2027, and we did have one that was finished off in June, and that is the Stars and Stripes shuttle. So hopefully people had a good experience on that, making their way into the park and having a better place to park out at the public's lot and not being trapped close to the park. But those are in service. We plan to use them for different events, and then maybe even use them for, like, hay rides to mix into the Halloween event or something like that. Here's a look at the vehicle projects. We had one that was moved to completion in June, and that is the brush truck for the fire department. That one was a pretty long build, so it's good to get that one in service. for our professional services projects for the year. The only one really with any progress in June was the comprehensive strategic plan. That's about three quarters of the way through. Staff is planning several more public engagement events over the next couple months. So we'll have neighborhood meetings and just invite everyone to stay tuned for those topics and those specific dates to finish out that project. So I also wanted to mention some of the upcoming fiscal year 2027 projects. For the single year group, we have a pretty good collection here. One that I'm pretty excited about is the Stallings Road Roundabout Artwork and Landscaping. That RFP has come back a lot. We've got a lot of proposals on that. So we're working through that project and it will move pretty quickly in the next couple of months. We have 750,000 or thereabouts in pavement resurfacing under the Powell Bill program. We're adding some shade trees at Harrisburg Park between fields 2 and 3, new monument sign at Harris Depot Park, and some infield renovations at Stallings Park baseball field. Some multi-year projects are really focused on transportation, pedestrian connectivity projects, so we have several projects there. Pretty light year overall on equipment, vehicles, and professional services. But on the equipment side, several pieces of equipment for the fire department, about three replacement vehicles, and then a couple professional services projects, including a downtown small area plan and the tree city study. So I am very excited to announce that we did receive our certificate of achievement for excellence in financial reporting for the 2025 financial statements. So this is something that we have been wanting to participate in for a number of years. We decided to go for it this year. It did take quite an enhancement to the financial statements and it is pretty rare to get it on your first try. They actually really strongly recommend that you kind of do dry run submission of that before you really step into the program but we decided just to go for it and I'm very happy to say that we got that and this will be a program that now we are locked into and will participate in going forward. So with that I will welcome any questions.

Any questions for Brian? Thank you, sir, and congratulations again.

I know that was a lot of work. We're very appreciative.

Next up, we have Lieutenant Helms with our law enforcement update.

Good evening, Mayor, Council. So our June report, our law enforcement-related activities was 4,421, including both self-initiated activity from the deputies as well as calls for service. Of that self-initiated activity, 2,891 security checks were conducted with a yearly average up to 2,103 from last year. So we're definitely upping the numbers in those, trying to keep a check on businesses. And at the end of this, you'll see a couple of highlights we had from last month that'll tie back into some of the good work that's that's brought on. The month of June for traffic stops was 919, just a little bit shy of our 1000 yearly average. Again, we still have a deputy out for an injury he sustained in motorcycle school. He's hoping to be back within the next couple weeks, so we'll be glad to have him back, and he is looking forward to getting back to work as well. He's getting a little stir-crazy just sitting in the office doing paperwork stuff with us, but he's helping out doing that for the time being. And also, we still have that vacant spot, so we've got some coming through the pipeline overall in the sheriff's office, so hopefully we'll start getting some folks funneled out here as well. Our non-emergency response times for June was seven minutes and one second. And trends and special activities, those are all looking pretty good. Our crimes against persons just up slightly, but crimes against property is down, as well as financial crimes, vice crimes, crimes against society, and non-reportable crimes. calendar year to date. Our property crimes are still encompass the majority of the crime in town at 26% along with our non reportable. So non criminal offenses, 21% but just reported to be done. Our crimes against society at 19% and then crimes against person 12 along with vice crimes at 12 and white collar or financial crimes at 10%. So overall really not looking too bad as far as especially crimes against person violent crime things like that So going back to the or moving on to the highlights of about the the property. Security checks here is just a second but I just wanted to hit some highlights that some of the work that he's did last month. So it began in partnership with the the county and the county negotiations team we had a gentleman that was a suicidal he's actually holding a gun to his head. We've got their own fire department. We're just kind of just hanging out, waiting for them to talk. The negotiators got there, they were able to speak with this gentleman in depth for quite a while, got him to put the gun down, and then we were able to go talk with him in person. A guy was just going through a very rough time in his life, but we were able to talk to him, get him some help, and most importantly, get the gun removed from him at that moment and get him some help he needed. So it worked out very well, and I hope he's doing well to this day. and then secondly we had some deputies that were first on scene what was dispatched as a welfare check what they located was another unresponsive female so they began cpr administered narcan prior to fire department arrival so they were instrumental in in that life-saving process and that young lady began or she survived after she got to the hospital got advanced treatment And going back to the security checks and the numbers on those, I think that's definitely had a direct correlation with some of the property crimes being down. And to highlight some of the investigative work from our Harrisburg detectives, they made an arrest in a couple business break-ins within town. So Loyola was broken into twice, and City Wings was also broken in after hours. So through their good investigative work, they were able to locate those that were responsible for that and in partnership with CMPD and Conqueror Police, too. I think they had some offenses that occurred in their jurisdictions as well. And then, again, with the investigative work, three juvenile petitions were solved for an arson that occurred at the Harrisburg Village pool house. So those are juveniles, so hopefully it's a lesson learned from them, and it's not a huge scar on their record, their juvenile record, but holding them accountable for what could have been a very serious incident. matter. Fortunately, the fire department got there very quick, got that extinguished as well. I just wanted to highlight some of the work they did last month. I think they're looking pretty good. With that, I'd be more than happy to take any questions you may have.

I do have one question, and it's a North Carolina DOT issue. They're going to close Tom Query and Robinson Church Road. I don't know how that's going to work. If you go past the detour sign or people are going to be turning around in yards, is that going to create any traffic? I don't know a good way around that, and it's going to go on until probably the first part of August.

Yeah, that's a good question. I hope it doesn't. But we can certainly go down there and look. And it may end up having to work with Bubba Works, maybe get a few additional barricades to prevent some of those things happening. But I'll get in there and look. I'm trying to picture it in my head. I can kind of see it, but I need to see that person just to.

Yeah, you probably need to go look at it. There's no, you're sort of committed to go around that curve. And then I picture them, you know, putting the car in a ditch or turning around on the driveway or trying to find their own way. You might want to ride by there.

Yeah, absolutely. I would do that.

Have there been any updates related to the incident in the park on DeLaforte?

No, we got a couple of social media posts from. So there was a brief, very brief fight that happened, I think, in front of Cane's Corn Dogs, roughly where it was at. just kind of looking at that between when all the juveniles or i'm assuming most of them were juveniles started running um i don't think that really had any anything uh that wasn't a catalyst for all of the kids running i think that was just kind of an isolated incident so we were able to spot that by the time we were calling that out from uh right there at the command post you know it was within a minute or so and they're just running that way and then running this way It's like I was telling Rob, if you look across the state and across the country, some of those team takeovers and things like that are gaining a lot of popularity and inciting a lot of people to run just because of panic induced over I don't know what's happening. I can understand that. In my brain, is this a serious event? Is there an active shooter? Is there some type of whatever going on? But for all intents and purposes, there's nothing to say that what actually caused that particular event. Some of the, I guess they call them flash mobs or team takeover stuff, or they're like AI-generated social media posts that name a specific location in a specific time, and they just kind of, funnel it all out to all their friends on the social media stuff. So, I mean, that's a possibility. I'm not saying that's exactly what happened. I mean, it could have just been a word of mouth thing like, Hey, Hey guys, you know, nine 37, let's all start running this way and just spread the word. And it kind of happened. I mean, that could have been it, but I mean, there was nothing to indicate that, you know, any, it was anything other than just juveniles running. Um, but fortunately nobody was hurt. And, you know, again, if you look across the state, across the country, there's a lot of, A lot of activities like that that people did get hurt, so I'm glad that you know nobody at our part got hurt and it was. Just a. A bunch of kids running, more or less.

Right. My question wasn't about the stampede itself. It was about the fight, though.

Oh, the fight. Yes.

My question's directly about that.

No, all we've got is, like, Instagram post of repost of repost. So, allegedly, maybe like a friend of a friend of a friend's name. So, we don't really know who they are, if they're local. I mean, if they're juveniles. They look like juveniles, but we don't know anything about them. who they actually are or why the fight started between the two girls. Nobody's really come forward with any of that. We don't really have the legal justification to do search warrants and subpoenas for social media records because, really, if they're juveniles, then that would require a juvenile petition that mom and dad would have to be responsible for wanting to prosecute with. It's just like if it was two adults fighting and we didn't actually see it, it would be like, you can go seek a private warrant on this guy, you can go seek a private warrant on this guy, but that's on y'all to go do against each other, unless we charge them with like a fray or something like that. But as far as identifying them, we're kind of so far removed from it that I don't know that we'll truly know their identity, unless somebody directly that knew them or knows of them will give us some names or social media accounts to follow up with.

Any other questions for Lieutenant Helms? Thank you, sir. Next up, we have our fire department update, which you've done.

All right, good evening, Mayor and Council. Good evening. I'm sure you're all glad to have me back instead of Chief Wooten. He probably went into great detail, I'm sure. But anyway, so for the month of June, we start off with our fire marshal activities. You can see some pre-submittals, pre-plans, 17 of those, and those were all completed. Some fire prevention events. Ladder 31 attended the children's courtyard, and about 70 people were in attendance there. And then, of course, working on July 3rd and 4th, fireworks and all of that. They completed 39 inspections in the month of June. Ten of those were re-inspections. And then, as always, to the right, you can see some of the violations that we do find in our businesses. With fire extinguishers, again, leading the path. As far as our fire stats for the month of June, we did respond to 279 incidents. Our 90th percentile for the month of June was seven minutes and 31 seconds. As a reminder, our goal was seven minutes and 30 seconds. As far as the fires that we did have, some of those were cooking fires, other outside fires. We did have a couple of house fires, structural involvement, vegetation, grass fires, and a couple of vehicle fires. And then the chart to the right, you can see the property value versus the property loss, and that correlates to 78%. And that is it. Quick and easy.

Any questions for Chief Dunn?

All right.

Thank you, sir. Next up, we have our economic development update. Welcome, Ryan.

Thank you. Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. As we're moving fast, I'll keep this going. But as always, feel free to ask any questions if you see anything that pops up. So this is my update for the last quarter of our fiscal year. You may have noticed in the manager's report last week, we have a new format for some of our project activity information. So you'll see in June we added one new project. We're still getting a lot of project activity, just the real estate requests aren't matching with the current building inventory that we have in town, as well as the sites. So you'll see a lot of information there. What I wanted to highlight is projects by source, We're actually self-generating more projects than our other sources. So we love the folks at the county. They're sending us a lot of projects, but we're self-generating 18 of our projects. So those are coming either directly to the town or through our activities here from our ED department. So really exciting numbers for us. I think in the fall you'll see our projects increase and you'll see our ability to respond to projects increase as we see the potential for some increased additional industrial buildings here in town. This is an updated slide with our, if you remember, we talked about business climate last presentation. So the April number, you had some sort of concerning numbers about activity here in town with some of the foot traffic. So this is coming from the placer system that a lot of departments here at the town utilize. Those numbers have stabilized a little bit here in July. I think that may be tied to gas prices and just more activity. We hear from our friends at the Sheriff's Department there's more activity when the weather warms up. So hopefully more people are out spending more money. But we still have some locations, 33, much less than 50 in April that are seeing decline in foot traffic. The nice thing is we can pick up and go reach out to these companies and say, hey, what's going on? Can we include you in some of the communications effort that the town has to try to promote the business? Also added, good idea from Brian here, some curious stats on what are our more frequented spots in town. So you'll see our most active POI or our point of interest is Harris Square, so the public shopping center across the street. And you'll see the Chick-fil-A is off the charts for visits per square foot, as you would imagine. And they're actually in the 98th percentile of all Chick-fil-A's. So this is a top-notch facility. To be honest, none of us can understand the Chipotle number. We see it. We can't understand it. We might have to talk to a placer about that one. But they're apparently doing exceptionally well year to year. So really cool information. But this helps us when we have time. We can log in, pull some stats on companies before we meet with them. not just industrial office users, but also retail providers as well. We've been very active. Keeping with the July 4th theme, you may see Mr. Hot Dog himself, Joey Chestnut, in one of our pictures. We were at a trade show, saw a big crowd, and said, hey, who's that? And it was actually Joey Chestnut, so I had to get a photo op with him before he went to Coney Island for the challenge, which he won last week. But more importantly, we were there, about 25,000 people, in the retail world, learning new trends about potential locations that are open out, potential new trends in different markets. One cool story real quickly, we were walking through down an aisle and the company had a giant touchscreen so you could actually just move the map around like Google Maps. So we started playing around with it, and they had Harrisburg highlighted. So we were one of the towns that they had already identified as a potential location for a new market. So it was easy to say, hey, we're from Harrisburg. So we had a good conversation there. So really good event, lots of walking. If you've been to the Las Vegas Convention Center, it's enormous. So I think we averaged about 25,000 steps on this trip. Very tired. Attended a smaller show in Charlotte, the MDM show, which is a medical device manufacturing show. But partnered, you'll see the folks from the Bat Cave there at the bottom. I have no idea what they do. It's very technical, very engineering driven, but very cool. So they were able to answer a lot of questions about some of this technology. that's here within the region we're so close to benefit from. We also partnered with the Biotech Center. They had a booth, so we were able to work in and help man the booth. While we were there, a gentleman actually from Harrisburg came up, and the other folks in the group grabbed us and said, hey, you've got a citizen here, so we've had some continued dialogue with him. So just continuing to get out and tell the Harrisburg story. It's coming up in Wednesday. Wednesday morning we'll have Harrisburg Business Network's second meeting here at the council chambers. The picture you see at the bottom is from our first meeting back last month. Had a really good turnout there. Some very familiar faces for some people on the dais. But a really great format and it works. It's a great opportunity for us to get to know some of our small business owners and large business owners here in town. Great networking. So Wednesday morning, we're going to be presenting on our economic development efforts to HBN or Harrisburg Business Network. And we're still negotiating on trying to get our team from planning and management to give a comp plan update in September. So probably going to be getting that group plugged in as well. More information about what's happening in town. Really excited to have them here. Business retention expansion efforts continue to meet with our local companies. So we had eight visits with large companies for us. That's 20 or more employees, 12 with smaller companies, and then resource partners, 20 visits. So those are, you name it. It could be engineering firms, design firms, regional entities, just companies that we need to go out and touch and have dialogue with about what's happening here in town. Big day, fun day in May. The Hayek Fan Day, I was able to check and we actually did see some increased attendance at the Fan Day this, in 26. This was an enhanced effort. If you remember, I was here last year talking about we were increasing our relationship with Hayek. This year, our friends at Parks and Rec were kind enough to give us a tent. So we had giveaways from the town to some of the race fans who were in town for not just the 600, but to tour some of the race shops. Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who's the driver, met with the mayor and myself. And then we've got one of the coolest shots I think we've ever had. of the Chef Boyardee car right there with Michael Anderson. Got a great shot with the puddle. But to show the continued relationship with Hayek, their VP of marketing grabbed me and said, let's connect you to some of our sponsors and suppliers. So he opened some doors for me. We're continuing to grow that relationship. And Hayek, we're really just proud to have them in town. Hopefully you saw our display out front as well. Another big initiative to wrap up spring was Student Track. This is a really innovative project that Harrisburg is now much more involved with. But this was started in 21 and it's now sort of transitioned to the EDC, our County Economic Development Group. So we brought Stephanie on to the town. She was still very involved with track, with student track. So she was there all week with the students, all 20 of them. And we had two from Hickory Ridge and one from J.M. Robinson. But they go around, they tour the airport, the Sheriff's Department, the EMS, manufacturers, and really learn about different career paths. And these are students that are particularly chosen by their schools. So there may be students who, I don't know if I'm going to college. I don't know if I'm going to the military. So it was really informational. I was able to attend the airport session and the taser session that you're seeing there at the sheriff's department. But it was really cool to watch the students. They actually went through and explored a potential crime and learned crime scene investigation as a potential career path. The really interesting thing for me was the students wanted more. On Friday, as part of the surveys, they said, we'd like to do another week of this, which is amazing for high school students. I have two of them. They're not sometimes the most motivated. So that was really, it was important to me. And you'll see it at the top side there. Stephanie spoke at the graduation, as well as the Concord City manager and mayor, some other folks, and Gretchen, the CEO. of the Cabrera CDC. So we're proud to be involved and we'll continue to be more involved as student track moves forward. And then business development continuing as I alluded to getting out you'll see us in side-by-sides which was one of our favorite things to do. Go out and tour sites. We took Monterey out and toured Morehead West and you'll see Dr. Banks. We attended the The decision day at West Cabarrus. Thank you for speaking to the students. You did a great job there. But anytime we get the opportunity to get out in the community network, tell our story, we're always excited to do that. One fun picture there, and that's the 60th floor of the Bank of America Corporate Tower. But you ever get a chance to go up there, 100% do it. The view is incredible. I think, Chris, you asked if we could see Harrisburg. Unfortunately, we returned the other way. Wrong side of the building. Yeah, wrong side of the building. You can see we were looking towards B of A and Wells. But it's amazing looking down at the Wells Fargo building. That's quite a view. But I won't say with that. But thanks again for the opportunity to give you an update. I'd be glad to answer any questions if they are.

Hey, Ryan, I know you guys are on it, but the signage program that we're trying to dress up the signs around town, any progress with that?

Yes, so we're actually, it's one of the things we're going to bring up to HBN, the enhanced program that we have. So no applications in queue now, but as we go out and meet with companies, it's part of our toolbox. We've started to tell more people about it.

Right. I got some candidates for you.

Absolutely. Send them our way. Absolutely. They don't know. It's still voluntary, I guess, technically.

Any other questions for Ryan? Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Just a couple mayor comments. We have a few upcoming important dates. We do have a ribbon cutting on Thursday, July 23rd at Clear and Company Eye Care, and that's at 10 a.m. at Harris Square. There also is the Sheriff's National Night Out. That's always a great event at the Cabarrus Arena. That is on August 4th from 5 to 7 p.m. It's a very family-friendly event, so bring your kids out. They usually have a good time. seeing all of the different setups around the track inside the arena. And looking forward to seeing everyone at our next Rockin' the Burg concert. That is on August 8th. I think the band is called September, so do not get confused. It's on August 8th with the band September, so looking forward to seeing you all there. And with that, we'll have council comments.

We also have a ribbon cutting for the Stephen and Morris Behavioral Health Center that's going to be opening in Concord, and that is July 28th at 1130. Do understand that that is your only opportunity to be inside the building because it will open immediately after and you cannot go in at that point. We did have our Mental Health Advisory Board meeting, our quarterly meeting in June, where we talked a lot about what the implications are of the VA Rehabilitation Center, and then carrying that over to how do we have more preventative work in our communities. It was really great, highlighted the importance of networking and attending events and conferences that are happening around us because I was able to talk to them directly about some of the vendors and law enforcement opportunities, mental health professional opportunities that we had breakout sessions on at City Vision. Again, thank you to our parks team and every other staff member that made July 4th what it was. We did have our summit in Kannapolis where we learned about water sewer stuff again, and I feel like that is just such an interesting topic that I know that Chad gets lost in the software numbers and all that. He says he speaks this engineer language, but it's really important to understand that so that we understand what this means for us and the cost that could potentially come along with it. And I did send an email to RMS or risk management because I am concerned about the vulnerabilities that could be created with HB 171, what that looks like for us as a municipality, because it could open the door for more lawsuits for us or any lawsuits for us. And I will say as a last, in serving on the board of trustees, I was elected vice chair. So I'll carry that role for a while. That was also decided in our June meeting.

And I think that's all that I have for today. I'll jump in. I want to thank Parks and Rec for their help with our Juneteenth. We had a successful Juneteenth celebration in June. I think it was well attended until the storm came. We had to run fast. But it was really good. Hopefully we can continue to do that in Harrisburg. Also, Councilman Glover attended with me as well. Pastor Watkins of Oak Grove is retiring. And so they're getting a new pastor. And so we said some remarks at his retirement in June. So that was pretty nice. And he'll still be around and of course advocating for Harrisburg. It was nice to be there in support of him. Again, I can't say enough about 4th of July. It was great for my first time. So I wanted to say that again. And also, I just recently went to a meeting talking about co-governance and had the opportunity to talk to some other meet people across the country. I look forward to bringing that back to our council workshop that we're gonna have about co-governance, how to combat data centers, and things like that. And also, and I will be remiss if I don't mention this again, that yes, the diets has not been updated and like something that was mentioned earlier, I too hope that it is not based on race and partisan politics and I'm looking forward to our meeting, our workshop with the council so that we can resolve this issue so that we don't have to talk about it and that it's based in something that makes sense to everybody. and so that this can be behind us, because Harrisburg is my community as well. I love it here, and I love the community, I love the people, I love my neighbors, And I don't want to think that we are in a space that we have to deal with race. I mean, we see that enough on the federal level, and we don't want to make that a local issue. And so I look forward to resolving this with my council members and figuring out how we can do this in a way that's equitable, that's transparent, and that's consistent, because there has been a departure. And so we need to address the elephant in the room as a council and figure out how we're going to move forward. And so that's all I have for now.

um i'd just like to say uh to ron smith if he's listening in somewhere we're thinking about him i know how dedicated he is he's got a personal matter that he's dealing with but uh he also did check in last week so he cares about harrisburg and we care about him

All right. We do not have any public hearings. We do not have any old business. And we have three items of new business. And Jonathan Young is going to spend the rest of the evening with us presenting these three items of new business. First up is consideration of construction contract with Cal Marketing Group for the town hall second floor upfit. Welcome, Jonathan.

A lot of words. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Happy to be here tonight, especially for this first item. Something we've been working on for a while, so I'm excited to bring it before you. Just a quick background on this project. As everybody knows, or most know, that the second floor of Town Hall was previously occupied by Harrisburg YMCA. Since that departure, we've been working as a staff and with consultants to do some long and short-term improvements there. As you can walk around our first floor here, you can see we're over capacity. We've got people kind of in the hallways, actually in the hallways. It's not safe, obviously, for movement in the area, so we need to get our staff upstairs. This contract actually includes some short-term improvements that are tied directly to that long-term work. So we actually have Creech, who's doing our long-term project, or our larger project for the outfit of the downstairs. They're doing this project for us. They're doing the architecture work on it. And they have actually incorporated what you'll see tonight into their plan. So we do suspect, or actually we know, that this project's going to tie directly into that. There'll be little that will have to be done to the upstairs once we move into the second phase. One thing I didn't put on here, and I forgot to mention as well, is a lot of our staff actually participated in the demo work, and we did do a lot of that in-house. So everything upstairs is demoed out right after the YMCA left, so all that is ready for this update. This does include construction to install new offices, demo, renovate existing spaces, which there are a few walls that will have to come down, and then create new staff areas and bring area up to code. Things that are included in this particular contract is office up fit, renovated staff areas, restroom improvements, flooring, painting, electrical and plumbing, HVAC work, doors, framing, ceiling, tile, and window wall. Not included in this contract but will be done are sprinkler adjustments, blinds, technology, IT items, furniture. Again, those things will be coming forward, just not in this contract. Just pay the schedule assuming award tonight. We we do anticipate contract execution in roughly August 1st. And then anticipate construction start in September 1st. That gap is for some permitting. We actually are working on permitting. We received the drawings final drawings tonight actually today before I got here. So we are anticipating doing some permitting in that gap there. Roughly three months of construction time with a move in just before Christmas that is our goal. And I know we've got several staff members that hope that is happening. So that is the anticipated goal here that that is a Christmas present for our staff. So we're working towards that. So just a quick overview of our floor plan. I know you can't see this and on your left some will zoom in some of the areas and kind of give you an idea of what we're looking at. So I'll start with the left-hand side of the building. So if you're facing the building from outside, this is the left top floor. Just to kind of give you an idea of what we've got going on, we have our town manager's office. These are actually existing spaces right now. So if you were to go up there, which I'd be glad to take anybody up anytime, this space already exists. There's actually a small restroom there. Deputy town manager's office would be right beside that and office manager here. Again, corridor here. We serve the executive offices along here with our executive assistant. I think I really want to point out here is this multi purpose room. So this is an existing room already. But really serves us for training. We're planning some furniture in there, have TVs on the walls, bringing in some some large spaces, some other things that might need to occur in here. This this is going to be a great space that we don't have right now. All of our, for example, our lecture learns are occur in this this area right now and in our town council chambers. That'll be really good. Right hand side of the building. These are where it just used to be the YMCA part. This was all open space or actually is right now. We are adding some department head offices there. There will be some room for assistant department heads as well. A large conference area. This conference area is probably about 40% bigger than our existing conference area downstairs here. and then a larger break room in the back. While I'm on this slide, I do want to point out, actually, our first floor will still be utilized. Customer service is going to remain down here, and then also our existing conference areas as well, so we can bring in folks down here and still utilize this space. Also, when this went, assuming award of this project, When we're doing a lot of this work down here, we do anticipate being able to utilize the upstairs for staff and keeping that going. So the hope is we can move folks up and then be able to renovate down here if that project moves forward. And then the last area, kind of the middle, give you kind of just step by step here. We've got an open space. This is going to be some cubicles in here. Again, these are existing offices here, but they'll be department heads. Our lobby comes up from the stairs and the existing elevator restrooms will be renovated. We do have some existing additional meeting rooms back here. These will again just be spaces smaller conference room type spaces and then a little area back here and more of a sitting area kind of we should call it rest stop but best of you'll give a little space for just kind of chilling out. This went back for an 89,670 dollars and 29 cent got down to the penny there. Contract with Mikkel marketing group that's the same companies actually doing our work over at the restroom open woods. Funded with overall town renovation project budget no budget amendment require we're using the that existing budget. Procured through informal bidding process, three bids were evaluated. Kale was determined to be the lowest responsible bidder, and it does require council approval since it's above the town manager's approval threshold. Again, as always, this supports the town's goal of providing safe, well-maintained, dependable public facilities, systems, and services. take questions i just have one question yes sir it's not related to the financial how long will this last so is this going to give you 10 room to grow over the next five years are you going to be back here next year going in the building or no that's actually a great question so we actually took into account so creech did a a study for us so we can look at what we're going to need for that 20 year it always says 20 year you're never really going to get that because if you look at the study it's like we're going to have you know harrisburg is going to be 100 000 people And you're going to need 50 people, you know, 50 new people. So you kind of scale that back a little bit. We took that and that's how we applied it to the upstairs to get those spaces, essentially. So our goal is lasting five to ten years again, probably in that ten year range.

But some of these offices are generic where you say department head, you may not have a department.

That's right. Generic. This is our plan for the spaces right now. We we took people and put them in spaces to utilize what we think is going to need we're going to need there but yes and cubicles i didn't lay it out on here but we actually are planning for roughly 20 around 24 cubicles in that area they will have their own doors that's the goal and they're a little bit larger than we have now so it gives people a little more space

Any of those meeting rooms will be able to use for community spaces or are you planning some of that on the first floor?

That's a great, great question. We hadn't really nailed that down yet. The training space is open to we do feel like it'll be open to be able to come in and be some things in there. I don't know exactly what that's going to communicate down to. We do anticipate this being a little more open for community type things, especially with our executive conference room and some of our other spaces. And even with some of our staff, they're moving out. So, for example, over there in the Parks and Recreation building or Parks and Recreation side or finance, actually the middle area, those cubicles will all be moved. That space will open back up as well.

So that'd be that'd be an area where I used to be like, I remember kids were doing art classes or something. It did. Yeah. Yeah.

It was a space that we utilized before for something like that. So we do anticipate that would be coming something for the short term, too.

Any other questions for Jonathan?

All budgeted, right?

Yes, sir. To the penny. To the penny. All right. With that, is there a motion to approve a construction contract with Kell Marketing Group for the town hall second floor outfit in an amount not to exceed $489,670.29, inclusive of applicable taxes and fees, and authorize the town manager to execute the contract in a form approved by the town attorney and finance officer. motion second second all in favor all right motion is carried thank you our next item up for consideration is the purchase of installation contract with atlanta power solutions for town hall backup generator and related fiscal year twenty twenty seven budget ordinance amendments

Thank you, Mayor and Council, again. So this is a project I've been working on for a little bit of time. Actually, when I got here almost a year and a half ago, it was something we've been working towards. Really excited, again, to bring this one as well. I do feel like it's an integral piece to our town hall, especially with the outfits and other things going on. Again, you can see some of the background here. Provides backup power during outage situations. Improves safety and reliability for staff and community. Protects personnel files and technology infrastructure that we have housed here. Ensures continuity during emergency and non-emergency power outages. Just one thing to add. Right now, outside of our fire departments, our public works facility is our only operational facility with an existing generator. Funding history originally budgeted in FY 2025. We did it there, quote, exceeded available funding. We revised that scope and have been working on getting some additional vendors to meet the need, which we do feel like this is meeting that need tonight. A scope is proposed generator part and will power the entire town hall and we saw that based on peak demands we had that we work with Duke energy basically get our peak demands were for the entire facility. That was one thing that we kind of narrow down in scope, and then work with some of the vendors that work with municipalities to get to where we are tonight. It wasn't formally bid. Project cost fell below the formal bidding threshold. Staff solicited three quotes for purchase and installation work. We do receive two quotes. One was determined nonresponsive, and staff determined Atlantic Power Solutions Incorporated to be the lowest responsive and responsible bidder provider. Again, just a general idea. This is actually the generator that we'll be getting, not necessarily this one, but the color and scheme. This is typical what you'll see in hospital situations. The size of it is actually around 18 feet by 6 feet, so I was trying to compare it. It would fit in between me and that diets where it comes up right there so and in space to it's it's really not a big generators 400 kilowatts. Again, mostly office uses really something that doesn't take a lot of power. In just a quick idea of where we are in the rear where we're planning on adding this. This is the rear of the building to the boat. This is not representative of the size. I just put a square on their rectangle. I guess is what that is approximate location. So it actually ties into all the existing meter bases there right along this wall. You can't see him there inside that brick area or enclosed area. So it ties directly into there. So automatic transfers to which switches will be put in place and then staff will come back. It does not include any landscaping around here, so we'll come in and do some screening on there. Again, fiscal impact is $205,000. It's funded equally from the Capital Reserve Fund and General Fund. And the capital reserve fund and water sewer fund a $102,500 each per the if if what 27 budget ordinance amendment tonight's request is for the contract approval of $219,220 that includes taxes that budget amendment you saw above their covers the expense we don't need to we don't need a budget for the taxes. And then originally budgeted FY25 for funds remain in a capital reserve funds for future use. You can see a breakdown of those funding a little bit over here. And then it does support the town's goal of safe, well-maintained, and dependable public facilities and services.

Questions?

diesel gas. It is diesel. It's 48 hour diesel tank.

How much 48 hour diesel tank 48 hours and then there's recurring charge. You got to crank this thing. You got to keep it maintained. You got to keep the diesel fresh. What's that recurring?

We actually already have a contract that does that work. We've got generators in every one of our existing facilities now. So no incremental cost. We'll just have to add that one to it. It'll be some cost to it, but I don't know exactly what that means for me.

How often has the power gone off here? Because when you buy this generator, it's never going off.

We were discussing that. We actually, last week, we feel like this year, and I did not have a chance to reach out to Duke Energy. They keep those things. I know it was at least 3 times last year. I know we had a couple power poles that were hit. That's generally where you get the major. You get any traffic signal or any power pole that's hit along 49 tends to turn off the power here. I know there was at least one storm. I think it was 3 or 4 times last year. We feel like it's averaging about 3 or 4. And that's our generator over in Public Works turned on 3 times last year. So roughly going to be the same.

Any other questions for Jonathan? All right. With that, is there a motion to approve and prove a purchase of installation contract with Atlantic Power Solutions for a 400 kilowatt diesel backup generator for town hall in the amount not to exceed two hundred nineteen thousand two hundred twenty dollars and eighteen cents, including taxes. and authorize the town manager to execute the contract in a form approved by the town attorney and finance officer and approve the related fiscal year 2027 budget ordinance amendments. Is there a motion to approve?

Second.

Second. All in favor. Motion is carried. Thank you. And lastly, for our item of new business is consideration of construction services contract with Carolina Site Works for the Oakley Drive Sidewalk Project and related fiscal year 2027 budget and capital project ordinance amendments.

Again a lot of words good evening again mayor council. Thank you for hearing this one as well. This is a project. I know we've as near and dear to several folks heart we've been trying to get it passed and get it get it going actually thought about it with the dog park tonight. It will tie really right in with that dollar park and have that sidewall going all the way along Oakley to make connections there so I was actually looking at it on my Google maps just to make sure that we had you know that area covered But again, the project purpose and scope, Town Harrisburg, focuses on pedestrian-friendly and accessible town. It does add sidewalks, curb and gutter, storm drainage improvements along Oakley Drive, Sims Parkway, between Sims Parkway and Harris Depot. It was actually funded in FY24 CIP. The project has experienced delays due to various circumstances. just a couple of quick call savings analysis here we did. Town staff did complete the design in-house survey only was contracted saving roughly $30,000. And then town staffs going to install the planned Sims Parkway pedestrian crossing, which is estimated to savings of about $20,000. Project was formally bid due to uncertainty anticipated bid range. Seven bids were received by staff that parent low bidder withdrew their bid. We do allow that in our bid processing. Staff received with Carolina Siteworks the next lowest responsive responsible bidder. And we did do some value engineering and quantity adjustments with Carolina Siteworks that reduced the construction cost down to $387,977, which is why it varies from what you see in your bid tab there. And Here's a little bit of a schedule in July 13th assuming approval tonight. September 1st is a construction start. December 4th is actually in the contract for December 4th completion and then town staff would come in right after that installed the pedestrian cross we actually already have this pedestrian crossing equipment we purchased it along with the the pedestrian crossing equipment for raging Ridge the connection there as well. Really not a lot to put it in. So it's really just making sure we're not in the way of the contractors doing work there This is the existing area Just point out it is on one side of Oakley Drive on the north side there It does connect down here with some existing sidewalk just behind chill dog. So that's where that is located there Lots of folks walking along here July 4th, obviously along this corridor We do keep this road closed at that time. But again, I think it's a really important connection here and Inters is this inside Wolfman Harris depot and obviously along Sam's as well. Fiscal impact is 413,000 dollars. Construction contractor on site working incorporated not to exceed 387,977. Plus, the pedestrian crossing equipment, I told you we were already purchasing. And that came in and I can't remember, around $15,000, I think. And so this is funded through the capital projects fund from transportation, including $163,000 transfer from capital reserve fund, general fund. Just a reminder, in-house design, survey, and installation saved approximately $50,000. Kind of breakdown over there on the other side. And then this does support town's goal of safe, well-maintained, and dependable public facilities and services.

I didn't understand the contingency. Is that in here or out of here? Or you're allowed to go out? What's the contingency part?

It's 10% contingency in the contract itself.

It is?

Yeah. Yeah. The actual contract for you was, whatever it is, $30,000 just shy of that. And then you have the contingency built in. So technically, it's in that contract itself. Does it come in for less? what's that we could come in for less absolutely yeah you could multiple depends it could happen I hate to say that up here in front of everybody yes it really depends in a situation like this and I'll go ahead and tell you know you got sidewalk in and you've got curb and gutter you know you could run into some specially in older neighborhoods where you utilize that contingency a lot of times you can come in under that budget so we could come in whatever the 10% in the gap somewhere there.

I know there's several neighbors that have reached out year after year and this could not come quick enough because there is such a huge increase in the traffic since the YMCA opened to avoid 49. It's a major cut through. So I'm very excited to see this for the safety of those residents. And it's tight through there. It's very tight.

Yeah, one of the things we're trying to do there, too, is we want to keep the existing network along there, really trying to fit it into the neighborhood as opposed to tearing down all the trees and things like that. So we feel like we've got a good plan. Yeah, there's some big trees through there. There are some older, bigger trees in there. We feel like we've got a good plan to do that.

Are there any other questions for Jonathan? All right. With that, is there a motion to approve a construction construction services contract with Carolina SiteWorks for the Oakley Drive sidewalk project in the amount not to exceed three hundred eighty seven thousand nine hundred and seventy seven dollars, authorizing the town manager to execute the contract in a form approved by the town attorney and finance officer and approve the related fiscal year 2027 budget ordinance and capital project ordinance amendments. So move. Is there a second? Second. All in favor? Motion is carried. Thank you, Jonathan, for three successful presentations this evening. Rob, action items. I just had one review the Sports Hall of Fame handout that Coach Smith provided with us because there was a monetary ask, I think, to give counsel enough time to kind of go through that to see if there's any questions and we can revisit that.

We'll add that to the list. I had one less than you had. Okay.

Wonderful. We do not have a need for closed session this evening. So with that, is there a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Motion is carried. Thank you all.