Town Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening. We'd like to call to order our September council meeting. Thanks to everyone joining us in council chambers as well as joining us online via the YouTube channel. We will move right into our agenda tonight. First up is the agenda adoption. Is there a motion on the floor to adopt the agenda as presented this evening?

So moved.

Second?

Second.

Pick. All in favor? Aye. Motion is carried. Thank you.

I'd like to pull out. come to amend the agenda please there is an option is a name in the consent agenda to pull out a C and I pull out what a C and I think I have to do a motion for each one of those

Is there a motion to pull out consent agenda item A? Yes. Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Aye. Motion did not pass. Motion to pull out item C. Is there a motion on the floor?

Second.

Your motion?

Yes. And I second it.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Aye. Motion did not pass. Motion to pull out item I on consent agenda? Yes. Motion.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed?

Aye.

Motion did not carry. Is there a motion? I think we already, do we need to go back to the consent agenda, like approving it? Or did you get it on that? Motion to approve consent agenda.

Motion.

Second. Second. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Nay. Motion is carried. We will move into our invocation this evening, and Councilman Thevenin will lead us tonight.

Mayor, if we could just have a moment of silence for our friend and former colleague, Zach Gordon. So if you wouldn't mind just bowing your head, let's have a moment of silence. Thank you, Father. We thank you for this evening, God, an opportunity to come again as a group to talk about the town business. God, just ask, as usual, to God, just grant us favor as we continue to move about our town. God, again, let us treat each other with respect and dignity and kindness, and we just pray all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Everyone, please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. We do not have any special presentations this evening. So at this time, we will move into our public comments. Anyone wishing to address the town council, there was a sign up outside. We do have that up here. Please make sure to state your name and address for the record. We do have quite a few signed up to speak this evening. If everyone could please stay within those three minutes. If there's any additional information, please feel free to email us at the council email address. First up, we have Jim Fairchild. And again, just make sure you state your name and address.

Hi, I'm Jim Fairchild. My address is 8033 Stillhouse Lane in Harrisburg. I'm a 34-year resident of Harrisburg, and I'm here as a proponent of Harrisburg's trails and greenways. I live in the courtyards on Robinson Church. I want to thank you for your role in getting our community connected to the Fuda Creek Trail. We are a pedestrian crossing away from completing the committed connectivity on this. I'm really excited about that. Plus street light, or red lights. I understand that the next steps for the Fuda Creek Greenway are, I think, solely with Harrisburg at this point. I think Rob's church... uh epcon's pretty much completed their thing other than the again the street light to connect to connect with the camelot huntwick at somerset lane to get the pudic creek all the way there that will open up the pudic creek gem of a trail to many more residents and improving their quality of life and probably property values Just a little anecdote. Last week, my wife and I used the sidewalks of Bridge Point to get to the Back Creek Trail at Berg Church. We were walking the trail and heard the Hickory Ridge High School band through the trees. We used the new connector that Joan helped us with get done, and were able to sit in the stands on a Saturday morning and watch and listen to the band practice. Just a classic slice of small-town America. Thank you for your continuing support of the Harrisburg Greenways and hope we get more greenways open. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Fairchild. Nicole Eskew.

Nicole Eskew, 8010 Wycombe Court. Good evening. I'm mayor and council. I just wanted to share my excitement and enthusiasm for your new business tonight, line item A, for the Fuda Creek Greenway. Greenways fundamentally change our daily lives. And just to give you a quick example, this month, for my daughter in particular, the courtyards had just completed the Fuda Creek Greenway portion. And that connected into Tottingham Drive and Fenton Dell, which is my neighborhood. And my daughter's been waiting over a year to walk to school. A couple weeks ago, mom, mom, it's open. We're going. We walked to school. And the time spent is very enjoyable. We take the dog. He's a little reluctant to come back after she goes off on her way. But it's just an enjoyable time. And she has an option to walk. She could ride the bus 30, 40 minutes. She can walk in 22 minutes. So it's just a great opportunity for us to spend some time. But it caught on, and she's got a friend that will go sometimes from the neighborhood as well, and another friend from Orchard Park. Actually, her mom drives her over to our driveway, and they walk. So I'm just very grateful for this and looking for other connections for the Camelot-Huntwick children to have an opportunity to walk to school as well. Again, it's not just for our students. It's for everybody of all ages. expecting mothers, and all the way to 99. And so I just am in great support of this project. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Eskew.

Catherine Jett.

I'm Catherine Jett. I live at 8213 Colorado Road in Harrisburg in the division. So I'm really excited to have the Greenway open so we can walk to school and around town the grocery store.

thank you Ms. Chutt Karen Cornett I hope I got that right Karen Sorry, y'all. I cannot rewrite it today.

It's okay. It's the handwriting. No worries. My name is Carly Cornett, address 7969 Dell Drive. Yeah, also just wanted to echo some of the other speakers tonight that, you know, we've been excited over the past several months to see Greenways and just different ways of the community being able to connect in very physical and tangible ways start to manifest. I've got two kids who are with me here tonight and part of what we've had the pleasure of doing via you know town council meetings and other activities in town is help teaching them what it means to be a good neighbor good community member and so that access to physically the rest of their community really enhances that you know day-to-day ability to go see their neighbors to engage with the people in their community and and yeah we're just excited to see that continue and are you know yeah grateful for all the work that's been done on this end to you know get us to where we are today so thank you thank you Rosa Culver Sims 93 minutes to catch my breath

We've been having the same conversation now for, we're into 10 months, where we've been trying to get Dr. Banks recognized on the dais as a mere pro tem. And we seem to be at a stalemate or something. But Groundhog Day continues. Now 10 months of Groundhog Day I think is enough. Everybody sitting there that voted for her to be mayor pro temp needs to say, speak up and say, we're done. Put it on the dais and let's call it a day. This is not a hill that you need to die on. It really ain't that serious when you think about it. Thank you.

Thank you. Jim Eskew.

all right i forgot my pointer uh jim sq 8010 wacoma court here on behalf of friends of harrisburg greenways and i wanted to take some time to just talk about how tonight's agenda item fits into the bigger picture so you can see up here the full fuda creek greenway it starts in churchill farms winds down goes through the crossings at robinson church that's the newest section and then picks back up in farmington and so what we're here to talk about tonight is the connection to huntwick and camelot that'll unlock or bring online 235 additional homes into the Greenway network. So you can see here that this is not just a Camelot project. It's not a Fenton Dell project. This is a Harrisburg project that everyone is going to benefit from. Now, the maps really only tell part of the story. I got it. The other part of the story is what residents are asking for. So this is not my data. This is the town's data. It came out of the parks survey. So you can see here, you know, this is what people wanted to invest in. We have soccer fields at 7%. We spent about $2.5 million on that last year. And then we have off-leash dog parks. That's another $125,000. And then way up at the top, there's paved connectivity trails. And that's at 34%. So if we were to invest proportionately, we would be spending about $12 million on greenways. Lucky for us, we don't need to do that. This project has zero land acquisition costs. It's going to go on town property. It's going to go on HOA property, which is dedicated for this purpose. And it's my understanding that the design costs have also been covered by a state appropriation. So we also want to Acknowledge that there are people that live along this greenway And the change is very real for them. It's very personal for them and so we appreciate all the effort the town has Gone through to meet with those neighbors to hear their concerns And as an organization, it is our mission to not just build more trail but also do that thoughtfully and do right by those people that do live along the greenway and i think that this design can achieve that So, you know, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, there's going to be more houses. There's going to be more people. There's going to be different people. But, you know, the Fruity Creek Greenway will be there for people to enjoy in perpetuity thanks to your leadership tonight. With that, I just wanted to give a quick plug for our story walk, which will be on the Back Creek Greenway from September 28th to October 8th. And we'll have a guided walk with Miss Amanda at 10 a.m. on September 29th. So come out for that. Bring your kids. Bring your grandkids. We had a great turnout last time, and we hope to see you there. Thank you.

Thank you, Jim. Kimberly Neifer, and sorry if I butchered that last name too.

Not butchered. It was a good guess. Knifer. Kimberly Knifer. I made it 8483 Plantation Way here in Harrisburg. I'm assuming from my shirt you guys can tell what I'm here to say. But I actually wanted to come up here also to thank you because I wanted to also tell you about my favorite memory from this past spring. am also a den leader for the cub scout troop 83 over at rocky river presbyterian and they set up a bike rally on the back creek greenway and if you have never seen 25 to 35 children on bikes and scooters like raring to go it was amazing and it just It encouraged me and my family to get out on the greenways all summer long, especially along Back Creek because it's beautiful there. But also we are super excited about the extension along Fuda Creek and we really hope that you will continue to invest in that to extend further up to Camelot. And I'm really, really super excited about the possibility of getting over to Harrisburg Park from there as well. you all have really concentrated on benefiting our community and it shows in these investments please continue and we thank you so much thank you Kimberly Allison Houlihan

Hello. I'm Allison Houlihan, 8307 Camelot Drive. I live in the Camelot-Huntwick subdivision, and I am here also to encourage you to continue. I really appreciate what you guys have done so far. I have three children, my two boys. One is a freshman in college, and one is a freshman at high school now, and they both love to ride their bikes around town. Now, my college student had to ride bikes around town on the dangerous roads. We had lights for his bikes, and We had to trust him to do his best, and he's still around. But I would love to have more greenways for my children. It's a great way to get outside. Kids need to get outside. They need to be out there. And unfortunately, I love Harrisburg. I teach at Harrisburg Elementary. I'm part of the Friends of the Harrisburg Library. I do love Harrisburg but I wish we had more sidewalks and I love my community but I really want my children to be safe and we have some super fast roads around here and it's just not safe for them so if the Greenway could continue to be connected it would be great I would love to have my kids walk to school if they would that early in the morning high school pretty rough But I do love that they can get around. My son works at Publix, and he has even walked to work sometimes, but even before the Greenways. So it always makes me a little nervous. So I really do appreciate the hard work that has gone into the Greenways, and I hope that you guys continue to grow this community and keep it walkable, bikeable, exercise-friendly for generations to come. Thank you. Thank you. Fred Brillante?

Fred Berlanti, 7646 Windsor Forest Place. Yeah, I'm just here for the Greenway. I think the pedestrian connectivity is a really struggle in Harrisburg. There's just not the connectivity. Even just my son, who's a teenager, really doesn't have anywhere to go. The neighbors are very landlocked. He ends up walking up trails and paths and just in really dangerous situations. He's got epilepsy, so it may be hard for him to drive. So anything we could do to improve that would be really great. And I think the number of cars on the road, I'm not saying we have to stop all cars, but if we could alleviate some of that with pedestrian pathways, it would be a great help. I'd really appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

That concludes public hearing or public comments this evening. we will move into consent agenda is there a motion on the floor to approve the consent agenda as presented motion there a second second all in favor I'm opposed the motion is carried me right into communications for stuff we've got our town manager.

I'm sorry went out. I'll defer to to rich on this one because it really comes down to a council rules is what is what governs

it doesn't have to be as long as someone makes the motion or says it then it has to be my first time yeah

If I understand the questions I couldn't hear everything that was said it's quite the question is on the motion to approve the consent agenda does have to be a unanimous and that's not no it doesn't have to it's just a majority vote on that you voted separately on a couple items be before that to remove them, and those were voted down. So when it came to the vote on the whole agenda, it's basically a majority vote with the council like it is for everything else.

Thank you, Rich. No, that's not correct. If we can go back and look at the statutes, it says if a council person anyone says that they need something to be removed because they have questions about it, it's to be removed. It does not need to be a vote. So if you can show me where it says it.

Well, I don't have it with me now. Oh, I do. But I can just say that you voted on that earlier.

No, we voted on it to be moved, and it wasn't moved. So what I'm saying is that if a council person says that they want it to be moved, it's supposed to be moved. It doesn't require a vote. But I mean, if you said, show me that it's not, and then we can move on.

Well, I can't do that right now. I don't have the authority with me. If I'd known this was going to come up, I would have had it with me. But you're right that someone asked to have it removed. But what happened is you all voted on that matter to be removed. And it was voted down. So it stayed on the consent agenda. So that's a different situation from what you're talking about.

But the consent agenda is supposed to be things that are not... Sorry, that might be why you couldn't hear me earlier. The consent agenda is for things that are not controversial.

Well, that is the purpose of it. You're right about that. But when you vote to deal with it separately and it's decided on that particular item that it's going to stay on the consent agenda, then it stayed on the consent agenda. That's the way I understand the law on that. So let me ask you this. What would happen given what's happened tonight if you take the position that you take that has come off the consent agenda? What is the result? It's already been voted down.

The result is to have an opportunity to talk about it, to address what we want to be amended. So we have concerns about how it's written in the consent agenda, which is why we wanted it to be removed so that we can talk about what changes we want. Because as presented, it's not correct. It's not accurate.

Well, that would have been nice to know when this came out a week ago. I mean, if you guys could have let us know there was an issue with it, we could have had discussion.

Well, we have no obligation to let you know ahead of time. So we're letting you know now.

I'll weigh in for one moment as a senior council member. In the past, in the years that I've served, if someone is questioning the minutes, there's a couple of things that happen. Usually, you reach out to your fellow council members and say, hey, there's an anomaly in the minutes. I'd like to bring it up. You explain what you're doing. You can even send an email and let us know. But to do that, I've never seen it work before. Generally, it's just been practical to let everybody know that you have a concern or even bring it out and email. As the mayor mentioned, we get it a week ahead of time. call it out then. If it's an anomaly, it can be adjusted before we get to this point and make a vote on it. So I think it's more that folks needed to be aware of what we were, the concern that you're pointing out.

I mean, go ahead. No, I agree. We could have done it that way, but we didn't. Well, it's been approved.

Right now, we've approved these items as part of the consent agenda. Well, the majority approved it. So we will move on.

Even if you pull it out, it's like it's already been approved. But also, just make sure that if we decide to move forward, that it's noted in the records that we were against and that it's inaccurate. And so I think the best practice will be to make sure that we know what's accurate before we have meeting notes that's not reflective of the entire board or what we talked about.

I guess that'll be in the minutes. That'll be reflected. But what I would say to the council at this point, given this issue having been brought up, does the council want to reconsider that vote and maybe pull these matters off and talk about them separately? You can still do that, even though you just voted on it. because it's not been brought up after the vote, that there are people on your council that want to consider it separately. You can do that, but it still would be by a majority vote. If you want to do that, you can. But the reason I answered the way I did at the beginning is because that was already done. before it even got to the consent agenda. Those matters were asked to be brought up separately. And the whole council said they didn't want to do that. So it's still a majority vote of the council. And it seemed to me that that issue about considering it separately had already been decided.

but we can agree to disagree and that's that's for okay we will move into our communications from.

Evening, Mayor and Council. A few quick updates for this evening before we get into the meat of the agenda. Just looking back at our updates for August, wanted to bring a few things to your attention. We had over 3,000 people show up at Rocking the Berg. It's one of the larger attendance that we've had in quite a while. We also had, just by the numbers here, over 100 tons of stone donated. by Vulcan for the fire department sheriff's combo storage building that you guys approved in last year's budget. So that was a nice surprise that staff let us know when they got that project started. CPRs, we've done four this year. We've saved four people. All four CPRs ended up with saves. Most people were discharged without incident from the hospital. So great work from our staff. More than $15,000 we have saved by either getting donations or doing work in-house and you'll see a few projects with that where we did some foundations for the signal pedestals in-house with our public works folks and including those that donated stone for the storage building. Three internal promotions including the promotion from Public Works to Assistant Manager slash Public Works by John who will be presenting later on today on the agenda as well as two others. Then the fire marshal 100 percent on schedule for those fire inspections. Despite being 100% fire inspections, you still see the picture here and you'll get to see a little bit more, the heavier incident load continues to be an issue for our fire department. This is the second light fixture that caught fire at Gold's Gym. Several others, natural gas leaks, mutual aid to Charlotte, we just seem to be getting busier and busier and busier. As soon as we slow down a little bit and we end up with a structure fire or one of these things that jump up on us. Our guys have responded in record time and we continue to have really set those records for the property damage that we've been able to save. A few serious crashes. Again, our public safety folks out there. Without delay, we had the overturned vehicle at Highway 49 and Main Street, which many of you saw, as well as the vehicle that made famous on social media that drove right into the middle of Vortex Bottle Shop. Some small injuries there, but fortunately it could have been a lot, lot worse. So injured several patrons, but they were back in business the next day, and our folks once again just responded fantastically. Swift Water Team was also activated this month. We deployed to Midland during the week of the 10th for some flash flooding. No rescues were required, but we were out there just in case. And those things happen real quick. For those of you that remember, it was last year, maybe a year and a half ago. We can have one of those incidents here. And there's the famous picture that goes around with the lady in the tall SUV where the water's up to her shoulders and she's kind of waiting for us to go out on farm mill there to get her out of the vehicle. So it doesn't take long when that water starts rising for us to get in trouble here. And Chief Fox and Captain Boss also went and completed their training in Vermont. They made that connection during Hurricane Helene. Vermont's rescue team was down here for months and months and Chief Fox deployed right next to them and our folks deployed with them. So now they do joint training. and certifications together. We saw the folks come up here. I was really excited. Most of the time when we get to these council meetings, we get people coming in telling us where we're coming up short. So it's so great to see people come in and see some of the fruits of the labor. Our staff works really hard. We've planned really well. We've juggled our finances extremely well so that we can be able to afford some of these things. And you can start to see them come to fruition now with the Greenway connectors being finished here on Cambridge Drive. We've also added kind of these ADA additions to the truncated domes, the crosswalks, just really making sure that we're making our town as pedestrian friendly as possible. And we really saw a lot of that in August kind of really come to fruition. So lots of partners helping us. Again, we talked about the volunteer materials but we also have lots of partners like friends of greenway different homeowners homeowners associations who have worked with us and worked with our staff to donate property to help out where they can to give us their their assistance wherever possible so lots of things coming on the built environment including john got the quiet zone completed so you may have noticed the trains aren't Blasting the horn as they as they go through town anymore Cambridge Drive getting open the Saddle Creek railroad crossing whistle boards installed All in the fencing that you see here the beautiful fencing So that those that are walking across Cambridge Drive here don't step off the edge and kind of end up in that culvert It's not a two-story fall or anything, but going down Six feet into some gravel isn't going to be fun. I On the two water breaks that you guys saw, we had plenty of water breaks come up in the last month. So if you see the overtime bill go up, know what's going on there. We've got guys getting called out. Highway 49 and Caldwell were significant breaks. We were able to get on top of those, get them fixed quickly, along with the regular operations still being covered without issue. Just in general doing more with less the people that we have on hand doing in-house labor Anywhere where we have the skills to do it in-house. We're not contracting that out That saves us a lot and that's really a testament to the folks in our public works department our fire department those are the two big ones that really like to get out there along with parks and Make sure that anything they can do they're doing it in-house We're also doing three audits all at once so Brian's got all three balls in the air juggling annual financial audit the workers comp audit as well as we mentioned earlier we deployed out to Helene that also goes through an audit making sure that nobody's gonna Cooking the books there, everything that we sent in for reimbursement, everybody that deployed actually deployed. Those are all audits that the state does. 104 customer service transactions, including eight passports this month. Looking ahead, we still have a couple of projects over the next month that you'll start to see out there. The FY27 budget scoped the access control and camera replacements so that RFPs targeted for September, expected to be implemented in October. The Moorhead West phase one sewer project that runs sewer all the way basically from the landfill and takes that out to the lift station east of, west of Moorhead Drive, kind of about halfway into the Moorhead West development area. That's been a project long time coming. That started back in COVID, but got shelved because inflation went crazy, materials went crazy. So that is back on the agenda and is out for bid. The storage building we spoke about, Lee's incredible dog park project. You can see it's staked out there in the pictures. So we'll be looking forward to getting that done here shortly. Parking and concrete work with Public Works is continuing to be done in-house. and finally on this the people program so we've talked about this at nausea and this has been a big push by human resource in the department on internally the employee recognition program has completed its testing and we now have nine employee-led interest clubs that people have joined up on so this is if you see taisha around tell her thank you for this we we have people we have a board game group we have different hobby groups where our employees are getting together by themselves and uh Just getting to know each other a little bit better and doing something other than just work all day. With that, I will take any questions, comments, or concerns that you have.

Any questions for Rob?

Rob, have you gotten any feedback about cartology and the calendar being incorrect on the days of service?

I haven't, but Lee is my cartology guru. So I am going to pass the mic over. Have you gotten anything?

No, I haven't heard anything about that. But we can certainly take a look and see. We have to update that every year. So if somehow it's gotten off, we'll get back on it. But I'll make a note and we'll get on it. Thank you. Thank you for bringing it up.

All right, Brian. Next up for a finance report.

represents just two months of motor vehicle collections over the next two or three months we'll start to collect the vast majority of the property taxes and so you'll see that number recover pretty strongly in the next couple months The general fund only at 7% collected. That is right on pace given that about two-thirds of general fund revenue is property taxes, so no concerns there. The water and sewer fund and stormwater fund are both right on target at 17% collected thus far. Departmental expenditures over operations are shown at the bottom half of the screen. You can see we have two departments in red, council and communications. Again, same as last month. We have some annual subscriptions, some software subscriptions. All the website fees are in communications for the entire fiscal year. So that's well within our expectation there. And that will smooth out as we make our way through the fiscal year. And all other departments are within about two to four points of our expectation. The remaining general fund departments are all in green, except for our two personnel heavy departments. And as you see at the bottom of the screen, salaries are at 18%, just one over our expectation. But July did have three payrolls. And so in our personnel heavy departments, that's going to be another thing that smooths out as we make our way through the year. The water and sewer fund and storm water fund are at 14% and 15%, respectively. So no concerns across our operations. Moving on to our projects. Here are our single year projects. I'll give you a second to look at those. First one I'll draw your attention to is the fiscal year 2026 Greenway program. So we've had a lot of people speaking about the Greenways. Here is a connection that was made from Raging Ridge to Back Creek Greenway. So this project is nearly finished up. Rob mentioned that Public Works is installing the rapid flashing beacon. They did that today. Rapid flashing beacons. Oh, okay. So that was put in today. So we just have a couple signs to put up, and then this project will be closed out. The next is the ADA Sidewalk Program. This contract was signed after last month's council meeting, and so work in Providence Manor subdivision is planned to begin in October. Our Wayfinding Phase 2 project, the contract is on the agenda for tonight. And so that will install nine new signs at key locations throughout town, including Rocky River Road, Stallings Road, Tom Query, Hickory Ridge, and 49 and Roberta. Another contract that's on the agenda tonight is a pavement resurfacing with the Powell Bill program. So if you'll bear with me, I'll go through the locations that that will cover this year. So that's going to be Grimsby Circle, Burgundy Ridge Drive, Mossy Cup Trail, Harvest Hill Drive, Plumcrest Drive, Fairgrove Lane, Sims Parkway, Speed Rail Drive and Court, Williams Road and portions of Patricia Avenue. So a lot of different areas in town getting covered this year. Here's a look at the multi-year projects in design. So we had some standard movement from our consultants doing design here. But one to draw your attention to is Woodside Pedestrian Project. Design is progressing on this project. And I wanted to let everyone know about the public engagement meeting that is scheduled for September 22 at the Lions Club to get people's input on that project. Another is the pedestrian connectivity improvements. We have signed a contract with a design and engineering firm for them to design the sidewalk from Stallings Road up to Harrisburg Elementary School to make that last connection from that roundabout up to the school so the kids can walk up to school. So that's a project we're pretty excited about there. And lastly, for the design projects, Moorhead West Sewer. This project was bid in late August, and so we anticipate bringing that construction contract to you next month. Here's a look at our multi-year projects under construction. The first is the parking lot expansion of Stallings Park. So this is another public works project, except for the fence, which was done by a local contractor. But this parking lot has been fully installed. The fence is finished. And so parks will be installing some signage to finish this out. But otherwise, the parking lot is open and being used currently. And the next is the stormwater spot improvements project. This contract is another one that was approved at the August council meeting. And the contractor will begin work on those three pipe sections that Brian Ashman shared with you all last month in October. Here's a look at our equipment projects. So we have all projects this year are at least started up in some fashion. We had a couple more that orders were placed this month. So the gas monitors for the fire department, as well as their SRT trailer, the swift water rescue trailer, were both ordered by the fire department. And then we had two items that were placed in service. The cam strap meter collector antenna is doing our water readings with our new smart meter. So you can see that installed next to Public Works. And then on the left of the screen are the new mobile lift columns that our garage is using now. we had a little progress on the fire engine that's being built but no real highlights there and then our professional services projects uh oops sorry the main note here is on the comprehensive strategic plan so we released this draft to the public on wednesday the 9th and you can see details about that on the one harrisburg website So we're inviting everyone in the community to share their thoughts on that plan. There are several drop-in meetings set up during the evenings of October 1 and 15, and then morning sessions on the 5th and 16th. The locations for those meetings are varied, so we just ask everyone to check the website and our social media for specifics on those. And then we anticipate having a public hearing for adoption on November 9 at the town council meeting. And with that, I welcome any questions.

do have one question you mentioned signage as these greenways are starting to come to life is there a standard for the signs that say you're on a harrisburg greenway or this is open nine to five or you're located here yep parks does have a sign program that they're developing and putting into place and so i know they've got a plan for all the greenways to have standard signage Okay, and then maybe a locator if you get out on 1 Greenway. I'm at position 7 in Fuda Creek or something.

Yeah, they should have all that around. Okay, great.

Thank you.

Brian, you had said the sidewalk on Stallings being finished?

Yes.

Or under design, rather. Does that mean the easements have been obtained?

That does not include the portion on Stallings Road. There's still that gap there where we need the easements from the homeowners, but we are going to be able to get from the roundabout up to the school. So it will really benefit, not Harmony, but Camelia Gardens. That neighborhood will be able to cross the roundabout and get up to the school. But as far as coming down Stallings, there is that gap there that we still need to close.

Are we making any progress?

I do not believe so.

Thank you.

Brian, with the recent North Carolina budget, there was the bonus for law enforcement, $1,750. Do we facilitate that at all?

No, we don't. That's paid by the county to the deputies, and so that is not something that affects the town.

Okay. And then what about the SNAP errors that are being pushed down to municipalities? I would call that fraud, but, I mean...

Yeah, the North Carolina error or fraud rate is, I believe, in the 7% range. And so that puts us in the 5% penalty range. That penalty range, I believe, can go up to 10% or maybe even greater than that. But North Carolina is in the 5% range. And so if that were to be withheld from our sales tax distributions, that could be in the range of $300,000 to $400,000 that affects the town.

any other questions for Brian thank you sir thank you next up for our law enforcement update like to welcome captain Gilmore for his first official meeting at town hall good evening mayor and members of the council I will present with you the

Data here from this past month, we had 3,861 different law enforcement related activities. With that, we also had 1,735 security checks. Traffic stops were 812. Our non-emergency response time, about seven minutes and 15 seconds, which is pretty consistent with what we've run the past year. And the three-month running trend in special activities, basically everything is pretty consistent. The only thing that's a little bit out is the non-reportables, which basically is not anything of any alarm. Different calls that someone may call in about that doesn't necessarily meet a reporting status could be just wanted to call out, they call the communication center, hey, we'd like to see an officer come out and talk to us about this, that, and the other, but it doesn't meet a reporting status. So that's the only one that was really high this past month. It just didn't meet the standard for something that has to be reported. There is our three-month trends and special activities as they relate, or actually for the year. Nothing really astronomical or out of sorts, but there's a pie chart for you. And with that, Do you have any questions or concerns, something I can answer for you?

Can I go back to the previous slide? Yes, sir. One second. So if somebody is lured to the bank to wire money. Is that showing up under fraud or forgery? Is that where that one?

Depends on exactly what the call was. If they're lured to the bank to do something, it may be some type of extortion or blackmail. It may be something where they are given bad information and they're asked to go buy green cards or send some money via these green cards or what have you. That may fall under a fraud type of situation.

Yeah, it would be mostly gift cards because they don't want it to be trackable. Right. So usually it's gift cards or something along those lines.

Right. And then you said trending. Are you seeing that steady or upward?

Everything that we've seen the last couple of months has looked pretty steady. There doesn't seem to be ebbs and flows from time to time. And some things become more popular. Some of you may have fallen victim, but my name has been used a couple times through the past few years where I call people, which I haven't, that you have not reported for jury duty and you've got a this, that, and the other. But for some reason, my name has come up a few times. I don't know. Prior to coming out here, I've been buried on night shift for five years, so I don't know how they get me. But I haven't seen anything. There's nothing right off the bat that seems... An anomaly or just standing out real, real big.

Okay. I know we did some education, too. We had some folks trying to learn about this and insulate themselves from that type of crime.

Absolutely. Good stuff. Okay. Thank you.

Any other questions for Captain?

We've got one more announcement for the council I'd like to bring up. former Sergeant Frye who has recently been promoted to Lieutenant Frye so most of you are very familiar with him. I just wanted to introduce him to the council as Lieutenant Frye.

Congratulations.

I look forward to continuing this relationship and growing in Harrisburg.

Thank you.

I'm glad Captain kept you around.

Thank you guys. Thank you.

Next up for our fire department update we have Assistant Chief Wooten with us this evening.

Good evening, mayor and council and management. Rob stole some of my thunder earlier, so. All right, so for last month, this is our fire marshal activities. One thing that we did do last month for our fire prevention, we went to the national night out at the Cabarrus Arena, and the kids really love coming to see the fire trucks and all the police cars and everything, so that's a really fun event. We also held our very first annual, we're hoping to do this every year, summer camp for fire prevention with the YMCA. We partnered with them and were able to bring the kids in and do fire activities and stuff with them. So it was a really fun time. Looking forward to doing that again next year. August 22nd we held a Stop the Bleed in our training room. I think we had 10 participants for that event. And we have begun doing light maintenance on all of our fire hydrants because we were still on the water restrictions. So we can't flow test. So the ones that were scheduled to be flow tested, we're at least going to go out there and touch them and actually make sure that there is water inside the fire hydrant. For our inspections, our inspector's always very thorough with trying to come up with better pie charts, because he comes up with some crazy categories, it seems like. There's a lot of other on that, because we weren't sure where to kind of plug that in. But fire extinguish was just not biggest this time. But I will tell you, our new fire inspector is very thorough and has all kinds of things that he comes up with within the code. For our fire incidents, we had 242 incidents last month, so somewhat light. A lot of people were trying to vacation and probably not in the area, so into summer vacations before school starts and everything. We are looking good as far as our turnout times and travel times on the bottom. The travel times are up just a little bit more than we like. We like them to be six minutes or less on that, so we're a little high. That's probably attributed some towards the construction, except on Moorhead Road, because Station 1 is the busiest station. OK. We had one working fire last month. It was, as Rob alluded to, the picture of the fire in the Gold's Gym. Again, it was a light fixture. So we reached out, started looking into a little bit more investigation work on that. They were installing LED bulbs in the fixtures. that were not installed correctly so we have notified them they should get a licensed electrician to follow up and figure out so we don't have this happen again this one was actually listed as a room in contents because the fixture had some stuff fall down and melt stuff on the floor so it caused a little bit more damage but still saved 14 million dollars on that one so Before we get into this one real quick, let me get back one second. I'm going to go ahead and just talk about, just to hopefully answer any questions, because preemptively, we did have a fire over the weekend on Sanger Court. It was September the 12th. It was at 6.53 p.m. There were a total of 21 fire units, 62 fire personnel, which constitutes a third alarm. Additionally, we had crews from Charlotte and Concord that were standing by for additional calls in the area while we were committed on the scene. We were committed for 15 hours on this incident. Our turnout time for this incident was 24 seconds was our fastest truck to get in route. They were on scene within three minutes and nine seconds of being dispatched. Again, like I said, it took us 15 hours while we were out there. The fire was investigated by the Cabarrus County Fire Marshal's Office. So we have to see them for their official calls and determination. This is part of our rural fire district. They're not actually in the town limits, so it doesn't fall under our fire marshal's jurisdiction. There were two adults and two children and two pets that were living in the home. They all made it out safely. According to the reports of on scene crews, the occupants advised that they had smelled an odor of smoke in the garage area for about an hour before finally seeing smoke around some battery charging equipment, which was located in that area of the garage that was charging various battery powered equipment. The home was a total loss. It was about $1.27 million worth of value. Smoke detectors are not required to be installed in garage areas. But on this fire, the occupants noticed the odor, so they thankfully were able to safely get out of the house. So very fortunate that we didn't lose any lives or have anything else. There was an initial report. While we were being dispatched, one of the dispatchers had advised that they thought the kid may still be inside the house. The other thing that we had big last month was the famous picture, as Rob alluded to earlier, the car into Vortex Bottle Shop. A little bit about this real quick. There were 14 Harrisburg fire personnel that were on the scene. We were on the scene in less than four minutes. We controlled the incident in 11 minutes, and it took us just over an hour to clear the whole scene. We had a total of seven patients that were evaluated and treated. Four patients were transported for further medical care. The total fire and EMS units combined were 13 because we got supervisors and more EMS trucks to come in on this. So this was a pretty significant incident that could have been way worse, and we're so glad that nobody was severely hurt in this case. And with that, I will try to answer any questions.

Any questions? Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Just a couple mayor comments. I had the opportunity to attend our youth council retreat and their first official meeting. So it was very nice to welcome the new incoming class. We have a great group. It was great to meet them. Thanks to Casey, Jared, and Nicole who were leading them. And big news at our Cabarrus Visitors Bureau meeting board meeting. They were awarded the Bridging Communities Award by U.S. Travel and Associations Conference for the Cabarrus Burger Madness. So many of you might have seen that on social media that was promoted throughout They actually beat destinations from all over the U.S. for that program. And it did just that, bridging communities. It supports businesses across the county, including several right here in Harrisburg. So congratulations to their team. We had a great economic development summit last week. Heard from several local businesses and leaders from across the county. That was fun to attend and hear what's going on. attended the central on a regional council board meeting we are in the process of filling the executive director position as Geraldine Gardner has accepted a position out of the state with another regional council so we are working diligently on getting that position filled as well as working on a business model for financial sustainability for the future and had a ribbon cutting for Wheelhouse last week. That is a performance driving company right here in the motorsports sector off of Moorhead Road. That is a $6 million private investment in our community that brings 25 new full-time jobs. And I said this when I spoke at that event. It really is the perfect example of what economic development looks like. It's private investment, redevelopment of an existing site, and then bringing a nationally recognized business to Harrisburg. So Justin and his crew over there were very welcoming to show us around their facilities. So it was great to see that and welcome them. A couple calendar pieces. We've got October 3rd. We've got Bags in the Burg right here in Town Center. October 10th is our last Rock in the Burg concert series. Feels like that went by awfully quick. And then, of course, October 30th is the Trick or Treat here at Town Center as well. And all of those dates can be found on our website. So with that, I will move into council comments.

So September is Suicide Awareness Month. So there have been lots of informational pieces, educational pieces to go out across social media. There's been a nationwide push to make sure that we're sharing information about resources that are available in our community, which leads me to Dr. Banks and I went to tour the Stephen M. Morris Behavioral Health Center. which would directly support individuals that are suffering there as well. There is a 24-bed partial residential treatment facility where adolescents will live, if approved for that level of treatment, for up to nine months. So they will be there. They'll have education there. There's also a detox center there for our youth, and then there is a – um behavioral health urgent care for adults which means that you'll get to be there for 23 hours a day just to get your stabilization treatment if you need to transition out they offer that to you there as well it's also hispanic heritage month that goes from excuse me september 15th through october 15th and at our august 19th board of trustees with risk management services meeting i was elected chair of the board of trustees which is We make all of the fiduciary decisions for the risk management pools for the over 540 municipalities. And the Cabarrus County Fair is going on right now, so that's always a big hit. Make sure that you take the time to go over and get a funnel cake, among other things. And I think that's all that I have.

I have a few things.

I have a few things. So as she mentioned, we attended a tour of the Behavioral Health Center. I think it's phenomenal. I think it's also a great resource in our county. And I found out that there's nothing like it. So we have an opportunity of being a template for others to follow. So it's good that it starts here. The other thing we have coming up at the end of the month, I'm on the Legislative Policy Committee for North Carolina, and we have a meeting in Winston-Salem at the end of this month. So at this meeting, we'll get to determine what the state will cover in terms of the topics, what topics the state will cover moving forward. And so that will be at the end of this month, and I'll be there as well. I also tried to attend Rock in the Burg, but we got rained out. But I think one thing I'll say is that our residents are faithful because they were still out there in the rain with the umbrella. The music was great, but we can't control the weather, so thank you to everyone who who helped to make that happen and I look forward to the next one. Also, I will be, of course, remiss to not mention the Mayor Pro Tem issue because we are in month 10 and it has not been resolved. And so I'm just going to use my point of privilege right now to make a motion that we move the town council directs the staff to formally recognize and display this title of Mayor Pro Tem, regardless of who's sitting in this seat, to place that title on the council dais. And that's consistent with the council's appointment of this position and the town's official recognition of this office. Second.

There's a motion and a second on the floor. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Aye. Motion did not carry.

And so thank you for doing that. And I'm glad that we were able to make a decision with the council because this is where the authority should have been in the beginning, the council, to make that decision. And so now moving forward, when the next highest vote getter or whoever is mayor pro temp, that name shouldn't be on the dais as well.

regional planning CRMPO meeting and with that we went over Salisbury's largest plan to do their downtown during the final phase revitalization of parking spaces and train station and all that. Good plan to see. A lot of work went involved. They've been back and forth. One of the few plans that get through this time of year given limited funds. But the reason I bring it up is Senator Ford was there and Sometimes we get some of our local legislators to show up, and I know Mesmer and Allman and a few others have shown up before. But this time with Senator Ford there, got a chance to talk to him one on one with regards to the constitutional amendment around the efforts of the taxation bill that's being proposed. from his seat he's got a bill himself that is in committee that he felt like would be the most successful of all that's being presented his bill is senate bill 992 but also competing as house bill 59 senate bill 230 senate bill 228 tied with house bill 118 senate bill 143 senate bill 128 House Bill 299 and Senate Bill 109. And of course, his Senate Bill 992 is probably the least impactful, if any of them have that capacity. They all still limit the local municipality. And there's also one that Senate Bill 143 that does focus on the veterans and allowing exemptions for veterans. But there's still some hitches on that one. So I don't anticipate that one going through. But it was a good chance to understand from his perspective how things are moving through. who's trying to attach to what bill and what's going to end up but you know at the end of the day none of them could tell you because they want the they need the referendum pass first before they write it so hard for me to write a blank check but And I've done my communications otherwise to the folks that I represent or the folks that on my social media feeds or whatever you want to call it, I do ads with it as well, just to say, hey, just be careful in what you're voting for. I don't know that that's something that you want to sign up for without knowing the parameters around it.

Ron, I have to ask a question. When you talk about the stuff in Salisbury, were y'all impacted by the parking minimums that are now in place with the latest budget?

They were not, but they were redesigning. And existing. And existing. So they were, and it's kind of, the way they explained it to us, it's a hot topic with a lot of the business owners down there because they've lost already some parking and they're going to lose like six more spaces.

Mm-hmm.

If you see the larger plan, though, of it, aesthetically, it looks a lot better. They're pushing out the curbs. And they're going to have lanes for the buses to pull up into and pick up the citizens. So you kind of have to give and take a little bit there. But yeah.

I know a lot of the business owners aren't happy with that. No, no.

I read another article this morning that it's quite upsetting up there.

Just two quick things from my vantage point. The comprehensive report, I finally took time to read that from cover to cover, so give yourself an hour. Thank you, Ellie. 138 pages or something like that. What I gained from that, there's some incongruity in there in what the voters are telling us. They say, I want to beautify this place, but I don't like art. So we have to sort of divine what they're thinking through there. But I do think it's helpful for us to keep that document alive and pay attention to it. I have my personal opinion. which doesn't always align with what I'm seeing in that document, but it is very telling. They've told us what they want. We owe it to them to listen, and it is very interesting. And it was also interesting to hear the Greenway people were able to go, look right here, number one on the list. It was also number four on the list, too, Jim, if you look. walkability and then walkability within parks. I'm like, that scores twice. That's what I meant by the incongruity. But anyway, a very, very useful document, but only if we refer to it and keep it right here when we're having trouble making a decision. The other thing that I asked for, not enough it warrants an action item, but when you said wheelhouse brings in $6 million, it would be interesting To include, Rob, in your report, I know you do it in the quarterly report, which are wildly valuable, but this many new businesses came in since last month. We answered this many RFIs. We had this many businesses leave. Two of them were retail. One was a restaurant. That's what we get pressed on all the time. When are we getting this? Well, we did. That's a nice scorecard, and it's objective. You can do that by the numbers and see what that is, but that would be helpful for me.

And Chris, just to clarify, it was a $6 million investment, not that they're bringing in $6 million. Okay, all right. But yeah, I'll add that to action item as well.

Janet, have that stricken from the record.

Any other council comments?

And I do have one had a resident that recently got a call from customer service that they had a leak water leak of the new meters that were installed showed that they were they were losing a 1000 gallons per minute And so he went through his house and checked to make sure there wasn't water running anywhere. No toilets were running and Actually found a leak in the yard So but very thankful that staff reached out and let him know that because it wasn't an obvious fix so he was very very happy that he was he was notified of that and was able to take care of the problem and I know we've had a lot of controversy on some of the social media about the new water meters. John, you've probably taken a majority of those phone calls. But I think this was an opportunity for our town staff to reach out to them, and they're grateful that they did. So thank you guys.

The greenest lawn in the neighborhood. Yeah. And a data center. That's right. That's a whole data center.

Any other council comments?

I just wanted to mention, I recently ran into a lady that worked at the local DMV that we had. And I'm wondering if, and I know she said there was some back and forth as far as whether they can open in the same location or some other location, but it will be really expensive to build. So I didn't know if we're trying to work with them to see if we could, because I really don't want to go. And drive so far away.

We did meet with them. They're building a new location in Concord. So they acquired the old Babcock building out there. So they're going to do a combo testing. It'll be a much bigger facility. This one, they're looking for a temporary solution, because that's going to not be open until spring or summer of next year. The problem out here is the traffic or the parking. They've got no parking there. So we were able to meet with them I think Friday, Thursday or Friday, I think it was Friday, met out with planning and folks from the DMV and kind of looked at the area, explained the situation. So they're going to do a little parking inventory and analysis to see if they can get out there for six months until they open the other one. But long term, that location's just overrun here. And good and bad, some of the numbers that Chris mentioned, We have less than 2% vacancy rate in Harrisburg. So finding a building that's ready now, which is what they're looking for, just doesn't exist. They would have to build something brand new, and that's going to take years. But I do think the state is committed to building and expanding the DMV capacity, both digitally and brick and mortar. But this one won't open in a year. They don't plan on opening it permanently here. Temporary would be a best-case scenario.

And the new location will have dual? Will do licenses and driving?

That was my understanding. They'll do driver's tests, licensing, and I think if I remember hearing that one right, Monterey actually did the review work on this in Concord when she was there. I think they wanted an ABC store in there as well. So, you know. Wow. Strange bedfellows, but, you know, get your license and go celebrate.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yep.

All right. With that, we will move into item four, which is our public hearing. We've got Jonathan with us. It's a public hearing to consider adoption of revised Chapter 53 stormwater ordinance. Welcome, Jonathan. Thank you.

This is the first for me. I try to remember all my years and I think this is the first public hearing I've done I could remember I did sleep, you know last night and so I've probably forgotten But I do bring before you a public hearing consider adoption of revised chapter 53 stormwater ordinance Just a little bit of background. This is in response to some general statute changes in 160 D 925 D 1 We've been working directly with the town attorney on these recommended adjustments for several months now. The changes are reflected in the town of Harrisburg stormwater ordinance and then the associated operation and maintenance agreement. These changes are intended to bring to town stormwater requirements in line with current state law while continuing to provide a funding mechanism for long-term maintenance, repair, and replacement of privately maintained SEMs, that's stormwater control measures, and does not require planning and zoning board review since it's part of the town code and not the Unified Development Ordinance. I'll go over these changes really quick. It does expand whom the requirements apply to. The current ordinance focuses certain requirements on SEMs maintained by homeowners associations, property owners associations, and similar groups. The revised language will apply those requirements more broadly probably on and essentially all maintained SEMs required under that Chapter 53. It does remove the current 25% developer contribution to the 15-year sinking fund requirement. Those provisions will be replaced with a revised escrow approach allowed under state law. And then does set the escrow amount at 10% of the original SCM construction costs. The owner would have up to five years to fully fund that amount. And last, it will simplify the town's funding requirements. The current provisions allowing the town to vary the contribution percentage and funding period would be removed. Staff does recommend town council adopt the revised Chapter 53 stormwater ordinance and corresponding stormwater operation and maintenance agreement as presented.

Are there any questions of Jonathan on this project before we open up the public hearing.

I got a question not specifically for you Jonathan. I want to look at Rob. When did this one get stuck in and where did it get attached to?

These are part of the kind of shotgun approach of a gazillion bills that went through the 160D. It was in the omnibus. It got pulled out here, pulled out there.

Did it show up in the pool bill?

I don't think it was in the pool bill. I think this was part of the eq ratified changes.

Jonathan, do you know any more than that. It was a 2023 2024 it's been in there for a couple years. It wasn't an older. We've been kind of delaying it for a little while because we really want to not make the changes. I think in trying to work through some of those items, but it was an older bill.

It's not one of the newest ones coming, you know, is there any retro action on this mean if it's

not I'm aware of to the statute that said anything about a retroactivity or anything else so we took the position that we're not to make any changes to what's been done in the past it's just all going forward

was there the last question of God was there a timeline in which had to be enacted. I mean I know we all had this drawn up and a lot of municipalities for us. Was there a timeline from when it has to be enacted or

In general, and I'll let you guys correct me if I'm wrong, when they do these 160s, they're effective immediately. They generally don't give you any time to update it. Now, whether we put it in our code then becomes this kind of legal back and forth and a little bit of risk there. I will soapbox here for a minute before we go to the... open the public hearing in that you know I think for the people listening at home you guys understand this really well we're under constant attack of trying to stand up for our residents and you guys have very limited tools and you utilize them really well this is one of those ones that we changed seven years ago And we did this because the HOAs came and said, hey, we're getting left holding the bag here from all these developers that come in and they put in these terrible stormwater devices. And then we've got to maintain them. And we've got to have this sinking fund to make sure that we can do that. And everybody that moves in, now our HOA fees are $1,200 a year just for the stormwater maintenance. And so we said, look, that's fair enough. We went ahead and there was no model on this. We developed this from a staff level. And so we're going to shift more of that burden onto the developer. They're making a lot of money on these. They can use some of the money that they make on this to actually create this sinking fund up front. And then the HOAs wouldn't be left holding the bag. The legislature and their infinite wisdom said, dang it, these HOAs and residents need to do it themselves. So now you can only charge the developers 10%. That's the max the developer has to charge. The other 90% is on you guys. So jack up your HOA fees. so that builders and developers can make a little bit more profit. We can argue over what the wisdom of that is to the state of the economy or the nation as a whole. When it comes to Harrisburg, that's a bad deal. And you guys have done the right thing and have said, hey, we're going to stand up for our residents. Each time we do that, the builder's lobby goes to Raleigh. And they write a check that's big enough to get the law changed. And then you guys end up cashing that check or paying for that check through the developer not having impact fees, not having to maintain their streets, not having to maintain their stormwater. And so this is another symptom of that. So all these folks that show up at our meetings, that show up all around the region and complain to you all, why aren't you doing something to protect us from development? We are you guys are as much as we can and even when we do go get the law change that you can't. So that's my soapbox for this evening.

You guys heard it from me to your so please do please to just to say that that in that same vein. What we do what the way I drafted that agreement was that make the develop can't transfer. The a storm water to the hoa until that money has put been put up that 10 so the statute said nothing about that either way so i thought that was a way to to do it in the way that that would protect the homeowners associations because they do get left holding the bag on these things

Well, we're doing our dry run. I actually like this language so much when I was at my former municipality, I took it and put it into our ordinance because I thought it was great language. The prior language was because it really did a good job for it. And it is sad to see some of those changes occur and, you know, kind of ties our hands up a little bit on it. So.

OK, Jonathan, thank you. With that, we will move into the public hearing portion. We did not have anybody sign up to speak on this, so we will now close public hearing. Council, if there are no other questions. Is there a motion to approve? The revised Stormwater 53 ordinance and corresponding stormwater operation and maintenance agreement as presented.

And to be clear, I know nobody wants to vote on this. It's legally required. Yeah. That's the law. I mean, we have to have a public hearing, and we have to go through that process to change it. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Motion.

Motion on the floor. Second. All in favor. All right. Motions carried. Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. We do not have any old business, but we do have several items in our new business. First up, Jonathan is going to hang around with us for a little bit. Consideration of a supplemental service agreement with Exalt Engineering for Food of Creek Greenway Design Services.

Yes, very excited tonight. Thank you, Mayor and Council. Again, this is consideration of a supplemental services agreement. We'll call it a contract. That's a lot of words. with Exult Engineering PC for Food Creek Greenway Design Services. Just a quick update since the agenda item posted. This item does now include the budget amendment recognizing $225,000 in state appropriations, Senate Bill 257, as a funding source for design services reflected in tonight's fiscal impact and motion. Sorry for the lot of words on here. I just want to kind of describe the background a little bit. The project is approximately a half mile of greenway trail connecting the existing greenway behind courtyards at Robinson Church Development to Somerset Lane. I think it's been mentioned several times tonight. One section of the larger project town staff have been working on for several years. Town staff have been working closely with Fenton Dell Homeowners Association and adjacent property owners to coordinate the installation. Design does not include. potential fencing or landscaping this will be addressed by the town staff the project progresses with the individual landowners and HOA and design is anticipated to take around fifteen months for completion with construction anticipated four to five months overall projects anticipated to be complete roughly in the summer of twenty twenty eight our original funding source that we had in our budget was two hundred twenty thousand dollars capital reserve fund and then with the additional funding that we mentioned earlier the state appropriations act another two hundred twenty five thousand quick schedule here assuming council approval tonight we do anticipate design beginning sometime in October and that would finish up in December twenty twenty seven just a quick layout here is an older map I'm not sure. There you go. So this is courtyards at Robinson Church. Already got an older aerial here, but this is there. Roughly the portion of the greenway that's been described tonight has been put in Fentondale area over here. The orange is the half mile that we're talking about with Somerset Lane being down here. And then you can kind of see some extensions, future extensions as they would occur. Fiscal impact is a contract with Exel Engineering PC is for $213,150. Our current FY27 budget does have $220,000 in there, which was $25,000 in professional services and $195,000 for construction. Under the North Carolina Appropriations Act, Senate Bill 257 signed into law July 7, 2026, to sign with the order of $225,000. Our staff is recommending that be put towards this project. one hundred ninety thousand professional services and thirty five thousand for construction that would that would increase the total funding to two hundred fifteen thousand dollars for professional services and two hundred thirty thousand for construction professional services got agreement with X old engineering PC meets requirements qualifications based selection process has been approved by the town attorney and this does support town goal sell safe well maintained dependable public facilities and services Staff recommendation. Staff recommends the approval of the attached supplemental services agreement engineering PC in an amount not to exceed $213,150 for design services related to the Creek Greenway project along with the associated budget amendment recognizing the $225,000 state appropriations as a funding source. Questions?

John, can you go back to that first slide, that fourth bullet point?

Mm-hmm.

Does not include the potential for fencing landscape and this will be addressed. How are you going to address that? What leeway do you have to work with the HOA? They say I want to

brick wall in the waterfall and higher fencing and a great question so what what I mean by this is this design company is not designing the fencing and the landscaping okay so what we're going what we've done as we've already met with all the property owners there's get their feedback for each one of the things along the corridor and then incorporate them as part of the project once we get the construction phase so instead of like the designer here is not saying oh it's going to be a template the blah blah blah whatever or any landscape we were individually doing that we meet and if you needed additional funding that's not coming out of any over under of this that that is correct okay. the design timeline why is it so long I had somebody ask me that question tonight so we do have to do the surveys there's some anticipation in there obviously for some additional meetings that will occur with the folks in the neighborhood so we kind of built in a little bit of that structure in there again there's there's there's a potential for that to be sped up a little bit this is the best guess by the designer we want to be fair to everybody here to understand that if they do run into some potential issues maybe there's a wetland issue I don't know just throwing things out there that that could take a little bit more for a design time frame so that's what that's built into that schedule and the company that we

want to hire for the design, have they done work for us? Do they know how to work with us?

They have not. So they're a new firm. So we did an RFQ several years ago, actually about a year and a half ago, for proposals on projects. This EXIL is actually out of Kannapolis. They're just pretty close to us. They have not done any work for us, but they scored really high when they brought in their proposal. We actually pre-qualified three firms at that time. We're using a couple of those firms already, and this is one of the third ones. But we have not, to my knowledge, that I've been here, they've not been used before.

Any other questions for Jonathan? All right. With that, is there a motion to approve the supplemental service agreement with Exalt Engineering in an amount not to exceed $213,150 for design services related to the Buddha Creek Greenway project?

Motion.

Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Motion is carried. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you.

Wow.

Love the enthusiasm. Next up, we have consideration of resolution opposing state-imposed limits on local property tax authority. And Rob will be presenting this evening.

I appreciate the applause, knowing I was coming up next. You've got to get really excited. I like that. So you go from my soapbox to John, then back to my soapbox. We talked about this, you know, ad nauseum. I don't think it's any news about the state-imposed or state-proposed local property tax levy limits. We went through this at the most recent workshop where we had lots of robust discussion on it. So I just wanted to walk us through kind of a high level of What is the resolution you have before you tonight prior to any conversation or vote? So this really started in House Bill 1089 that was ratified by the General Assembly. It's now a statewide referendum for November 3rd. The ballot question is constitutional amendment requiring limits on property tax increases by local governments. amends the various sections of the constitution if it should be approved by the voters the amendment is not self-executing so there is no formula there's no benchmark on this there's no guaranteed exceptions every rule that they pass would be later and that would bind harrisburg's budget without any real input by the town So the core issue, I think, in this as we look at advocating or lobbying our legislature for how they will approach this if or even when it were to pass is really rate caps versus levy caps and what's the difference there and how does it affect the community. If you look at what the state applies to themselves, they have their own constitutional amendment on for state funding. That caps the rate only. State collections still grow without limit. As the economy and population grow, so does the state revenues. Really going that way, that rewards fiscal discipline. Having a low rate is your goal. You can try to get the rate low, expand the economy, progress as a community that is what they use for themselves what the question is and what they will eventually have to write rules for if it were to pass is a levy cap that applies to the towns it doesn't apply to the state that caps the dollars collected regardless of the rate You can put the rate as high as you want or as low as you want. Doesn't matter. We're saying no matter how much you grow, no matter how much you do on stimulating your local economy, no matter how many tools you use, that doesn't matter. We're going to cap the amount of revenue you can bring in. town that holds or cuts its rate it's just it's still capped it doesn't really matter that penalizes growth in and of itself it penalizes having good tax rates it penalizes efficiency because you're just it's a one-size-fits-all for every municipality in the state We already practice good rate discipline, which is why we'd like to advocate to the legislature that should this pass, we have lots of suggestions for them, and they're all in that resolution. 41 cent tax rate. Most recent rate discussion actually lowered our tax rate. We're amongst the lowest tier amongst all full service municipalities in the region. Our levy grows because Harrisburg grows. New homes, new businesses. We talked several times tonight attracting new commercial and industrial in to lower the burden on our taxpayers. That would not or potentially could not based on the way it is written now, help the town. The legislature could easily say that's not exempt. New growth is not exempt. We hear some people say it would be, some people say it wouldn't be. The truth of the matter is there is no guarantee. property tax is the most stable locally controlled funding source for police and fire streets stormwater solid waste all of the things that affect our residents this has been the most stable in the most the closest to your pocket of taxes that you you pay in this country it's it's the oldest tax is property tax and again if if people don't like the way Their municipality is spending their money. They can come out here, they can sit in the front row, and they'll let us know about it. And we certainly, everybody at this dais knows that that happens regularly, where people will give you a call and show up here and let you know, hey, this is how I want my money spent, good or bad approach. We see a lot of folks here tonight telling you I want you to invest in greenways. This is going to be a problem if the legislature does not write the rules in a way that allows us to have that type of autonomy. It's also going to constrain one of the region's fastest growing communities, even while we are able to hold or reduce that rate. So it's not going to stop us from growing, but it's going to stop us from having an effect on how that growth affects our residents. if we don't have the funding locally we won't be able to address the growth we won't be able to address the the traffic impacts and the school impacts because remember this doesn't just affect the towns it affects the counties at the same time Then ultimately, we have this squeeze that I'm talking about. Obligations are up. If you cap revenues, if you cap a levy, if you don't worry about rates and just say you can't bring in any more money, then municipalities have to fund services and obligations that the state doesn't fully fund. We just saw that with the stormwater issue here where it's just passing that off under our HOAs. We've had HOAs come to us and say, hey, town, why don't you do this? You have people that know how to do this. You have engineers. You know how to inspect these things. If they break, you know how to fix them. Why don't you tax us? And you could do it at a lower rate than our HOA fees where we have this churn of people that don't know how to manage these. And our response is no. How? The state isn't going to allow us to continue to protect our residents by capping the amount of fees that our residents can voluntarily decide to pay and to tax themselves. The state's already done this with local revenue. Development fee authority is restricted. impact fees in the resolution it calls us out it asks the legislature to consider impact fees as part of any comprehensive levy capping that they may choose or may not choose to do beginning October 1st you heard Councilman Glover bring this up earlier and this will be on our next workshop that we have with the council they plan to to withhold sales tax distribution from everybody for federal SNAP cost sharing. If that's 5% across the board, as Brian said, we're collecting $6 million. That's $300,000 that you're already pulling out of our coffers that we have no effect on. The town does not manage SNAP benefits, can't make the fraud rate go down if we wanted to, and here we are with our funds being further restricted through no fault of our own. And ultimately, one size fits all cap just doesn't fit 500 plus different municipalities. East Coast is a lot different than the Piedmont. Western North Carolina, a lot different. You have older established towns who need to do different things. Some towns have high crime rates, some have low. Everybody has their own unique circumstances that they're dealing with. Those decisions are best left to the locals that live there. What our resolution does, it speaks to the local revenue authority not matched by a limit on the state's own collections. It merely raises rates or relief from the state-imposed obligations. If the voters were to ratify this, we're urging the legislators to craft legislation with exceptions for new construction and annexation, for revaluation, for voter-approved debt. for emergencies and ultimately state mandates. And we're asking them to give us a local override so that if the residents approve of it, that full section that the residents go out and vote for on a referendum is exempt from these caps. Fund the mandates first. We've already pointed out a ton of mandates. The state needs to go fund those mandates if they're going to cap what we can spend. That's what our ask is. that the levy cap be targeted, that state-funded relief be actually sought after for seniors, that we support those targeted reliefs, especially for totally disabled individuals. That's in the resolution, as well as 100% disabled veterans. There is a taxing problem at the state level, but it's not a one-size-fits-all. There are some folks that need this relief, and we specifically call them out. in the growth pays for growth authorized the development fee impacts that is something that almost every state does and North Carolina is one of the very few states that does not make the new development pay its own way as it comes into the community and now they're looking to cap our ability to pay at all. So if you're not going to make them pay up front and you're going to stop us from coming in and fixing it after the fact, one of those two things has to give or our communities just really see a degradation of services and a degradation in general. And then ultimately transmittal to the legislative delegation. We want to send this to the House and Senate leadership as well as the municipalities and the town's legislative consultants. This resolution is the town's official position. It's addressed to the General Assembly or legislative advocacy and it's consistent with how the town engages on all of our state legislation affecting town revenues. Because the amendment is not self-executing, the resolution stays relevant. It doesn't matter if the voters decide yes or no on November Third, the implementing legislation is really where Harrisburg's exceptions and protections, that's where it's going to be won and lost. That's what we're lobbying for. Upon adoption, if we were to adopt this tonight, the town will transmit certified copies to the delegation, to the chamber leadership, and to the league municipalities and our legislative consultant. You see the recommended motion at the bottom here, and I will entertain any questions that we have.

um i get it and i'm in favor of it but if we can't explain it any quicker than that in the hallway it's going to be you know he voted to raise taxes uh that's easy to paint us as you know unlimited unbridled spending and all of that so we got to get a handle on messaging uh once we if we do adopt this resolution we need to get a communication out that says We're not voting for higher taxes. We're voting for these five pillars, self-governance, local control, whatever those five big statements are. We need to get the message out because otherwise they just voted to tax the hell out of you.

Well I think the resolution speaks for itself when you look at it in that regard I also want to remind everybody to be clear we can't advocate for residents to vote one way or the other once something's here you know that that is out of bounds what isn't out of bounds is for us to take a position to our state delegation and to advocate on behalf of our residents which is what this resolution does And we need to be careful during an election season not to conflate the two. I don't want to confuse residents say here's a position we're taking on levy caps, which if you look, we take no position on caps in general. We do call out the difference between a levy cap and a rate cap. It's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. They have a rate cap and good for them. Why don't they have a levy cap? if it's good for us it should be good for them or why is the rate cap that we have currently insufficient and we've talked to our legislators about that I think the the more poignant part is should this pass and look you have an issue on the ballot and most people don't research a lot of issues on a ballot if you have an issue that says lower eliminate my taxes it's probably going to be pretty popular right so assume this passes and when it does pass then what we need to be ahead of this with our delegation to say look we took a position so that we understand what the mandate is after the fact this will be if you just purely don't have any of these exemptions and and I know everybody says oh there's an exemption coming here or there put it on paper I'd like to see it and then we'll adjust to it if it's if it's done with just a pure hard cap and you've heard I've heard the common number be 2% increase per year That's not inflation. So if you can only have 2% increase, but asphalt's going up 5%, you've got to cut something. We're not the federal government. We can't just print money into existence. If we expect to retain police and firefighters, they can't live on 2%. Our health care isn't 2%. It's 20%. And so we've done a really good job keeping the number under 4% annually. And we're proud of that. And we continue to be committed to that, even though we have no cap. But it's really, if you have a hard cap, that's what California did. You look at California before their levy cap, California had the highest growth rate, the best, highest growing economy, safest communities, wonderful schools. After their levy cap, the state had to take over the schools the very same year. You saw their crime rate go through the roof and you saw their growth rate go negative as people started to flee because the communities became poorly educated, high crime because they have no ability to react to it locally. My much shorter pitch, My 10 second pitch, and this is just as a resident of North Carolina, as a resident of the United States, I like my money closest to home. When is the last time it was a good idea to send your money to DC and think it's going to come back? you know, multiplied or more impactful. You know, we're all skeptical of that. I trust my local community to make the right decision with my money a lot easier than I do Raleigh. If you're gonna if you're gonna cut a check for $2,000 anyway, do you want it going to your local cops, firefighters street? Or do you want to go in Raleigh and then coming back to you with some strings and some lobbying that's needed to get it back to your home. So I think the best government is local government, but I'm pretty biased.

Any other questions for Rob? All right. With that, is there a motion to adopt the resolution to communicate the town council's position regarding local property tax authority and related legislative priorities to the members of the North Carolina General Assembly representing the town of Harrisburg, the leadership of the North Carolina House of Representatives and Senate, the North Carolina League of Municipalities, and the town's legislative consultant? So moved. Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Motion is carried. Thank you. Item C, I believe Lee is joining us for this one. It's a consideration of the ordinance regulating electric-assisted bicycles.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. I will do my very best to do this justice. So this is going to be going through the electrical assisted bicycles. We had talked about this at the August 24th council workshop. So hopefully none of this is new to you. At least to you, we're going to go through everything for the public. So you can look here and see that the state law, the session law 2026 46 went into play and so when that is going to take effect on December 1st of 2026 here just in a couple of months. And it creates three e-bike classes. And with that statewide use is permitted on roadways, bike lanes and multi use paths. The town may regulate paths and sidewalks, and that's what we're mostly going to be talking about this evening. We have the ability not only to regulate the e-bike classes, what different classes are allowed on our different multi-use paths and sidewalks, but it also allows us to set the speed limits and also require helmets for minors. So this is going through the three classes of e-bikes. We had some discussions about this at our council workshop. And the first thing I wanted to point out, actually, to go to the bottom of the slide, and then we'll go back up to the top. But there was a big question as far as what is an electric bike and one of the big differentiations between a gas or electric dirt bike is that it doesn't have pedals and is already considered a moped or a motorcycle under state law. Those do not have anything to do with anything we're talking about tonight. So I just wanted to set that off to the side. If it's got a dirt bike, no pedals, it doesn't impact anything that we're talking about tonight. We're fully focused on e-bikes that have pedals. As you can see here, we've got three different classes. The first one is pedal-assisted, and that is where the motor assists only while pedaling, and it cuts off at 20 miles an hour. Our next level is the same as class one, except it's got throttle power. So now it has the ability to actually move without you having a pedal. So it's got the throttle just like you're kind of used to, either a button or an actual throttle like a motorcycle. And then the last class is the higher speed pedal assist in same exact thing as the class one, except this actually goes up to 28 miles an hour. With our August 24th workshop, what we got out of that from council is that we wanted us to move forward with an ordinance rather than relying on complaint-driven enforcement. That is a possibility. We can go specifically with what the state law says and just let it be as it is, but that's not going to give us the ability to control what we have on the different surfaces that we're looking at and talking about tonight. So enforcement concerns were raised, discussions about the practical enforcement and avoiding unnecessary interaction with children. We certainly didn't want the children to feel like they're being arrested and everything, and that's not anywhere near close to the case. But now some of the council really wanted us to make sure that we included them as we were going through all this. And then the last thing that council actually made a change from what we originally had presented was no class II e-bikes on sidewalks, bottom line. So if it's got a throttle, it's not going to be allowed on any of our sidewalks. So we want to make sure that tonight we're not asking for a specific motion to be formally adopted. This being there was a motion in your packets that will be for next month whenever we bring this back. but we want to make sure that we give time for the public and for council to digest this a little bit more if we hear about anything back over the next 30 days and then we can bring this back to you next month and have that adopted if you so choose and still give us time before the december 1st date that it kicks in This is a chart that Rob actually presented at the workshop. And I think it's a really good one. And if you look at it, it really sets two things right off the bat. And I would recommend everybody look across the top row and then down the last column. State law covers streets and bike lanes, so nothing that we're talking about in this ordinance is going to have any regulation over streets and bike lanes that will come into effect with the new law, and they withheld that piece as far as what they they will handle. But class three, if you see that anything that will relate to our local ordinance, we do not allow class three at all. So those e-bikes that go from 21 miles an hour up to 28 miles an hour, we're saying are not allowed within our ordinance at all. So that really gives us class one and class two to look at. It helps to kind of shrink down, because it gets confusing, all these different classes and types. At the end of the day, what we're saying is on our pass and greenways, we will allow class one and class two. So you can have not only the pedal assist only, but also the throttle. But they'll only go up to 20 miles an hour. For sidewalks themselves, we'll only allow class one. So only the pedal-assisted will be allowed on any of our sidewalks across town. Unpaved and natural trails are not allowed to be regulated under this, so there's no... ability for us to uh basically they're not allowed by state law to have any of these types of e-bikes on unpaved or natural trails so we don't have that ability to regulate it but it's also from the state law actually covered in there already so and one thing did want to point out is that this applies to every path and sidewalk public and private so this isn't just relating to public sidewalks is this goes for all of our public and private across town what does the ordinance do where can the e-bikes operate we kind of went through that i think the chart that we just went through is a little easier to gather than all what this says but Again, just to reiterate, Class 1 and Class 2 are allowed on multi-use paths and greenways. Class 3 is prohibited across the board. No class two or class three on sidewalks, only the class ones. And one important thing I wanted to mention is the term greenway, as is spoken throughout this ordinance, means town paved trail networks. And going back to what I just mentioned there, unpaved natural surface trails are off limits to all classes, not just class three, so none of those are allowed on that anyway. The speed limit, we have set it at 15 miles an hour on multi-use paths. That, again, as I mentioned, you have the class 1s and the class 2s that go up to 20 miles an hour. We're saying just because they go up that fast, we're not going to allow them to go that fast. So we'll lock it down at 15 miles an hour. Riders need to yield to pedestrians, pass with care, and stay off of the unpaved natural surface trails. Helmets and enforcement. The riders and passengers under 18 must wear helmets on class 1 and 2 e-bikes. And as I mentioned a second ago, there's no class 3 under this ordinance that we're allowing in town. So the important thing, and you can see here in my note, class 3 helmets are required directly by state law using the same under 18 threshold. So they're still required, just not part of our ordinance. This is state law. The civil penalties, again, this is not a criminal code. This is a civil code, so nobody's gonna go to jail. What we'll do is first issue the written warning. That's all it is, is a warning. Nobody will be charged anything. The second would be a $25 charge, and then the final would be $50. Signage and public education. We've got signage of the trailheads and path access points. We kind of talked about that a little bit earlier. This would be additional signage that we have that would actually notify people when they get onto those trailheads and the paths what to expect. So we'll kind of incorporate that. We haven't really gotten all the details out, but if we do that as a separate signage or incorporate that into our total signage program. educational partnership with the Cabarrus County Sheriff's Office and the Cabarrus County Schools we'll talk about that a little bit more but what we're really trying while it's not directly in the ordinance from for the Cabarrus County Schools we really feel like we want to partner with them to be able to get the education out to the students on the front end This is what an e-bike is. This is where you can and can't ride it. This is what you have to do and follow these rules. And if we can get them educated up there, and then we can also hedge the sheriff's office to be able to continue that education, hopefully the back end, which is where the warnings and the tickets come in, will be small to none because we'll have the education. That's really what we're trying to focus on. So kind of wrapping it all up, the effective state, again, is concurrent with the state session law, so December 1st. If next month you also choose to approve it, that's when it would take effect. The minor signage and education costs are really, we feel like we can absorb those into our existing operating budgets. That solicitor, you can see the statutory authority. And again, our enforcement partners that I just mentioned really want to use that as education first, then deal with the enforcement on the back end. We certainly have no plans on the sheriff's department running around pulling people over just for the plan is that if it's it's more still complaint driven or if they happen to see it they can take action but we're not going to be on patrol and that goes into it's not we're not having to employ anybody else to try to enforce this. Staff recommendation again tonight is to receive the presentation. The plan is that we'll continue to gather public input over the next 30 days. Anything that y'all may receive, please pass on to us so we can accumulate all that information. We plan to route a draft of this to Captain Gilmore for review, and Rob and I have plans to sit down and talk through some of the opportunities, especially the educational side of that, that we can work with. and then return next month for formal consideration and adoption. Happy to answer any questions if I can, unless I answered everything.

I think I just need some clarity on the educational piece because we often just think about Harrisburg as being Hickory Ridge when literally right here goes to J.M. Robinson. So I need some clarity on what that looks like with education. I totally understand the Sheriff's Department. Is there going to be any engagement with Officer Scott at J.M.? Like at Roberta Road Middle? What does... education is too broad. I want more like me to that.

I will say we haven't gotten into all that detail. Honestly I think this is one of the good things as Rob and I were talking to delay the vote for 30 days is we have time to get an answer back whenever we come back next month. I do feel like we're going to have to sit down with the school system and find out what resources are they willing to help us out with this. I believe that we're going to be one of the first ones that are going to that put this out. So it's going to be new for everybody and it will be a learning experience. I certainly don't feel like we're going to have a perfect from day one, but I think the more we can prepare for it on the front end will be better. So yes, that's great. And we'll make a note and make sure we and I think you'll have partnership.

I mean, because a lot of times these kids are using school grounds to ride these vehicles so that Lex calls them on their property. So I think that there's an incredible opportunity there for sure.

Let's go back to the slide with the restrictions on it. See, class two. Well, pedal and throttle, right? I think it's a throttle. Is a class two a throttle only or a pedal and throttle?

Pedal and throttle.

Pedal and throttle, see? So state law allows class two on sidewalks, correct or no?

No, they do if we don't have an ordinance in place.

Right, so why would we go against state law in that regard? I'm sorry, I'm a big e-bike guy.

State law allows all three, if we choose.

Well, I can understand, no, you don't want somebody doing 30 miles an hour on the sidewalk.

The class two at the workshop was a yes. We switched it at the workshop to a no.

And our conversation around that was.

There was actually a conversation whether we should even allow class one, which is the pedal assist. I remember that. Class two was a throttle only in our conversation. That's what it says here as well. They're both 20 miles an hour.

So, Lex, our conversation was everybody's not going to be as responsible as you are.

No, I get it. I get it. But they both go the same speed, right? They're both 20 miles an hour. and with the absence of bike lanes in a lot of places, it seems like it would be better to allow them on the sidewalk, especially since I want to ride on the sidewalk.

I think the idea was captain is here too, to give them discretion. If you see somebody running up and down, knocking over baby carriages, it's like, okay, I got little teeth here, I can enforce that. But if, hey, it's not against the law, you know, that they wouldn't go out and actively seek somebody who was well-behaved on a sidewalk and was clearly trying to be safe. But if some of the stuff that I'm seeing up here on the corner at CVS with a kid with no helmet Running right through the road.

You're gonna want as much firepower as you can get to go I got you on this and this and this One thing on the throttle again, I I do not have any bikes So just from what I research so take that as what it is but the throttle Picks up, gets you going fast, a lot faster than if you just pedal.

So it depends. It depends on the bike. I should just bring some e-bikes up. How many do you have? I've got two. I'll bring them up and you guys can ride them. That might be actually a good thing to do.

This is why we did it kind of as a public. We don't have to do a public hearing on an ordinance like this. But we're kind of following the public hearing process so that we can kind of get this type of information.

But this is very helpful. I mean, because Saturday I talked to somebody in Bradford Park, and they were really upset about the amount of e-bikes. And I'm not as technical as you are. I think the majority of us are not.

So I think that there's some terminology that gets confused. There is an e-bike, which my wife and I have. And we love them because it makes riding bikes, like I grew up in Fort Lauderdale. We didn't have hills. Aaron will tell you. Riding a bike in North Carolina, completely different. So, I mean, it's awesome for us. We love it. We take it to the beach. We've got the big tires on it. We can take them off-road if we want to. And they're awesome. And they're not... they don't really go any faster than somebody could pedal a 10-speed, right? We're behind on Saturday and Sunday. We're behind large groups of people on 10-speeds that are doing 30 miles an hour, right, which is faster than the pedal-assisted versions of e-bikes can go. Now, there are electric dirt bikes, and that's what I see zooming around town. Right, and those should probably be regulated. Those are not technically e-bikes, those are technically mopeds or electric bikes. Class 2 is a pedal assist with a throttle, and most e-bikes today are sold with a throttle. There are very few models that you can buy that are just pedal assist. And by the way, there's two types of pedal assist. There's pedal assist that goes faster as you pedal harder, and there's pedal assist that just checks to see if you're pedaling and then just goes as fast as you want. So there are two types of pedal assist. If the state law allows them on sidewalks, I'd really like to see us allow class two on sidewalks as long as somebody's not being an idiot and there's no bike lane available.

How do you nuance that? Yes, and that's a good question. I get it.

It's the same speed, too.

Yeah, it's the same speed. What's with somebody concerned that if they have a kid with the throttle, like they don't want them to be on the street, they would rather they're, you know, the responsible kid that they're being on the sidewalk? Right. That was our conversation.

Yeah.

And then also, is this, since Bradford Park was mentioned, is this only going to be applicable to town kids? proper or etj like what happens in etj i know we don't have as many sidewalks these are just the things that are in town public or private but it has to be in town here your jurisdiction does not go out it does not okay the golf course golf cart coordinates it doesn't okay apply that right report so do we need to ask the county to see that they also put something similar in place or something otherwise it's going to be not regulated at all right in our etj area yeah i'm not sure what the what the county's uh authority is under this and i'm not sure if it extends to them or not we can check on that though or if we if they're not responsible for it then maybe we can be responsible for those sidewalks

Does anybody know where the scooters fall into this? Because I've seen scooters going really fast.

Well, they're definitely not pedal assist. But yeah, some of them goes, you can buy them on eBay or on Amazon.

I've seen a lot of that, but I don't think that applies here.

So a couple things. Rich says this does apply to the county and I see somebody hiding in the back that we can let know that they need to adopt something as well so we can we get that taken care of the other several questions all focus around let's go ahead and go back to that class two definition make sure that we understand that before the next meeting so we'll get something out to you guys on that but I think what the mayor mentioned on scooters and throttle only fall under a class two as a throttle only without it so I'll double check on that but that was my understanding on those and I think that was what led up to our conversation of swapping class two from a yes to a no because we were all okay with people pedaling on a sidewalk right but it made sense but if it's only throttle which if you kind of look at the bottom and the updated like class two throttle e-bikes are no longer permitted I think that was the intent but we can go back and yeah but Lee said that class two was pedal and throttle

Yeah, based on what the notes that I have is pedal and throttle, but it can be throttle power. It doesn't require pedal assist, but it does. But they have pedals. Right. That's the way I understand it.

We'll get you a definitive answer on that. That's not what the screen says, and I'm not positive. and I think there's some question I'll bring you like yeah I understand like this point that is particularly because it's the same speed limit like there's not there's just not a difference on there so I don't know what the difference it's a problem I'm pretty sure but I'll get you the yeah I think a class one has pedals and a throttle class to just as a drop and they both go the same speed under this definition that we're we have in here which takes me back to Rich's only suggestion on this was that we not cite the definitions of another agency that we actually physically put them into our code so that's one of the updates that we'll be doing as well as far as the schools too I think some of these other schools they're technically in Concord so Concord will have to put regulations around this

and I don't know if we can just share this is what we're doing with them but it could be done we see education come out like this all the time sharing the education is different yeah there's a whole period because if they don't pass anything then those schools will like it will not be affected unregulated and we're not trying to

dictate what happens in another municipality just we recognize that we have kids that live in harrisburg that are going to be impacted by this that need to be um educated on what can and cannot happen where they live like literally right here town center robinson canterfield goes to jm robinson it would be our school district we have to make sure that we're doing it equitably across all of them if they're within town limits yeah

I think we dedicated six months before enforcement to education on understanding here's the ordinance and we'd have to get that as many places and schools are one good places as lee had mentioned but so are our hoa boards so our youth councils so we're all the you know rocking the berg events you know there's lots of places you can educate if it's a if it's a big issue that would also be a good time for us to educate on what is not an e-bike and these these electric dirt bikes that are going around that are the real dangerous issue that kind of everybody thinks of when we talk about e-bikes is a whole separate communication effort

this is starting to resemble the dog park conversation one thing I will quickly mention the mayor asked about scooters so the way I understood this based on reading up the state law it

All of this only relates if it has to have a saddle and it has to have pedals. If it doesn't have it, it's not regulated by the new state law or this ordinance. So it kind of eliminates scooters and eliminates the mopeds and motorcycles.

One wheels, etc. Electric carrier class 2 machine. So if I take the seat off, I'm legal? No, but you are in danger.

Any other questions for Lee? If not, we'll go to that.

Perfect. Thank you, Lee. Thank you. Last item is consideration of town council travel and training policy, and we're back to Rob.

Okay last item on the agenda is consideration for the travel and training policy. This was also something on your recent workshop. So we discussed in the workshop why having the policy, what is the purpose, what is the need for it, supporting the town goal four, communicating our goals, success and challenges to community and serve as an advocate for the community this is something we've talked about as a group we've not done this historically however we have been pushing more and more out into areas of serving on different boards serving around the state serving in important positions in the local region so that we're increasingly representing the town in all of those capacities. Today, we don't really have a consistent framework of how we do that. This policy establishes clear, transparent rules for the travel, education, training, and advocacy so that there's one written standard that's available both to the council and to the public so we understand what that policy is and how we're using it. It supports a more active, assertive advocacy role. We talked tonight in several capacities where the town's residents are worse off because people outside of this room make decisions on our behalf. Us being out advocating for those and understanding how to head those off before they get here is important. And the North Carolina law recognizes a local government's advocacy for its own interest as a public purpose. So this policy ensures that every dollar meets that test and can be explained to the residents. How does it work? we have group things that we do together we have mandatory trainings those are all outside of this policy those are done in whatever budget they exist in if this is an economic development effort or something that is a group may go to that is that lives with ryan we also have the elected officials mandatory training that the state tells you guys that you have to go to but does not fund that so one of those unfunded mandates that we spoke about earlier this is specific to each individual elected officials discretionary amount what are the trainings what are the boards that you want to be on most of the people on this dais are on some significant involvement with a different board or a different organization or they may be sitting in a chair seat and out there advocating for the town that is what this goes towards this is up to 2500 as or as directed tonight there was some discussion of whether that number should be higher or lower but as of now it stands at 2500 for the year amounts for future years would be set in that budget cycle so this is up for discussion each and every year moving forward it applies to the elected officials um eight of you it's a reimbursement it's not compensation it's a not to exceed reimbursement individual not transferable and there are no carryovers this is year by year and you guys said that everything would be reimbursed based on the town employees travel and per diem rates which gsa rates would comply where the town has none What qualifies, what doesn't qualify? Here's our examples of things that are covered. So eligible things would be like going to the League of Municipalities, town hall day, legislative and regional meetings, school of government courses, municipal essentials, ethics, finance, land use, ICMA or National League of Cities programming, central line. subject matter training, ethics training, and official representation of the town at intergovernmental or town events. Things that wouldn't be eligible are the things that you would think obviously are not eligible. Campaign, election, referendum activity, dues, fees to political organizations, anything where their primary purpose is partisan or ideological advocacy, regardless of viewpoint, it doesn't matter which side. If we're doing ideological advocacy, that's ineligible. Political or charitable contributions, personal expenses, fines side trips family travel anything that would be obvious to you guys and we've never had a case of is something that's not eligible and is in the policy and located within their four-year use there's documentation and fiscal control in there pre-audit through our finance department a transparency Component was added when we talked about this at the workshop with an annual disclosure report. That would be a real-time document that's available, so we would do an annual disclosure, but that could be requested at any point and is a public record. And then sensitive expenditures were the area where I think the individual discretion was important from a staff standpoint. If something's legal to go to and you guys have a policy and you're all individually going to things, not as a group, I think it's best left to the individual to make that determination. Is this something that they want to be involved with from an advocacy standpoint and benefits the town? I think people can disagree on that. But if it's legal, it's permissible. If it's not, it's not. So that's where the town attorney determination would come in. If there's something that isn't obvious on the list that we went through before, then the town attorney could make that decision in consultation with your town manager. before the expense is incurred and there's always a an appeal to the general body of counsel if for some reason they disagree with the town attorney's determination on that The recommended motion is here on this slide. What the adoption does is it sets that $2,500 ceiling per individual, or whatever you decide this evening, defines eligible and ineligible uses with written predeterminations, and requires all of the receipt certifications pre-audits as an annual public disclosure. will take any questions that you have we recommend approval of this this evening subject to the council's amendment suggestions where is it in here i know we talked about it but i don't see it where you said that the city vision would be excluded and league of cities would be excluded This is just individual. Those are group events. I don't have the policy up in front of me. But I think this doesn't call out everything that's excluded. It calls out everything that's included, which is just your individual allotment. So anytime we're on group travel, there is a separate budget. item that's city vision that's the league or the national league of cities those are the two we budgeted for this year in any given year you could say hey like for instance we have a budget workshop coming up on our legislative advocacy we may take a trip to raleigh to advocate for the levy that wouldn't Be coming out of individual expenditures. That would be something we take out of the advocacy legislative advocacy Budget and book it there if we were going on a fact-finding for EDC that would come out of Ryan's budget that we put into travel for and that and it could include some council all of council but those would come out of each department this would be specific to individual trainings and really serving I think as an advocacy or an advocate in different positions for the residents

uh... i'm going to forget what the third one is but there's three things i want to add maybe i'll think of a third when i get to it i think this amount can come down based on some of the exclusions that you have in there if we have to go to training or uh you know that's mandated or we go as a group fifteen hundred dollars to me feels like if you were a state legislator i think they give you some ridiculous housing amount that you couldn't possibly live on and if you don't want the job you don't take it i don't plan to submit any receipts because it's probably more hassle than it's worth so you won't get any from me um But if something is paid on my behalf or you say, hey, you're going to – I have no idea if we paid for that economic development luncheon that we went to. I don't know. Did that cost us money? Would that come out of this?

No, that's the economic development luncheon.

$1,500 seems more reasonable to me. Now, if there are situations where somebody says, oh, there's this wonderful thing that I want to go to, if they came before council – well in advance and said, this is going to cost me an extra $1,800, and you've got five hands in the air, then I think council can say, yeah, we'll authorize to go beyond $1,500. Based on the exclusions that you have, I just think I'd be hard pressed to come up with $2,500 worth of expenses that I'd be comfortable turning receipts in for, including gas or hotel or any of those fees. I don't know. And Ron, I think you were surprised at like, why do we have any expenses?

Well, yeah, I mean, I've been on MPO for years and, you know, I think I was calculating the number one day and I was like, a few thousand dollars. I just eat it. Time, money, gas, food. I always took all this in as this was kind of what I was elected to do. education it's even in my job you know you'll find my job i have compliance courses i do those because that determines whether i get a raise or not um am i going to be a lot better what i do i'm going to probably do a lot of ojt I learned more through my residence, and I learned more just being out talking to people. When I go to my local meetings, I get more out of it there. But I'm like you. You know, the one time that I used it was the required newly elected.

Right.

And the only place they offered it that year was Asheville. I was like, okay. And I was there a day and a half, I think it was.

Right.

yeah I think based on a lot of feedback that I received since our meeting and after giving it some more thought and all the exclusions like everything that's mandatory everything that's required is not included in this amount so this is really for someone in addition if they want to go participate in a certain event and based on the historical expenses that we've seen for the last ten years and based on um you know the recent salary increase that council members had i believe that even 1500 is generous but i will go up to 1500. so rob let me just ask the spreadsheet that you shared that's accurate which one the last one that you sent via email on friday

Yeah, I mean, they're both accurate, but they're telling a different number. So the first one was what we're talking about this evening, which is that individual expenditure exclusions of the group trip and of the mandatory training. The second one is all of the expenditures that Brian had for all of that, which was trying to capture your request after that.

okay so that leads me to say that i have questions on okay so then if the required one is excluded emg right essentials of the government of municipal government is excluded are the ethics trainings excluded as well because they were not reflected for any of the incumbents

Are the ethics mandatory training?

Yes, they are.

That's part of the newly elected.

If it's mandatory training, then it wouldn't be included in your $2,500 discretionary.

For newly elected?

For newly elected.

No, for re-elected, you have to do...

If it's mandatory, we budget for it as a part of the mandatory training budget. We don't have a... We don't have an option. Like if you guys were to vote no, you say you got rid of the whole policy and said this number is zero. We still have to send you guys to the mandatory training. So we budget for that just like we budget for new computers and the other stuff for new council members or for those that are required to do something. If there's something missing, it's all in there.

okay so and I want to be clear because the notes don't reflect this the conversation that I was a part of was never to have a higher amount I asked that if we wanted to make like I said it was very important for us to ensure that the amount was appropriate if someone wanted to do other courses through the League of Municipalities school government central on a wherever that was what I said I think it's also very important to be clear, we need to be educated on what we're doing because we're responsible for you, Rich, and Janet. So that's not something we can lean to Google for. That is not something that we can just glean on our own. Yes, there is opportunity to learn when we're in partnership with our neighboring municipalities and folks across the state. However, we have an obligation to do this. I just want to be very clear on what the conversation was around that. Excluding those things is fine with me. I think that accuracy and what was shared is of the utmost importance.

I'm confused. What's my obligation other than when I was newly elected?

You have two hours of ethics training that you have to do when you're reelected yeah that's a violation of our oath and code of conduct if you don't do this what was inaccurate you said it's important to be accurate what was inaccurate the notes from our workshop oh is that was that the minutes okay i have not so you want to make sure that you always the ethics training is added for no he said that he said that it is part of the required that if it it didn't matter if we said it was zero so it doesn't mean if something's required

We budget for it separately. This is really about how we budget less than what we're doing. If we budget for a group trip, that's budgeted separate and we have a line item for that. If it's mandatory training, it's mandatory training. The town's obligated to pay for it. this is non-mandatory discretionary an amount and again I I want to reiterate that I do think it's really important I'm the person you know I'm gonna brought this up in our budget workshop and we've seen examples of it tonight where you know there is a question on a procedure a policy a rule a way something's done and an educated counsel is a manager's best friend like if you guys hear one thing from your manager and

and you go hear it again from the school of government and you hear the same thing from the league of municipalities that is the best thing that can happen to me that's it what are you going to say I've been in that situation and Rich knows the situation I'm talking about I referred to Rich at the time I referred to the town manager and I referred to the school of government and I didn't have to travel I did it all from my email I did it from my phone So I don't understand why we're fighting over that we have to have money to go do that. When you can pick up the phone, you can send an email.

Well, I think that's different than sitting in class and learning best practice or learning how other municipalities have dealt with various things. That whole conversation we had about data centers. I've been in quite a few trainings where that has come up, to be able to have some foundational information, to be able to have a knowledgeable conversation about data centers, or about brownfields when we were figuring out, or greenfields, just trying to figure out what that would look like, as Lex talked to us about what the size and scope of these facilities even look like Should they, you know, we just don't want these big empty boxes around the town. Like, those things are important. Also, just basic Robert's Rules. That stumped us tonight. Like, these are very simple things that we are exposed to that you learn that is not an email, that is not a phone call.

That's a book that Janice gave us. I didn't get that, and I learned that on my own. When you talk about data centers, just at my MPO, I talked to the gentleman from Midland because he came to our office. workshop and he's like hey i like what you guys drafted up how do we get on board to do that and he and i talked and we talked about doug and rob getting together and sharing what we did but at the same time i pivoted to my left and there was the mayor salisbury and she and i had conversations about how their ordinances were created hey look at these things and look at this so you don't get Mayor Salisbury said, look for this. Doug's going to call you because they weren't interested in our stuff. I mean, I did all that, and it was an MPO, and I didn't collect the money that I was supposed to get to go travel over there.

Well, I'm just going to interject. There's not a one-size-fits-all. And I think that we were all elected to do right by our community. And that involves learning. And learning involves good governance. That's what we took an oath for. So if we need to take an ethics course when we're appointed and when we're appointed and we're elected, we need to do that. If there's an opportunity to go and learn and to talk to someone in Wilmington or wherever to go to a conference, we should be encouraged to do that. Is $2,500 enough? Maybe not, maybe it is, I don't know. But I think that, and I asked at the workshop, this was our first time ever even talking about a policy. Why? Because Councilwoman Glover and myself are now traveling and are on statewide boards and all of that. That puts Harrisburg on the map. That makes Harrisburg look good. And so I don't, it gets the feel that, you know, that all of a sudden, because now we're traveling or, you know, now we want to, we want to hinder that. I don't think our community would want that. I think our community wants us to be able to call things out, to be able to do good governance, and the way that you do that is not by sitting in the room with eight people. You learn that by being around other people, about comparing best practices, because why reinvent the wheel if you can go to these things and you can talk to people? Why do that? And I'm sorry, but Google and AI a lot of times is garbage in, garbage out. So I say, why not try this? And if we don't use it, we can go back to it. You just said that we can change it at any time. But it just feels like we are being hindered from wanting to learn and wanting to do things that happen differently from what's been done in the past. And for me, I'm probably the only one up here with a terminal degree. So I love learning. So feeling like that's being hindered on this is troubling, especially for Harrisburg. Well, it's depending on the field.

Engineering, bachelor's in engineering is a terminal degree. So depending on the field, it's different.

And if you, to your argument, if we look at what's been done in the past, the reason it's being asked to reduce is based on what's been used in the past, the least amount.

Well, I don't think that, back to her point about the spreadsheet, I don't think that was accurate. Well, and then when we talk about this. What's inaccurate? I mean, because, I mean, or maybe it is. Because maybe the ethics courses weren't attended and that was required. So maybe, and that identifies another problem, right? But I think that. So, you know, that just identifies.

If there's something inaccurate, let us know. But I mean, it's everything that we have.

yeah so my question again goes back to what I asked at the workshop how do we come up with this number and the response was I just thought it was a good number and that's a I mean and that's fine I'm not judging that you just think it was a good number my my remark to that is if we pull out what is excluded

probably works I don't think that we'll hit the $2,500 mark but I don't if I said that if I said that point well taken it was a clumsy way to say it I developed a number because it's the most that's ever been spent by a council person in a single year was twenty four or fifty something excluding the other things so and you gotta remember I was doing this in the budget in like February So coming up with a number, it's like, OK, individually, we've never gone over this amount. Let's budget that for each individual person. And that should be a number. And as Chris said, Councilman Fall, sorry to be so informal, if there's something that we really are itching as a board to send somebody to, that's an easy thing to come in and say, yeah this is important for us we want to we want somebody to represent us there let's let's go ahead and prove that I find that to be a difficult thing to sell tonight but we've never had we've never had that individual you know that amount individually exceeded above 2,500 for any council person in the history of the town I think that it looks like with you know

All of us have expressed our opinions, and there's different sets of values and views on this. So with that in mind, I'd like to move to adopt the Town Council budget and training policy as presented, establishing an annual allocation of $1,500 per elected official for the fiscal year 26-27.

there's a motion on the floor is there a second so all in favor aye opposed nay motions carry thank you I think it's just two nays all right action items I did have I believe councilman fall brought up new business business updates

investment number yeah Ryan gives us quarterly updates he gives Ellie and I weekly updates I get monthly update I mean we'll find a way concerned about AJ's

yeah we'll find a way we'll see how that best package is but I did have that and I had one other which was a an update on cartology I was able to get a quick update in here that looks like Labor Day wasn't adjusted so we sent out a push notification and we could have some November December dates that will get adjusted as well so that was sent out though yeah yeah but we don't we don't want to have to send out going to Well, the Labor Day one, we sent out a push notification. We don't want to send out push notifications. We want cartology to be right on the future ones.

And then I had e-bikes that were still following up on that part, too. Yep.

Yep, I got defined class two.

I'm bringing e-bikes. Anything else for action? We do not have a need for closed session. So with that, is there a motion to adjourn?

Motion.

Second? Second. All in favor?