Council - Regular Meeting

If you will, before I call the meeting to order, silence your phones. Mr. Campbell is going to say a prayer for the council.

Let us pray. Heavenly Father, once again, we gather here in your presence to conduct the business of the town. We ask that you guide us with wisdom, confidence, and civility. as we take care of the things that you would have us do and as our citizens would have us do. Be with us day by day. Guide us and protect us. We pray for those who are sick and are hurting, particularly our council member, Veronica Carter, that she is home recovering from surgery. And we ask that you lay your hand upon her and grant her a quick recovery. Bless our people. first responders, our police officers, and our town staff as they take care of the things that they need to take care of for your town. In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Thank you, Mr. Campbell. I will now call this meeting to order at 6.01 and remind everyone that these meetings are filmed. Anyone can video. So just... Be nice. And if you will, silence your phones, and let's do the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you all. Next, we have approval of the agenda. Does anyone have any amendments they want to do, or do I have a motion?

Madam Mayor, I'd like to add something during new business, just upcoming proclamation suggestions. We could just call it recognition.

And you want it where?

In new business.

You want to do it with your council report?

I can, yes, ma'am.

Okay. Anyone else have anything? If not, do we have a motion?

Motion to approve the agenda as amended.

Do we have a second?

Second.

Any discussion? All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Motion carries. Announcements, Cape Fear Blue Star Mothers of American Proclamation. Council, you want to come down with me as we invite these mothers to come up? Once again, Mr. Hire brought this to us. And so you ladies, if you'll come up, please. And I'll let you do this.

All right, we'll come over.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor, fellow council members, and members of our community. Tonight, we're honored to recognize an organization who is rooted in service, compassion, and unwavering support for the men and women of our armed forces. and the families who stand behind them. In the active duty and veteran community, a Blue Star family is a family with an immediate family member who is currently serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. On our council, Mr. Pendleton is an example of such a family as he has a son who is currently serving. The Cape Fear Blue Star Mothers is a dedicated who work to encourage active duty service, assist veterans, and provide comfort community outreach, volunteer service, and countless acts of kindness, they demonstrate that our military members are remembered, appreciated, and never alone. Among those who exemplify this mission is Mrs. Michelle Bunting, whose leadership and volunteerism have strengthened the organization's impact throughout our region. This evening, we have a proclamation for the organization, and I'll just read it briefly. Whereas the Blue Star Mothers of America was founded in 1942 by mothers of service members who came together to support their sons and daughters during our nation, serving our nation, beginning a proud tradition of service. patriotism, and support for military families. Now, therefore, be it proclaimed that the town of Leland hereby recognizes and honors the Cape Fear Blue Star Mothers of America for their unwavering dedication and service to our service members, veterans, military families, and community, and encourages all citizens to join in expressing our sincere gratitude for their service and commitment to our nation. In witness thereof, I have hereunto set my hand and cause the seal of the town of Leland, Mayor Brenda Ball. Bozeman.

Thank you very much. I had a speech, but he said everything. There's really not much more I can say. We just wanted to get our name out there. We do work within the community. We work with Post 68. We work with veterans of foreign wars, Post 12196. We are here for active duty, vets, Coast Guard, and reserve. So you can be a Blue Star mother if you're a mom. stepmom, guardian, female legal guardian, and we are here to boost membership. So if you know of anybody that would be willing to come on, we don't make them do anything unless they want to, but it's all volunteer. Thank you very much for having us.

Michelle, mine retired. Air Force.

Thank you. You can be a booster mom then, too. Yes. I thought they had to be active. No, veterans too. Oh. Yeah? All right.

Let's pull it in.

A couple of you ladies want to come over here? Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

All right, next we have upcoming events. We got a bunch of things coming on. Mr. Barnes, tell us about them.

Sure thing. So I have some slides to go along with this today, so hopefully you all can read along. And if you have any questions, there's some information at the end to assist you with how you can register. come before you every month to share with you some upcoming events that we are working on town, primarily through our Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department. And I wanted to share with you what we have planned for the month of August, as well as what we have through the majority of September. I'll call your attention to a few things on this list here, starting with tomorrow, Aesop's Fables, presented by the Brunswick Arts Council. We have made the decision to move that inside, so that'll be at the Cultural Arts Center due to the impending poor weather for tomorrow, and so... That'll be a play performed there by members of the Brunswick Arts Players, and we'll have that at the Cultural Arts Center from 6 to 7 p.m. On August 22nd from 6 to 8, we also have a magic show by Mr. Ken Norris at the Arts Center, and then we're back in the park on August 27th from 6 to 8 p.m. for our next concert. This will be the third in the series, the British Invaders, which is... the British invasion of music from the 60s and 70s into pop and rock culture. And so we're excited to have them in the park for our third concert, which is part of the Live in Leland series, which you can find more information on that on the town's website. been really well received so far. The first concert we had over 3,000 people, and the second one we had over 2,000 people. And so we are excited that this is an opportunity for the community to come together, listen to some live music, and enjoy some time together. We also have a new gallery starting. Oh, sorry, before I get there, Family Clay Day on August 29th. It's an opportunity for families to make pottery projects together. It could be kids, parents, grandparents working on projects together there, as well as a jewelry class on August 29th from 11 to 2 p.m., and then an art class, Find Your Flow, on August 29th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Also, on getting into September, on September 3rd from 6 to 8, we'll have our fourth concert, Deer Marabella and the Pig Kickers, which is a bluegrass, rockabilly-type vibe there, getting into our fall weather. Hopefully things are starting to cool off around that time. And then September 4th, we have an outdoor adventure program from 145 to 5 p.m. That's a kayak paddle from the Cypress Cove Park out to Eagle Island. It's about a six mile paddle. They anticipate it taking about three hours, but should be a great time there. We have a new gallery starting on September 9th, the Kennedy Holly Gallery, as well as the gallery reception there on September 10th from 6 to 8 p.m. We have a rotating art exhibit every month at the Art Center. And so that'll be the reception for the new one there starting in September. We have a Leland We Don't Know tour scheduled for September 15th, 9 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. You can see parts of town, hear the history of our community, and see some areas that maybe you don't see every day. We have Battle of the Bowls planned for September 17th, 6 to 8 p.m., which we're really excited about. This is one of our newer programs going into, I believe it's third year, where we have a chilly cook-off between our public safety folks, between fire and police. I'm not exactly sure who has the lead right now. Fire says they have the lead right now. And so it's an opportunity for the community to come out and see which department has the best chili. We also work in partnership with Manna Ministries, so it's a food donation as well. So bring some canned goods and donate that to Manna Ministries, and then you can vote as well for who you believe had the best chili. And if I'm remembering correctly, I think we also have participation from the county sheriff's office today, or this year, getting in the mix. So we might have a new winner this year, depending on how that goes. Okay. And lastly, I want to end with Latin Dance, September 18th, Seasonal Scrapbooking, September 21st, and Candy Bar Bingo on the 24th. And then lastly, something new for you all, wanted to bring y'all's attention to our programming guide, the CAPE. We put this out twice a year for the seasons, and so the one that's out right now is Summer-Fall. This QR code that's on the screen here, you can scan, and that'll take you directly to our program guide that'll tell you all about when these programs are, where, and a description of them. And so not just for the ones I read tonight, but through this season. So these will take you all the way through November, and then you'll hear a little bit more about our holiday programming as we get closer.

Cool. I'm excited.

Thank you.

Thank you, Barnes. Okay. I've been looking forward to this all week. Legislative update presented by Patrick Bufkin from North Carolina League of Municipalities Legislative and Regulatory Council. Welcome.

Thank you, Mayor. It's a pleasure to be with you. I'm Patrick Buffkin, legislative and regulatory counsel, one of the members of the government affairs team at the League of Municipalities. It's a pleasure to join you tonight. Here's an overview of what we're going to talk about. And when we wrap up, I welcome any questions that the board members may have or any discussion we want to have. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the League of Municipalities, we are your full-service government affairs team representing 550 municipalities in the state of North Carolina. We work on all sorts of issues. The scope is exactly like the issues that you all are dealing here. But our job is an important part of that in connecting city officials with their legislators, growing those relationships, making sure that you have a voice in Raleigh and that problems are getting solved for your constituents and the people you serve. We have resources on our website that we encourage you to look at. Our primary communication during the legislative session is our weekly bulletins. We shift to monthly when the legislature is out of session, as it is now. But our legislative hub hosted on our league website is there for you, and we hope you'll take advantage of that. We also host great events, and we love seeing you all come out to those and invite your legislators to come to those. So for our league members, we will have a legislative summit on September 30th in Winston-Salem. Part of our... legislative agenda and goal-setting process for this year, which I'll talk about a little bit later. And then a little further out next year, we will have our town and state dinner. This is the big one in Raleigh, and we invite the entire General Assembly and all 550 members of the League of Municipalities to come join us for a nice evening in Raleigh to connect with legislators and further the good cause of good government. So I mentioned our policy development process. We are just getting started with that right now. This is the process we go through every other year to set our agenda for the new General Assembly that will start in January of the odd number year. So this gives you an outline of the process that eventually reaches our league board of directors, which is made up of about 30 city officials who will get the final say in approving that agenda. And we will carry that forward through the legislative session that runs 2728. But tonight, we're here to talk about what's happened in the last two years, 26 and 25. And to get started, I'd like to do just a little bit of a level set and talk about where we are politically in North Carolina. And the conversation, forgive me, because you all are so familiar with it, the conversation really starts and ends with growth in this state. We're growing tremendously fast. Again, I feel a little silly saying that to you all. You... I guess, have the good fortune of being one of the fastest growing towns in the state and one of the fastest growing counties and one of the fastest growing regions in the country. And so you see that on this map here. And where that puts North Carolina nationally is the ninth largest state. And most of the demographers think we will pass Georgia and Ohio here in the next five, maybe 10 years. here's a looking closer at North Carolina and we're still talking about growth but we're seeing that growth is not even and it's not evenly spread areas in the mountains are actually losing population mostly due to Hurricane Helene rural areas are still struggling and losing populations and then cities and towns in North Carolina like Leland are just absolutely booming and you see that pictured here in the dark blue with the regional effect of Charlotte, the Triad, and then the Research Triangle Park. And then, of course, down here in southeast North Carolina at home, like I said, one of the fastest growing counties in the entire country. And so here's just another look at that. You know, again, and I will apologize one more time for telling you how hard it is to deal with the challenges of growth because you all know that. And, you know, there's Brunswick County down there in dark green. And that really shapes a lot of North Carolina's politics. And again, it's cities and towns that are really driving the growth. 70% of our North Carolina towns added population in 2025. And Raleigh has topped half a million. Charlotte's now the 14th largest city in the country at almost a million people. So this matters for our politics, it matters in who represents us and how many people represent us. In our business, I like to say it's never too early to start talking about redistricting. So even though it's 2026, we're looking ahead to the 2030 census and 2031 round of redistricting Where we will we will as a state redraw our congressional map our General Assembly legislative maps for the House and Senate and then of course any counties or cities and towns that use a district method should probably look at rebalancing their districts after the census and And it looks like in 2031, we're probably going to get an extra congressional seat, so our delegation will grow. Reallocation of the General Assembly districts will likely mean more urban representation as those areas become more densely populated. And for our congressional delegation, which is currently 10 Republicans and four Democrats, but probably more important than party affiliation is these 10 Republicans are in really large rural districts. The four Democrats, with one exception, are in pretty compact urban districts. And then looking at the state legislature, this urbanization trend that we see, I just thought it was kind of interesting that three counties in the in the state hold 30% of the seats in the General Assembly, those being the top three most populated, Mecklenburg, Wake, and Guilford. So we would expect those numbers to go up after 2031. And then, of course, a very relevant question is who's making the decision about how the districts are drawn. And then, of course, we all know there'll be lawsuits for probably about 10 years, and then we'll do it again. Look, this is our congressional map. That purple one in the top right is the one seat that Democrats hold that I would call rural. It's very large. That's Don Davis' seat, and that seat was redrawn last year. But he remains in the seat and we still have the 10 Republican, four Democrat split. An emerging issue, something to watch out in for in that redistricting is what impact does the changes in the Voting Rights Act mean for our state? We have traditionally for a long time had two Voting Rights Act districts. That's the 12th district. It's a little hard to see, but it's Mecklenburg, essentially Charlotte. And then the blue seat in Wake County, or excuse me, the pink seat in Orange County, Durham, are the two districts. um voting rights or the uh forgive me back up district one the purple one and district 12 are the two voting rights act districts so those would be impacted but truly the whole map's got to be redrawn um because we're probably going to get that extra seat Here's our North Carolina legislature in the Senate. The Republicans hold a veto-proof majority at 30 members to the Democrats' 20. In the House, the Republicans are almost at veto-proof majority in their own numbers. They've got 71 seats. The Democrats have 49. And new this year, there are two unaffiliated members of the General Assembly. Both those members are Democrats who lost their primary and switched to unaffiliated, and they helped the Republicans get some things done this year, which we'll look at in just a moment. Some high-level political trends that really shaped and impact the way the legislature is doing business and the results for this session. Starting in February, March, national polling, public polling. I'm sure there's lots of political junkies in the room. So we're reading all the same stuff that members of the General Assembly are reading and the Republicans are getting worried about. because President Trump's approval rating has been coming down and people are looking to Democrats more since they have two choices. So, you know, they're getting very nervous about protecting their majorities in the General Assembly. Another thing that we see happening is the political issues that are being talked about at the General Assembly are more and more the same issues that are going on on a national level. So like immigration issues, anti-DEI issues, things like that that really got started as national issues. There's the same kind of things that you hear national politicians talking about are now making their way to the General Assembly. And so that's changing our politics and how the place works. And in some cases, it's changing the results too. And then this two-year term has really been marked by a lot of uncertainty at the leadership level. Of course, you all probably know Senate Leader Phil Burger, who has led that chamber since 2011. lost his primary this spring. So he entered this short session as essentially a lame duck leader of the state Senate. Everybody knows he's not going to be there next year, and you have to be a member of the Senate to be the Senate leader. So there will be a new leader in the Senate. That means probably some changes in committee assignments and who gets to chair committees. And then over on the House side, while the Forward-looking view is is maybe more stable. This was how speaker Dustin Hall's first term so again new committee chairs new group of people running the place and We were all learning how they wanted to run it. So Things were a little unsettled during the two-year session just at a high level political dynamic There's also some ways that business has changed at the General Assembly and these procedural realities really shaped the session too. There's been more truncated or sometimes political scientists call it unorthodox law making. So, you know, not like the model that we learned in school and on Schoolhouse Rocks where the bill goes to a committee and you get votes on and it passes one house and it goes to the other one and goes to some more committees. They're shortcutting the process more often, and so you'll see things like omnibus bills that contain multiple provisions affecting lots of different people. You'll see bills that contain provisions that you see for the first time, and it's in a conference report, which is the final step of the process. We've also been working with a shortened work week. Going back, say, ten years or so, the General Assembly had about a three-and-a-half-day work week. They would come in late Mondays, have an evening session, and work through about noon on Thursdays. The last two years, that's been cut down to basically two days, and Tuesday and Wednesday are the busy days. And that's made it harder to access the process and harder to influence it as well, as we'll see with some of the results. The General Assembly is also passing fewer bills. I'm going to show you a chart in a second that this is a long-term trend, just fewer bills are passing, and that creates a pressure on every bill that's going to pass to have things added to it to get things accomplished. And it's sort of related to this last point is we see our General Assembly sort of modeling what is going on at Congress in using this one big beautiful bill model. For example, the state budget was over 600 pages of legal language and then another 800 pages of money language. So you get these enormous bills and they are must-pass bills and everybody has a little something in them and they become quite unwieldy. As for the state budget, the General Assembly came back this year having failed to pass a budget in 2025 and had not had a comprehensive state budget since 2023. And so in our state, unlike the federal model where the government shuts down if Congress doesn't act, in our state, the agencies have continuing authority to spend the money. So things kind of go on as normal, but the longer you get away from rewriting the whole budget, the more things kind of get out of whack. Federal rules change, money programs change. And so there was a real need to deal with some of those things this year. And one of them was, the pressure on the Medicaid budget. Changes made in that one beautiful bill, big beautiful bill act will result in the state paying more for the Medicaid program and the dollars are just enormous. And we're going to talk a little bit in a moment of how the state has passed the bill to local government on the Medicaid front. Still, the General Assembly was grappling with how to help Western North Carolina recover from Hurricane Helene this year. And there was a strong desire to lower income taxes. And we'll get into some of these. We turn drill down into more issues in the legislative session and just to kind of summarize this You know high-level framework that the journal assembly was operating in, you know We talked about the unpredictability the instability this use of omnibus bills that are extremely long You get you kind of got some weird results We'll talk about down zoning a little later how the journal assembly was kind of heading in in two different directions at one time We see a lot of log rolling that's related to these omnibus bills. That's what political scientists call it, where you just add things to a bill until you have enough votes to pass it, and then everybody's a little bit invested. um this procedure called the proposed committee substitute we we call it a gut and replace around legislative billing and i'll show you an example of that that impacted cities this year this is where the legislature uh schedules a bill it's got one title it may have been considered by another chamber addressing a subject matter that they then substitute the entire bill And it's a totally different subject matter and often happens with little notice. Hostage taking, another political science term, that's holding on to someone else's prize project to exert some pressure on them. And we saw that most famously between the Speaker and the President Pro Tem in the Senate over large funding for a children's hospital in Wake County. So this was that graph I mentioned, or this is one of two of them actually, just showing you the data that the legislature is doing less lawmaking. They're introducing fewer bills than they have historically, and this is not political. This is a long-term trend. It covers times when Democrats and Republicans were in charge. And there's just less lawmaking going on and fewer bills in the hopper. But more dramatic is this one. The percentage of bills that pass is just plummeting. And so this is all related to the bills are bigger. There's more pressure on the members of the General Assembly to pass them. Everybody has to get something in because so few bills are passing. And so this is kind of the environment in which we're working. And now we're going to turn to what happened in the last couple years at the legislature. We love this slide because this is how we feel when we wake up and they're gone. It's just, what in the world just happened to us? Well, they did pass a budget, and the governor signed it into law. They overrode several of the governor's vetoes. They added two constitutional amendments. to the ballot. One was left over from last year. So there will be three constitutional amendments on our ballot. And they redo the congressional map and lots, lots more, which we're going to talk about now. So I won't read this to you. This is just kind of an overview of the individual policies. Policy areas, the issue recap we're going to do. Property taxes was a big theme of the session this year, and the House started it off with a study that was aimed at reforming and reducing the burden on citizens who pay property taxes. The Senate had their own working group. And in the end, what we got was this. This is the proposed constitutional amendment that will be on our ballot, one of the three. And what this does is essentially tell the General Assembly to adopt a law that limits the amount which a property tax can increase year over year. So we expect that there will be legislation on this maybe as early as November, maybe it'll be next year, but those conversations are starting to happen. We also saw this truth in taxation bill, which is a Measure that would require sending notice if you're going to adopt something other than the revenue neutral rate in the year after a reval. That didn't make it, but it's still eligible. We think it might make it across the finish line later this year. The other thing the General Assembly did on property taxes was impose a moratorium on revals. So there were about, I think, 12 counties that did a reval to be effective January 1 of this year. That's the group of folks that would have been affected, those counties and all the cities and towns inside them. It started as a little bit of a political issue up in Guilford County. Guilford's doing a re-eval. Senator Berger was trying to get re-elected. He represents Rockingham and Guilford Counties, and the last few weeks of his campaign, he proposed this moratorium in an effort to win the vote. Of course, it was to no avail, and like I said earlier, he came into the session essentially as a lame duck. But what the General Assembly did was narrow down the number of counties that are impacted by this. And so they did that in two bills. The House took a shot at trying to close this so-called affordable housing loophole. This is something related to a court case called the Blue Ridge housing case. And The problem with it is that there are for-profit companies who will buy 1% of the company who does the affordable housing, and they get all the benefit of the tax credit, but for all intents and purposes, they're operating as for-profits. So that passed the House but didn't make it in the Senate. Infrastructure investments, a big part of what the General Assembly does and what we care about is representing cities and towns. So there's a few dynamics to talk about here. Personal view is the era of big earmarks at the General Assembly is either over or on pause right now. Very few directed grants over a million dollars. Very few. I think less than 10 in the state budget. You know, this is very different than the budget we saw four or five years ago. But there's less federal money moving around, and the General Assembly budget is more constrained with some of the pressures on health and human services. Transportation, our power bill funding was protected, same level as last year, same method of divvying it up. And the city of Charlotte regional area got permission to go to voters to get approval for a new Once an additional one cent sales tax to fund transportation That of course is only interesting to them But the really interesting part was we heard a lot of members of the journal assembly saying, you know I think my area might want to look at that too And I've heard from lots of cities and towns who'd love to have more options for revenue, you know Through that sales tax whether it was dedicated to transportation or something else So that's an opportunity we're keeping an eye on you know water and sewer side federal grant programs are fully matched and they'll go on that's the state revolving fund the community development block grant programs there's two or three of those that do water and sewer infrastructure and then another issue to keep an eye on in the contracting space is the new DEI laws and restrictions we'll talk about those in a minute and the elimination of state historically underutilized business office budget special provisions are what we call the legal provisions that go in the legislation that makes up this state budget and lots of times it's saying you know of the money that we've appropriated here we want you to do this and this but Part of this new environment or this increase in pressure on bills that are going to be passed, the budget this year, and it's not unprecedented to be fair, but the budget this year was, like I said, very long, and it had lots of policy that wasn't directly related to the budget in it. And you see some of those there, including that SNAP error rate payment that I mentioned earlier. So here's what's going on with the SNAP error rate. That is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. We used to call it Food Stamps, but now we call it SNAP. But it's the same program. And the federal government, in their revision last year, has set up a new way of funding that takes into account the error rate, that is if the county office sends a payment to someone who didn't get it, that's an error. And so they're now going to be tracking this and there's more reporting requirements on it and the funding is tied to the error rate. So the General Assembly came back and their way of dealing with that was to pass most of the costs on to local governments. Counties are going to get a bunch of that, but cities are also going to feel that too because it's going to be taken out of sales tax before it's distributed to municipalities in each county. That's something that appeared in the budget that no one outside of the budget writers had seen it until it was in the budget. We think there's members who did not understand that the impact would be on cities who, of course, do not run these programs, have no control over any error rates. So it feels unfair. We've gotten some traction with that idea, but continue to work on it. The good news on that is it doesn't take effect until October of next year. And we think there's movement on the national level to put this off a little bit. They've already done that for states that had really high error rates, ironically. The people with the worst error rates got a break first. But there's some conversations going on in Congress about delaying that. And, of course, the General Assembly will be back next year, and we'll be talking to them about this problem. You know, some good news for our law enforcement officers. Sworn officers in the state are getting a one-time bonus of $1,750. Those should be distributed out through the state government, like, I think, soon. New reporting requirement on economic development expenditures, and that's not a typo. That's the threshold. If you spend more than $25,000 on economic development, then you should be prepared to file a report with the state auditor's office. We don't yet have guidance on exactly what that means. We have had a couple conversations with them. We believe it'll be a web-based portal, um, but that's a new requirement also showed up in the budget for the first time. Um, Couple other real quickly, a merged agency of our building code offices. So three currently become one agency under the Department of Labor. Interbasin transfer is probably an issue of particular interest down here. And in the Catawba Basin, that's where the two moratoriums and the two studies are going on. They're similar but slightly different, but that's related to the The one here in Cape Fear is related to Fuquay-Varina's application. So that's on pause for the time being as this study gets organized. And we were pleased to see that the study calls for consulting with the League of Municipalities. So we will have our turn to have a say about that. Lastly, the General Assembly continues its shift of appointment powers away from the governor in favor of either the General Assembly or some council state offices that have people in them that they like. So let's talk about downzoning. I mean probably the most mysterious and frustrating issue that we dealt with. This happened in a 2024 law. It was a hurricane relief bill right after Helene in December 2024. This is one of those provisions. It was inserted in the bill. At the conference report stage, it went to the floor of the House and Senate, no amendments in order, and nobody really seemed to know where it came from. But what it does is restrict all local government zoning authorities from reducing density or reducing number of uses on a parcel without the owner's written consent. creates all sorts of problems. I have a piece of paper on my desk back at the office with about 60 jurisdictions now that have some projects that are being held up for this. It's things like corridor planning, rewriting UDOs and future land use maps, revitalization efforts. You know, these big projects almost always come with some downzonings and some upzonings. But they're all great projects and they all need to get done and they've all been put in a state of doubt because of this law. In the end, the Senate passed the bill nearly unanimously. They passed it last year. This is Senate Bill 587. It would have fixed not everything, but it would have fixed the worst problem around nonconforming uses. The House indicated no interest of taking it up, despite probably about 50 members of the House have signed on some local legislation to repeal it or a statewide repeal. They could not move the bill in its current state and they adopted a committee substitute to regulate wake surfing. So that's what Senate Bill 587 is now instead of our down zoning fix. You know, I mentioned earlier that, you know, you see the General Assembly moving in opposite directions of itself sometimes these last two years. The downzoning is a great example of that. So in 2025, Mills River, who was just one or two votes away from approving a new UDO, they'd done two years of citizen engagement and spent nearly a quarter million dollars on consultants. They couldn't adopt their UDO. They got a special provision to allow them to do that in 2025, and then the General Assembly came back and repealed it this year. So we're calling this the Mills River roller coaster. They had the authority, and then they didn't, and then they had it, and now they don't. And along the way, Harnett County got special authority to do some downzonings around its airport, which is expanding. And so the safety zone has to expand. And so they're going to be able to move ahead with theirs. Mills River is not. And on a statewide level, we still see no action on this issue. The jury assembly was into preemption of local authority big time in the last two years. I won't read you all these. We're going to talk about some of them. But there was a lot of action in the area of taking away authority from cities and towns or telling them they have to do something and telling them how they have to do it. You know, primary example of that is the annual regulatory reform issue that addressed various land use and zoning issues. We were successful in stopping the permit shot clocks. That's restrictions on both your staff and elected official time for considering rezonings and zoning decisions. that's still eligible could come back in November December but we we did stop that one from now but there's lots of new land use and zoning laws to pay attention to including the repeal of authority for parking minimums which some cities are already doing and some new stormwater regulations and calculations there It's sort of related but separate topic is how these issues get resolved when they leave the city and we're just seeing the General Assembly squeeze cities and towns from both directions when it comes to land use litigation. It's become very popular to require a mandatory award of fees against someone who prevails in a lawsuit. Developers will now be able to use their trade associations to challenge city decisions and they'll be able to appeal administrative zoning decisions straight to Superior Court bypassing the Board of Adjustment. And also interesting on this slide is, you know, I've noted here the provisions and how they got to become law. And you'll see most of them, a good number of them here, never even considered by a committee of the General Assembly. It showed up in the legislation at the last step of the process. Public camping and homelessness was an issue that came up in the legislature this year. This legislation in House Bill 437 was actually a combination of two different ideas. One is directing local governments that they cannot allow public camping. And the other idea is that if you want to allow it, you can designate an area, but then you're responsible for the health, safety, and welfare of the people in that area. Now, this was vetoed by Governor Stein. It's still pending at the legislature. Deannexation has become really popular at the legislature and currently in North Carolina the only way to remove a parcel from city jurisdiction is through a legislative act and We saw lots of this activity this year Again, the interesting thing is so 11 single city bills were introduced only one of those passed the rest these four omnibus bills that included deannexations impact 17 cities and So, again, you see, you know, not many bills passing, longer bills, dealing with lots of different subjects. And the property tax debate led to some interest in creating a city-level process for de-annexation. Now, that passed the House. and is pending in the Senate. It got started really late, so we're not real sure where the Senate's going to go with that. But that would be a new tool for you all, and it includes various provisions to help ensure you can recover investments you made when the parcel was first annexed. Lots of interest in how local governments run elections this year. And yes, it's true that if you run your local elections at the same time the rest of the county and everybody else is voting, i.e. the even number of years, you do save some money. That's relevant. The other thing that's relevant is there's been a strong trend toward even number year elections and making local elections partisan at the city and town level. So you see all the municipalities that were impacted. Notice some of these include all the cities in a county like Moore and Catawba and McDowell up there. So this was a large group of cities that are changing the way they elect their boards. The General Assembly really flexes muscle on local government oversight this year. I don't have a whole lot to say about that other than you don't want to be in the uncomfortable position of being oversighted. These are pictures of city and town folks, and actually one's a school board. Those folks in the bottom left are school board people. But up on the right is the Raleigh City Manager, and up on the top left is the Charlotte Police Chief, and they were there to explain themselves. Here's just another example using the unauthorized camping bill of just how difficult the process is at the General Assembly for a group like ours that's big and diverse, and we need time to talk with people and understand what's going on. What I want you to see here is, you know, this bill passed the House last year in April, and then the Senate took it up, and now they're meeting two days a week, and so you see one week it passes two committees, the next week it passes one committee, the following week it was approved by the House and Senate, and one week later it's on the governor's desk. I mean, so just when they get up and ready to move something, you kind of have to decide if you're going to jump in front of the bus or let it pass you by. because they do move quickly. I'm winding down here. Again, another area where I'm a little bashful and saying because y'all are doing a great job keeping in touch with your legislators, but things are changing. It feels like the winds of change are blowing, and so we'll have new folks to talk to, new people to get to know either you know later this year or in two or four years so we encourage you to do that we're glad to help support you in doing that know that we're very proud to represent you and we can't be successful without you so here's my number that's my cell it's in my pocket or my car maybe and my email you know reach out anytime we can help and if you have any questions want to talk about anything glad to do that

Wow. That's a lot of information, Patrick.

It was a busy couple years, Mary. It really was.

Y'all got questions?

I wanted clarification. The League is a nonpartisan organization. So the impression to anybody here is that you are leaning Democrat, Republican, whatever. That's not how you work. The other thing is the service of the league is to act as a, an intermediary, shall I say, between towns and municipalities and the state legislators to get concerns and ideas across and to do just what you've done here tonight was to monitor those things that are going on and then report back. And it's not just us here on the council that benefit from that information. It's everybody out here in the public that they can go to the website and see what's going on. Thank you to the league for following up and doing that difficult, difficult work.

Thank you, Council Member. I didn't say, but I normally do, that we're not cheering for the red or blue team, but who wins and loses affects us, so we keep track of it. Even though we're not rooting for either side, we just want to see you all be able to do good government and serve your constituents.

Frank?

Yes, ma'am. Mr. Buffkin, thank you for coming out this evening. I enjoyed listening to your presentation, and you gave us an update on some of the things that are going on in the legislature. Early in your presentation, you had a map of some of the fastest-growing areas in the state, and I noticed it listed Belleville. Well, in light of the growth of Leland in the last several years, I might recommend that you amend that to show Leland instead of Belleville on your slide. My question... The Save America Act has been in the media quite a bit late with the elections coming up. And I know that recently HB 958 passed bipartisan lines in the House and the Senate. It was carried over to the governor a few days ago and it was vetoed. Touch base with us and tell us where you see this. Do you think the house is going to revisit it? Do you think they're going to be able to override it?

Yeah, the short answer is I don't know. So the reason I say that is they left town a couple weeks ago and, you know, either, you know, Outright said they weren't coming back until November or, you know, basically they had put the word out and everybody's making plans. So I haven't heard any change to that. And I keep talking about November, November. The General Assembly has scheduled themselves to come back on November 30th. And it's, you know, we're calling it a lame duck session now, like they do in Congress. You know, after the election's over, you'll have people who didn't run, people who got beat, still members of the General Assembly until January 1st. So what I know is really not much different than what I've read in the press. You know, the Board of Elections director said it was important to pass this stuff, but he also raised the question whether there's enough time to do it. I mean, even if they overturn the veto today, I don't know. if county elections boards and the state board could adjust quickly enough. So that's kind of where they are on that issue. They're really squeezed by the calendar and a little bit by the schedule they set for themselves. I mean, you know, they're all real anxious to get back in campaign or go on vacations before the campaign really gets heated up after Labor Day. So that's what I think. where I think that one stands, that it's just a matter of, you know, it's one of the kind of a funny situation of it's just as important, the timing of it is just as important as the timing of getting enough people to vote on it.

No doubt. It's almost like the farmer with the hole in his roof in the barn. When it's raining, he can't fix it. And when it's not raining, there's no need to fix it. Yeah, and no time to do it, right?

Did you have something to add? Is that all, Frank?

Yes, ma'am.

Patrick, we do appreciate you coming and being with us. You gave us a lot of information here.

Thank you, Mayor. It's a pleasure. I'll come back any time.

Yeah, you don't live too far away.

That's right, just up in Surf City, so it's good to be with you all. And, you know, I spent a little time in district court. It's great to be standing next to a man with a gun again.

Ha, ha, ha.

Okie dokie. Ha, ha.

Thank you all.

Thank you, Patrick. Wow. If y'all bear with me one second before people start getting up and leaving, can we have all veterans stand so we can show you our appreciation?

Thank you so much.

Thank you all.

And if I'm not mistaken, Mr. Roy Latire is our oldest veteran here, and he was a Korean War veteran. Thank you all for bearing with me there. All right, next, Leland Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance. Ben Andrea.

Thank you, Mayor, members of council. Good evening to you. The town council asked for a presentation about how we regulate development in the flood zones. And so I am going to give that to you tonight. I'm going to talk a little bit about what is a flood hazard area, how we allow development in those flood hazard areas in the town of Leland. What do our guiding plans say about how we do that and what possibilities we have for changes that we talked about previously and also the effort to wrap our flood damage prevention ordinance into the town's unified development ordinance. So a little crash course on what a flood hazard area is. When we talk about flood hazard areas, we're primarily talking about the 100-year flood zone. These are the areas that are designated to have a 1% chance in any given year to have a flooding event. These are known as the special flood hazard areas. These are the areas that folks with a federally backed mortgage are required to have flood insurance. These are also the areas that are subject to the town's flood damage prevention ordinance. So these areas typically include some sort of water course, the areas of fringe or the stream banks, so to speak. And in these areas, there is usually a base flood elevation that's established. So I'll talk a little bit about that more in a moment here. A flood hazard area also includes other areas of risk that have less risk. These areas are the 500-year flood zone. These are the areas that have a 0.2% chance in any given calendar year to have a flooding event. The 500-year flood zone is known as the shaded X area. The 100-year flood zone is known as the A area. There are some additional classifications of an A area. But when we're talking about flood hazard areas, we're primarily talking about these two areas, the 100-year and 500-year flood risk areas. These two areas are designated by a process that's ultimately approved by FEMA, and these areas are designated on flood insurance rate maps. What we're looking at here is a screenshot from a North Carolina run information system mapping tool called Frizz. These are every square here is what's known as a panel of a flood insurance rate map. The blue colors that you see here are essentially the the areas of flood risk that are designated by FEMA. And so these areas of color are shown on the county's GIS map, the town's GIS map, generally anywhere that shows these flood hazard areas, it's all pulling from the same information, these flood insurance rate maps. So as I mentioned, every one of these squares is a firm panel. So I'm gonna keep on zooming in here. We're gonna look at this one, 2198. This is an area in the town of Leland off of Village Road that has the Sturgeon Creek Excuse me Cypress Cove Park site This is what a flood insurance rate map looks like it talks about what the area is Where is the community? What version number of the map it is sometimes those are amended or updated and midway through a wholesale update of flood insurance rate maps in the community. Also talks about the map number and then the last date of the update of the map. So in this case, and for the most part, I think probably all of the active flood insurance rate maps for the town of Leland were last adopted in 2018. The process to create these maps is at least a five-year process, often longer than that. So you think about this map was adopted in 2018, the effort to adopt these maps probably started at least 2013, if not sooner or prior to that. So on these flood insurance rate maps, it has a legend. I'll go through what each one of these mean in more detail. The areas shown in yellow, excuse me, the areas with no color are the zone X. These are the areas outside of any area of designated flood risk. So outside of the 500-year or 100-year flood risk areas. Again, these are the areas shown in no color. The floodway area is typically associated with some sort of creek or stream or water course that has some potential for a velocity event during a flooding event. Excuse me, I think I might have hit the, or I skipped a slide, I'm sorry. Well, I'll finish talking about this one and I'll go back. So a floodway is, like I said, it's typically associated with a stream or a creek, some area that has the potential for velocity during a flooding event. The areas of yellow are the 500-year flood zone. Again, these are known as shaded X with a 0.2% annual chance. And then the areas in blue are the A zones. If a base flood elevation has been established, the designation is AE. If not, it's known as a Zone A or an unstudied A area. We do have some unstudied A areas in the town of Leland. But nonetheless, any area that's designated with an A means it has a 100-year flood risk associated with it. So we're going to keep on zooming in here. This is the site of the Cypress Cove Park, again off of Village Road here, not too far from us. We can see the areas in yellow and the areas in blue, the 500-year in yellow, 100-year area in blue. Because this is an AE flood zone, this means that a base flood elevation has been established. A base flood elevation is the elevation above sea level in which a flooding event may occur associated with that risk. So for an AE zone, the risk is the 100-year flood or 1% chance in any given year that a flooding event would occur to the base flood elevation. So for this site where the park is, where that old pad for the home is, the base flood elevation is 9 feet. So that means that there's... 1% chance in any given year that there could be a flooding event to the elevation of 9 feet. Again, this is an elevation above sea level. This is not elevation above adjacent grade. One of the premises of the flood damage prevention ordinance is to minimize risk of property damage and therefore areas in the AE Development in the AE is required to either be elevated to a certain level or to be flood proofed if it's generally if it's not residential. For residential development, there's a number of ways that elevations can be met. Shown with examples here, typically what we see are the ones on the left, the slab on grade, or we may see things like pile supported or crawl space helping to elevate a structure. Talk about this BFE. We'll continue with that nine-foot example. In the town's local code, and this is very common among jurisdictions, there's what's known as the freeboard. This is the amount of elevation that's required above the base flood elevation. So for the town of Leland, that's two feet currently in our ordinance. Combine those two things together, the base flood elevation and the local jurisdiction's freeboard requirement, that provides what's known as the regulatory flood protection elevation. So this elevation, if we use that example of nine feet of BFE plus the town's two feet of freeboard, that means At that site that we looked at, Cypress Cove, if a home was to be built there, it would have to be elevated, the first finished floor would have to be elevated to 11 feet above sea level, 11 feet of elevation. And to meet that elevation requirement, you could do any of those things. So I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and talk more about what the town allows in these flood risk areas. Currently our flood damage prevention ordinance is only applicable to a zones. So these 100 year flood risk areas So that means areas outside of this including the 500 year risk area or beyond there's no special requirements But in the local code in the town's code of ordinances that require some elevation or some other special construction or design techniques the town's freeboard requirement is two feet and This used to be consistent with the state's model ordinance, which was two feet for a long time, but was changed a few years ago to be four feet. But the town's is two feet at this time. There's no limitation on density in a flood risk area. The density is managed by what density is allowed based on the zoning code. So there's no special provision in our Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance that says you can only build up to a certain number of units per acre. We do allow fill in the town. That fill can be used to raise individual structures, or it can be used to modify a site to either bring the whole site up to the regular sort of flood protection elevation, or to remove that site from the special flood hazard area. And then finally, our flood damage prevention ordinance does not apply to things like roads or parking lots. We're primarily talking about minimizing damage to structures through this particular ordinance. Excuse me, so when we talk about, when we look at the applicability of these flood areas in the town limits, We're looking at about 3,600 acres that are in the 100-year risk area in the town's limits. These circles show areas that include residential structures. That number is how many residential structures are in an AE flood zone, the 100-year risk area, within various areas of the town. So as a comparison, I mentioned there's about 3,600 acres that are applicable in the town limits. That comes out to a little over five square miles. The total town area as a whole is over 29 square miles. We have a number of plans that we use for guidance in making decisions. These are the policy guiding documents that went through some sort of process one way or another, ultimately adopted by a town council and setting the vision for where we're going as a community. The 2045 plan is one of those. This plan was adopted back in November of 2021 through a year and a half long process, but this plan provides the policy direction for where we're trying to get to as a community. And so this direction is focused around six themes, and each one of these themes include different goals and strategies and objectives on how we achieve this desired vision that was set forth in this plan. Minimizing flood risk is one of those themes. It's interwoven into this plan in three different areas. This one in particular under this theme comes from a perspective that there is some environmental benefit to areas that are in flood risk areas. These areas are typically along stream banks or banks of watercourse, so they have some environmental benefits both in flood mitigation and habitat area, but also in preserving water quality of the receiving water. In this theme it talks a little bit more specifically about taking a look at how do we weave more resiliency into our codes and ordinances, particularly as it relates to minimizing damage from flood risk. And then finally this theme talks more specifically about trying to minimize the alteration of areas that have essentially are in flood risk areas trying to minimize the hydrological function of these areas. Another plan that we look to is the Town Council's 2030 strategic plan. This plan also has a specific initiative that talks about ordinance updates to reduce development in the floodplain. This is under the strategic priority area of resilient, high-quality infrastructure and environment. So back in September of 2024, there was a flooding event that occurred known as Potential Tropical Cyclone 8, PTC 8. following month the Town Council excuse me let me back up during that event there was some flooding in a certain neighborhood in the town where some structures got damaged and as a result after that Town Council asked staff to look into Well, to get more information similar to this presentation about how we manage development in the flood zone and also come back to you all with some options for potential changes to that Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance. And so we did that and we presented some options for changes to the Town Council. being the five potential options, one of which is expanding the applicability of that ordinance language to areas beyond the 100-year flood risk area. We also said that increasing the freeboard requirement from two feet to something greater than that is a potential option. We also... said that limiting density allowance in a flood hazard area could be a potential option. A more extreme option could be to wholesale limit new residential development at all in these flood risk areas. And then finally, another option that we presented was to minimize or prohibit fill in these flood hazard areas. So the town council said, Why don't you all staff look into four out of five of those? And we did. The one we decided to not move forward with, you all decided to not move forward with, was to prohibit a wholesale prohibition of new development in the flood hazard areas. So ultimately, we presented some amendments to the flood damage prevention ordinance to the planning board and ultimately to town council, and those amendments were not approved. Just wanted to talk a little bit, and this will be my last talking point, is the effort of the Unified Development Ordinance that town staff is currently working on. Currently in our code of ordinances, we have several chapters that pertain to how development occurs in the town, and this is a process, this UDO is a process to update and consolidate all those chapters and language related to development within the town limits into one New updated consolidated chapter in the town's code of ordinances. So we're just shy of halfway through this effort right now. One of the last articles that would be presented to you for discussion would be the flood damage prevention ordinance. So with that, I'd be glad to answer any questions or try to provide any further information that you'd like.

Okay, anyone got any questions for Leigh Ann?

You showed us the number of homes that were built in the flood zone in that one map. How much land has been annexed into Leland now that is in a flood zone that hasn't been built on?

I did not come with a number to give you, but I can help articulate on the map if that gives you some idea. The area, you see the large circle on the top left there associated with that number 12, those are two areas that were some of the most recent annexations. This includes the project known as East Lake and then also the project now known as Terrapin. Those are two of the town's recent annexations. The most recent large annexation is known as the Jackie's Creek property. That's the area essentially between where it says Atkinson Trail and then the blue squiggly lines above that. As far as the exact area, I could get that for you. I just don't have that tonight.

So are we going to be able to prevent new construction in these undeveloped areas and flood zones?

Any developments right now would have to adhere to the rules that are on the books, which allow for Development in a special flood hazard area so long as it meets the requirements of the flood damage prevention ordinance So the answer to your question is no, but if we have a provision in there that there's no fill How are they going to be able to come in and build in a flood area? That would need fill if we don't allow it Sure, so when the town talked about an option for change that included limiting fill What we presented was essentially the premise to not allow fill to either wholesale remove a property from a special flood hazard area and also to not allow fill to meet that elevation requirement. That means if that provision was on the town's books, there are still different ways that structures can be elevated. For instance, either on a basement, foundation wall, pile supported, things like that. That slide that showed the different homes and different ways of being elevated, essentially there's other options besides fill.

Ben, do you by any chance know the East Lake now, how close it is to the flooding area? And where does that water come from? Everything looks dry around there. Mm-hmm.

and normally flooding comes from creeks and rivers and all sure so i'm not an expert on the hydrology of that area but there is a a creek that kind of runs through the terrapin project that ultimately has an effect on the east lake property okay um there whole area ties into drains to Hoods Creek. I'm gonna go back to my map here. I should have just left it on there. It's probably germane to point out that the areas shown in purple are unstudied A areas. So if we look in that circle that's around East Lake and Terrapin, we can see that on the East Lake side there's a blue and you know the line is a lot more defined whereas on the East Lakeside, it's purple and a little bit more blobby looking. That purple is what's known as unstudied A. So before East Lake could start developing, they had to do a flood study to essentially change what is the blobby purple into a more well-defined area of AE. So what's represented here in purple does not necessarily mean that all of those areas are going to be subject to the flood damage prevention ordinance. They have to do a further study to clarify what areas have that 100-year flood risk.

Okay.

Have we done a flood study on the Jackies Creek area?

That is not an area that would need a study insofar as to determine a base flood elevation because those base flood elevations were established as part of the adoption of the flood insurance rate maps. So we can see that it's shown in blue there. That signifies that those base flood elevations are established, whereas the areas in purple in Eastlake, they weren't established when the flood insurance rate maps were adopted. Therefore, the developer had to undertake a further study. to essentially get to the point of having the information that's already defined for the Jackie's Creek area.

Ben, how do you propose that we would address non-conformities that might occur of any of the implementation of the four measures that you showed us?

Out of the four options that the town council directed to move forward with back in 2024, I think that the one that probably is, that we would have to be the most cautious about in terms of the nonconformity language in the state statute would be the one that talks about limiting density. It's not crystal clear in the statute one way or another whether a change to the flood damage prevention ordinance is the same thing as a change to the zoning ordinance. And no one has done it, it hasn't been challenged in court, so we haven't had any clarification there either. So it is a bit of a question mark as far as limiting density. I'm of the opinion that the other three options could be done in a way that don't create nonconformities as it would run afoul of that down zoning language. But that's certainly a conversation for you and your attorney, Mr. Coggins.

Madam Mayor, a further question. If somebody had built in the 500-year floodplain and this was passed, those four were implemented, if they wanted to build a deck or a garage or something to improve their property, would they be allowed to do it?

The short answer is it depends. The portions of a structure that have to meet the elevation requirement include, mostly include the habitable area. So things like a deck wouldn't necessarily have to meet that same elevation requirement. In addition, there's a premise in the flood damage prevention ordinance called a substantial improvement. And the idea there is that if you add so much, if you do a certain amount of work or you have to rebuild your house and it triggers that substantial improvement clause, then you have to come into conformity. So there is some wiggle room, so to speak, of someone being able to do improvements to their home, even if they have a home that doesn't meet the current flood damage prevention ordinance in the current flood zone. There's still some allowance for work to be done before the home as a whole would have to be elevated. Does that answer your question? I'm sorry. For now, thank you.

Okay, go ahead.

It would seem there's an inherent difference between trying to build on property that's not affected by a flood zone versus property that is. And you mentioned that we're somewhat hamstrung by the downzoning legislation. Have we met with or approached anyone from the legislature or our representatives about getting... an amendment to that that allows us to restrict in flood zone areas because one of our primary goals is to protect the people of the community. And if we allow them to build in flood zone areas, then we're allowing them to potentially put themselves in harm's way. So have we made any inquiries into getting an exception for building in flood zones?

So that would be a matter of the council making that decision and instructing staff to reach out to any of our legislators to do that.

There's no chance of that until after November.

Ben, have we condemned homes in the floodplain because they were flooded?

Not condemned, no, sir. There have been homes that have had to meet The current ordinance requirements, because of the substantial improvement clause, very few occurrences of that have happened in the town of Leland. There also have been some properties that the property owner has voluntarily applied to a buyback program, which is a federal program that's administered at the local level, in which there's money to buy properties that have a repetitive loss and essentially remove the structure and keep that property, return that property to an undeveloped state.

And that was Stony Creek, am I mistaken? That's correct.

Okay.

Go ahead. Will you allow me? How many homeowners or how many lots ended up actually applying for that federal aid? Twelve.

Twelve?

Would it be okay if we follow up with you on that, maybe at a future meeting? Yeah. It was a dozen or less, I think, is how many applied, and probably less than that that actually were approved and bought back. But we can follow up with you on specific numbers.

Twelve is what sticks in my mind.

And when were those homes built?

When were they built?

Probably. It was in the 1990s.

We can follow, we can do our best to follow up with a specific number, but we believe that it was early to mid-2000s when those homes were built, and they were built before that area was within the town's limits.

Okay.

Everybody okay?

I think he's good. The Neighborhood itself was approved in the county, but the homes were built under the town's regulations. But either way, the flood maps would have been the same whether they were in the county or the town.

Yes, sir. Thank you.

All right. Any more questions for Ben?

No.

Okay. Thank you, Ben. Give us an update in a bit. Okay, next we go into public comment. Miss Sabrina, we have anybody? Oh, Mr. Hollis tonight.

Yes, Madam Mayor, we have a few people who have signed up to speak. First up is Tom Powers.

And everybody, please remember, as you come up to speak in public comment, you're speaking to the council, not to the staff.

Good evening, Madam Mayor and council members. My name is Tom Powers, and I'm honored to serve as the new commander of the Johnny Jacobs American Legion Post 68 here in Leland. Tonight, I would like to share what our post does to serve veterans and our community, as well as offer my support for proposed veterans council sponsored by the town of Leland. The American Legion was founded in 1919 by Franklin Roosevelt Jr. on the principles of service, patriotism and support for those who have worn our nation's uniform. Post 68 provides fellowship for local veterans while serving the needs of veterans, their families, and our broader community. Our purpose is to ensure that veterans know that they are valued and have somewhere to turn when they need assistance. We help connect veterans with information about benefits and services, support military families, promote patriotism and American values, support children and youth programs, encourage responsible citizenship, and honor those who served before us, especially those who made the ultimate sacrifice. I know that you've heard from John Hacker, who's in the audience with us today. He's the American Legion Department in North Carolina, Be the One state chairman about the Legion's Be the One campaign and its mission to end the veteran suicide epidemic in our country. Be the one challenges each of us to take responsibility for the veterans in our lives. We can be the one to ask how someone is doing, listen without judgment, recognize when a veteran may be struggling, and help connect that person with support. Sometimes one conversation, one telephone call, or one person willing to listen can save a life and keep another family from receiving a folded flag. This is a mission that Post 68 takes very seriously. We want Post 68 to be an active and visible part of the Leland community. Veterans possess valuable experience, leadership, and a strong commitment to service. Our service did not end when we took off the uniform. We still have much to contribute to our neighbors and our town. I recently learned about the idea to establish a veterans council sponsored by the town of Leland. I support this idea and believe it deserves serious consideration. Leland and the surrounding areas are home to veterans from every branch of the armed forces and many generations of service. We're also fortunate to have several organizations that support veterans. A town sponsored veterans council could bring representatives from these organizations together to communicate, coordinate their efforts and address the needs of our local veteran community. The council could help coordinate Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and other patriotic ceremonies. It could share information about veterans' benefits, health care, transportation, employment, housing, and mental health resources. It could also help identify veterans or military families who need assistance and connect them with the appropriate services. A veterans council could advise the town on issues affecting veterans, recognize local veterans for their service, support patriotic educational programs in our schools, and create new opportunities for veterans to continue.

Thank you, Tom.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Louis Harmadi.

Why is that so high? Can this be reduced? How do you? Oh, okay, okay.

Don't break it, Louis.

How do you reduce this thing? Okay. I'm not seven foot tall, so that's why. It's over my head almost. That's the way it goes? It gets kind of in the way of what I'm trying to see.

Okay.

Well, how's everything going? Good? Okay. It's just irritating the things in the way. Okay. So people ask, who are you? I am an American educator. I am life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I am the Constitution. I am the Freedom Clock. I am the Army One. People ask, what do you do? I promote individual liberty, constitutional principles, and religious freedom. People ask, what experience do you have? I was a special agent for the U.S. Treasury Department Audit Division, defense audit contractor, Department of Commerce Census interviewer, retired commander, served in infantry, armor, and transportation. military, accounting, and finance officer, instructor of public administration and management, North County Insurance real estate broker and instructor, Constitution speaker, candidate for U.S. House, NC House, and Town Council. I'm a poet, I'm a writer, and a seminarian. I wrote a birthday poem for Mary Bozeman called Birthday Candles. I'm a combat veteran. I came in seventh out of 110 rangers on obstacle course, and I made 100% on the PT test. I just wrote 11-page review on district elections, redistricting, North Carolina general statute, equal protection law, and the Voting Rights Act. Predictions. At the end of January 2020, I wrote an email writing that all hell will break loose and Donald Trump will lose the 2020 election. Toward the end of February, COVID hit and the world was reset. A new world order is emerging as I speak. Countries are being realigned. In 2023, I told the school board that AI is coming. Today, we are facing uncertain future. America is losing its status on the world stage, and it's not mentioned in biblical prophecy covering the end time events. Since 9-11 and COVID, it has been downhill for America. Most civilizations collapse from within due to division, immorality, corruption, and deficit spending. What do people say about my work? Belleville gave me their town seal for representing the Constitution. School board thanked me for sharing information and making our schools and community better. 23 of my 25 doctors have a copy of my Constitution. My doctors say I should be an elected official. People say I ran for office for the right reasons. I say that voters did not recognize my intent and my work. It's unconscionable that the Town of Leland Council has failed to recognize my work and their failure of conscience. And anyway, here's seven pages of 300 articles I've written. Here's seven pages of when all hell breaks loose in 2020. And so here's my presentation on election, electoral district redistricting and large voting is 11 pages.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you. And here's the mayor's birthday candle poem. Thank you very much.

Next up, we have Chris Rogers.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. My name is Chris Rogers. My wife and I reside at 2614 Snowball Court in a community called the Willows right off of Village Road. We operate an animal welfare charity at 117 Village Road called the Geo Fund. I'm sorry to say, but I've complained to several members of this and the prior town councils that my experience in obtaining permits and zoning approvals for our charity has been nothing short of painful at every turn. Inspections always seem to be like a gotcha game instead of a true concern for safety. Recently, we had an organization, Better Government for Leland, organize another Let's Talk About It session at my event space. As a result, I decided to hand out flyers inviting all of the other businesses up and down Village Road Gateway District to attend. And what I thought would take an hour or two of my time handing out flyers turned into multiple days of hearing the stories of Village Road businesses trying to navigate the zoning and inspection departments within Leland. I've encouraged the local businesses on Village Road to thoroughly read the Gateway District rezoning plan and recognize the zoning tactics that the council has chosen to use to force redevelopment in this area of our town. Specifically, the difference between revitalization of everything that currently exists versus tearing down and creating room for four-story apartments and mixed-use structures. sadly we already have an example of what the council vision will create on village road what the town referred to in their report as catalyst site one now known as harrington square business after business is closed or relocated many stating the same problems lack of proper signage lack of proper parking overall lack of visibility from the main road and no one from the town of leland to help or listen The flex code that was organized and approved several years ago updated the code in the Gateway District is really just a way to brand the whole area as nonconforming, making a good faith attempt at revitalizing the area almost impossible. Dozens of small businesses, my apologies, on Village Road already believe we have a viable downtown, and we certainly don't want to be forced out to make room for more four-story apartments and mixed-use buildings. My hope is that the council will reconsider and deem your flex code rezoning experiment a failure, as Harrington Square has shown over the last several years. The flex code zoning is not creating new small businesses. Unfortunately, it's only closing down the existing ones that are there. I only have 15 minutes, so I thank you for your time.

Thank you, sir.

Next up, we have David Frankel.

Madam Mayor, Council Members, tonight, towards the end of your agenda, you will have before you Resolution 26064, supporting a comprehensive environmental review and evaluation of alternatives for the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge reconstruction project. I really urge everybody on the council to support that. In fact, I would ask all council members to join Councilmember Campbell in being a sponsor of that. Mr. Campbell, you did an excellent job of drafting a very comprehensive resolution. I would suggest one small addition to it in the distribution. I would suggest that you include in the distribution the Office of Management and Budget up in Washington, D.C. We sent a letter to him on July 20th asking him to exercise his authority, and I left a copy of that letter with the town clerk. Basically, that office has the authority to direct the Army Corps to... submit a request for the Wilmington Harbor Channel North to be included in the House Senate Conference report to truncate the area of the bridge that right now is being used as justification for insisting on a 135-foot bridge. Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Madam Mayor, that's all who have signed up, and that would be an opportunity for anyone else that you could ask.

Does anyone want to speak that did not sign up? Okay, thank you. Next, we have the approval of the consent agenda. Does anyone have any disclosure they need to make?

No. No.

Okay, do we have a motion?

Mayor Bozeman, if you don't mind, I'll just recap what items were on the consent agenda. Okay. We had quite a few items. The first was sets of meeting minutes from July. And then we had an ordinance updating our peddling and soliciting article. We had a resolution authorizing the town manager to execute a Brownfield agreement for some town-owned properties. We also had two new performance guarantee agreements, as well as three authorizations to release performance guarantee agreements. We had four resolutions directing the town clerk to investigate petitions for voluntary annexations. And we had a resolution to adopt a resolution of intent to annex approximately 28 and a half acres of town-owned property. And the final item was a finance resolution supporting an application to the WMPO grant project for the South Navassa Road multi-use project.

Would anyone like to make a motion?

Madam Mayor, motion to approve the consent agenda. Second.

All in favor of the motion?

Aye.

Any opposed? Motion carries.

There's no questions.

I'm sorry. You have some?

Yes, ma'am. I was just curious. We had four properties that are on the consent agenda for voluntary annexation. I just want to understand, what's the process for a property owner or a development company to go about to approach the town about voluntary annexation? What does that process look like?

Thanks for the question. The items on the consent agenda are... The first step in town council's consideration of an annexation, it's a resolution to direct staff to look into it. It's not to actually annex the property, just for clarification. The process to consider a voluntary annexation is that a property owner would submit to the town an annexation petition, also with an accompanying application that talks about their intended use of the property, if they know that, as well as the existing zoning and the proposed zoning of the property. Once that information is submitted to the town, this step that's on the agenda tonight occurs, which is the first step. Once this step occurs, the town staff goes and looks into the validity of the petition, makes sure that the property owner is indeed who owns the property. By property owner, I mean the person who signed the voluntary annexation petition. as well as does the property meet any statutory requirements or restrictions to be considered for annexations of the town. Once staff does that, we present to the town council a certificate of sufficiency and an ask that the town council adopt that certificate of sufficiency, essentially acknowledging that the property meets the requirements to be considered for annexation, and at the same time set the public hearing to consider the annexation. Once the public hearing occurs, that's ultimately when the town council makes the decision to annex the property or not. I would say concurrently towards the end of that process, we also present to the planning board a recommendation, staff's recommendation for what zoning should be applied if the property is annexed into the town. Planning board considers that, renders a recommendation, and if the town council decides to annex the property at the public hearing, then there's a public hearing that usually immediately follows to assign zoning to the property. Does that help? Yes. Thank you.

Anybody else? Okay. All in favor of the motion?

Aye. Aye.

Any opposed? Motion carries. Discussion topics. Resolution R-26064, Support and a Comprehensive Environmental Review and Evaluation of Reasonable Alternatives for Cape Fear Memorial Bridge Replacement Project. Y'all got to tell me how you want me to handle this at the NPO next week.

I think the proposed resolution was passed to all council members for consideration. Subsequent to that is my understanding that the Federal Highway Administration staff is preparing a meeting to look into the environmental issues to review the environmental process. So, the I think maybe the decision whether we should act on that now or wait until the federal staff comes back with their report. And according to Mike Kozlowski, who is the director of WMPO, he... He's stating that the impact studies and so on would be over 400 pages in length and that would be presented for public comment. I don't know if we try to do something with this now, it may go past the deadline for us to utilize the federal grant money that we've gotten, and we would lose that money. That's true.

That's what Mike told Mr. Hollis and I.

So I would like to table this resolution for now until we see this report come from the federal agency.

And we don't have a date of when that's going to be. But there is going to be two... workshops where you can go and view the two possible bridge replacements that they have settled on. And one of them will be at our Cultural Arts Center in September. I can't remember the date, but we'll advertise it, help them with that. And then there'll be one at the DOT over in Castle Hayne in their office there. for the Wilmington people.

I think it's important for all of us who are concerned about the impact of the bridge and the truncating of the river, and particularly the tolls, to make a special effort to attend these meetings, particularly one here when it's in our backyard, and discuss it and to get some information from these people that are making the decision.

One thing that worries me about everybody putting things off, which this is important, I agree with you, we need to, but for years this has been going on. We needed a new bridge. Many years ago, about 2007, they were going to build the Cape Fear Skyway right over the golf course at Brunswick Forest. That was stopped, and then every time it comes up, there's some other reason for them to stall, and it just keeps on escalating. The time, you know, we've got to have a bridge. The bridge that we got is obsolete, and the repairs that is needed to be done in the middle of the bridge, the part that goes up and down, they can't find the parts for it. And it was old when we got it. So is that a motion you want to make about tabling?

I'd like to hear other comments.

I agree with the resolution, Mr. Campbell. I applaud you for putting this forward. I think this is something that we need to look at. And in fact, I think we could dovetail this in because we know we're going to get a bridge at some point. And it's going to cause a lot of chaos and congestion for traffic coming from Leland back into Wilmington. And to kind of allude to Mr. Rogers' comments he made earlier during the public comment section, I think that the council should look closely at a revitalization plan for the old Leland portion of Leland off Village Road and Old Fayetteville Road and look at a revitalization plan that kind of dovetails into this resolution for the bridge. Because if we can revitalize that area and bring new businesses in and relax some of the zoning that he alluded to, then I think people in our county would rather stay here than to try to go to Southport or Bolivia or fight the traffic. So I applaud the resolution. I support it. And if you put forth a motion to table it until the September meeting, then I will support that. I agree.

And as far as the comments about the downtown revitalization, I've been in favor of that for years. I always felt like we needed something more than what we had there that was declining and aging and that we needed a plan to really make that downtown. So I'm all in favor of that. What it takes as far as zoning and permitting and all that I'd have to know more about what you know what that is about but I agree that that part that segment of revitalization could be dovetailed into a plan you know for what's going on forward with the along that same lines and what I'll do is I'll put something on the agenda for the next month's meeting for us to look at what a revitalization plan looks like sure

and see what we can do to help the business owners in that area become more successful.

Mr. Hungless, do we have access, maybe Sabrina would know, access to when the flex code was first started, the charrettes and the different things we had, the residence of this part of Leland was there, and that's what everything was built upon, right?

I'd have to look into that, Madam Mayor. I don't know what information we would have back from that time period because that was prior to my...

It was about 2007 when... Yeah. Well, a little bit before then. Frankie was still mayor when it first started and then Walter became.

Exactly. It's in that late 2000s era. I'd have to look and see what... Information we have on record to try to bring back to you to show what participation occurred back then We do have some information about the update that was done and that's Not so long ago a few years ago.

Yeah, okay Yeah, if we could get some of that, I think that would help Make everybody understand why it happened the way it did. I

So I would like to make a motion to table Resolution R-2064 until we have further information from the Federal Highway Staff. We should have that information next month.

If they haven't done it yet, and our MPO meeting is Wednesday, then it may be October. I don't know. It's up to y'all.

Do we need a specific time or time frame to when we table a... I don't think we do, but...

You can postpone it to a date certain, or you can table the matter to come up at any time in the future.

Okay. My motion would be to table until we have further information to make an informed decision.

Okay. All right. We have a motion.

I second the motion.

Okay. Okay. Any discussion? All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Motion carries.

Madam Mayor, if I may, just for point of clarification, I did not write this resolution. Brayton Willis wrote it, forwarded it to me, and I merely presented it to council. So I can't take credit for writing it because I'm not that smart.

Aye. Old and new business.

Staff reports are on your iPads. Mayor, if I could just give a few highlights within those staff reports. Okay. Just to make you all aware, you may have noticed that some of the staff reports looked a little different in terms of the dashboard and the metrics that usually are provided within them. You may have seen a transparency portal link to those usual metrics. We did launch a transparency portal, so hopefully you saw some of that social media, have taken some time to check out the data points that are on there. So again, you'll have links within the staff reports to go to the individual department pages, but then we also included, you'll see item, 9.2 we have just a transparency portal link that will get you to the transparency portal and then you can maneuver your way through and look at all those different types of metrics so wanted to point that out and also our finance team has published our budget revenue manual so that is now live live on the website as well okay

I like the way the staff reports are now. It gives a little more clarity and somewhere to find what I want to find.

Thank you for doing that. A 13-month look back, as you mentioned.

Does any council have any reports they want to give? Leland, I think you have one.

The only thing I wanted to ask, Madam Mayor, is if we could have proclamation in September for Canine Assistance Month and then in October for Pedestrian Infrastructure Month.

I have no problem with that.

No, it's okay.

Frank, you got anything you want to add, Bob?

No.

All right. Does anybody want to make a motion to go home?

Motion to adjourn. Second.

All in favor of the motion?

Aye.

Any discussion? The motion carries.

I'll let the sound of our books closing effect.