Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

able to make that. Okay, go for it. Ladies and gentlemen, we call this meeting to order. The mayor and board of commissioners for March the 10th. Can I get the roll call, please? Yes. Commissioner Dalling present. Commissioner Pearson, present. Commissioner Kleiner, present. Let the record show you have a quorum. Will you rise and stand for the pledge of allegiance, please? 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.

Commissioner Kleiner, would you do the prayer tonight? Yes. Father, I thank you for this day. Thank you that we can be together to serve you. and I ask that you would give us wisdom as we make decisions on behalf of the constituents of this town. I ask for provision and protection for all of us and our first responders especially and um we ask for your grace and mercy over every town's person in Jesus name. Amen. Thank you. All right. Consent agenda. Town administrator, do you have that please?

Uh yes we do. And all you really have is the approval of the February town meeting minutes and then the meeting scheduled for the next two meetings. All right. Could I get a motion to approve the consent agenda? I make a motion to approve the consent agenda. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Is there any discussion? Hearing none. All in favor? I. All right. We don't have any public presentations or any unfinished or new business. Would anyone like to speak this evening? Anyone? Moving forward into staff reports. Town administrator.

Yes. Um I'd like to update uh you guys. As you know, there's a lot of activities going on behind the scenes uh this time of the year, and I wanted to cover a couple of those real quick to give some people some updates. First of all, we're going to be uh we are working on the budget for next year. Um the budget is going to be very similar to the ones we've done in the past. Um we're not projecting any tax recommendations for tax increase. We think that we can hold the line like we always do. Um we, as I've always said, um every year it gets a little bit closer. Fortunately, we've never had to go into rainy day funds to balance um anything. We've um we have budgeted for things in the past that we thought, hey, we'd like to do this if things work out, but we we monitor those on a case-bycase basis and we don't go forward with certain things uh based upon the climate or the environment that we are in. Um, our real estate tax base is growing, which if you remember all the budget meetings we've had when it was really tough here, we talked about our property values declining significantly. And just to remind everybody, um, back in 2005, the total value of all property in the town of Rising Sun was about $236 million. That's what I always call the apex. And as we know, the town's real estate tax is derived based upon a formula of that uh $236

million. By 2010, after the housing bubble in 2008, and I've talked before about anything that happens in the economy or in our world always takes about two years to trickle down to the local level. said differently. When the feds cut their money, they cut money to the state. And when the state cuts money, they cut money to the counties and the local government. So, it's it's always a slow we're always like two years behind the upswing and the downswing. So, by 2010, our total assessed value dropped to $176 million. So it went from 236 to $176 million which meant the town had a reduction in about 51% of its revenue coming in reduced but the town was still able to provide police protection uh the code enforcement everything we we do. We've never had to cut those services out, but we've also added services like Spooktacular, Winterfest, and those other things for our community. So, we continue to tighten the belt every year while also finding new creative, innovative ways to maximize whatever money we have, and we continue uh to do that. So, we're probably going to have one more year in that cycle here. um which I want to take that opportunity to uh well let me say that what I'm going to be presenting to the board is a a barebones budget like we always do but we're going to break some of the items into what we believe are primary things you have to have and things that might be secondary to make it a little bit easier if there's a need to reduce the budget will give you some

dollar amount line items on things that you could decide instead of going into that 60page document and trying to find the needle in the hay stack to figure out if that's what you want to lower and what that impact will be. So, we'll we'll set that up for you in the budget process just like we've done in the past. I'd like to segue into the land development um that is going on in the town. And I know I I think it's always important to remind people that there are there is always an element of our community that does not like growth. And we get that we're in a rural community. We want to keep that rural nature. But the one thing that makes it difficult to juggle is landowners rights to do things with their properties. And so all we can do is create zoning requirements and stuff within the parameters of what the government the state government and federal government allows us to do. and then try to if somebody's going to develop that we get protected from a lot of the bad development that happened in the early 2000s where we have streets that are too narrow and proper fees uh that a developer would normally pay would not pay to the town. Um, we've always sort of joked in the past there was a time in the late 90s and early 2000s where you could say that the fox was guarding the hen house here and we had to deal with that. We we've had to dig our way out of that and we're being very successful in that. So, we've made a lot of changes to our zoning code and I've talked about that in the past. But one thing I want to remind you of, and this is what I like to call a segue for a second, I've been talking to you folks about legislation that has been coming

about at the state level to take away the rights of communities to be able to create the zoning code the way they want. And at it at its um at its core, zoning is supposed to be something that's left up to each individual local government. We are called a sovereign entity under the state law. We're a sovereign entity with the right to pass laws and do what we think are beneficial for our community underneath an umbrella of state and federal. And we all know how federal government oversees certain things and certain powers are given to the state and then certain powers from the state are given to the towns. Well, what has been happening over the years and you could sort of phrase it this way that the state is sort of sort of been attacking um our sovereignty, not just the town of Rising Sun, but a lot of different communities. And I've talked about that uh they made it where we're not allowed to regulate cannabis. And you know that's a controversial subject, but we are we are not able to say that somebody can't have a cannabis dispensary in our community. We're not even allowed to say that somebody can't grow cannabis on a farm field in our community. Now, the state does limit the number of licenses that can be granted in a county and I venture to say that those those number of licenses are probably going to increase because the state has a tendency of looking at the cannabis industry as another way to raise revenue for the state in general. So, we've had our ability to regulate cannabis taken away from us. We've also had our ability to regulate solar panels. And I'm not

talking about solar panels on individual homes. I'm talking about our pristine farmland that we want to try to keep here. The law would now allow somebody to come in and put a a 20 acre 30 acre solar panel array. And there's normally like if we were doing the zoning code, we might say things like the solar panels can't be within 300 ft of the road. They have to be screened off. So when you're driving down our beautiful rural landscape, you're not looking at the ugliness of solar panels. Well, the state has taken all that right away to do that. another threat that was put forward, but through the help of MML and Mako, our are our uh professional organizations that were members of, I think I said at the last meeting, the state was going to make it so we could not regulate minimum sizes of building lots any greater than 5,000 square feet. So if we were to take a property such in Manor Quarter in Summer Hill where somebody might have you know 10 15 20,000 8 or 20,000 square feet of land that would have been reduced to 5,000 square feet of land. So when you think about what 5,000 is just think about when you drive by a townhouse and you see the front yard, the townhouse and the backyard. That's just a little bit smaller than what the state requirement would have been. So that would have meant that any remember we talked about landowners rights to be able to develop that would mean that some of the farmland not just in rising sun in Cecil County in general would have been you know 300 acres could have been divided up into hundreds if not thousands of

5,000 square foot lots uh and be developed that way. And what we find happens at the state level is that they try to solve issues that are important in certain areas of the state, but they try to do a one-sizefits-all. And we being a rural community, like a lot of other rural communities, we sort of get chewed up in the cycle. And so we have to be very diligent. So, um, the town has sent letters in to the state legislators suggesting why these are not going to be good, and we were successful in getting the legislation to back off the requirement for 5,000 square foot um, pieces of land. The problem is it's not going to go away. And I'm going to say this personally, I don't want to speak for the elected body. I do understand why the state wants to do it, but they're going about it the wrong way. Said differently, you don't need to change the regulations. You have to attack the reasons why building a house is so darn expensive. That's what you have to do. just, you know, allowing a developer to sell more and more houses at an exorbitant cost is going to build more houses, but it's not necessarily going to make it more economical for families to be able to buy a house. Whereas, if you tried to figure out regulations where you can control the price, maybe deregulate certain things to make it more affordable, that's the way to go about it. However, often times our state people don't see it that way. They see it as just provide more regulations and we see that all through our our country right now. So we have the uh development that is occurring in the community. Um Pond Valley which is the canson track um they are still in

the phases of doing their storm water, their forestation. They receive preliminary and final planned review from our planning commission, but they're still working through all the boxes they have to check from an engineering standpoint. So, there's constantly a lot of back and forth conversations taking place and plans being reviewed and uh modified. Stevens Preserve is another one that is a land development behind Jane's Church that also is in uh it has preliminary and final land development approval and they too are going through their final uh storm water forestation um things like that. Um the other one is Maple Heights. We did advertise for a meeting on March 16th for a phase two of the Maple Heights development. And essentially what that is is if you go into Maple Heights and make the left and you have the town houses on the right hand side, all that land that's open behind it is what was considered phase two back in 2003 2004 when it was in the pipeline. um a new person or a new entity has bought that land and they are picking up that land development effort. It's at the very very beginning stages we will be having public um meetings for people to come in and comment on that. So, just keep an eye out on our our web pages, um Facebook pages, and we do send notifications out as we're required to to let people know that that is that is coming forward. Um the one thing I feel better about is that our zoning codes are a little bit stronger than what they used to be. And just the plan that we

have now is significantly different than the plan that they were trying to do back in 2004 2005. And a lot of that is due to the changes that we've made in our zoning code. Um I also get questions about Mavis Tire. Um Mavis Tire has um been looking to develop the land um to the east of the car wash. That has been something that has been in the pipeline for maybe two years now. They did go to our board of appeals to get some variances on wetland disturbance. We don't really regulate wetland disturbance. It's the Army Corps of Engineers and MDE. So, they're working through those final phases. So, I would imagine maybe in another two or three months we'll probably see that popping up again to go before the planning commission. The other project that is moving along is what is called the Commons or Rising Sun Commons and that is the piece of land at the corner of Red Pulp Road and uh uh Route One Coningo Lane. One of the one of the things that we changed in our zoning code and people might remember this about two years ago, we created what we called an employment center zoning. So instead of letting people just come in and plant and I I actually joke sometimes that developers are like Johnny Apple Seed and he just throws seeds out and grows houses in a farm field. We've tried to eliminate that. So the zoning that we created was called an employment center zoning where we're asking them to do a mix of things. So what you might see coming out of their ideas is what we would normally consider on a major highway like a gas station, a

fast food restaurant, a bank, something that when you're driving down the road, you had to go to the bank, hit the Mac machine, there's a bank. You need to get gas, there's a gas station. You want to grab something to eat, there's your Chick-fil-A, McDonald's, or whatever on on the road entrance there. And then behind that, we're looking for employment centers where we have created incentives for people to come in and create employment centers that attract middle income wages to the community. So, we're talking about trying to create jobs in that area that maybe were able to create 100 150 middle income wages of 60 to 70 $80,000 a year in wages. Um, that's what our zoning code change would require that to be. And then there would also be a housing element back in there. That is something you're seeing happening in a lot of different areas of of the state where they're trying to do more of a mixed use where you sort of create an economic ecosystem that feeds off itself. Out of that, we have talked about taking that new found real estate tax and rolling it into lowinterest loans and grant forgiveness for entrepreneurial businesses in the community. Because one of the things you're going to hear me say is that we obviously don't have Superman coming to save the town of Rising Sun going forward. I've already talked about changes that the state is doing and the federal government. We've got to get ourselves in the better position to make sure that our community is sustainable for the foreseeable future without having to raise taxes and hit people in the pocket. We wanna we wanna we want to think outside the box and if it has to come here, let's control what it is that's coming here and making sure it's

a benefit. So, that's just another example of where we're looking to take some of that real estate tax and roll it back into the entrepreneurial spirit of our downtown area so that we can it's one way of maintaining our small town feel by making people feel good about investing in an entrepreneurial business in our community and we'd be able to help them for that. So, that's a couple examples. The other thing I wanted to roll into is grants. Yes, we've been we've been telling people for a while the buildings on Main Street are coming down and the church is being done. Uh we're renovating the church. We're ready to go. We've been invited to the prom. We're waiting for the state to come and pick us up. And what I mean is they got to give us the money for it. And so there are some regulations that have to be followed. So we're an example. One of those is we could move along with the demolition, but if we want to use the grant money, we can't incur the expense until after July of 2026. So, the grant has been approved, but they haven't freed it up. And we don't the the total of all that is going to be well in the 200,000s to demo those buildings. We don't want that coming out of our constituents tax base. we want to use the the grant monies from the state. So when you hear that the state is a little upside down financially, it helps you understand why although you get the grant money and they say it's coming, there's still a little bit of delay in getting that. So we do have the grant for to demo the three buildings. We also received a grant um that's going to enable us to go forward with the deck on the outside of the church plus some renovations inside the church. And we do have an exciting tenant that we haven't

finalized deals yet, but we do have an exciting tenant that is homegrown. It's residentbased. It does a lot for our children and our community and it will truly turn that church into a cultural center which is what we always wanted to do. So as soon as some grant money frees up in those kinds of areas and we start being told you're going to get the grant on this date then we can continue to move forward with it. So it's it's not because we're not doing anything. We just we're at the end of the runway and we just need the state to step up from that point forward. We also have a uh safe streets grants that we're having our first kickoff meeting uh tomorrow. Um that is where we receive some money from the federal government to evaluate pedestrian hazards in our downtown area. So that could result in uh bigger sidewalks, better sidewalks, crosswalks, a variety of different things to make our downtown area safer. So that's another grant um that we've gotten and we're going to be kicking off. We also have a grant that we've got to try to get on at the dog park. Um we are in the process of redoing the dog turf down there. Um, and then there's some playground equipment that we want to build, uh, we want to construct down there, and we are working on putting bathrooms in down there also. So, there is a lot of stuff, you know, going on. I just wanted to take the opportunity with a a light uh, agenda to to bring you guys up to speed on all that. That concludes my report. Chief.

Um, first off, the mayor and I attended two read across America sessions. One at the well, both at the U one at Razing Sun Middle and one at Konowingo Middle. Um,

elementary, I'm sorry. And, uh, that's always great, especially when you get heckled by a fourth grader telling you how poorly you read. Um, so we did that. It was a great time. Um, I suggest that we sign the mayor for media remedial reading, including myself. But, um, that was a good thing. Uh, as the weather gets warmer, we're going to see more kids out and about. Um, this is going to fall in line with the street safe streets meeting that we are going to have with the next couple days. Um, there's a lot of pedestrian traffic around town, so be cognizant of that. We have kids that walk from school every day. Um, you know, and we have a lot of traffic on Main Street. Um, also on April 11th, we have the Little League parade that's coming up and uh you're going to see a lot of detours and delays in that area because we have a lot of kids that sign up for Little League in our community, which is a great thing in my opinion. Um, and lastly, our candidate is in his final stages. he graduates. I believe it's the 26th of March and we should have another officer here in town to finish out his final segments of training and then be out servicing our community. Um, and most of the board's met him. He's a great individual. Um, I think he'll fit in well. Um, outside of that, I've received three um, additional applications and uh, one of them is certified. So, I'm hoping that they go well and we can add another officer here shortly. That's my report.

Thank you, Chief Assistant Town Administrator.

I do. You have each of you have your financial packet uh today. I'm not going to spend any time going over that. If you have questions once you get it home and review it, just give me a call. Uh we do have some things that are happening at the parks. Uh we have at Veterans Park, we're going to be working on the pavilion. If you see the pavilion roped off, uh just abide by that because we're working on the roof and on the supports for the pavilion. Also, uh the playground will still be open. You can still go in, use the park, just avoid that part. Uh also at the dog park, uh we're nearly complete with working on the turf and getting it ready for spring. Right now, you if you go there, you can use the outside track, but not the inside. They will be working there for the next couple of days. He's expected to be completely finished by Thursday. Uh, last and not least, it's warmer weather now and we know we've had some uh water mane breaks. You will start to see some patching in the next couple of weeks. So, just be aware those things are going to happen and that that's the only things I have.

Thank you. Moving forward into uh the mayor's report. My report is pretty brief tonight. Uh myself, Chief Peterson attended the state of the state. Uh we also I attended the Maryland Mayor's Association conference which was last week and chief and our town administrator came down for advocacy day. It was a great event. Uh we talked a lot about SB36 which is the zoning law that the town administrator had spoken about. Uh it looks like it is dead. Uh so that's good news for local governments for now. Uh we keep our uh eyes on any legislation that's moving forward and continue to uh put forth um guidance from the town on whether or not we oppose or support those bills. Um they can be public safety related. Uh some of them are zoning related. Um but we keep an eye on those just to make sure that we have a voice uh before the state general assembly. Uh I also sent a letter to the CEO of Delm Marva again regarding the outrageous electric rates that all of us are facing. Uh and the last time uh they sent a response that I felt was kind of out of touch which was offering payment plans and discount programs. Uh and uh we're going to continue to send that letter every year so that they can know and see that uh our residents are affected by their outrageous rates. Uh that is the end of my report. Just a reminder as chief said uh the upcoming little league parade. Uh I also forgot to mention that myself and uh Commissioner Kleiner hosted, sorry about that. We hosted uh an uh member of the uh governor's staff uh to go through the the different projects that we have uh local or state funding for. Uh those included the demolition projects on 16 East Maine and East Cherry as well as the uh community building. Uh it was a good conversation. Uh we look forward on

hopefully moving forward with the demolition of those buildings sometime uh in late April. Uh that concludes my report. Uh Commissioner Don.

Um yes, just first echo what Chief had mentioned about nicer weather and more pedestrians. I'm in a neighborhood with a lot of small children and a lot of uh cars parked on the shoulders and uh it's easy for kids to be excited and running running throughout the neighborhood and playing basketball and all that type of stuff. So, just a reminder to slow down and um and and be safe and keep our residents safe. Uh also coming up on the 23rd, we're going to do a ribbon cutting for Bucks Tavern that opened up uh a few months back. they've uh been wellreceived and and and very busy and looking forward to uh formally welcoming them as a new business here in town.

That's all I have. Thank you, Commissioner Kleiner.

Um uh Calvin mentioned that we have a planning commission meeting on Monday the 16th to um review some updates from Maple the Maple Heights development phase two. Um and uh yes, we met with um Madison from the governor's office on a couple Fridays ago and we did have a really good meeting with her and um felt like she really connected with the town and our history and um had had understanding for the position that we were in with the grants um and needing that funding to come through. So um that concludes my report.

Thank you, Commissioner Cloner. Commissioner Pearson. Yeah, I'll be real brief. Just reminder alongside along with the Little League parade. Right now, you've got Little League practices in the e afternoon and evening all over town. Wherever they can find a spot, they will practice. So, just be careful of that. Uh that concludes what I want to say. Thank you, Commissioner Pearson. On the agenda, you can see the board of zoning appeals and commission schedule as well as upcoming town events and holidays along with trash, recycling, and yard waste schedule. Is there anything else to come before the board this evening? Hearing none, could I get a motion to adjurnn? Make a motion. Second it.

It's been moved and seconded. All in favor? Eating adjourned.