City Council - Regular Meeting

Greetings friends, City Manager Wilson Hooper here with a preview of next Monday's Brevard City Council meeting. Apologies in advance, no b-roll with today's preview. The meeting will start with a proclamation recognizing the upcoming Juneteenth holiday and community celebration. Next, we'll hold public comment where members of the general public are given three minutes to address the council on a topic of their choosing. After that, there will be two special presentations. The first will be on the proposed Transylvania County Comprehensive Transportation Plan, which is a long-range transportation document which identifies major transportation improvements needed over the next 25 to 30 years. The plan incorporates traffic data, land use plans, economic development goals, and constraints to the physical environment to try and anticipate how the system ought to look and operate in the decades to come. I'll post a link to the document and its supporting materials below for those who are interested in getting more into the detail, but the critical thing to note for Monday night is that the Council's official endorsement of this plan is needed for any of these projects to ever be eligible for state funding. The second presentation will be by Police Chief Christy Wenzel on the results of the Organizational Health Study that's been in progress over at BPD for the past year or so. Also known as the Barry Dunn Report, after the firm which conducted the study, the report focuses on the culture of the police department in the summer of 2025 and what cultural and organizational changes could be made to make the department higher performing. Chief Wenzel's presentation will be an abbreviated version of the presentation she gave to the Council's Public Safety Subcommittee back in April. I'll put a link to the Barry Dunn Report and the Chief's April presentation down below as well. Next council will hold a public hearing on a proposed voluntary rezoning down near the entrance to Pisgah Forest. If approved, the property in question will switch to the new PGX zoning category. After the public hearing, council will be asked to take a series of ministerial actions. Accept the May 26 tax settlement report. Accept and endorse the recently completed asset and inventory assessment documents for the city's water distribution and wastewater collection systems. appoint Mark Tooley to the Acosta Trail Advisory Board, formally accept the final $8.5 million from the city's $13 million state appropriation to fund the construction of wastewater treatment plant improvements, and approve four sets of recent committee meetings. Two of those items, the asset inventory and assessment, and the $8.5 million earmark, are procedurally minor, thus why they're on the consent agenda, but they're pretty significant in the big picture. The asset inventory and assessment was briefed in more detail at the last Public Works Subcommittee, and that group recommended that full council accept and endorse the documents. It is what it sounds like, a full inventory and assessment of every piece of distribution and collection infrastructure in our system. Pipes, manholes, pumps, you name it. For the first time, we'll have a reliable GIS layer with all this information, and we'll have an engineer's recommendation on what order we should set about maintaining and updating that stuff. The report also confirms something we've already been working on, and that is our wastewater treatment plant is in need of an upgrade. The second notable consent item is acceptance of the final $8.5 million of our $13 million gift from the state from a few years ago to pay for phase one of these upgrades. We've been expecting this money for a while, but we just recently got the official approval from the state, and this action is the ministerial step we need to take to accept it. Next, council will be asked to take up an item that was originally set to be considered on June 1st, but was postponed until Monday night, and that is approval of the FY27 municipal budget. I'm chock full of links today, so I'll include a link to the proposed budget document down below. But just know that at a special called meeting on June 5th, the Council made some tweaks to that proposal. I'll ask them to officially approve their tweaked budget on Monday night. If you'd like more detail, I'd encourage you also to view the YouTube recordings of recent Council meetings and to read local media coverage of the Council's budget discussions. We'll conclude the meeting a little differently than normal by having our finance director, Dean Lubbe, give a presentation on accounting moves that we usually do on the consent agenda. These things usually aren't very notable, but after recent budget discussions, Council has expressed some interest in hearing a little bit more about how the books are kept. So Dean will review and then ask Council to approve a series of accounting moves that Wrap up FY26 and tee up FY27. As always, all the same information that we send to Council is available at the link below. I hope to see you Monday night.