City Council - Regular Meeting

Hey, hey, hey.

Heat. Heat. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Heat. Heat. I want you. Hey,

do it.

Heat. Heat. Good morning.

It's April 7th. We'll wait for folks to get seated. Thank you for being here today. Morning sir.

Again, good morning. Welcome to the Myrtle Beach City Council's April workshop. We do one of these workshops a month typically. Thank you again for being here today. We've got a long list of subjects to talk about. They may or may not take a while to to do. I believe Mike Ladder is out camping today, so he's not going to be with us this morning. But thank you everybody else for being here today. Let's see. Let's start things off with the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce quarterly updates. We have Matt Pavarick, Jimmy Gray, Stuart Butler, and friends.

And friends. The room is full of friends today. Um, I think I start every meeting off just um doubling down and telling you all as our leaders how much um we appreciate you um we appreciate your leadership, your guidance um your wisdom and one of the things that we talk about across the street is how each of our elected leaders uh especially our council uh really brings a unique set of talents. It's really fascinating to see the talents that you guys bring to us and also just perspective to this council. Um, I've mentioned it before, but but I was just thinking last night a little bit that uh I think this council epitomizes uh Theodore Roosevelt's quote about the man in the arena. I'm not going to read that quote, but it is interesting uh how many people have opinions uh of how things should be uh but yet they're not willing to enter the arena. And I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you all for that. I also appreciate our board members, our volunteer leaders. You're going to hear from uh Randy, our CFO shortly. And I will just say our financial review committee, our F FRC, they've been on fire lately in a really good way. They're just so engaged and and I just wanted to give them a special shout out. That's that's one of our boards uh that oversees everything financially for us that I don't think that really gets enough uh credit and accolades and uh they definitely are holding us accountable as are you. Um, I also wanted to say we appreciate our relationship with your city leadership, your staff leadership, uh, Fox, Brian, Josh, really the entire city team, including our relationship with fire and police and and uh, I I just want to say I I appreciate that. And then and then our team, you hear from me and Stuart and Jimmy a lot. Um, matter of fact, sometimes I think you all might get sick of us a little bit, but behind us and with us and alongside of us, just an amazing team that we have. You're going

to hear from a few of those folks today, but so many are across the street uh right now and maybe just out in the in the ethos selling and retaining uh business for us. Um, I I I want to mention that we've been having a really good uh uh dialogue on the TDF and um and I want to thank Mayor Kru, Mayor Prom Connor, and Councilman Mccclure. Uh to me, we've had two meetings uh and we're having another one soon. And to me, I feel like I'm in a room with leaders that are trying to do what's best for the community as opposed to two sides. And it it feels really good. and uh and at the same time, our commitment to the rest of the council is that we're keeping you up to speed uh on on what's going on and and our the progress that we're making there. But I feel really good about our progress that we're making there. We have we've had two great meetings and we have another one coming up very soon. I also just want to remind all of you that collaborate 2031 really kicks off next week and uh we have a a strong steering committee but we also have a host of focus groups and I hope and pray uh that everybody on the dis and everybody behind me intends to participate in one of those focus groups and just really uh help make your voice heard in this entire process. So um looking forward to that. Um for for us I want to just let you know that we are working on improving the way we communicate and how we communicate and to who we we communicate. uh we we spend a lot of time and I would say really really from a chamber side, from a a leadership grandstand side, from a a grandstand young professional side, we we communicate a lot in our own community. But one of the things we realize is that Visit Myrtle Beach doesn't necessarily communicate as much locally, right? Because that's really that's our job to communicate uh externally. And so we just know we have to do a better job at that. and we've

been having that conversation. We say the words marketing a lot and marketing can mean so many things and some of the things we do is absolutely not marketing. It's just different. And so we we realize that we're guilty of just kind of putting this thing out there and just calling it marketing. But when we say marketing, here's what we mean. We have a sales team right now. We have a sales team that's out selling this market. Okay? Uh we we have a retention and a service and a partnership team. Uh the mayor got to go on a trip with us recently where we were literally going on a trip trying to save a massive piece of business that's been in this community for year for decades actually. Uh we have a public relations and brand protection that we're working on as well. Uh we're very involved in youth sports and sports sales and also the support of youth sports and sports sales. Um, air service recruitment. I think you're going to hear a little bit about that today. Uh, but we're working on that recruitment and working on that strategy. Golf strategy. I saw golf tourism solutions is in the room. Our support of golf tourism solutions and our marketing strategies for golf. Uh, just the the the support of it and the marketing of it is very important. Um, we also support the Myrtle Beach Hospitality Association and have a strong relationship there. And then we also have very strong film and music strategies that we're working on in addition to culinary strategies. Uh and just really the development of our culinary scene, place branding, crisis response team. We have a crisis response team. So when things aren't good, uh we have a team that is together rolling up their sleeves sometimes all night, sometimes all weekend. And uh and then our our metrics, our data, our KPI tracking, uh our events. I think you're going to hear a little bit about events. So, I won't go too far into that, but the the creation of events, the attraction of events, and the support of events and and then really there's marketing and that's one of those other

things that we do, but it's on the it's on a long list. So, I just want to again thank you all and remind you that our annual meeting is next week and so I hope to see all of you there. It is actually next Thursday. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to our CFO, Randy McKill. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good morning everyone. Good morning.

So I hope you all know that we continue to provide good stewardship and investment of the funds you entrust with us. And now we'll present those numbers to you today. So, diving uh straight into October through December tourism development fee, we invested a total of 10,594,784 to reach non-S South Carolina visitors out of state. And for people in the audience, if they don't know, the tourism development fee is a 1% general sales and use tax on all sales at retail with a few exceptions within the city limits of Myrtle Beach. So TDF um digital and social search investment was at 32% this time. When you add television and outdoor print, the total equals 52% for all traditional advertising. General consumer promotions came to 9%. These are activations, events, and trip promotions and visitor guides. Group sales international and golf the three specialty markets were at 13%. Creative and content development and research was 20%. Destination publicity is at 3% and then air service is at 3%. Moving to October through December accommodations tax, we invested a total of $630,599 to reach visitors more than 50 miles away. For people in the audience, the accommodations tax is the 2% state tax applied to rooms rented to guests for less than 90 consecutive days. So looking at the numbers, air service was 2%. Digital and social search is the biggest investment at 41%. And then you add television and outdoor print, the total equals 70% for all

traditional advertising. General consumer promotions are at 19%. Again, activations and trip promotions, visitor centers and call center services, and visitor guide distribution are some of those in that category. Group sales international and golf the three specialty markets equal 3%. Creative and content development and research was 4% and destination publicity was at 1%. Are there any questions about TDF or ATAX numbers? We gave a full report to the city CFO Michelle. So she has that and it will be published on our website. Also wanted to let you know that we received yet another clean audit for 2025 and this marks decades of clean audits received by the chamber and visit Myrtle Beach. The audit is overseen by our financial review committee. Uh internally we call it F FRC and I know Matt mentioned that uh when he started the conversation. Um, this committee is made up of 10 independent members that ensure our finance finances are in order and they keep me on my toes. So, just wanted y'all to know that. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Stuart. Good morning, council members. Good morning. Here again.

Um, I want to say a few thank yous. have worked for visit model beach for almost 5 years and I don't recall a period in which it's been more collaborative, more teamspirited in terms of our relationship in the community. Um, seeing Mayor Krauss in the in the um crowd today is great. They're doing some wonderful things in Surfside. And the fact that both Mayor Krauss, Council Person Hatley, Brian Tucker are now serving on the Visit Myrtle Beach board among some other folks from the community is is a wonderful thing. You know, this community will survive and thrive together. And so, we're really excited to have you guys a part of it. I also want to thank the city. I've been a pain in your rear end over the last few weeks. Um, we've had a a major film being shot in town, a $14 million budget with some high uh high named celebrities. We weren't allowed to talk about it publicly, but uh behind the scenes, I've been harassing Josh and Fox and and the police department on almost a daily basis. Uh these things are complicated. Um they often don't go to plan, but your team at the fire department, the police department, and the the staff have been phenomenal as we navigated some of the unforeseen challenges. So, thank you. film is something that I I believe is a big opportunity for our our community. Um, as Matt mentioned, we don't just market the destination. I I think one of our roles is stewards of of the community. And so, we're going to talk a little bit today about the performance of uh Q4, but we're also going to look ahead and then reflect a little bit on some of the other activities that visit model beach is responsible for. So, starting with Q4 accountability, this is a wonky one. So a tax collections for Q4 uh were up 33%. Now that that was not what we were expecting and we actually reached out to the DOJ uh to figure out why that was.

Apparently there's there was and they wouldn't share who. There's one specific business entity that remitted a large sum to ATAX during Q4. We're not sure who it is. We have some theories. I don't want to speculate in front of the the media, but it was either a catchup or as a result of a a lawsuit, but that this 33%, although it looks great, was not the reality. We're actually about flat if we take out that one individual business entity. And you can see with TDF, too, we're up slightly, just under a percent in uh TDF collections for Q4. So, we we were pretty happy with that considering, you know, last time I was here, we talked a little bit about the headwinds that we were facing. And if you remember last time we talked a little bit about uh gas prices and the impact that that has on our community and I stood here before you and said gas prices were too low in terms of creating demand. And as I explained to you that gas prices are often a lag indicator of demand. So fewer people are traveling then the the cost decreases and that creates a downward pressure on us. Um, in addition, it becomes cheaper for folks in the Northeast to to go all the way down to Florida. And then we see as gas prices rise, we hit a sweet spot, uh, where folks will come to Myrtle Beach instead of Florida. And it and it's it's really, um, good for us. Now, there there's the war going on in the Middle East, which has create created an unexpected, we'd call that a black swan event. It's created an unexpected spike in gas prices. And unfortunately, what happened is we went from being too low to high overnight. you know, as as gas prices went up over a dollar, we shot right through our sweet spot. So, we've done two projections. This is the first one, which is current conditions. Assuming that the war in Iran continues through August, it's not it's not looking great. Um, we would definitely see a decrease in occupancy from our original perspective uh uh from our original um presentation, if this

continues. Now there is a lot of rhetoric around that that the war might end early as soon as today. Um we're praying for that for many many reasons but one of them is this. Um our our forecast is a lot healthier if this war ends soon and gas prices drop to uh last year's levels or even slightly higher. So we're watching this carefully and we're trying to bend the curve. We're trying to see okay despite all these headwinds uh what can we control? Uh we're doing a lot with the community right now. Now, there's actually a firstofits-kind deal that is uh out and about. There's about 45 properties that are participating in this deal, which allows folks to to stretch their dollars a little further. They can buy three nights and get one free or they can buy five nights and get two free. And so, it's about value, not discounting. And that that that uh that deal's going pretty well. We're we're hearing anecdotally that pace is is decent for the first uh quarter. We're looking at May being fairly strong, June being fairly strong. August is a little soft right now. And one of the primary reasons for that is the school start dates have shifted tremendously. Um we're the only county in the state of South Carolina now that goes back when we should go back in the third week of August and most of them going back in the first week of August now, which creates a real struggle for us. You know, August traditionally was one of our peak months and now uh everything's shifted forward two weeks. And so the end of May looks stronger than it used to, but the the end of August looks weaker. So we're working with our partners in the community to figure out what do we do about that? You know, we're going to have to change our rate strategy. We're also going to have to target different audiences at the end of August. You know, folks that are homeschooling or couples that are looking to get away without a bunch of kids running around. So we're we're actively working on that. Um, Matt mentioned events, you know, and I know, uh, May Crew, this is something you talked a lot about in your campaign and

continue to talk about bringing the fun back and, um, we're committed to that. You know, we have a lot of fun here. We can always do better, but I wanted to talk about the impact of events real quick. So, coming up here in a couple of weeks, we have the World's Strongest Man Competition returning for its third year. It took a break last year, but um, we're excited to have them back. Uh, this is a great event. Not just from an experience perspective, you know, it's a quality of life improvement for our residents, but it attracts a lot of people. We had over folks visiting from over 72 countries in the first year that we had this. Um had a massive economic impact, about $8 million in the first year. Um so it continues to to provide great ROI. What we love about this event though is it also has massive media reach. Um, I grew up in England as many of you know, and Boxing Day, which is the day after Christmas in England, it's a tradition for families to sit down and watch the World's Strongest Man competition. And uh, we we were the model Beach signage in the location because it's right downtown on the old pavilion site, was broadcast to almost half a billion TVs worldwide. So, that's great advertising for us. Um, we love this event. We hope it continues to come to Ma Beach. We're continuing to have dialogue. These kind of events don't happen without the team sitting behind me that um identifies events, negotiates deals with events, coordinates with the city and other folks, and sometimes even sponsors these events uh with TDF and ATAX money and state money to to get them to come to Mobile Beach. It's brutal. Competition out there for events is at an all-time high. Uh Matt Panic mentioned that uh Mayor Kruer came with us on a trip to Wilmington a few weeks ago. That's that's an event we've had for a few decades and there's another destination that's offering them a lot of money to to to leave Mal Beach behind even though we've helped them grow and

to go to a new location. So it's a constant firefight out there for events. Um we also have coming up the Mal Beach Classic, the OneFlight Mal Beach Classic which continues to grow year after year. The addition last year of the OneFlight um co-title sponsor with Visit Myrtle Beach was a great addition. Um they brought in celebrities which are coming back again this year, folks like Kurt Russell will be here. Uh the economic impact of this is tremendous. Uh not just the folks that come and visit, the majority of which are from out of town, but also the again the media exposure that we get. Um being on TV on targeted channels is tremendous. We actually see a massive spike in um bookings, golf tea time bookings during the event leading up to the event. And again, the queue, the qualifying tournament is is about to launch and that's going to reach a different audience than the actual Myrtle Beach Classic as well. So, we love this event and uh we hope it continues for a long time. We also have coming up CCMF. This is our largest event in terms of participation. Estimated close to a $50 million economic impact this this has. And I want to take you on a little journey back in time if I may. This event was a a collaboration uh from the hospitality industry that said, "Hey, we we typically ramp up our staff for Memorial weekend. We get a lot of people Memorial weekend and then we see a massive dip the first and second week of June uh in visitation and then it comes back up again as we get close to 4th of July. And so this created a problem for our community because we had fully staffed hotels and restaurants, but we didn't have the patrons for a week or two in between. And so we as a community decided, hey, let's let's attract a major festival in that second week of June or second weekend of June to try to um create a springboard. And as you can see here, it's continued to grow year over year. Um almost $50 million in

economic impact every year. And uh I can tell you now that that second weekend in June, which was our weakest throughout the summer, is now our second highest behind July 4th if that hits on a weekend. So this was a deliberate strategy from the community where we invested dollars, we continue to invest dollars and resources to ensure that we have a healthy and prosperous uh economy, tourism economy. We'd love to see more of these. Um beyond that, you've also started to see that there's a lot of sporting events in town. Um you know, spring break was really big for us. We partner with Ripken Experience. They had somewhere between 450 and 500 baseball teams visit them throughout the spring break period. Um, it's phenomenal. We also had recently an NCAA track and field event which was world class. We had the top schools in the nation visit here. So, this was a deliberate strategy again that was created decades ago by a former mayor and it continues to pay dividends. Uh, I've been here for 25 years and I remember a time when we were Memorial Day to Labor Day and that was it. But now you see weekends like the last few where we've been, you know, traffic's been pretty busy. And when I see traffic, I don't get mad. I see economic impact. I see prosperity. I see paying for firefighters and police and and teachers. So, we should be happy that we're at people from around the world, around the country visiting here to do baseball and soccer and cheer and dance and all these other sporting events, many of which would not happen without the visit Myrtle Beach team. We recruit these, we help these folks. um obviously with collaboration with the city of Mr. Beach and the county but um this is a important role that visit model beach plays to uh diversify our economy. There's also a lot of other events. These are the kind of fun events that I think uh mayor crew talks about. These improve the quality of life and enrich our community because we get to participate in them but they also drive our economy throughout the year. There's a lot of events that are coming up here.

Some of which we have a very hands-on role with. Um some of which we invest in. some of which we don't, but we support in other ways. So, there's a lot of events coming here, but we'd love to see more. I know it was recently mentioned at a city council meeting uh or suggested there be a task force created to uh evaluate events and look at how we can do better. We fully support that idea and we'd love to participate in that. Um beyond the consumer events, we also as sales team, and you're about to hear from Bob, he heads up the sales team. Uh we recruit event planners, we recruit groups and meetings and bus tours and folks like that and we bring them here on what we call familiarization tours. Uh just earlier this year we had rendevous South. I think uh Mayor Crew got to come to that one. We had uh the South Carolina Governor's Conference on Travel and Tourism and many many others that we're bringing in to showcase what the M Beach area has to offer in with the the strategy of trying to get these folks to bring their massive groups to the M Beach area. This is an important part of our economy. And then at a recent uh city council meeting, it was also mentioned, I think uh council person Hatley mentioned this, that back in the day she used to go to trade shows out of market with uh folks to with the visit model beach team. We continue to do those things. So Bob's team are on the on the road 52 weeks a year pretty much either recruiting sports or or meetings or um bus tours, people like that. So, we're often out in other areas trying to get these folks to come visit us and spend their hard-earned money to improve quality of life for our residents. Matt also touched on air service. Jimmy, who somehow got out of having to present today, I'm not sure how he did that. Um, he he's he has a phrase he uses a lot in the office. It doesn't just happen. And this is true for many of these things I've talked about, air service being one

of them. Um Diane, who's sitting in the second row over here, just got back a couple of weeks ago. She missed a major event we had here because she was visiting with a a large um airline. Not allowed to mention which, but trying to recruit them to come here. They're not currently here, and we we'd love to, but we enjoy over 52 direct routes here as residents. And that's in part because of the increase in in uh folks that have moved here, but it's also because we work collaboratively with my by providing data, by analyzing the situation, by going and meeting with airlines and even sponsoring um some of these folks to bring in new routes all the time. We would not have Southwest, we would not have Breeze, we would not have AO if it weren't for Visit Mal Beach in their collaboration with MYR. And we hope to have more to announce really soon. And if you look at these folks, not only are they coming in, but we're supporting them when they're here. We're putting over $2 million a year of the the public's money into investment to ensure that the routes that are new can be sustainable and they can fill up those flights so that these airlines don't just come in and then leave, but they come in and they stay and they thrive. So significant amount of dollars of that we're entrusted with go to ensure that air service continues to thrive and in in part that's why we have the number one um small airport in the country. Now I'm going to turn it over to Bob. Um one of the other things we do and one of the things Bob started to do and I think we're going to share more regularly with the community is product development. Uh there's a lot of good things to be excited about in our community right now. There's a lot of opportunity that there's also a lot of new investment coming in. So Bob's going to spend a few minutes talking about what's going on just within the city limits. There's actually more along the Grand Strand. And as we know, regardless of where this investment is going, it benefits the city of Myrtle Beach. A lot of times people will come here for

something or they end up spending money in my beach and investing in our community. So I'm going to hand it over to Bob. Thank you, Stuart. Good morning, council mayor, council members.

Um, one of the first questions we get asked when we attend those trade shows or we host people from for familiarization tours is what's new? They often know the things that we have in the area, but they often want to hear about this destination being an alive a thriving destination. So, it is important for us to know about it and it's important for us to also celebrate some of the real victories and product development that are happening here in the city. Um the Marina in at Grand Dunes, which is one of our larger uh conference hotels in the area, is spending quite a bit of money redoing all of their uh hotel rooms. They have condo style rooms, but it's really looking fantastic. Makes a real difference when we bring those clients in to see properties, especially independent hotels. Uh the captain's quarters at 901 South Ocean uh in the city is also doing some major renovations. If you haven't been down Ocean Boulevard recently, it's really changing the whole look of our destination. Also, the Sun and Sand uh Myrtle Beach Resort closed down in August of 2025. We'll be reopening this fall as a Fairfield in by Marriott. And I think that's great because it's always easier to tell a client about a product that they have had good experience with in other destinations um as well. And of course, the Oceans 23 by Hilton, I forgot that one as well, is doing, you've seen that construction project uh happening downtown um as well. Gibson Hotels, which operates the Homewood Suites over in Harelson, is working on a new product. It's going to be a Townplay Suites by Marriott that'll be happening or being built very close to the existing Homewood suite. Um, the Fairfield in Broadway at the Beach recently changed ownership uh to a local uh owner and they are doing some work with Strand Hospitality as well to do some work there, but to also become more involved in the group market segment, which is exciting to us. Um, Ocean Escapes Boardwalk Oceanfront Resort is a new property uh that if you haven't had the chance to go over and see that, it's really it's got a lot of really nice units. It's something that I think visitors are really looking for now because some of these are

multiplebedroom units. Uh, that property is being managed by the team at Vacation Myrtle Beach from a marketing and management standpoint. Uh, they also have two other properties, the Ocean Escapes condos down near the Landmark Resort and they also have one up in North Myrtle Beach um, as well. And then of course near and dear to Jackie's heart, the the Seip the team at Drewing and Suites are working on plans to redevelop that and add a new product there that includes a meeting space, which is music to my ears as well. That's something that we desperately could need some more of. Uh this is a product that I think really is a surprise to a lot of people, but if you haven't seen it recently, definitely take that drive. I'm sure all of you have. Um but the Rosalie um beach uh properties or condos, these are not your traditional hotels have gone up where the Sea Gypsy and the Coral Sands properties used to be. We used to plan our site inspections and our familiarization tours to kind of bypass that area because we had hotels that were boarded up. And as much as I tried to do a song and dance number to distract them from seeing that when we went down Ocean Boulevard, it was difficult. So it's very exciting to see these there. um prices are very affordable at between I think 1.5 and 2.5 million. So if you're looking for a second home, I I encourage you to to uh do that as well. I did see that three of them are already under contract and they're not even finished yet. So that's encouraging news as well and certainly changing the uh the look of our destination and there are a lot of other condos going are being built in that area as well. There's one developer that's doing I think 24 uh town homes in that area which is going to add more to the destination. Another product that we in group sales are very excited about is the Pelican's Ballpark. Not just because we're really improving the situation there, and I thank you for your investment in that. I know that's a really big project for you guys, but you see that big green building there. Um, that's going to house the new clubhouse for both the visiting team and the home team. Uh but in the middle of it is the new project that they have that's called the diamond which is about 10,000 square feet of space that they'll use for some

of their practice and in inside things that they're doing but they're also open to doing conferences and meetings and other things there very close to our convention center. So it's great to have that product right there. So we're looking forward to working with them and already are working with them to try to find ways uh to occupy that space. Uh and then in the restaurant the dining scene so much stuff is going on this year. It's incredible. Uh, Old Smoky Distillery in the Yehaw Brewing is coming. I believe they have a ribbon cutting date already set for this May. Um, you can see that project over Broadway at the Beach. And then the Big Fish restaurant is going to be going into space that was previously occupied by the Liberty Tap Room, which I believe closed back in 2020. So, it's great to see that location being filled with a a business that's going to be opening and bringing people in and and generating some tax dollars for our destination. Raising Canes. This is something honestly I had never heard of, but I have heard more people who are passionate about this place. Um I don't often get passionate about fast. Well, maybe I do personally, but not from a group standpoint. Look to me last back there. Um but this is a really cool place that's going to be um opening in the old Burough Loco location. And then T-Bones um Gill and Grill, which closed last December, and I think we all saw that and thought, "Ah geez, here's a restaurant closing." But it's looking at reopening as a breakfast restaurant. So there's something new coming out of that. This last one is not in the city, Myrtle Beach, but certainly will have an impact. Um, Stuart always talks about how people come to the region, but they all 85% of them are always coming into the city to spend money, too. This is another one of the new attractions to downtown Flavortown, which is scheduled to open up this year. Um, and certainly is a brand that is getting a lot of network time right now on some of the the cooking channels that are out there as well. And Family Kingdom Amusement Park, we're excited to see some of the progress that they're putting in uh this year. They're adding a new single rail roller coaster ride this summer. It's the first of its type. It's going to be about 2,000 ft and go 50 miles per hour. Jimmy didn't speak today, but he'll be riding that in my place. Um, so I'm

excited to see that. Um, they also are bringing back the Lunatic ride, which is the only one of its kind in our country. And we're looking forward. We always talk about listicles and dates and anniversaries when we talk to travel writers when Diane does and and and we do as well. But the Swamp Fox is celebrating 60 years. And I thought it was really cool to hear that the carousel that's there is going to be a hundred years old in just a few years. So, more exciting news there, too. There's tons more that's happening throughout the region, but we just want to share some of those that are happening in the city. And now for questions, I'll turn it back over to Stuart.

And real quick before I open up to questions, you know, some of these projects we've been directly involved in, some we haven't. We're not certainly not trying to take credit for other people's work. Um, but often when a new investor is coming into town, they'll reach out to us first um, just to get a lay of the land to get some data and get us to connect them with other folks. I mean, an an example of that is Drury Hotels. And, you know, we we spent a lot of time educating them on on the importance, especially once they were under contract with CIP. And one of the things they're looking to do, which I think is really special, is the the the classic iconic seed sign is actually being restored or it's been saved and they're going to put it in their lobby of the new hotel, which is kind of a cool homage to your legacy, Councilwoman Hatley. Um, and your family's legacy. So, with that, I'm going to open it up to questions.

Council, I'll start with one. What so what I'm interested in and I think all of council is, you know, is the macro outlook of what we're facing the next year or two? And nobody's a susayer, but I what I'm interested in from you folks is what do you think that 60 to $120,000 family income, how are they going to be impacted presently with their debt levels? And we can't predict the black swan type effects,

but just as much as you can give us a straight and narrow with regard to where that middle income patron is, that is helpful in our budget deliberations here. Um the the action items is great, but I want the big picture.

Yeah, I mean there are a lot of headwinds for travel in general. Uh we see that demand for travel, intent to travel is still at an all-time high, still higher than pre- pandemic, but the means to travel is a challenge. We talked last time we were here about there's a bifocation in the economy that's happened. So there's the the upper middle class and upper class folks that are doing okay and they're weathering the storm and their wealth comes from different means and um things like the stock market are doing okay for those those kind of folks. They're continuing to travel. This is why our higherend properties tend to do better. Last year, we saw a big split. Higherend properties were filling up first and were doing okay, relatively speaking, but our economy product was the one suffering. Um, it's that that lower income family that that doesn't have the means to travel. Credit card debt is high. Um, interest rates are higher than they would like. Uh, cost of goods, CPI is is high. Gas prices are high. Um, unemployment, especially in our feeder markets, is beginning to creep up. Although we just had a a above expectations um report in terms of jobs, I think the long-term impact of things like AI are going to going to cause a squeeze on the lower class folks. And so um you know, it's right for us to be concerned about all that, right? But we we focus on controlling what we can control and influencing what we can influence. We cannot influence the economy in a meaningful way and we cannot influence mother nature. And those were the two biggest impacts on us last year. Um, what we're doing is working collaboratively with the community to make sure that Mr Beach remains familyfriendly, remains top of mind, remains value for money so that when consumers do travel and they have a choice that their choice is the beach region. And we continue to see really good indicators of that. You know, Moto Beach continues to be the number one beach destination for for leisure travel

in the country, according to Trip Advisor. We see from Google Trends that the search demand for Myrtle Beach is above all of our rivals. Um, despite a lot of folks on social media locally here, our reputation nationally for things like safety, familyfriendly, uh, value for money continues to be at an all-time high. Uh, and we continue to out compete our competition. So, Beach is resilient. It always has been. I think our people here are the friendliest, most welcoming folks I've ever experienced anywhere I've traveled. Um, we're industrious. you know, we've dealt with some catastrophes throughout our history, and so we pulled together in a way that I haven't seen anywhere else. So, despite all of the headwinds, I'm optimistic about our future. I think we we're set to compete better than than anyone else. We'll have some bumps in the road. Um, but we'll come through this as we always have and we'll do it better than most in my opinion. Do you see and can you encourage all the jurisdictions now more than ever to really get together whether it's legislatively, whether it's advertising to work together to present one front? That's that's just it's paramount now.

Agreed. Yeah. Uh and and I I will say I was at a um Myrtle Beach Regional Economic Development um annual meeting just a month or so ago and uh County Councilman Johnny Gardner said to the audience he's never felt a sense of togetherness and community spirit in his time here than than he feels right now. And I would 100% echo that. I've been here for 25 years. We've had a lot of uh talk about what's happen what's going to happen and then we've sort of complained on the other side that nothing did happen. And I think it's different now. Um, there's a part in the middle where people actually have to step up and do stuff. They have to, as Matt said, step into the arena, get involved. Instead of, uh, being a keyboard warrior and complaining about the problems, let's actually roll up our sleeves, work together on solutions versus complaining about the problems. And I'll tell you, our problems aren't nearly as bad as other places. If we look around spring break, um, across the country, almost every major tourist destination has had significant safety challenges. Um, our police department here is second to none, and they've done a phenomenal job keeping us safe. This year, we've had incidents and, uh, there are really two realities when it comes to public safety. You know, there's the real situation that's going on that every city in the country has and we need to continue to work on, but then there's the perception and our perception is inflated, especially here locally. Um, and so I want to commend our local law enforcement because they do a phenomenal job. Just go look around the country. You pick a a beach destination. I'm not going to name them in front of the media, but you can go search. Almost every one of them has had some major incidents this year. And then that's that's sad. breaks my heart, but it also makes me proud to be here and to to work alongside this community and our police department.

Thank you. Thank you, Stuart, Bob, Matt. Thank you. Great report. We appreciate that very much. I would agree that we need to be intentional with our actions and that it's all opportunity at this point. We have great opportunities ahead of us. Certainly the collaborate 2031 is a good opportunity for all of Ory County to speak up and say this is what we want the future to look like. Thank you. Anybody else have questions on council? Excellent. Good. Good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jimmy.

First time you've been that quiet. And thank you chamber staff and board members for coming today. Thank you very much. And Mayor Krautz, thank you for being here too.

You're welcome to stay or not.

Enough of this. I have to admit that I'm struggling a little bit today. So we'll see how how it goes this morning. I may temporarily turn things over to Mayor Prom Debbie depending upon how life is for me. So up next we have Edmah and Bob Kemp from the Ory County Solid Waste Authority.

Good morning. Good morning. There are a few friendly faces I see still up here. Mr. Chestnut, Mr. Render. Um this morning I'm going to borrow the words from the previous presenters. Uh we've stepped into the arena so to speak.

The Ory County Solid Waste Authority has begun a process to protect the solid waste disposal capacity for the residents and businesses of Ory County uh as a result of some of the capacity issues that we're facing. And so what I'd like to do today briefly is just go over kind of where we're at, how we got here, and what the plans are for going forward. So without further ado, if I can run my There we go. So some of the things we're going to talk about again, how did we get to this decision point, what our plans call for, and where we're at currently in the process. And as many of you know, and is what we talked about here this morning a little bit in terms of tourism is that there's been a tremendous growth pattern here. Since 2010, we've seen a little over 50% growth in our population. And by 2040, we'll probably be somewhere over 600,000 people, maybe 625,000 people, according US Censa data. That's a lot of people in this county. But in addition to that, as we just heard, we have the tourism population. If you take the 18 million uh figure that we had back in I think it was either I think it was 24 uh that adds another 50,000 people a day to our population base. So our population is really much bigger than what even the numbers will tell you inside of the US Censa data. So what does that mean for waste generation? Well, if you go back to 2010, Ory County processed and disposed of 394,000 tons of garbage. Fast forward to 2024, that's 564,000 tons. And by 2040, when we have as many people as 625,000 residents in this area, that's going to be almost 800,000 tons of waste that's going to be have to be processed in Ora County alone. 800,000 tons. So, what are we doing? What is the Ori County Solid Waste Authority doing to

help slow the process down of filling up these landfills? Well, important to us is the waste reduction and and diversion programs that we do. So, it's not just what comes to us and how we bury it and how we build the next landfill cell. It's really how can we reduce or divert some of those materials. And you'll see we have a CND recycling facility that diverts materials. We recycle concrete, brick, and asphalt. We have cover material that we reuse for our cover materials uh on the landfill. We have a composting operation, tire recycling. Alto together, we we divert about 116,000 tons a year. But on top of that, we've also made investments in processing on our CND side because that's where the most critical capacity crunch is right now. So, we invested a little over a million about a million eight uh in processing. And in that picture down there in the lower right, you'll see the shredding operation that we have. And what we do is we take all the bulk waste that's delivered to our facility and shred it. And it reduces the volume by about 70%. So over the 5 years that the CND landfill had when we first began the program, we expect to save anywhere from 6 to 8 months of life in that facility just by shredding and reducing that volume. So we're doing things like this, the recycling, the waste diversion, the shredding to bring us to a total of almost 150,000 tons a year, about 25% of the waste that's delivered to our facility. So that's what we're doing. That's what we're trying to help divert and and protect the landfill capacity that we have because the concern is this class landfill which is your MSW landfill your typical household garbage that facility is planned to last until about 2050 20 population spikes if tourism goes through the roof that number can get smaller and we've seen it get smaller over time but right now it's planned for about 201.

Our class 2 landfill, which is a CND and bulk waste landfill, is scheduled to close in 2029. Not 39, not 49, 29.

So for us, that's the big concern. What do we do with that CND material? Now, prior to 2022 and in the early days, we had talked about, well, we'll just when that landfill maxes out, we'll blend it in with our class 3 waste. We don't want to do that. We took a second look at that. And with the TAC committee last in the 2022 solid waste management plan update, we said there has to be another alternative because if you add the class 2 waste into our class 3 facility, now that class 3 facility is not 201, it's 2040. And we're out of capacity for disposing of the materials in Ory County in just over 10 years. And that would mean all 500 plus thousand tons would have to get sent somewhere else. And that will not be cheap. So, what did the what did the authority do? We had we had some I don't know, Mr. Kemp, we had some good discussions. I called them. We had some good meetings where we talked over the different options. And long and short of it was we said, "Well, the first option is well, we just won't take it. We'll just stop taking box springs and mattresses and couches and furniture and CND material and that'll be it. We just won't take it anymore." And then all the curb line in the city here and Surfside and then the unincorporated parts would probably be filled with those materials because where else would it go? You'd have to put it on a truck and send it 100 miles away. So we said that's not feasible. That's not responsible waste management. And that's what we're here to do is provide solid waste management services in a responsible manner. So we said that's not an option. So the second option we looked at was well when we close the class two facility again we'll just put it in class three. Well the problem again is you you really limit the capacity that you have just over 10 years and you're right back in the same situation. So that really wasn't a feasible option at least at our determination. We could develop a transfer station much like the transfer station that's here in

the city. It'd be much larger. We'd have to put a lot more materials on there. But in looking at the landfills around us that can handle the 160,000 tons of CND material that we generate, you'd have to go about a 100 miles away. And the tipping fees at those facilities are anywhere from $100 to $110 a ton just to get rid of the waste. Then you add on top of that about $50 a ton in transportation costs. And now you're looking at $150 plus ton disposal costs for Myrtle Beach, for Surfside, and everybody else in the county where right now it's 46. you'd have to triple your disposal rate for CND materials. Not a really good option either. We we're trying to do this in the most cost-effective manner that we can and try to provide the best service that we can both fiscally and environmentally. So, that wasn't an option. The last one we came down to is we said, "All right, let's look at the property we have. We have a little over 1,800 acres at our facility. There's got to be somewhere else where we can put these materials." So we started looking and we identified three sites. In the top left, it's called the green space. It's actually termed site one. Now below that, uh the oak tree, that's site two. And in the lower right, the 100 acres at site three. The green space site there you'll see is a little over 75 acres in total. But the actual footprint where the waste is going to be disposed of is about 56. And that'll give us about 19 years of capacity for our CND materials. That's CND cell one. When that cell fills, we'd have cell two, the oak tree site. Again, 93 acres in size, 74 acres of disposal capacity. That'll add about 20 years of life. Together, that's about 2068 for CND. Instead of 2029, it'll be 2068. The last one, the 100 acres, that's where we'd put our class 3 facility. So in 2050 when that landfill runs out,

that's where the new class 3 facility would go. And again, it would add about 17 years of capacity, pushing that out to about 2068 as well. So this plan, if approved, if we can make this go forward, we'd have disposal capacity until 2068 for all materials in Ory County. Based on population projections, based on the growth factors, and everything else, you'd have capacity until 2068. And that's what the authority felt was the most logical, the most reasonable, the least environmentally impactive, and the most practical. So, where are we at? Well, back in December 19th of 2025, we submitted a permit application to uh the Army Corps of Engineers, which you've probably seen in the news. We've been talking about that process. That public uh comment period began on December 19th and ended on January 19th. So, the long and short of it is we're still waiting. Since January 19th, uh the authorities been waiting to get those comments back from the core, but they haven't received them yet. So, we don't really know what those comments are. We don't know what the demands are going to be or what the permit requirements are going to be when we go in and do this work. We're guessing at some of those things now. We're making our projections. We're making our plans. But I'd love to be able to tell you what we are going to be able to do and not do, but I just don't know yet because we haven't gotten the comments back yet. We've had public hearings. We had an open house at the landfill. We've done tours, which by the way, anybody if you want to come out for a tour, more than happy to give you a tour of the landfill, recycling center, and all that. Um but assuming that we can get approval through the Army Corps of Engineers, once that approval is received, phase two then would be the approval from South Carolina Department of Environmental Services. The dees permit for the waste uh design permit construction. That process would also have to happen and that's about 3 to four years is what we're estimating. So, we know we're going to have to take

class 2 materials and put them in our class 3 facility for a short period of time, but we're trying to mitigate that as much as we possibly can and reduce that time as much as we can. We'd love nothing more than the core to come back and say, "All right, do XYZ and if you do that, you're good and then we're on to the next and we can move through that process as fast as we can." Don't know what that process is going to be, but to the best of our knowledge, that's what we're looking at. And then the last thing obviously would be the construct uh the construction phase. The first phase would be the first class 2 facility obviously and then the other ones would come online as they were needed. So in the meantime we're asking for a little bit of help. One of those things we're asking for is to continue on with your good recycling programs that you have here in the city and try to divert as much material as we can. Uh we've asked this at Loris, we've asked it at Surfside and every other municipality we've gone to. please continue to do your recycling efforts because every ton of waste that doesn't go into the landfill helps us to extend the life of that facility. So, we put that plea out there every time we go out there. If you need support with your recycling efforts or programs, just let us know. We'd be more than happy to help you out. Second thing is we've passed on letters of support and resolutions uh to all the local municipalities uh to give support to the project so that you can say that yes we believe that the authority is doing what's in the best interest of the county. We believe this is important to the county and and it would help us as the city of Myrtle Beach in this case um and that uh we support the their efforts. That's really kind of the 30,000 foot view. Um, I'm here to answer questions that you may have that I may not have touched on here that you have in your head. I I know that there's been TV discussion out there. They've seen things in the news. So, I'll be happy to answer any of those questions best I can. But again, right now, we're kind of in a holding pattern until uh the Army Corps of Engineers lets us know what our

next steps are. Any questions? I don't have any questions, but I do have a comment. I I want to commend y'all for actually having these conversations on trying to do something that's more economical and better for our environment and our community and stuff. So, I really appreciate that. It sounds like y'all have pretty solid plan if you can just get it expedited as soon as we can. But thank you for all your hard work because trash is a big thing that people do not consider in their everyday life. you know, we throw it away and don't think of it anymore, but it really is impactful on our community. Thank you.

I didn't realize that there were three sites that you were going to progressively open.

Which of those sites is the one that is concerned a lot of people regarding wetlands? I believe the first two sites are the ones that are the most concerning because there's restrictive covenants on 76 acres of landfill or excuse me 76 acres of wetlands in those two sites. Uh site one and site two have equivalent amounts of wetlands. We don't know also that all 76 acres are going to be considered wetlands. At the time that the restrict restrictive covenants were put in place they determined that it was 76.6 acres in total. when they come back as part of this process, they'll do another survey of the area. And we believe that that area is actually going to be smaller than the original 76 acres. Don't know that for sure, but but we're hopeful that that will actually even be smaller than the original anticipated 76. When the core comes in, will they um give you mitigation or things required things for you to do to ensure that there's no seeping of material or whatever into the wetland area.

The core will have their permit requirements and dees will also have their permit requirements. We'll have a storm water permit. We'll have our waste management permit. I mean, we're when when it comes to waste management issues in this state, there is there is more coverage uh on in terms of requirements or a permit condition than you can shake a stick. I'll just be perfectly honest. I'm sure so the core will have all of those things. We'll have to manage all of the wa the waste water.

We'll have to manage all of the storm water. There are air classifications or air quality concerns. We're getting ready because of the size of our facility. we're going to be entering another permit requirement that we haven't had before, but because the facility's grown to a certain capacity that we are now going to be uh coming under those. So, there's new regulations coming all the time that we have to deal with. Great. Ed, years ago, um solid waste folks used to market or sell recyclables such as cardboard to foreign concerns. And I can remember one figure where it commanded maybe $200 a ton and then the price fell to $100 a ton and it was no longer feasible.

Do we do are we involved with any of that recycling for sale?

Yes. Matter of fact, um, generally speaking, the facility that we operate right now generally runs in the black. If we go below because of bad years and we're starting to see a softening in those market prices right now, the market conditions are they're getting a little bit strained because of the other things that are going on in the world. So, as those prices change, we try to do the best that we can to get the best price that we can, which is why we put out our materials for bid every month. We get on average higher than the national or even the Southeast average for price on our materials because of two things, quality and consistency. And those two things drive our ability to hit a market that normally gets shut off for other people first because they know they get good material from our facility. So, we've been very fortunate. The staff that we have does a fantastic job at the MURF keeping the materials clean, keeping them processed in the right condition. The bales are the right size and weights and those sorts of things which are all critical to that very number you're talking about. Um, I can tell you PET markets right now, they're the ones that are really getting the hit. Uh, our cardboard is kind of holding its own right now. Um, but there's other market forces that can hit you next month and you just don't see them coming. But generally speaking, we're able to stay whole at the MURF. It's it's not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I will tell you that. But we do uh provide good materials out the other side of that facility. As a matter of fact, all the material that goes in, only 7% goes to the landfill. That's how clean the material comes to us and that's how good the people inside that facility process the material. So, we do a good job at it and um I encourage everybody to use it as much as possible.

We appreciate we appreciate your compliment on our 5.8 million recycle recycling. So, you know, some things aren't pretty pretty, but they just have to be done. Yeah, that's right. So, thank you. Could you share quickly what resale I resale products you have for local folks that can come out and purchase some things from you? I know that.

Sure. Um at our CND recycling facility, we make uh multiple products uh primarily uh wood mulch. Uh the wood mulch comes as blonde material, which is just single grind plain wood chips or we sell it in black, brown, and red. and it's a double ground with that material on there. From our compost facility, we sell regular mulch. We sell compost and we sell enhanced compost that has food waste in it. We sell a glass product, sand and collet, which can be used for landscaping. It can be used for construction projects and different things like that. Um, if anybody wants to come and buy tires, I'd be more than happy to sell you a lot of tires. Matter of fact, anybody that comes for a tour gets to take one tire home for free. I guarantee

I had to buy a new one yesterday. But we do we we try to sell some of those other products and that helps support the programs that are out there because not everything survives on the tipping fee. And to be perfectly honest with you, the materials that we sell goes to support those efforts and that's how we're able to keep those programs up and running. So we do sell a lot. It's coming into the spring now, so call ahead. I'll just throw that out there because the compost does go quick. Um, but the colored uh materials, as I said, they're they're always pretty much the bunkers are full all the time and it's and it's a really good product. Um, I've been trying to get Troy to put it around some of the parks as well. So, I I'll talk to him afterward. Good. Sorry to throw you under the bus, Troy.

Any other questions, comments? Ed, if you would just just um I know you said if you had to start shipping out the cost would go up. Throw some numbers out there. I mean, so people can. So, right now, uh, just imagine this. You You have a transfer station. I I got a little insight into this. You have a transfer station over on, uh, Joe White. You send, I don't know, four or five loads out of there a day, maybe five.

You would have to send that same amount of material, but you'd be sending it a 100 miles away instead of 13 miles down to my facility. So you would need at least probably five or six drivers compared to the two or three drivers you have today. So that's just a personnel cost. You'd have to double the fleet, which means probably two to three more tractors at about 250,000 a piece. You'd have to have as many trailers and they're about $125,000 a piece. Fuel's going about five something a gallon right now for diesel and all the maintenance costs that go with it. That's just for those materials coming out of your facility. Now, if you brought them to us because you said, "Well, we don't want to do that. We don't want to afford that extra cost." We're still going to bring it to you because the county will have its transfer station. All those costs apply to me as well. And I've done the preliminary numbers and it's $100 to $110 a ton just to dispose of the material, not the hauling cost. The hauling cost for me at 160,000 tons, I'd have to hire probably 24 drivers. I'd have to have a fleet of tractor trailers. Um, and and it's about $50 a ton. So, it's not a cheap endeavor to run a 100 miles down the road with something on your back. It's just not. So, that's what I'm that's what we're trying to avoid because if we do the expansion at these facilities and we're able to get these landfill cells built, are they going to be higher tipping fees? Sure. It it might be a few dollars more because we're going to have to bond. There's going to be a bonding component to this. There's going to be some added costs on the construction side that we'll have in the future years because construction costs are going up. Just ask Janet in the public works department, she'll tell you. Ask Jay. But the problem for us is that those are controlled costs. Once we once we build it and we have it here, we'll be able to control those costs. And as we have for years, we've been able to control our cost of disposal. As soon as you put it

in the hands of the private sector or another landfill, you've lost control. you you don't know where that tipping fee is going to go. Republic could decide, you know what, we need to have more money coming in the till. So, next year we're going to go up $25 a ton and they could do that right in the middle of the year after your budgets have already been approved.

So, those are the concerns, right? That that's why we try I believe that our landfill and our facilities are an asset to this county. It's an asset that you ought to be proud of. Just to give you another idea, in South Carolina, there's only 17 landfills in the entire state. There's nine public and eight private landfills. And if you look at the solid waste uh annual report out of DEES, several of those landfills, if the capacity isn't extended, could be closed in the very short future, like within 5 to 10 years. Now, if you go from 17 landfills down to a number that's less than that, and to be honest with you, I don't know that Georgetown necessarily would want to take waste from outside their county. They're trying to protect their landfill space. Same thing in Greenville County or any other municipal facility. So, it may not even be 17 landfills that would be options. Could be a number less than that. So, it really gets to be quite the challenge to identify where and how you're going to move materials across the state. I've had discussions with the gentleman Scott Ribes out in Three Rivers uh waste facility and they have disposal capacity forever out there in Augusta. He said, 'Y yeah, come on down. Be more than happy to take it. It's 200 miles one way. I'll have sleeper trucks pulling garbage down the road. So again, it's it's not the, you know, crying wolf or it's not any kind of uh, you know, some kind of a distress signal that it's going to happen tomorrow, but we have to be conscious of it. We have to be aware that this is coming. And that's why we're trying to do the planning efforts that we're doing now. That's why we're reaching out now so that we can ask for your assistance and doing more for recycling. And if there's anything we can do to partner to help you to do that, we'll do that. Um, and and we're looking at other ways to divert waste and to do more. Um, but you know, this is not a problem that'll go away. Recycling won't solve this either. We can recycle everything that's in our

waist stream and it'll save us about 8 to 10 years. That's the truth. And so, you know, at some point a new facility will be required. We're just trying to push that number off as far as we can. How soon do you need that letter of support? Well, I got one in my fold. I'm just saying we need to I'm ready to sign. So, I appreciate that. Thank you, Ed. Thank you, Debbie. Thank I had heard this presentation at the League of Cities meeting six weeks ago, maybe four, five, six weeks ago, so I'm familiar with this. Thank you, Ed, for coming today. Thank you, Bob. Um, any other questions, council?

Thank you. Thanks. planning and zoning followup discussion.

I'm going to come down here because I'm not used to sitting up there. So, bear with me. um tail end of last meeting, I think there was a request from Councilman Mccclure to have a follow-up conversation about uh the the organizational structure of the planning and zoning um department so you all can have that conversation. I wanted to just sort of set the stage very quickly uh and just sort of give you a refresher. Council asked uh back in January for staff to evaluate uh the pros and cons of separating the planning and zoning department. Uh we did that. We came back to you with a recommendation to uh continue as we are now with a unified uh planning and zoning department. Uh as a part of that as a part of that consideration, we did we did three things. We had a um we we surveyed a number of other communities um directly. We also engaged with the municipal association. So Charlie Barono is actually here today and can share uh MASC's perspective on this. And we also asked Kimley Horn and Kelly Keppler who is our uh consultant doing our zoning rewrite for um their opinion, perspective, uh experience uh with unified and separate departments uh in all of their work. Um we used all of those factors to come to the determination that we felt like maintaining a unified department was the most efficient route forward, the most businessfriendly route forward. Um and and again we brought that recommendation to you. Um again Kelly is here. He can provide some comments from Kimley Horn. Charlie's here from MASC and can also offer some perspective from MASC and their experience. Um before they do that I would open it up to you all and see if you have some questions, opinions, discussion amongst yourselves as to where we go from here.

I'll jump in here at this stage. Thank you Brian. Thank you for the letter from Kimley Horn. Our combined departments are relatively new. Planning and zoning were separate departments within the city for many years, many decades. I don't know how long. At some point, they were combined about nine or 10 years ago. I don't know what the exact date was, but about nine or 10 years ago,

they were combined into one. The letter from Kimley Horn talks about linked inherently, working together. I mean, that's true for all city departments. We're all linked inherently. We all work together. Having separate departments would not prevent them from working together or from being linked inherently. Um, I point again to the success of a planning director with significant vision, the late Jack Walker. The market common was a product of Jack Walker's work along with Buddy Styers and the Middle Beach Airbase Redevelopment Authority. Um, we're growing like crazy. We've dropped from number one or number two fastest growing MSA in the country to number three fastest growing MSA in the country. And that's more than just the city of Myrtle Beach, but it's it's beyond that. And then over the last number of months, those of us who've been out and about in the public um heard some very strong opinions from the public about some of the choices the city has either made or allowed along the way. Okay. And this was one of the suggestions that came back, let's go back to a separate planning and zoning department. Um, I also understand in talking with staff and city attorney that this may not be a a council decision at the end of the day and I understand that as well. But wanted to have that conversation based on the the feedback, the significant and strong feedback that I think we've heard from the public in recent years. The Kimley Horn letter, I just got it a minute ago,

had a chance to scan it real fast. Talks about the comprehensive plan. We've talked about the comprehensive plan as well. And I'd much rather see us do a holistic comprehensive plan rather than a peacemeal comprehensive plan with greater input from the public in as much as the comprehensive plan really is the the guiding document the roadmap for our future and by state law has to be updated I think every 10 years and in updating it on a peacemeal fashion I think we're missing the big picture at some point along the way. So having independent planning and zoning departments doesn't strike me as the end of the world by any means. Um they certainly would continue to work together and and strive for common goals, but I point back towards the successes that we had when we had independent planning and zoning departments. If

I could offer a couple of comments and then we can come back to council. Um and you have referenced the separate planning and zoning departments. Just for clarification, um before before this current configuration, we had a standalone planning department. Zoning department was under construction services. So they were not necessarily completely separate autonomous departments. Um small nuance there. Um you know, you referenced some of the some of the comments that you heard from the public um about about various decisions. Um there's a there's a lot of there's a lot baked into those comments and I I can appreciate a number of those. Uh I I would argue um I would encourage you all to consider sort of the basis for those those comments to be based more in our code than in our staff configuration. which is why we're going through the zoning rewrite process is to update the code to provide a more cohesive approach to the planning and zoning process. Uh and and and staff's uh and staff from staff's perspective. I think some of the frustrations that we run up against are our staff trying to work through uh an outdated antiquated code that we are now addressing. I think Kelly's letter also makes the point that that maintaining the sense of unity now while we're doing the zoning right is imperative. Um you know if we want to revisit this a year down the road, two years down the road when we have a new zoning code that that that's a valid consideration and and and staff's senior staff's always open to making sure we're doing the best we can and operating as efficiently as we can. And then back to your reference to to the comp plan. Um we did a comprehensive comp plan overhaul I think during 2020. 2020 it was during COVID we didn't have time to do any public input there. So

the decision then was made to focus on each individual element, which in in our estimation allows us to focus on each individual element, allow the public more opportunity to comment on each individual element versus trying to bite that whole elephant off in a single bite. So I mean there's um there's valid points there with with all of the comments but I think again even after considering uh that perspective um you know we are comfortable with where we are with a unified department and again we left last council meeting obviously council mccclure with with your request to have a follow-up conversation but so open it back up to to council. I would like to hear from Charlie since he's made his way here representing the Municipal Association of South Carolina and kind of his perspective on this.

Mr. Mayor, members of council, it is great to be in Myrtle Beach. Good morning, sir.

Um, to echo what Brian said, I mean, you know, statewide we see a combined uh department as the standard. Not to say you can't separate it, but the standard is a combined department. I think it brings unity, unity and communication. Uh how you handle things. Um and we have currently seven former administrators, managers that work for the association. All of us are used to unified departments. I too looked around uh what Brian echoed what Brian said and we see that unification. So glad to answer any questions that you have. Anybody? I would uh what occurs to me is that if you have two departments, right, under one overall manager, it really does take away the ability for each department to be independent. Think about that. I want my zoning administrator to be independent from anybody else. I want the head of planning to be independent and report to us. The other thing that I noticed and that and I I appreciate the work that went into this is that for some reason there's no counter to this at all. And I'm pretty sure if you just take a minute and you look, you can find a number of wellfounded reasons that would lead us to the conclusion that actually both of these departments need to be separated. I believe that they should be here,

but it will be at the will of council.

And I think that's the um bill. Well, I think that's the um that's the question or the answer why we here because I thought when we left off the last time that there was a majority of council saying that we are not looking to change what we got because I think there needs to be a um I think I feel like though this is just me that some of the concerns that we've been hearing um were from some who again it was on a maybe they didn't agree with some uh personnel. Um and it wasn't on when it probably should have been more on if there's a policy decision or if there's something needs to be tweaked or something, then we need to do it. But don't get mad with the baby and throw the baby out with the bath water. That's the way I'm looking at this. So, I I'll be honest with you. I I appreciate this report. I appreciate listen to Charlie and um I've seen over the years where departments have been able to work together um and be more efficient and um I I think you get a better bang for the buck. That's just me. So my I have not changed. I'm still supporting keeping the departments together

and um I would have to uh agree with everything uh Mr. Chestnut just said. We're we're spending money and time right now going through a rewrite because we're trying to correct antiquated ordinances that we currently have on the books that we've been dealing with for years. Myrtle Beach has changed over the past 20 years. We need different things to accommodate the changes that are happening around us. I don't want to throw all the efforts out the door that we've made so far and not give our new rewrite a chance. In another year, maybe we revisit it again. But right now, I'm not willing to make that change to split the two at this point. I want to give it a chance. we've spent a lot of effort and money and time that I just don't think we should take lightly.

And I would say one of my concerns, um, I teach organizational management. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make in organizations is flipping around the structure of an organization when the problem isn't the structure. the problem might be um relational um individual to individual or that type of conflict. And so it concerns me most of the things that I've heard have been of more of a conflict of specific decisions that might have been made. Um, and I don't know that that in particular should move us to change the organizational structure that we have currently. And I would just um say that we we do need to be very careful when you start thinking of organizational change and why that would or would not make sense. Now, the mayor mentioned, and I'd like some clarification on this, that at the end of the day, this may not be council's decision, or did I misunderstand that?

No, I said that. And if you my understanding is if you read the the code, it says with the advice of count of counsel is that the way the approval of the manager and the recommendation of the manager. Yeah, with the approval and recommendation of the manager. So I think um there are multiple ways to read it. I'm not trying to be okay. Thank you about that necessarily. But at the end of the day, the the manager works for us. True. So yeah, I think we're all excited about the zoning rewrite. I think that's a good thing. The last time we did a zoning rewrite was 2014,5 134.

I think our staff would tell you the 2014 iteration was a rewrite light. It was more of a reorganization and and uh cleaning up some obvious things. I don't know that we've had a true zoning rewrite in I think we would say decades. But there there was a revision to the zoning ordinance. Yes, there was. Yeah. 2014 12 years ago. Yeah. 2014 was was the last thing we call a zoning rewrite, but it was not comprehensive process that we are doing now. I think Jackie makes a good point as did you with regard to the revisit year or two after our document is hard.

Um and again it doesn't escape me that are we reinventing the wheel when so many jurisdictions which I hold in the highest regard go one way. Mhm. That's not to say we might need to adapt and improvise, redeploy, but uh at this juncture I'm I am for the unified system. Okay. Thank you. And just a note, other departments have merged and unmerged. There's probably a better way to say that. through the years. Um, you know, parks has moved from

one side of the world to the other side of the world and back again. I think so. It's not uncommon that this would occur.

Not at all. And quite candidly, we've had conversations internally about reorganization of other departments. I I would I would tell you that's based as much on experience of the personnel that's heading up those departments. If if if we have uh I mean we've had conversations about uh what to do with capital projects. Do do we have a single capital projects department uh or do we have do we have right right now we have two. We have a infrastructure capital projects and a and a vertical capital project. Uh we've we've had discussions about merging those. We did not merge those because we didn't have a single person that had experience in both of those worlds. So it just didn't make sense. Uh and so yeah, as as personnel dictates and as experience dictates, we we we like to always be looking for opportunities to be operating as efficiently as we can be.

Was that rough out expense about $1260,000?

It depends on how we would structure it. Uh again, go back to the last way we had it. I say split, but it really wasn't split. It was just the zoning department housed under construction services. that wouldn't necessarily have the same capital impact as a standalone planning department and a standalone zoning department. If we had two standalone departments, then yeah, you're looking at probably $200,000 uh in and just that's just that's just uh compensation. What I would like to see over the next year or two whenever professional advice comes across your desk in regard to professional articles with regard to unified versus separation, I think we would like to see that analysis too. Be happy to. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you very much. And to Mike's point, when council suggested this at the first part of the year, the management looked at it and came back with a recommendation not to do that. We did briefly talk about that. it. This is just the the tail end of that conversation if you don't mind. Okay. Okay. Um the towing franchise update both pricing and signage. Um I can start this conversation or you can start this conversation or Chris can start. You can start the conversation.

Morning. Morning council. Good morning. Uh we just wanted to touch base to present some recommended changes to the towing signage for the purpose of increased transparency for the individuals that are experiencing uh non-consensual tow events. By non-consensual tow events, that's outside of the realm of law enforcement um law enforcement um requested to repossessions. And then at the end of the uh presentation, we also wanted to discuss for your consideration the fees associated uh which have not had a adjustment since 2012. Um I put up the ordinance. There's several elements of it, but I I'll I'll I'll key in on just the primary ordinance or elements of the ordinance that I wanted to touch base on as we go through. Um, if you notice under subsection B, it's private property owners shall verify that proper signage is in place prior to summon summoning the wrecker service. So, obviously signage is required on those private property areas. Under 23141, um, I do want to point out the police department shall provide a template for such signs to be used uh by the private property owners indicating requirements for size, materials, placements, and wording. And then any exceptions to this template must be approved in writing by the chief of police. Uh so long as council wants to uh go in that direction. So currently this is our approved tow signage. Uh it has the private uh the property name. Um it has a phone number, property address, parking only. It uh depicts the unauthorized or illegal parking and then it has the tow company name that's franchised for that particular property. Um, but there is no fee listed on there for the actual fee associated with the toe. Um, and it's very limited information other than the actual toe company. And so our recommendation on the sign would to be to display a QR code, uh, two QR codes,

one on each side, at the bottom left and bottom right of these signs. Um, there's a couple benefits to doing this. uh it will link the the um individual that's experienced a non-consentual toe or has question directly to the website of the actual franchise tow company. Um and that link will also provide details of the actual ordinance which may um eliminate or maybe reduce some of the questions associated with those particular toes. Uh it will also include the specific fees. Um, I know a topic or area discussion was to have the actual fee associated with that, but as we go on in the presentation, I'll show you there's actually numerous associated fees with non-consentual towing. And so that would probably not fit or look well on the actual signage on the private property.

Um, and the link will include all contact information to that particular tow service. So they can have all of their address, location, name of the service, and it'll have all of the information readily available on the website through the QR code. So the benefits of actually using a QR code on the actual signage itself, um, it's a cost savings, cost savings to all the private property, uh, without having to replace every single sign throughout the city. If I were to estimate probably over a thousand signs throughout the city um with a cost to replace those signs any time and as we go on through the presentation to evaluate the fees associated every time there would be adjustment of fee of some sort we would have to replace those signs with a decal placard of a QR code that would eliminate the need to replace every single sign for the property owner. So we have a a cost savings there. It's timely. Uh we can have that done very quickly. The QR codes can be in place. We're entering the season as you all know. Um volume is picking up so we can accomplish this very quickly. Um and then efficiency. We can easily adapt for any kind of future adjustments with the actual QR code itself. It could be removed, replaced, or it just adapts to the the website adjustments. Any questions thus far?

Yes. Um, one of the issues was the fact that the code says that um, it specifies that payment other than cash is required. Um, that you can pay with a major credit card, a debit card. That's correct. And that's not included here. And that's really one of the challenges that we're facing. It's not so much the cost of the toe because the cost is set, but the fact that the customer standing out there in the dark necessarily

when they're calling, they may not be getting the fact that they can pay with a debit card or a credit card. So, that's that's the sort of information I'd like to see on a sign. So, two two questions. The QR codes, do they go to the towing company's website or to the city's website for more information? Those will go uh specifically to the towing company's website that will list their fees and their services, their individual contact information, and a uh um image of our ordinance. Um because each property utilizes a differing toe to tow service. So for it to link to our website, we would have to list you would have to connect the actual private property owner that's franchising with that specific tow service.

Um and and to go back to just one second, if you don't mind. Um, so I think it would be really beneficial also for these QR codes because we can specifically link the ordinance for the payment methods that's outlined on our ordinance. So that way our individuals that are experiencing these non-consensual toes will immediately have the availability that says um, shall pay by uh, cashier's check, check, credit card, debit card uh, and cash. Okay. Most folks have cell phones

and know how to generate a QR code image and follow that link. I I would suggest that it probably would be better to have that information on a city website rather than on the individual tow company's website. The tow companies already have it sign up. They've got the phone number that they call. They may not have their street address, but you call the phone number and they tell you where they are. Um, I I personally would prefer for the information about the code to be on the city's website rather than on a city website rather than on the individual tow company's websites.

Sure. We may be able to solve a combination thereof as well. Maybe a city QR that would link to the city. Um, and maybe the contact information also direct to a a tow site for the individual to be able to contact them. and then a suggestion so that we can spell out in so many words the methods of payment that are accepted cash debit card major credit card um so that there is no question in anybody's mind that it's not a cash only situation right

um what about a smaller second sign rather than adding a QR code to the existing sign how about just a smaller second sign that has a QR code on it plus the specifics that we would like to communicate regarding the the methods of payment and then you could also put on there the the towing company's location. So these are 12 by 18. These are 12 12 x 18 I believe. Yes, sir.

So maybe a 12 x 12 sign that would also appear beneath this sign that would have a QR code that would have the specifics from the city code saying cash, debit card, major credit card or methods of payment. And then the the towing company could also include its specific address on that second sign on a smaller sign. That would be um maybe a little more expensive than adding QR codes, but it would be less expensive than replacing the entire sign and it would give the public more information at the end of the day and also address the fact that some folks just aren't going to be able to deal with QR code.

Arthus, I've got a question. Um, are the signs doublesided currently? Are current or not? I think they are, right? So maybe it's just putting it back could be just putting it back on it. We can certainly evaluate those options. Yeah, we were looking at it from the cost savings and efficiency side of it. Um, obviously we want to be able to have those up and running. I think that'll take some time. Those unfortunately those signs at that material are not the least expensive of the options. So those are our responsibility, the signs, or are they the towing company's respons or Yeah. towing company's responsibilities. Those are the actual property owners responsibilities. Yep.

If they want to franchise with an actual uh tow company, that's their responsibility to post their property. It's included in the ordinance that they must have that posted before they can do a non-consentual tow. Because I know when we had signs, the actual towing company actually provided them to us. Yeah. They passed that cost along now. They don't do that anymore. do that no more. It's been a while. I don't think we've ever towed one car out of 54 years. So, you know, um do all of these uh towing companies have a website?

Yes. And she uh Stephanie James has actually been inh communication with them just to tell them a little bit to start off before uh we got too deep into this with your with your uh direction on this. Um but we've been in communication. We can certainly make those accommodations. They've they've uh all agreed Thanks.

I think one of the uh the other concerns that I heard when the mayor uh ended up shelling out a lot of cash for some folks uh is that whatever towing company uh at that point in time that you were dealing with is you know they were telling everybody well no you you know it's cash only that type of thing and I think there needs to be a a strong educational component to this so that towing companies understand uh what they have to offer uh and I'm I don't know how easily it is to enforce that but I think uh a kind of continual uh communication with them uh what our expectations are and what your expectations are too

uh so that we can eliminate a lot of the calls coming into uh

moving forward for the purpose of this this discussion we we obviously just wanted to present present um some of the mod modifications to the sign so we can be more transparent with individuals that are experiencing this. I think it's twofold. It's fair to the individuals that are experiencing and need that information, but it's also, you know, a little bit more efficient for us because typically we'll respond to a call for service for some form of tow dispute and it may just be a simple question that, you know, this would have helped out with in answering for that individual. Um, another thing, but moving forward, we also do want to take into consideration an evaluation of the currents ordinance and some of the verbiage in it, which addresses specifically cash, uh, debit, credit card. Um, you know, we talk about a flat fee. That flat fee also, and we'll move into that here in a minute, but also encompasses the, um, merchant service fees, and the merchant service fees are now kind of being um, uh, encompassed through the actual record service itself. So, they're processing. They're now being charged a processing fee. Um, but one portion of the ordinance, it just says nothing in this ordinance shall preclude payment by a motorist in the form of cash, check, or money order if this form of payment is acceptable to the operator. And so, when we're evaluating that and looking at the language, we just want to be sure that we are actually in compliance with the ordinance and they're also in compliance with the ordinance. And so to answer your question, moving forward, we are going to at least evaluate to make sure that there is a best practice and we're um taking the appropriate accountability approach.

The ordinance specifically does say that correct cash, debit cards, and major credit cards are shall be accepted. That's right. This is one of those chances I think we have to clearly communicate to the public to eliminate any possible confusion, which is why I would suggest we do a second smaller sign

to literally say this is how you can pay. Fortunately, knock would I haven't parked where I shouldn't and been towed, but I'm aware of folks who have parked where they shouldn't and been towed. And it's a an hour, hour and a half long process to get your car back. And that's assuming that you don't also have to find a ride, either taxi, Uber, or a friend, that you also don't have to in in the case that it was required allegedly that you had to pay in cash, make a trip to an ATM. Um, so without having to do those things, it's still an hourlong process to get your car back after it's been towed. Minimum probably of an hour.

Any other questions on that portion of it? Well, my comment to that is just don't park where you're going to get towed. I agree with that as well. I agree with that as well. And and I I understand it from, you know, I get it from both lenses. It's a 12 by 18 inch sign. It's easy to miss on occasion at night in the dark. At night in the dark, some of the lots are not improved lots. Some of the lots where vehicles are allowed to park with a hang tag from a property owner are not improved parking lots. They're dirt or sand lots. They're posted for this signage and somebody accidentally parks there. Yeah. Or or on purpose parks there. Good. But it it it's not as clear-cut as one would like for it to be at the end.

Understand? We'll breeze over this. This is just a copy of the uh letter for notification for the actual companies themselves. When we uh come through with the finalized plan um being the additional sign um on top of that with the QR code additions, we'll we'll make those adjustments. All right. So, now we're going to move into the uh the fees. Um like I explained a little bit ago, the fee for each toe is a flat fee and it is all inclusive. Innesota, it does include the merchant service uh charges or the service charges for the um cards to be utilized. Um the fees, there's there's a a full breakdown of these fees. I'll I'll let you take a look at those on the actual in the actual ordinance. Uh the first is a class A. So any vehicle that is uh under the 10,000 gross vehicle weight would be $160 uh flat fee. Um then we have storage fees. We have a no tow fee of 30. uh if they already coupling to the vehicle, $45 decoupling. Um and then if they offer after hours uh the the ability for after hours um access to the vehicle for private property. So they're not getting the vehicle out of the actual lot, but they want to retrieve personal property. Um they have to pay there's they will be required to pay a fee after hours if the pro the the record service provides that as an option. Um, and then we have to take into consideration large vehicles. Uh, large vehicles over 10,000 gross vehicle weight, large vehicles, uh, the cost is $250, uh, for the actual tow fee itself. Uh, that takes additional fuel, larger truck for the tow service. Um, and then the the additional increase fees as you continue on. Um, $60 no tow fee, $120 decoupling fee. Can you go ahead talk a little bit about the after hours? I mean, if your car is towed at midnight, they're obviously working.

What's after hours? If your vehicle, this covers the incident where it is maybe late afternoon, your vehicle is towed from a parking lot. Maybe you have not noticed that the vehicle has been towed. you return, the vehicle is not there. You realize that your vehicle has been towed and after their actual open business hours, the service, the record service is not required to respond back in with an employee to open up and retrieve property. But if they do offer that, that is the fee associated with them having to be compensated for time to come provide that service. Does that make sense? I'm sorry if I explained that. It does. And yet I suspect the towing is occurring largely around the clock.

Correct. Yeah. Um All right. So in comparison uh we provided this chart just for your consideration. In comparison to the I know it's very small uh but in comparison to other jurisdictions um with the non-conentual tow ordinances all these ordinances are vastly different. My beach we have some similar elements but they're different. Uh Conway is $266 for 10,000 gross vehicle weight or low or less. Um Georgetown is probably the only area or jurisdiction that is lesser than ours. North Myrtle Beach 257, Highway Patrols at 272. The top portion is Highway Patrols, but it is all over the place. So, uh I tried to decipher that, but they offer a lot of different uh services because of obviously hazmat ordeals. are working more interstate and they have to uh charge charge accordingly for other other things. Um and so we provided this comparison just for your review to uh to uh seek feedback on um if this is a area that we want to make adjustments u in our ordinance for the actual fees associated. Our recommendation would be to implement the changes to both the signage and the fees uh at the same time just for the uh means of consistency. I think that would be a good offering. We can adjust fees if that's what you uh if that's at your discretion to do so. We adjust the fees. We can implement the changes to the signage. Um that'll streamline the RFQ process. Uh the current franchise agreement is June 2022. June 30, 2020, I'm sorry. Yeah. June 20 June 30, 2022 through June 30, 2027. And so the new process will begin at the beginning of 2027. So we're nearing the end if we want to make those adjustments. Chief, you said this at the outset, but just for the public's benefit, these are non-consensual toes. These are not I called the tow truck to come get my car because it needed to be

towed. This is I did not give permission for my vehicle to be towed, but it was parked where it should not be parked and the property owner gave permission for the vehicle to be towed. We set the fee because it is a non-consentual tow. It does not occur with the agreement of the vehicle owner. Um, and we set the fee currently at $160 for a standard That's correct. vehicle under 10,000. Yes, ma'am. pounds. Um, as you note in your chart, the fees with the exception of Georgetown County are all higher than ours. Georgetown County is at 150. That's correct. Currently, I don't believe our towing fee has changed in 2020. 2012. That's correct.

12 years probably somewhere in that neighborhood. Um, so it's been at 160 for a while now, correct? Um, and it it is council's choice where to set that fee or to change it at all for that matter. So, that's a second part of the conversation that we need to have. Yes, that's right, Mark. Any additional questions? Perfect. Appreciate y'all. Thank you very much for your time. See, council, any comments? Yeah. Well, are are we good with adding an extra sign instead of doing just a QR code?

I'm good with adding the extra sign. I mean, it's going to add some cost, but at the same time, I think that should clear up some confusion and stuff. That's the main part. Okay. Yeah, I agree. All right. And you'll bring back something to us at a future meeting. We'll provide an update. Do we do we have a Do we want to have the conversation now about whether or not to revisit the fee? I think we can, but at the same time, has any of the tow companies reached out and say that, "Hey guys, at least one has." Yes. We've had feedback. Okay.

Rising uh as they explained earlier, you know, there's rising fuel costs. Oh, yeah. So there's cost associated with it and I'm certain that if we don't at least evaluate it and take some appropriate steps, the RFQ process may be a little bit limited. I think that's our that that would be staff's concern is that if we don't look at adjusting the fee now, the response to the RFQ is probably going to suffer um because it's not it's not necessarily going to be competitive. I will say this since my boss is not here, I don't know the juice would be worth the squeeze. Do you want to send him forth with percentage to consider or

um we're at 160. Highway patrol is at 272. Conway was at Can you 50 um you know at the end of the day this is a fee that is being imposed upon somebody um that goes hand in hand with having their car physically removed. Um, I fully understand that the fee hasn't changed and that this is a thing. Um, it was me making a recommendation 200.

That's what I was thinking. I I like it still being under a lot of the other municipalities and then for the vehicle over 10,000 that clearly needs to be more. I've my my understanding from feedback, correct me if I'm wrong, Stephanie, uh is that that is that is probably their more focused area of contention. Uh not saying the other one the other fee is not uh but the substantial cost to operate those larger trucks is very much higher with the diesel prices and the uh the time it takes to actually install couplings and and to tow those larger vehicles. So,

and that's frequently when we would call a towing company to remove a larger vehicle. Is it not? Maybe. We've we've had there has been non-consensual tow instances where it may be a bus, it may be a large uh passenger style van, could be se. So, it it it does there are occurrences that do happen there. We do have a lot of those, but there is there are certainly instances uh for larger vehicles on non-consentual toes. Ours is currently 250 500 for the larger vehicles. Yeah, looks reasonable. What feedback are we getting from the towing companies? What are they saying to us or Stephanie?

She communicates with them very staff had to come down and you thought you were going to get out of here without saying something this morning. Hello and good morning. I am Officer Stephanie James. Pull your microphone down a little bit. I have to put it at level. Um hello and good morning. I'm Officer Stephanie James and one of the many many many things I do is I oversee the record franchise companies. Um the past several years um they have expressed that the 160 has been in place since 2012. It's been 14 years

operating at said cost.

So as we all know since co on everything has gone up. The cost of pay to employees, vehicles, insurance, gas, you name it. So they have repeatedly said to me that they are with the city of Myrtle Beach, we are just one entity that they tow for and we are the lowest of all the entities that they tow for. With that being said, they said they're basically breaking even or actually almost losing money with us because with that 160, they're eating the cost of the rise of everything else. Plus, with the 3% charge for using the charge card, they're having to also eat that cost. So, not only are we the lowest, but then the cost of everything has gone up around them and then they're also eating that 3%. So, anything that you guys can do, council, can get that up for them significantly for the smaller vehicles and the larger vehicles, they would be greatly, greatly appreciative.

And there really are two occasions when a vehicle could experience a non-consensual toe. One is when the city through the police department calls for a vehicle to be removed and then we're paying the the non-consentual tow fee. Correct. It's not the it's not the car owner that's paying it. Do we re seek reimbursement from the car owner for that? Okay. So, we're paying it. So, that's a piece of it, but then there's the other part where um a private person parks his or her private vehicle out there and experiences the non-consensual tow. So the city sets those rates in both.

I stopped for a second. I may have misunderstood what you were saying. So you're saying when a police officer is out with a vehicle, like for DUI, we request to be towed. Oh, no. That falls back on the vehicle owner. So we do re seek we do seek reimbursement. We don't pay that. Okay. And that's actually not Please direct it to

And yet that's that fee is set by this ordinance though. Correct. Correct. So it is set by this or whether it's consensual, non-consensual, the the fee to tow the it still costs them to tow that vehicle. And usually what they do is that fee is across the board what they charge everybody consensual or non-consensual. Now, there have been times where um hey, I really don't have the 160. Can you help me out? Can you work with me? And they'll actually drop it down to maybe 100, 140 to help the person out. But whether it's consensual or non-consensual, that's the flat tow fee is 160 which is set by the city. Correct. Yes, sir.

In in both of these instances, whether it's a police um required to or a public member of the public who experiences this sort of thing on their own. Yes. Okay. And I understand the the the shift towards allowing companies to recover the credit card fee. So, I'm, you know, personally, I would be okay adding, you know, credit card fees up to 3% or something like that if that's a standard fee as part of the part of the ordinance because, uh, the other surrounding entities allow them to do that as well, allow them to charge that 3%.

Okay. Um, what would, you know, we just talked about, you know, maybe we go up to 200 or whatever, whatever it might be. I personally, yes, if I'm allowed to give my opinion. Steph, what is your recommendation? My recommendation would be it's been 14 years since we have done any type of a rate increase. I think we should go ahead and mirror what highway patrol was doing and let that be the new standard.

And I would I understand your request. I understand the length of time that's involved. Um, you're talking about a your perspective maybe more from the police department side where the police department has to call to have a vehicle towed and granted that cost is passed on to the consumer to the car owner, the vehicle owner. Um, but we're also dealing with members of the public who experience this and um, rightly or wrongly, they've parked where it's not allowed. And this is currently $160 versus a $272 unexpected charge plus an hour's time. Um, that's a balancing act that I think is contemplated in why this towing amount is set by the city. I think that that's one of the reasons why the city sets the towing amount so that there aren't excesses that are allowed to occur. Well, you know, we're in we are in Ory County, so I think uh possibly mirror mirroring what the county is doing

would be would be reasonable. That would be my proposal. I I would I would I would like that. vehicles that are towed by vehicles that are towed in Ory County, whether it's by um county police, whether it's from a private property incident, whether it's uh from the highway patrol, vehicles towed by the highway patrol, we're dealing with a much larger area than we are with the city of Myrtle Beach. So, the the cost of towing a vehicle is much greater in that instance than it would be within the city of Myrtle Beach. City of Myrtle Beach is 2% landwise of Ory County,

but there's still the cost of the vehicle, the cost of the gas, all the operating procedures. The only difference there is you're talking the gas aspect of it, but everything else irregardless if it's inside the city or somewhere else, that other cost is still there for them that they've been eating the past 14 years. I understand. Um, again, we have to strike a balance point between what's feasible for u all concerned. Well, perhaps may I would recommend I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. I I just say let's match Ory County then some. Even it out. 250. Yeah, 250. That's fine.

500. So, a visitor to Myrtle Beach who parks where they're not supposed to park is going to have to spend $250 to get their car. That's the complaint that you'll hear. Well, that's the complaint, but at the same time, if if I don't know how these guys have done it for since 2014, you 12 2012. It's been 14 years since the city has given them an increase. Wow. I agree that an increase is due at this point. Yeah. Maybe a compromise of 225. I mean, I I still think we ought to be at the county. I really do. I agree with Bill. I mean, we're Me and Bill agree. That's not me.

I'm taking note. Did Mr. Chestnut say we actually agree? Yeah. Yeah. It's April 7, 1055. Cory County is at 242. I think that's a lot of money. Um, I understand the cost involved in the process. Um, you know, I need my vehicle towed. I end up calling AAA and they send they send the whatever the nearest towing company is, which is nice. Um, do we know how the county arrived at 242 or how the highway patrol? My understanding is from what was explained to me is every year

that highway patrol ups it then the other agencies have upped it except for us. I I hear my fellow council members say they would be willing to increase it more than $40 per toe. I I kind of like the 225 if you if you got to go up.

Emergency service recommendation council woman. It'll have to come back. It does for an actual vote to readings and all that fun stuff. So, let's get let's start there. How's that? Okay. So, what I'm hearing and understanding because I um that it's 225, they will be allowed to do the 3% fee and for the smaller vehicles and larger vehicles, $500 and they're allowed to charge the 3% fee. And as staff, we will make sure that we don't go another decade before.

True. This this should have come back along the way. Um and then a separate standalone sign break. Sure. Take a break. We'll take a 10-minute break.

Heat. Heat.

Heat.

I did the typical guy thing. I can wait. It's a problem. Good morning. Thank you for sticking around today. Yeah, Nor's not going to let me forget it. That was about a 14minute break, I think. So, up next on the agenda, the convention center project update.

Uh, actually, mayor, if I could, we will combine the next two and actually the just the way the the presentation um fell, the we we will do the theater update first and then we'll do the convention update. Chris Edwards from Monteth is going to come make that presentation here momentarily. Um, y'all may recognize the white-haired gentleman in the audience. Jay Hood, is back with us um on a part-time basis. He can also answer some technical questions if we do that. We will start with a quick video uh Councilwoman Connor asked several weeks back about a tour of the theater. So we we arranged a tour. Councilwoman Hatley participated in that along with some CCU staff. U Patrick went with us and took some video and put together a very nice looking uh clip after that. So I figured we would start with that and then Chris will come to the podium and give his presentation. By the way, it wasn't the coldest day of the year so far, too. Yeah.

Well, we have better weather now. So, that today will end with an offer to do another.

We had a good walk through with the city of Myrtle Beach and Coastal Carolina. Uh, show them current progress, what we have going on inside of the project right now. So, as you can see behind me, in the last few weeks, we just got the slope seating area done. All the concrete is placed, ready for the seating. We've got framing going on upstairs. We've got electrical roughins going on. HVAC is out here right now doing some duck work and getting the unit set up on the roof. So, just making provisions, getting things moving out here in the field. Out front, we're going to be starting the storefront and restoration of the front of the buildings. So, we're starting with the EES and doing all that stucco work in front of Helen Mates. Then, we're going to start working through on all the brick and uh trim work and all the restoration that we need to do to that front facade. We're anxious and ready to roll. So, we got a lot of things in in store for us. So, just really excited to keep this thing moving and get it to a point where it's finished product so we can get the owner in here. As Chris makes his way up, I would also tell you Monteth is also the contractor at the Pelicans baseball stadium. Uh, and they are on track to open up next week. So, um, you guys have been juggling some pretty large projects. So,

and Smokey, you got a little shout out. And they're out at Coastal. Everywhere I turn, there's a Monteth sign. And they're doing a Vietnam Veterans Memorial for us, too, if we're just going to continue to look. Yes, sir. All over the place. All over the place. Council members, thank you for having me. Good morning. Um, just want to touch on real quick. We'll start at the theaters. Brian mentioned uh just going through where we've been, where we're at currently, and what the future is in store for us. Um one second, please. Yeah. Will you point your microphone towards you a little bit too?

All right. So, where we've been, uh started out at the theater, we had a bunch of asbesus abatement to do. That took about 8 to 10 months. That was the first activities that happened on that project. um had a couple discoveries as we were going through some additional abatement, but that is all done and behind us now. We did interior and exterior demolition. We demoed the wall that was demising between the two buildings, demoed the damaged portions of the buildings, um and then did a lot of openings on the inside to create the new space that's going to be going in there. Uh precision demolition for all the openings in the existing walls. We have uh three wife walls out there. it's existing brick. So, uh very fragile walls that we have to do shoring and reinforcing in order to cut these openings in and that'll entail the uh full space so everyone can um interact between the different buildings. We've done all the concrete footing slabs and everything in the slope seating area. Um that was a major milestone that released us to proceed with fabricating of all the seats um after they came out for field measurements. Um, currently we're doing the steel structure catwalk installation. It's very complicated process, working through existing conditions, walls out of plum, walls in different locations of what we anticipated. So, a lot of challenges there, but that's moving through. Uh, currently, um, we have interior wall framing that's ongoing in the Helmate space and throughout the other two buildings. Electrical, plumbing, and HVAC roughening is underway. Uh we've installed all the uh belowgrade uh slab vapor mitigation system which is for the overall space to make sure that no vapors from the existing soil conditions make it into the finished space. That's very complicated system as well. So that is complete. Uh we've received all plumbing, electrical and HVAC equipment. We did a very early release of HVAC equipment to get through some big increases in HVAC pricing. So, that was

something we did very early on in the project to save some costs. Um, elevator is currently sitting on site. As I mentioned, the seating is all being assembled as we speak. Um, and one of the big things that we had to go through in the early stages of this job, we had to redesign the HVAC system due to existing conditions with the existing steel structure that was in those buildings. So, in order to maintain ceiling spaces and clearance heights, uh, we had to do a pretty significant effort for redesign. So, credits to um LS3P, our architect, and Ashley Weatherly um to help us through working through those challenges and getting the design appropriate to where we needed to be for the buildings. Um then where we are right now, so we're continuing the steel structure to full completion. We're continuing the foundations of all the buildings. Um and then starting the building extension that will happen on the back side of the property. We're continuing interior framing, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical roughins. And then right now m making major preparations for roofing. We're putting up the decking on the existing steel structure and then starting to work through all the different conditions to get that building dried in. Um so what's to come? Building dryin. That's a huge milestone construction that allows us to proceed with all finishes on the inside of the building. We're getting the HVAC units installed. We just did the curbs a couple weeks ago. Um the electrical gear and the panel are ready to go. That's usually a very long lead time. and that was a year lead time on this project. So, we have that gear that is currently sitting in a warehouse ready to go in. And then we're starting the front facade restoration towards the end of this month, early next month. That's going to be the most exciting thing for people to see. Start bringing the brick back up, restoring all the brick on the front side. We'll start Eaves, we'll start storefronts. Uh we've been going through a lot of different design changes trying to figure out the blend between historical restoration achieving the design and mimicking the old design. Um

so a lot of challenges on this project but we are through that now. So storefront is moving into preparations for fabrication and then the front facade will start happening here not too distant future. Um I have a couple pictures on here and some things that I'll um shed just in a minute. But um just wanted to kind of highlight some of the challenges that we faced on this project. As I mentioned, we had additional asbesus abatement and other measures that we had to do through the demo phases. Um existing buildings, the dimensions were quite different than what we anticipated. We did find a nine extra 9 in for the lobby. So we made the lobbies a little bit bigger but two of the buildings were narrower, one was a little bit longer than we expected. So a lot of things that we had to go through to design the structure appropriately for those buildings. Um all the work has to be phased. It's very narrow project site as some of you already are very familiar with getting out there to the site. So we have to get in there. We have to do steel, do concrete, do steel, do concrete and work our way out the back of the building. So, um, not the best flow like a normal project, but we're working through all those challenges. Um, existing walls and the new structure, trying to get those two to, uh, be cohesive is big challenge. Very old buildings, uh, walls aren't straight, walls aren't plum. So, we're doing a lot of things to make sure that the end finishes are what everyone's expecting, um, regardless of what the bones of the buildings look like. Um, there's historical and restorative requirements. We have existing trusses that need to be maintained. We have historical components that need to be withheld. We have equipment that's being reinstalled and being repurposed. So, a lot of challenges on that front too uh to make sure that this project both proceeds with a design intent and also restores some of the previous design from the buildings that were there and historical parts of city. Um we're also a little bit limited with adjacent property interruptions. Um Brian and I have gone through that just recently. We

had some demo work that had to occur which unfortunately entailed relocating a couple tenants. Uh so we're working through that process now to get them back in next week. And then frankly uh water intrusion. We want to make sure that this building is tight. So we have a uh building consultant that's going to be working with us as we go through the finishes stage of this project. We want to make sure that this building is tight, lasts a long time, and achieves the design that everyone's looking for so we can all enjoy the space together. Um, and I just have a couple pictures. I'll roll through just so you guys can see some of the things that we've been through. Um, top left was the building. Uh, when we got there, it had experienced a couple of storms, couple of fires. Um, some very unfortunate events. So, lot of cleanup effort there. Then we got into some asbestous abatement. Those are the top two photos where you see the entire place has to be ballooned in plastic and everything has to be maintained and documented for where the trash and disposal. Then down in the bottom left, um it's all gone now, but we had to do shoring to reinforce the front structure during demolition phases until we got the steel structure in place to reinforce that. That's now gone. Um so we're back to u going towards the facade. Um down in the uh bottom middle you can see some of the existing trusses that we had to shore up and maintain. So those are still existing inside of the building and then we built the structure around those. Um and then just some other challenges. The bottom right is in the helmade space. Part of the slab was historical. So we had to maintain the slab rather than cutting it all out. We only cut out the pieces that were necessary for us to install the new work underground plumbing and things of that nature. Um top left you can see we're having to work inside a very tight space. So we have cranes that are backed up inside of the building. That was during some of the initial structural demolition um and installation. In the middle at the top um as we were going through the

structure uh removal and demolition phases, the foundations were determined to be compromised on both buildings adjacent to us. So, we had a team come in that installed helical piles on one building and then an expansion foam um underneath the other building to make sure that we had stable foundations to continue on with our work. Um steel structure, a couple pictures in there just kind of showing how tight that structure is to the existing building. I mean, you you barely slide a piece of paper between the steel columns, existing brick walls. and then other challenges that we're trying to work with existing conditions to reroute plumbing and things of that nature around those challenges on site. So I say that is very complicated project uh working through it with the team and it's really coming along together. As you can see here we've got framing going on on the inside and rough ends for our mechanical electrical plumbing. The middle picture here is that uh vapor intrusion mitigation system membrane that's been installed underneath the slope seating area and then following that is the slope seating area concrete complete and the orchestra pit uh placed as well. So where we're at just kind of moving forward and more recently we set some HVAC curbs so we can support the units. Um that was done just a couple weeks ago. the demo at the stair for the existing tenants in the neighboring property. That picture in the middle there, that was done just last week. And then we've got duct work and some other finishes going on inside, drywall and other finishes that are starting to take shape so you can really see the space. Um, this was on the presentation, but just wanted to include this. This is our 3D model that we've assembled inhouse. Um we use this as a tool through construction to make sure everything is facilitated and coordinated on site. Um obviously that being paramount on a project like this with a lot of existing conditions and challenges and then from a similar perspective the rendering of the end product. So that's what we're

all here for to achieve. um very excited but a lot of challenges on the theater project but um happy to be part of the team and working through it with the city and everyone else involved CCU as well. So, um, I'll pause there for any questions on the theater, any updates you guys want to hear. Curiously, is your vapor barrier application is that for is it gas, gas, and water vapor or what does that protect against is what I'm

What happened was when we demoed the buildings, we had a third party consultant come out. They did some core samples underneath the slabs to take some soil readings. They got some measures in those soil readings that were just borderline over what they would like to see as far as living conditions without a system like this. So, think of it as a radon system if you're from used to that up in the north. It's just an active fan system that will allow those vapors to be mitigated out. Quite honestly, there hasn't been anything underneath that soil that has caused us any concern. It's all very nice sandy soil. Um, so I think this was a belt and suspenders approach to make sure that nothing could come up through the slab. But in a space like this, it's very important to make sure that if it was any vapors from old gas tanks or anything that could be underneath the slab, those were the kinds of hydrocarbons and things of that nature that they want to prevent.

And our elevations are all uh anticipatory of hurricane type events. Yes, sir. So that's part of um a lot of the things part of the challenges what I mentioned with storefront. All of that storefront needs to be to a point that replicates the historical conditions but is also hurricane rated. So quite a few challenges there. We've had to do custom cuts for dyes to make sure that we get angles that match the existing conditions but also needs to be stout to withstand hurricane. So impact rated glass all those things is all part of the system and then trying to fit that into a space that frankly wasn't developed for that is challenges. So additional steel and things of that nature to reinforce open

and foundationally secure on that. Yes sir. Foundation was great. This was one part where once we got towards the end we have footings that are down 8 foot below grade. So we had to undermine the existing structures foundation. And as we are going through that process, we're monitoring it. And once we get to a point where we see any type of movement, that's when we call in the troops to come out there and did some helical piles to support that. And then luckily on the other side, we were able to use a different methodology, but for the same purposes to reinforce that existing. Thank you, sir.

We're running about six months behind schedule in part due to the vapor barrier, due to the shoring up the foundations of the adjacent buildings. Is that costing us any extra money?

So, what happened? There have been a couple things. The vapor barrier mitigation system that was an ad early on in the project. The major challenge that we faced early on was the redesign of the steel structure. Um, essentially we demoed the building. We had everything exposed. We had a design of the steel. Then once we started to plan where everything was going, we were getting ceiling heights that were in the six foot range. So, we had to drastically change all that. Now, that did entail a schedule extension. Part of that comes with our general conditions. The things that we try and do here is like, yes, I I don't see a way that we could get the project done any sooner, but if we can get it done sooner, those are all subjective to the time frame that we leave. So, it's not something that we think it's going to cost three months or four months and it takes us two months. That's money that would roll right back into the city. So, that's how we factored it in. But we have to just play worst case scenario in some of those situations. So we have had a few schedule extensions that unfortunately are kind of part of the game with this existing building. But um that was our major hiccup that we're past that now. I think we're past all of the major impacts. Not saying there's not going to be small little hiccups here and there to make sure that details work, but that's the nature of the game. That's stuff that we work through with the team. So

I'll let Brian answer the cause question in a minute. It it's inherently difficult to convert a movie theater into a theater theater. There's no back of house space. There's no dressing rooms. There's no fly space. There typically wouldn't be enough restrooms to accommodate the crowd. So it it you have to add things created all that. Yes, sir. That that are not there and spaces that are not there when you're converting a movie theater.

All correct. Uh and again, I think we've had this conversation a number of times. I I think this is probably one of the most complex projects um that that I certainly that I've ever been a part of. I think Jay would say it's one of the more complicated ones that he's been a part of. Um I think back to your timeline and budget question, we are still within the original budget, but that original budget assumed we were going to run into some conditions that we didn't expect out of the gate because it is it is an old space. We didn't there was there's same with the convention center. We'll talk about that again in a minute. There there's literally no way to know exactly what the dimensions of that steel structure were going to be until we got in there. So, you know, I'll give Jay credit, Monteth credit for building in enough contingency uh into that contract to accommodate what we did eventually find. Um and so, yeah, we're still looking at delivery of of mid to late November. um CCU will be able to get the in there a little earlier and start getting comfortable with the equipment. Um but we're still on track for that that middle end of November timeline. And again, um candidly, the more I talked to Mont's folks about the project, the more I understood the complexity of it, which then led us to hire their superintendent as our next director of capital projects. Um, so we've hired Jay's replacement, who will start on Monday, who is currently the superintendent on on the theater. Uh, so fortunately, we won't lose any we won't lose any time. Um, and Chris and Matt are still talking to me after we stole Ken away, but um, it is a complicated project.

Yeah. And I will add that part of this project with the historical renovations that was part of the funding for this job and inherently it helped fund the job, but also brought us significant amount of challenges. Total total number of seats at the end of the day. Uh 300. Okay. That includes the box seats and there's a a balcony or a mezzanine. Yes. Yeah. You have elevated mezzanine and then you have your regular seating areas and then there's another step seating area towards the back and then additional seats in the orchestra pit that can be added and 300 max at this point. So fixed.

Um you mentioned purchasing like HVAC, those types of things early. What cost savings did you realize by doing that?

So, let me rephrase it as cost adversion or uh what happened was in the end or beginning of 2025, there was a refrigerant change for all HVAC equipment. That refrigeration change would have entailed, it's now somewhat flammable, so it required a lot of different provisions inside of the building and all the equipment would have to change. and we were told that was expected to be a 30 to 40% cost increase, but we had the job bid and everything bought out as this previous type of refrigerant. So, our first move was to instantly send those in, get the approvals, get that HVAC equipment released, and get it here sitting on the job. It's been sitting on the job for quite a long time, ready for it to go, but it was released in the early couple months because we are expecting a 30 to 40% increase. So we diverted that additional cost that

was just coming from a federal mandate that changed refrigeration. So um we had to make some quick moves early on get quick approvals from the team so that we can avoid that additional cost at the beginning. I think walking through the building with Dean Bourhalt um and she pointed out a space that is the storage room for the Steinway piano for concerts and use which I thought was pretty cool. Student concerts. Yep. It's going to be very very interesting space. We're excited for it. Um finishes are going to be very nice mill work inside of that space. Very fancy. So really looking forward to it. Did we put a Steinway in the contract?

I don't believe brings that. It's not us. Having had to valid question wrangle wrangle those things in a postal is a Steinway school. So all their pianos are Steinways. It's not you. Valid question. What curiously, what will the facility be named? That's a great question. Great question. I'm going to be asking that question formally here in the not too distant future because I got to start prepping signage

and there's been an internal conversation. Ultimately, you all you all will be brought some options. Um I mean there's there's a couple different ways to go. Uh we had originally contemplated some type of a naming rights uh option. I I don't I don't know that staff necessarily feels great about that option. Um especially as it relates to how much revenue it would generate. I don't know that we would want to give away the naming rights for what we think we could get from a naming rights contract. It could we could we could always go back to the Broadway theater. We could we could I mean won't be Main Street necessarily at that point, but I mean that that's a that's a point for conversation.

Would you like are you making a motion that it be the Render Theater? No. Okay. No, but I certainly would entertain seven figure naming rights. If we could if I thought we could get seven figures, I would be adamantly going in that direction. Ford's Render. Ford's you you'd mentioned the the name the Broadway Theater. There's already a Broadway there's already a Broadway theater at Broadway at the Beach. It is. And that's that's the reason we haven't settled on that. It could be the historic Broadway. I mean, there could be some version of that, but um that that that's a matter that we're going to have to discuss here very shortly. Okay.

That's what it was called, right? Perhaps the electorate should have a contest naming. I thought one time it was called the rocking chair. The what? The rocking chair. Oh, maybe it was. But I think it's officially the Broadway. I'm looking called a rocking chair officially. Okay. Next. All right. Moving on to the convention center. Interesting.

So, convention center. Um, going through a little recap where we've been. Uh, did the interior demolition of the phase one scope, that job is basically broken up into three different phases. Uh, when we did that phase, starting the demolition, we installed the pedestrian tunnel so everyone can still access that space, get in and out through the building. Um, we did the entire exterior skin and structural demolition for phase one. um did extensive analysis of the existing structure for the new structure tie-in. Um you'll see kind of a similar theme here between the convention center and the theater, both existing buildings, both going into it with demo and then bringing in new steel that has to tie into the existing structure. Uh we did exterior site drainage and utility routing. Um that was leveraged as we could do some work inside, we could do some work outside. uh removal and relocation of electrical, HVAC, fire alarm, sprinkler, what have you. Everything throughout the space had to either be shut down or relocated so we could continue on with the existing work. And then coordination of the new design to existing conditions. Again, common theme here between the two projects. We get into the job, we have a general understanding of what the new steel structure is going to look like. We demo it out everything old and then we start to learn of where things actually exist, what size things are, how they need to attach and then going through that process to make sure everything's designed accordingly. So where we're at right now, um kind of major item here, the steel structure for phase one is in fabrication. It's delivering this month. Jay and I were just talking about that earlier. Um the storefront and glass is currently being coordinated to the existing and the new structure. So that can also start into fabrication. Then the idea is phase one steel comes in. Right behind that we start putting in storefront frames and glass. And then that allows us to close the building in, finish up the exterior skin finishes, metal panels, stucco, things of that nature, and then bringing in the whole roofing system to tie the

whole building in. And then we can continue on with the interior. Um interior it's mostly putting in new light fixtures, new HVAC, new fire alarm devices, and things of that nature. But the vast majority and the scope of this project is restoring the exterior uh storefront system that was leaking for quite some time. So um on that project some of the challenges along the way we all had limited information on the existing steel structure. Part of the thing is we have to get in there. We have to demo to identify that. We've had multiple walks with the structural engineer and our steel designer to figure out what we needed to do after discovery from demolition and then multiple rounds of engineering for design and connections. Um just so everyone's kind of aware of the process. We identify an issue. We bring it up to our design team. They issue out details. We send that through to a fabricator. We get it detailed on our side. Goes into fabrication gets installed. So, a lot of steps in that process to make sure everything's right and again maintaining hurricane ratings, um, wind ratings and what have you to make sure that the structure is adequate. Um, couple pictures. This was right when we first got there on the left. All the existing facade and storefront was all still there. Middle picture, we started doing demolition up top, uh, bringing out all the concrete and bringing off the framing. And then we started to remove glass and all the panels going through for all the storefront areas. Um that was pretty fun process to watch. We had a robot that they would drop in there and it would cut the caulking out and then pull the panel off. So pretty neat process. Uh took a lot of work to do all that and get that coordinated, make sure everything was safe. Um couple more pictures from inside of the building showing the open air structure now. Uh so we're ready for steel. All these things, every little point of connection that you can see in these photos had to be designed and coordinated with our new structure to

make sure everything was cohesive and jive for elevations. And then on the far right, that was the process of us taking off the canopy um in one of the tall structures. Um guys out there doing some welding and cutting. and we had a couple cranes out there to basically pick the top off, set it down on the ground and chop it up into pieces and then start prepping for the framing of the new one. Um, so a lot of different activities that's gone into there for our demo. Um, this picture is shown as we are starting in demo and in constructing the new uh bypass wall for the pedestrian walkway to go through there because obviously it's still an active space. Um, so a lot of coordination there with the existing conditions and with the owner. We got to make sure that we maintain all those spaces for events to still happen while we're going through construction. Um, but overall that project is moving forward well. Um, and just looking forward to getting steel out here this month and really getting started on the steel structure. Do

you have an illustration of what the finished project will look like? Um, I don't have it with I wish I had something with me. Um, I can send that back to council. Okay. But yeah, will it be vastly different than the previous? Yeah, it's going to take on a new shape. It's going to look a lot different than what you've seen. Um, the geometry and just kind of the overall design of it is changing. So, that I think that'll help for any water mitigation, things of that nature. Um, it'll really open the space up a lot. Um, and then just kind of bring all that cohesiveness through. And then also kind of tying in the Sheridan and the themes of Sheridan. So it's all kind of working together as one nice space. So and the work ultimately will wrap around the front of the building too.

Yeah. We're starting at phase one when you're viewing the building from main from you know main perspective. We're working right to left essentially. Doesn't add any square footage though to the building. No sir. Questions. Yeah. Going back to the theater so I can jump to this. Uh way back now there was some issues with the steel at one point in time. Were there any issues with the steel for the convention center

from a similar perspective but so with the theater it was a little bit of the new structure had to change a little bit for the existing conditions which is common with the convention center but the theater also had some existing things in the helmate space that nobody was aware of until we had to open up walls for the convention center a lot of it has just been connection points and making sure that our new steel ties into the existing properly Not really more or less design concerns or routing or clearance heights. It's just more of what do we have once we open the wall up? How thick is that beam? How tall is that beam? And how's the new stuff going to sit and attach to it? Okay. Thank you.

Long Bay Symphony has said all along that even 800 seats when we were talking about that was too small for them to use. So 300 seats is certainly too small for Long Bay Symphony to use as a full concert venue. However, Meredith mentioned yesterday that Festive Brass, which is a local brass orchestra, would like to use this new theater as their home base. Do a couple of concerts a year in that. And I suspect we can find a way to do that within the allotted time that the city has for it.

We we could do that during the allotted time or or through I mean CCU is ultimately going to be the programmer of the space. We have set aside oursel a certain allocation of dates where that we can use however we so choose. Um CCU may CCU may rather incorporate the festive brass into the into their calendar their grant institutional schedule. That's a better way to say that. U but but either way I think there's a there's a way to accommodate that request. An exceptionally nominal cost attached to that that that ultimately will come back to council for consideration. But I thought that was a great idea. I think it is too.

Mayor, back to the convention center campus. Is there anything on the horizon with regard to the sports center that we're going to need to invest heavily? Excuse me for intruding on your time. Not at all. Uh well, the major the major expense right now is going to be the HVAC turnover. We basically have to change all 50 some odd units at the 50. Yes, sir. Yes. I mean, okay. Oh, okay. I'm thinking the convention center, but roof roof and floor are in good shape. I

I believe so. Yes. I think that the Yeah, the HVAC is the major component there that we need changed out in the near term. Any more questions for Chris? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And and I will offer his services up. It really is an impressive project to see live and in person. Um they're always great about walking folks through. So, if you'd like to walk through um we can help you coordinate that. Absolutely. Quick Memorial update. Not not on the

um Memorial Day grand opening. It's we're on track. They've done a phenomenal job. I was out last week and they were putting out putting out the pavers. I think they were start capping the wall this week. I'm looking at Mick. I think we're we're we're on track with we're on track with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Um, and sorry about the curve balls. That's Yes, it's a good time to ask. And the baseball stadium is coming along, too. They do the ribbon cutting next Monday and the first game is Tuesday. Yep. Ribbon cutting on the 13th. And we've already done a kind of partial turnover of Pelicans um seating bowl related things. So, another good success. Yeah, we were in the stadium

couple months last week, Thursday to talk with um some uh some of Grandstrand Medical C Center's personnel and their possible connections with that too. Mayor, are they going to sample each of our arms to see to whom be appropriate to throw out that first pitch? No, but they've offered that to me and I will tell you that I threw a baseball Sunday and I'm still sore. So, I've got to figure out how you got to do it better. You can handle it. 60 feet 6 in is a lot farther than one thinks it is. You're on an elevated mound, so it'll be They told me I can throw it from anywhere I I choose. So, I don't have to be on the mound. Just don't throw it underhanded. I think Dr. Render's fishing for a opportunity here. That's what I heard. All right, Dr. W.

Thank you, council. Thank you, Chris. Up next, we have the Ocean Boulevard lighting update.

Um I I will I will provide this. There's no pretty pictures necessary to look at. Um you all passed a motion at the end of December to appropriate $500,000 for Ocean Boulevard lighting. Um with the contingency that you also approved the design. So um Jason Green MBDA came back in in January. You all reconfirmed your commitment to the Ocean Boulevard lighting and attached to that a specific design. Immediately after that, um, MBDA got to work and realized very quickly that, um, everyone underestimated the foundations that were going to be necessary to to hold up and support the arch system. Um, so we began to panic a bit. Uh, I'll give Troy and Chris Thompson and John Johnson, uh, technical credit. I will give Manie Sabbranji from the Skywill motivational credit. Is that a good way to say that? Okay. Uh about finding finding a solution. Um you know, Troy has been able to work with Jason Green MBDA to come up with an alternative solution that would uh and and with Santi Cooper support, we will string cables from the Santi Cooper light poles and then hang lights from the Santi Cooper cables. That can be a permanent solution. that can be a temporary solution. So, we we have the the ability to revisit that. Um but but we are able to to have lights on Ocean Boulevard this season. Um

good good that's that's okay news. The good news is uh the 500,000 that you originally allocated 410 410 410 at the end of

um I think we only need about 105ish but that will stretch from 9inth Avenue to 16th Avenue. So, we will be able to string that system of lights a lot more economically. We we felt I think some of you have had parts of this conversation and we felt comfortable that you were okay with that solution, but because you passed a motion that was specifically attached to a design, we wanted to make sure to say it out loud and that everybody was still okay proceeding with uh the new the new lighting system.

I think yes would be the answer to that question. We've also had interest from businesses on the southern section, 8th Avenue North to 6th Avenue North, who would love to have lights there as well. Is that a possibility?

It is a possibility. I I think we are we are going to burn the candle at both ends to get the lights hung in that stretch for this season. Number one. Number two, and Troy and I talked about this earlier, to hang these lights requires that the boulevard is probably going to be shut down intermittently for about a week. Troy is working with the contractor now to try to get him started at 4 or 5 a.m. and work until 9 or 10 a.m. every morning so that we're not interrupting the flow of traffic. But um it's it's a considerable effort to get done as quickly as as he is being able to get it done. So again, give Troy, Chris Thompson, John Johnson, and Jason and Mandy and Mandy and Mandy some credit encouraging. So, so she wants the lights is what you're saying.

Yeah. Yes. Okay. Yes. And and she has been very very adamant. Good. In a very nice, polite way. Mayor, I heard what you said about the people on the south end wanting to be involved in this. I really think let's get this project done, learn everything from it, and then we'll be able to take it as far as we want to take it.

Yeah. And I I think this is certainly a more economical option. And I think once we once we got into um the realities of having to dig new footers along Ocean Boulevard and uh the conflicts with existing infrastructure along Ocean Boulevard, the the archway system is as great as it would have been is probably going to be maybe completely cost prohibitive. But again, Mandy Mandy is emphatic also that we at least have one arch through there some way. So um she is She's a a formidable proponent of the arches.

We we we looked at arches on Pharaoh Parkway at one point and realized quickly that that was cost prohibitive for Pharaoh Parkway. And I would argue it would be exponentially simpler to do them along Pharaoh Parkway than it is Ocean Boulevard. It's a larger span, but it is a larger span, but it doesn't have a hundred years worth of history in the ground. Well, I know just hearing from the merchants, a couple of folks that over the last couple of days that they've had really great week and a half, two weeks, lots of traffic.

The original change implied that the lights wouldn't appear until after the season. What you're telling us today is that we've got a plan that will put lights there end of May. Before Yeah. Before June. End of May. Okay, good. May maybe maybe a little earlier than that even, but we're going to say for your purposes June 1.

Okay. Thank you. Poet laurate discussion. We've talked a little bit about this. Um we had a poet laurate for the two-year term of that poet laurate's position. Um, we haven't had much conversation lately on that subject, but wanted to to throw it back out to council and see whether you wanted to appoint a new poet laurate.

I think it'd be a good idea um get something a little more fresh. Bo has done a fantastic job um and been a lot of fun to be around when he's doing it. But I would like to see if we have good candidates that we uh go ahead and look at another poet laurate. I think it's the right thing to do. We need to go back through the the process. At the end of the day, it's council's choice. I think we should go through the same process of didn't people submit applications? Yeah. with a sample of a poem. If that's the desire of council, we would go back through the cultural resource committee and they would do they would do the same type of process that we did the first time around.

That's good. Okay, works. All right, I will instruct them to get started.

Oceanfront alleyway swap ordinance update. We've talked about this and we've got a draft in front of us at this point. Will you do. Um, just for context, from time to time, developers of projects east of Kings approach the city about acquiring cityowned right away or city-owned alleys. The current municipal code does have a mechanism for the city to trade or swap um its its alleys or right of way, whatever you want to call them. um provided they receive in exchange I'll just say like kind property. Um the current code u provides that if you trade or swap a oceanfront alley the the code favors or prefers that the city receive and exchange oceanfront property. There's a similar uh preference if you trade a second row or third row alley. the code prefers that the city receive in exchange a second or a third row alley. Um, however, it has become increasingly difficult uh in light of the scarcity of oceanfront land for developers to find that oceanfront property that it can offer to the city as a trade or a swap for the alley that it desires to use to to as part of its new development. Um, and so the last time council looked at this chapter 15, uh, council expressed a desire to sort of I I'll just say loosen up the process to allow for this type of trade or swap. Um, and in exchange, the city can receive property anywhere in the city, provided that property has fair market value equal to the abandoned alley. Um,

and so what you have in front of you is a draft. Um, really the the only changes to this draft are to sections A and I believe sections D. Um, but the revision to section A allows council to abandon an oceanfront alley provided the city receives quote replacement land and other consideration having a total value equal to or greater than the abandoned alley close quote. Um, the revised ordinance keeps a preference for replacing oceanfront alley with similar oceanfront land of at least comparable area and comparable beach frontage. If however, city council determines that there is no similar oceanfront land u or council determines that there similar oceanfront land is not reasonably available, city council may then accept non oceanfront land again, so long as it receives fair market value equal to the value of the abandoned alley. Um and and that leads me to sort of one wrinkle here. If there is property that is offered as a as a replacement that has its fair market value is less than the fair market value of your alley, the developer can in the draft ordinance u they are to provide you a supplemental payment either additional land to make up the difference or perhaps a cash payment to make up the difference. But in either event, in exchange for abandoning the city's alley, the city is to receive uh land or cash, land and cash, u at least equal to the value of the abandoned alley. Um that's in section subsection A. There's a similar revision in subsection D which applies to the abandonment of an alley on the second or

third row. Same thing. um there's a preference that that you receive in exchange for the second or third row alley that you receive in exchange comparable property on the second or third row. But again, if council determines that there is not that that there is not similar um comparable land on the second or third row, council can then accept uh replacement land anywhere in the city so long as it has equal uh fair market value. Um, I have eliminated I think it's subsection E

E. Uh, I've eliminated E, but I've kept the idea of U, there was an idea originally that um, council preferred consolidating alleys. when you did a replacement or excuse me, when you abandoned an alley and received an alley in its place, there was a preference that you do it so that you could get multiple alleys together to have increased or better access to the ocean for the public. And so, although I have eliminated subsection E, I have kept that idea and incorporated that same idea into the new subsection A. Um but and and D and E

D.

Yes sir. Correct. That is right. The only other change I've made here is in subsection E that is the section that provides that in addition to the replacement land that the de that the developer will uh provide that the developer will also do one of two things. is either um pay to the city 1% of the construction cost or originally it said pay $40,000 whichever is greater and I forget when the original code section was written but it was some time ago and so I have just increased that number from 40 to 60 and I will admit to you I pulled that number out of thin air and that number can be whatever number you want it to be, but inflation alone over 20 years time would suggest that the number ought to be greater than 40. And in most cases, I would submit to you that the 1% of the construction cost is going to be the greater of the two values.

Thank you. This looks good. Um, the original alleyway swap ordinance was approved in 1994, which is 32 years ago.

And in that time, we've swapped a lot of alleyways. That was a limited supply. Um, I think we've achieved the goals of the original alleyway swap ordinance by preserving public access, public views, um, property rights for adjacent property owners. Uh, and yet, as noted here, we're running out of alleyways to swap. At the end of the day, Plyer Park was created through this process. I believe we swapped five alleyways to make Pler Park at some point. We we couldn't do that today. There are not five alleyways that you could move around in that manner today. Okay. So, this recognizes that oceanfront land is dear and to be prized, but that there may be other land within the city of equal or greater value that the city could use as part of a swapping process if there are still remaining alleys which could be moved. That make sense,

council? Good. I think this looks right. That'll come back to us on an agenda soon. I believe in one week. It'll be first reading on the 14th. Correct. It's already there. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, sir. I'd like to note that my item is the shortest of the day. I don't know. Noted. Top three.

Top three. The Lario is pretty short. Up next, ocean I'm sorry, wind activated shading devices. The subject that will not go away. Um, and the the thought process is for the last several years, council has considered and ultimately not approved a trial period in the residential sections. Um the subject keeps coming back up. Um you know certainly things change, people change, ideas change, whether it's you know prohibition or segregation or there there are lots of things that can change at the end of the day. uh and this was something to consider at least for purposes of this discussion today only as a trial in a residential section but you'd have to define what residential section we were talking about. So and I've not done that in my head at all. So, gentlemen, I mean, I I don't think our stance, staff stance, nor the beach advisory has changed at all where we're not in favor of a trial period, nor are we in favor of changing the excuse me, changing the ordinance.

And for the record, I had a conversation with Steve Taylor yesterday. He called the police department's position has not changed either. Sorry. We're still not favoring any changes to our current ordinance.

One of the challenges I see is that ours is the most liberal of the three ordinances, four technically. Well, Surfside is more liberal than we are. So, second most liberal of the ordinances that exist along the Grand Strand. Um, North Myrtle Beach has a longer time period when umbrellas are the only device allowed. Orie County does not allow anything but umbrellas year round at any point. Um, this, as I recall, came about when the cost of the square tents and canopies became so affordable that people could easily buy them and almost dispose of them. They came down to about 60 bucks a piece at some point. And that's when the real estate became um more precious along the beach. The difference between a tent and a canopy and a wind activated device is the wind activated device is typically supported by only one or two

mounts. Holes poles. Poles. That's the word I was looking for. Poles. Whereas a tent or a canopy requires four. Um the wind activated devices come in a variety of sizes. U again just thinking about doing it as a trial period. a defined trial period not on the commercial sections of the beach but in the residential sections of the beach council

frankly um because you know with me growing up on the beach and stuff we've always had umbrellas and it I've always thought that that's what needed to be there and stuff like that. Over the past few years, um, I've been seeing more of the the wind shading devices on the beach during the offseason and stuff, and I see how beneficial they are to some families, especially younger families. Even um, more mature people, they can't bring their umbrellas and chairs and everything to the beach um, and and secure them like they should be. Um, I really don't have a problem in the residential section with your shading devices that uh would not go projecting down the beach or anything like that. Um, I wouldn't mind a just a pilot program in the residential. Um, trying to see how it would work out.

Yeah. So, the question would be what would you define as residential? Um, you know, so there's that. Uh, and then some of these windshaded devices are $300. So, you're going to tell someone they can come down this year and spend $300 and then they come down next year and we say, "Well, that was just a trial period. You can't have it on the beach." Uh, what type of metrics are you looking for? Uh, what defines if it works or doesn't work? Um, other than opinion, you know, there's really not a not a validated uh component that we could say yes, it works or no, it doesn't work. Uh the ordinance was created in in what 2014. Um there was a reason behind it. You know, talking to Steve Taylor, it was about how everything just turned into utter chaos down there. Uh we have more visitors uh than we have at that time. Um some of the individuals that will come before you and say that, you know, well, they do it in this place and they do it in that place. And I would challenge you to pull the data and see who has more visitors because we do. So comparing us to Sunset Beach and other places, it's just I mean it's it's different. Um you know, the question then would come is and this comes from from our individuals, ocean rescue and law enforcement on the beach is well, you can have this, but you can't have a tent. Um you know, and I think the ordinance right now pretty much just lays it out there. Uh Memorial Day to Labor Day, you can't you can't have anything else down there other than an umbrella. Um it's pretty simple. It's pretty easy for us to to defend. It's pretty easy for us to uh to explain. Um you know, and that's I think why staff and the beach advisory keeps coming back to the to the same the same spot to eliminate the confusion.

I think easy for us may or may not be the the qualifying factor at the end of the day. Certainly this ordinance was approved before these wind activated shading devices existed by a year or two. These are later additions to the sun shading um toolbox. So they they did not exist. I do understand enforcement issues and have made that argument myself through the years. Um but if you're doing it on a trial basis in the residential section, uh enforcement should be much much easier in the residential section alone.

Yeah. And some of the shading devices I'm sorry. That's fine. Go ahead. some of the devices, you know, are advertised on their website as 150 square feet, which actually violates the current ordinance of 144. Um, you know, so where you can't have the big one, but you can have the small one. And again, that's difficult to explain to somebody when, you know, they went on a website, there were two options. Well, I I, you know, I I buy the one that's bigger because it provides the the bigger amount of shade for me. And then, you know, fire and police are are charged with saying, "Well, that's that exceeds the ordinance. You can't you can't have that." Uh, it it it becomes problematic. I mean, it really does. But I certainly understand that where we are now is not as far as technology and some of the advances that the mayor just spoke of, you know, is different than it was in in as well.

I believe they do come in different sizes. They do. Yeah. The purpose of a trial is to see if it works. And if it works, great. If it doesn't, you know, we've tried it and found that it it actually doesn't work. Terms of residential um 30th Avenue North to 48th Avenue North, somewhere in that neighborhood perhaps, or the north end of the beach, a 79th north to the north end of the city limits would be a possibility as well, I guess.

Hadn't thought about that until yesterday. Steve mentioned that. My question would be if you're moving the people that want to use their shaboomies to the residential areas and they start flooding the residential areas that's the place they want to go. What is that going to do for parking in our already limited spaces on the north end? What are our local residents that are on the beach year round? How are they going to feel about this influx of people with these large shading devices on the beach where they normally go? And secondly, take an area like 31st Avenue North. There's not a hard and fast geographical barrier between residential and commercial. So, I'm gonna have somebody trying to set up a canopy in front of the Caribbean and they see a shaboomi or whatever shading device in residential. That's going to create a whole host of problems.

I I am aware of that. Yes. Um there can be certainly on beach signage at the beginning and the end of the whatever designated area you choose. Okay. Anybody else? During the the part of the year that these are allowed, have we experienced any major problems? Any concerns that you're aware of?

I mean, I think the big difference is the beaches are not as dense as they are during the 100 days, if you will, of summer, you know. So when you get past Labor Day or you know obviously spring break is is busy but you know March is not the same amount of people as as there is obviously July 4th weekend. Have we looked at Surfside Beach? They don't restrict it to umbrellas only.

I think you're comparing apples to oranges to be honest with you as far as as far as density. I mean, how many highrises do they have, you know, side by side and everything for the overall for the overall ordinance, you know, but I I know to answer your question, mayor, I I don't think we have I don't know if anyone's talked to him or not. I I realize it it does make enforcement a little bit more challenging, but I would argue that it's probably a little bit more challenging, not a whole lot more challenging at the end of the day.

Anybody else? How many in you might know this how many instances were there last year in regards to enforcement of tents? So on average last year we responded about 900 calls. You guys need to talk into the talk into the microphone. So uh on average last year during the summer months we did about 800 to 900 ordinance enforcement calls on the beach and I would say largely most of those were tent violations. The lifeguards usually do it tent. You said were they tents or were they shades or what is it? Sabello or the other

any combination thereof. It was any shading device that was not in compliance with our umbrella's only ordinance. And that's the ones that we get to that the lifeguards haven't already gotten to. That's just on the police department end of it. The fire department does their own tracking. It was significant as well as I recall. I could pull that for the fire department. I don't know off the top of my head. The lifeguards usually are the ones who are advising folks. You can't set that up here. In a lot of cases, it's that somebody has set up a tent or an umbrella. um seawword of the umbrella line on top of it all. So that that's a factor too.

I was just want to add add one more portion to this. You know, we're talking a lot about the enforce enforcement aspect of it and identifying. So about a week ago, we did a uh little run on the beach with the recruit class and so we're at the top of the beach. Um, and one of the things that we're not talking about is when we we do a trial run in a condensed area and everyone sees the opportunity to be able to set the uh shading devices up in this specific location. Um, just take into consideration the visibility to be able to see effectively and respond efficiently to the potential of a surf rescue or somebody that's having difficulty swimming in the water. I just, you know, we're we're talking a lot about the enforcement portion of it and signage on the beach. Um, what we need to really consider or think about when we're considering this is the uh, ocean rescue PD's ability, lifeguards ability to be able to see effectively that there is a swimmer in distress. So, I just wanted to put that out there.

And yet, we have a long-standing ordinance that says all shading devices, including umbrellas, must be behind the line of the lifeguards chair. They must be at the high tide line or farther back. And I would say from my an experience riding behind the umbrella line, I couldn't see the ocean in a truck. So, and like you said, these would be behind that. So, um I mean just my personal experience and I got out of the truck, took pictures. I'm like, I can't see the ocean from here. Um, so

anybody else? Just so I'm clear, if I'm tasked with writing something, what type of shading device is going to be allowed in this trial period? Is it any and all? Yeah, I don't think we can say this brand versus that brand. I think it would have to be wind activated no matter what its other characteristics We can we can define the size I believe. Okay. And I apologize for calling out brands. The only two brands I know. Again, so what is what is the size?

Uh I think will what you're about to ask is is connection points. That's that's also been a point of contention with staff and with beach advisory is is the number of connection points and and how that creates tripping hazards um both for visitors and for our folks as they're trying to get to the oceans. I mean there's some other details there that we need to we need to sort of talk through size and connection points being two of the major ones. What else? Yeah,

that's really the what I size and the points of contact with the sand. And again, I I think we would look to council for direction direction on if we're going to go down this path, where is the residential area that we want to test this in? Um I I can't I can understand um the enforcement issue there of telling someone you can have it on 49th but not 50th. Um but just across the city you you know it's just need to be very clear in how we define that because that will be an issue. To Chief Smith's point, one of the pri the initial primary concern has always been visibility to the ocean for um to to be able to identify swimmers in distress. I mean that that's still an issue on the table

and and you know we keep talking about enforcement but that's obviously the whole thing we're concerned with whether it's a a windshade device whether it's a a tent per se anything that's behind the umbrella line because you know as as Miss Connor was stating it it gets pretty congested and when you you add another layer of that congestion I mean you it's just very difficult to see the to see the ocean during uh during that especially the busy time. Is there an umbrella line in the residential areas? No, there's a there's a Is there Let me rephrase the question. Is there a line of umbrellas in the residential area? Yeah, they do set up lines of umbrellas, but talking to Mike, I'm sorry,

Meredith's got you. They do have lines of umbrellas that the lifeguards or the the concessionires set up up there, but they're kind of spaced farther apart in the residential residential area relies on mostly mobile lifeguards to watch the water. They don't have very many stands in those areas. So, yes, there is an umbrella line, but it's it's spaced very far apart. And we have different rules for different places in other aspects of the city's life. So having a a rule for this section and a rule for that section is not unique in this particular case. I can think of several things off the top of my head where there's a different rule for different areas and we have to enforce those differently.

Is this a trial that would begin and end this summer? Haven't we we haven't that's why we're having this. Yeah, we haven't had that conversation. Okay. Well, we Okay. Do we want to have it potentially? I'm going to bring one. I'm going to bring an ordinance back to you.

That's fine. And at this point, these wind activated shading devices are allowed anywhere in the city of Myrtle Beach until Memorial Day. So, there's a a little less than a 100 days when we don't allow these sorts of devices. Um, and again, it was implemented before these windshade devices actually existed were a thing and because the the cost of tents had become so cheap that everybody bought a tent and stuck it out on the beach. I think it's a lot to consider and we should be really thoughtful about

I I do think the next thing would be like if if this is allowed the next domino to fall would be well why can't we try tense? Why can't we try this? You know it it does kind of open Pandora's box. I mean, and and you know, obviously we've had the discussion on a on a certain type of windshed device numerous occasions, but if you get somebody if if easy up keeps coming in and saying, "Hey, why can't we put a tent in in the residential area? Why can't we put the next best thing in there?" Um, it it it certainly it certainly opens opens Pandora's box in in in our opinion.

It does. and and it's a policy decision that this body can make to say yes or no to those sorts of requests if and when they come. But without the trial, we're sort of guessing here. And that that was the thought process behind let's try it in one area. It it it may not work well citywide at any point in time. Um, Dell Web didn't exist when this ordinance was on was added to the city code. We've added a thousand homes in Dell web basically and those folks um not all of them at once thankfully want to go to the beach and have access to the beach and we haven't added any extra parking for those new thousand homes that we've added at Del Web. We've got, you know, a curfew ordinance that speaks specifically to 900 p.m. in certain areas, but it's still midnight in the majority of the city. So, having different rules for different places and things isn't unusual at the end of the day. I don't know how to define the residential. I I would look just suggestions and thought processes on the residential side.

Can I offer a suggestion? Um, this has not been redised at beach advisory at this point. Um, we could ask beach advisory. We we we know I think we know what beach advisories blanket opinion is going to be based on based on the prior recommendations. Uh, I think if we ask beach advisory to consider some of the variables for a pilot program that that council is encouraging, uh, let beach advisory come back with some recommendations on what a pilot program could look like. Um, and I I would I would encourage beach advisory to to think through some of the some of the geographic parameters, time parameters, size parameters, etc. Uh, and then come back to you all with a recommendation. And that's fine. I again I talked to Steve Taylor yesterday. They've got a beach advisory committee meeting next week maybe. Um if not next week, the week after. So they could take take a look at this and make some suggestions in terms of what they would consider residential at the end of the day.

It feels like it probably wouldn't work anywhere where we have beach service umbrellas. That's what I'm feels like. Maybe would not. That's what it feels like for sure. Yeah. This is literally a trial in the least busy parts of the city to see if this works. The question's not going to go away.

I I would I would my only respon my only counter to that would be by number of people the residential district the golden mile would be the least busy but it also has the fewest number of parking places. So, I mean, the parking in that area is still and we're if if we go down this route, it's probably going to exacerbate the parking issue on in that residential section. Uh, but again, I I would still fall back on let beach advisory take a a pass at outlining

and and honestly, I don't know whether we know that or not. Um, the folks who live in the residential section may have a shaboomi or a what was the other device? Sabello. Sabello that they'd like to to use and our ordinance currently prohibits them from doing that. If I'm staying at 25th Avenue South and I go to the residential area just to put up my wind activated shading device. No, I'm not.

Send it to the beach. And he's still smiling. That's right. I mean that's the beach advisory. Yeah. I mean, I think at this point we would take it to beach advisor. And with the idea that how do we do a trial? Can we do a trial? Where would you ask them how? Because I don't I think if you ask them can they're going to say no. Again, I had a a a nice chat with Steve yesterday. All right. Right. Thank y'all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, J.

Downtown Farmers Market Update. Um I think there's a slide that's the it's the the site plan that I had given you. We we've had a number of conversations about um the impact to the farmers market of us um doing away with Coast Coast RTA's permanent building there. Um what you see on the screen, it's a little tough to see there, but you can get a pretty good sense of that. Uh as we sit today, um the the the original plan was would have done away with the farmers market. Um this plan allows the farmers market to stay. We would use a secondary curb cut there uh where you see that area hashed in blue. Um so we would all of Coast RTA's buses would come in from Mr. Joe uh into that blue section and then pull through. they would angle park um on the existing parking lot that's there. Uh the farmers market will will remain untouched. The parking lot there on the top side of the screen at the farmers market would remain untouched. Uh they would continue to have power there. The the existing restrooms will be going away along with the existing RTA um office building. uh we can work out a scenario where the vendors from the farmers market can use the annex bathroom across the hall across um 10th Avenue for a time. Uh Coast RTA will be bringing in one of the nicer bathroom trailers that could be used by the vendors also. Um, you know, I I I still believe like I think they will be able to function there and it will be it will be the the the greater impact is not going to be from the change of the footprint. The the the biggest impact is going to be the change in the environment. That's going to be the

middle of a construction zone for some time. Um, I think Troy and I would still I think Mick included in this conversation would like to find an alternative location.

Uh, and I think that we, you know, there's a couple of things under consideration. Toss out a few. Still working through that. Uh, for the time being, this will be the location of the farmers market. They will continue to set up in the same booths that they have always set up in, park in the same place, uh, get power from the same place. Um, it's just going to be a construction zone. Let me add some to that thought process. One of the concerns for the vendors currently is that because the city services building parking lot is under construction along with current oak street that the city services staff is parking in those spaces right there and that there will be no space for vendors or for customers of the farmers market. That project is not due to be finished until

August August 1st. And then my second part of that question is I was under the impression that we were moving not from Oak Street to 10th and Broadway but for the fall from Oak Street to 9th Avenue North in September. Is that not part of the schedule?

That is that is still correct. The the major the major driver here is the the new water and sewer connections that have to happen on the western end of 10th Avenue. So from the annex back to Oak Street, we have to make that connect, the water and sewer connections back to the Oak Street work that is currently underway. That's the that's one of the larger drivers here for the timeline. Uh is that we have to tear up 10th Avenue in that section to make the water and sewer connections and then we and then we will go to to 9inth Avenue. don't want to delay Coast RTA's transition to this other method which is going to exist for a couple of years until their new facility on M on Grisom Parkway is complete. That is correct.

But if the parking spaces are occupied until August, what's the point of having a farmers market in that location would be my question. Let's find an alternate spot for it. I would we would love We would love I think Troy's probably had Yeah, come on up. Troy's had more conversation with the vendors than than anybody. So, I'll let him speak to their desires. And I know that if they move too far away, they're going to lose a chunk of their audience. And I understand that, too.

And and more of that is where the parking is wherever we move to. Um median age of a customer at the market is above Yeah. My age and above. Uh, and they're they're very afraid that even if we we talked about Nance Plaza and moving to Nance would mean that they'd had to walk a much further distance than they do now from the spaces that are right in front of the stalls. Uh my plan right now immediately for the April 22nd opening for what Sarah and and the rest of the vendors are looking for is to literally put signs up in the five parking spaces that go directly in front of the stalls so that uh customers can pull right up to to there and those stay free. Um we'll move Sarah and and vendor parking adjacent to 10th Avenue in the 10th Avenue entrance. So, because that will go away, I'm assuming. So, she'll be able to back her truck up and we'll get other cars in there. Um, we can continue to look for a another option. Uh, at this point, we just haven't found one that they're comfortable with and we're comfortable with.

Did you run past them the idea of the space on Broadway Street? I I did and we have the the same issue is there's no power, there's no bathrooms, and there's the parking issue does not get much better. There there aren't bathrooms, but I think there's power nearby. There's power in the power in the building. Trees out there.

Well, but that that gets spotty at times. Um, we would have to work with MBDA, utilize their office for vendor restrooms and for probably access to power, whether that's front door, back door. I think we're still trying to hash that out. That I mean, it's not there is no other amazingly ideal spot at this point. So, I mean, everything's going to have pros and cons and and you know, I I don't I think Troy has taken the position, and I agree. I don't think we're going to dictate to the vendors that they are going here and not going there. Um, I think if we had if I had a magic wand, I won't speak for you. If I had a magic wand, um, Chapen Park would be an amazing option. Um,

what was the objection to Japen Park? again. Um some of the same issues that we currently have at Myrtles Market just that and it would seem very small in a large large space. Four or five vendors and and that park is not going to look the same as it does in Myrtles Market. But we talking about how long I mean I mean for three months, four months. No. Well, it's just season probably.

Yeah. for the for this season. I think we we can either have this location more functional for them next season um or we can find another alternative for them by next season. Uh but but right now is the crunch. Yeah. But I guess what I'm saying, I mean, why wouldn't they want to I think Chapen Park would be an ideal place for I I can float it to them again. I I I've been turned down twice on that one now. So I mean it's I I can float it to them. Um, I think right now they're kind of dug into wanting to stay where they're at, where everybody's been coming for 20 years and they kind of know where it is. They might be, but the reality

I think I'll let them I was thinking we'd let them go with that and then if it doesn't work, then we move to another location, but um my guess will be after this if they remain in this location this season, they would opt out to another location next season. I don't think they'll have an option next season. Uh it it's I think you'll clean up some of that. Well, the the excess parking will go away next season. The construction on Oak Street will go away next season. The bus won't go away. The bus will still exist next season.

I will absolutely talk to them again about about Chapen Park. Um my my only thing with that is and I would have to get with you guys on this is that the parking is paid and we would have to we would figure that out work for customers to come and park. That part we can work out. So I think so. Thanks. All right. Thank you. Thanks Troy. You the man, Troy. You can do it. Yeah. No pressure. No, no pressure. We want to make sure we can get some good tomatoes. Yeah.

Well, that was what's on the agenda. Council, do you have anything else? We've got some executive session items to discuss, but are there any other council things you want to bring up here at this point?

Mark, Mark, only one minor thing. We we' had All right. I had I had asked a request earlier about the possibility, which comes up every summer when the children are in uh the pickle ball area of Pepperdings. Was there any time uh mind for uh the pickle ball players early morning? The problem comes when it rains. You know, the kids are inside, but if you would continue to explore that. Um the wreck folks are going to take a look. Thumbs up. Good. Very good. Thank you. Anybody else? Well, thank you for your patience today. I'm assuming that we'll do the executive sessions in this room. So, let me read through the motion and if we can get a a motion in a second. We have four items for executive session. Motion to go into executive session to discuss negotiations concerning the proposed sale of city-owned property on 9th Avenue North. Motion to go into executive session to discuss proposed contractual arrangements relating to the lease of city-owned property at 505 9th Avenue North. A motion to go into executive session to receive legal advice relating to Rain Maker Holdings, Inc. and a motion to go into executive session to discuss proposed contractual arrangements relating to the purchase of property for use as a treatment center andor emergency housing facility. We would invite Will Brian, Brian Tucker, Michelle Shumpert, Mara Bell, Meredith Daener, and Amy Mu Schaefer in addition in addition to the council members for purposes of this. Do we have a second?

Deon Parks will be invited to the first two items. Okay. and Devin Parks to be invited to the first two items. Second. You're not on there. Oh, no. I didn't read the last sentence. My bad. I did not read the last sentence. Here we go. And Devon Parks for the last two items or for the first two items. Yes, sir. Is there a second? Second. Second over here. All those in favor of going into executive session for these four items as discussed, please say I. I. I. Any opposed? Thank you. and we'll do that. Um, we'll give you a chance to for council building. Lunch is in the room. Dustin says we've already