Board of Commissioners - Special Meeting

I would like to begin with some old business. And I'll give everybody a moment to take their seats. I do ask that you please silence your cell phones and please keep all sidebar conversations to the absolute minimum out of respect for the business of the town. We'll now begin with Ordinance 20-26-05, an ordinance amending the Town of Spring Lake 2026 rate and fee schedule for the revised special event vendor and food truck fees. This is from the last meeting. Oh, we want to make a motion. Mayor Fretman? Madam Mayor, I'd like to make a motion that we approve Ordinance 20-26-05. Commissioner Jackson? I second that motion. Is there any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Motion carries. I'm talking into this mic as if it works. So we are now moving on to agenda item three, which is our town manager candidate forum. As you all know, we are in the process of hiring a permanent town manager, and these are our two finalists, Mr. Dennis English, our current interim town manager, and Mr. Michael Douglas. This forum, in the forum, there will not be any comments from the audience. All questions have been submitted to our town attorney and vetted and passed on to our moderator tonight, which will be our clerk. So again, I ask that you please keep your comments to the barest of minimums out of respect for our candidates and for the business of the town. And I'll now turn it over to Madam Autry to begin the forum.

Thank you, Mayor. Sorry, we're having issues going live with YouTube again. We test ran it, it worked, and now it's having issues again. So I am recording on my phone, so disclaimer on that. All right.

Is your mic working?

My mic has never worked.

Can you switch to a mic that's working? Mr. English. Y'all can switch the mic. Use the mic from the podium so you guys can, or you're gonna have to go to the podium.

Yeah, we can go to the podium. All right. First question is, if you are selected as our next town manager, what are the three most important problems you believe the town must address? What specific actions would you take during the first 12 months to address them? And how would residents measure whether you have seceded?

Mr. English.

that's a great question and i've been working on those three priorities since i started as interim town manager the first one as we all know is our water infrastructure we have an old aging system since the 1960s we have to create more opportunity revenue stream grants and lobby the state lobby of federal government, all hands on deck to ensure that the town of Spring Lake is getting that significant, as you all know, a significant amount of blight and abandoned properties across the town of Spring Lake. That is unnecessary, it is not going to happen. As I'm continuing to be the town manager, we've worked continuously. We just came out of a focus group meeting, working with our stakeholders to ensure that we're creating those opportunities to make sure that the blight is going away. Now it's a process, but we have a strong ordinance in this town. So we gotta continue to work the consistency. I'm gonna need four years. I'll be candid with you. It's gonna take more than one year as a town manager to fix the problems like blight, abandoned homes, nuisance. We have a lot of those issues. And over time, it has just grown and grown and grown. So as a community, I'd love for you to be a part of these areas. You are more than welcome to be a part of those focus groups. The last one I would say is you mentioned three. would be economic development. It's imperative that we bring jobs into our community, and we have to bring a unique job opportunity to our community, one that would embrace our community and not create eminent domain or anything of that nature, but opportunity for us to build Spring Lake where we are, leverage our military base, and also bring new jobs into our community. So those are the three areas, our water infrastructure,

life and nuisance homes as economic development thank you mr douglas first let me start by saying um i want to thank the board for making uh making that finalist and i hate these things i absolutely hate these things um Thank you, Jesus. All right. So, the question was, what are the major problems? What are the actions we're going to take in the next 12 months to affect those? And what are the measurements to do that? I agree that infrastructure is your biggest problem. You have $75 million plus deficit on your infrastructure that you need to figure out how to use the money. And the town I just came from, they had a $30 million deficit in their water and sewer. So what I did was ask the state legislature, give me $23.3 million to help fix those problems. And they gave me $23.3 million. We also went to Congress and met with our... representative, and he gave us an additional $1.25 million to help with the infrastructure. So, the capabilities are there, you just have to look for the money. And, to sum this one up, I look for a fact that the CDBG fund, that community grant, they have an excess of $240 million that they're trying to fund, a way too small. So, we just gotta go get the money. That's all it is, so we just gotta go get the money. Transparency. Everything I've read thus far is that there's a transparency problem between the board and the residents. A lot of people don't trust the board or the town manager. We need to fix that. One way to fix that, and this is what I did, I had a Meet the Manager meeting. Meet the Manager meeting is a meeting that I had every single month, two days after the council meeting. That way residents could come and talk to me one-on-one. Any question about anything. They came in and asked, hey, why is the sky blue? I don't know, let's look it up. So the Meet the Manager is another way to get that transparency out. Another way is to contact residents With a newsletter, we developed a newsletter in the extension to send it out to resident study. So those are just ways to get information out and be as transparent as possible. Blythe's. Yeah, Blythe's. My experience is people won't start fixing their life, their homes or their business until you start tearing them down. That's the bottom line. So what I did in the municipality is we funded $40,000 per year and I just started tearing down houses. Period. We would go through the code enforcement process, tell them that there's an issue, tell them there's an issue, have them try to evade it. If they don't evade it, you know, we have the hearing, providing the facts, and then after that, get the ordinance created, counsel signs off, and I'm tearing down. Period. So how do we measure, how do we measure all that? With the infrastructure, you just gotta go out and get the money. If we are able to get funding within the next 12 months, because the CDBG portal right now is open for CDBG-I, which is infrastructure grants. That portal closes September the 6th. So whenever it comes to manager, they need to get on that website and apply for that grant. Blights. If we start with 100 blacks in one year and there's money allocated, we turn down 10, we've made an improvement. So that's how you measure these items, and that's how residents can come back and say, okay, I believe what my council says, I believe what my manager says, because they're putting their words into action.

Thank you, Mr. Douglas. All right, the second question is, residents in neighborhoods like Deerfield have concerns about security and property upkeep. What is your approach to balancing fair, consistent code enforcement and neighborhood safety with homeowner rights and resources?

to go next. Yes, that's what I'm trying to do. Mr. Douglas? All right, sure. Which one was the massage? It's a killing problem.

One thing that we can do is we can get into these schools and talk to these kids early on. Because if a child doesn't have something to do, what are they going to do? You know, breaking their cars, breaking their homes, and everything else. One program that we started in the time of this semester is we went to the middle schools once a quarter and we talked to kids about safety, we talked to kids about crime, we talked to kids about drugs. That's what we did. That may work here, it may not work here, but it's an opportunity to reach the kids before they get to high school and they've already decided if they're gonna drop out or if they're gonna be something else. There's no one way to secure a town. You can hire 100 police officers. That's not gonna fix the problem. It's just not gonna fix the problem. You can have a police officer sitting at every stop sign And I guarantee somebody's gonna pack to go through that stop sign with cops sitting right there. So hiring for a police officer isn't really the problem. It's getting in contact with the residents. Having you, the residents, call and say, hey, there's a house over there and I just saw two guys walk in there and I know Miss Alice is not home. We need you to go over there. If you don't report as a community, we're gonna continue to have those problems. And there are other initiatives that can go into effect. Yeah, there are other initiatives that can go into effect as well.

Thank you. Okay, Mr. Inglis, would you like me to repeat the question? Yes, you don't want to. Okay. Residents in the neighborhoods like Deerfield have concerns about security and property upkeep. What is your approach to balancing fair, persistent code enforcement and neighborhood safety with homeowner rights and resources?

Sure, that goes back to our focus group where we were talking about light and we were talking about code enforcement. We have someone now who is contracted with the town of Spring Lake who focuses just on code enforcement. Now he is one person, but his job is to go to homes where there are issues with homes not being kept up. So that's the first thing. And you are more than welcome to participate in those focus groups with us to hear how he is developing that list and we're working through that. We do have a home right now in Deerfield where an older lady, she's in hospice. And we had to make a decision to clean that home up. We have real situations here in the town of Spring Lake. The grass is overgrown, there's snakes coming out of the yard, the garage is overflown with hoarding. So these are direct issues that I'm dealing with right now. I had to make a decision as your town manager to start working on that yard. That's in Deerfield. That's an exact example of what we're dealing with right now in the town of Spring Lake. Not all of it is crime. Some of it is just aging population with individuals who need assistance. I have to be very sensitive to those issues. When I go and speak to a 90 year old woman, I have to understand what those problems are in the yard. Maybe she don't have the resources or he don't have the resources. So I'm talking to individual residents individually to find out what that situation is. I'm talking to that son and knowing that he is now in the power of attorney for that home. So how does that look? Is that real code enforcement or is that making sure that he buries his mother when the time comes in the appropriate way? So there is a combination of sensitivity as we talk about Ms. Johnson. We talk about where she is, Ms. Johnson, we talked about that. How you keep a finger on the post in your community. You walk me to all of those different Sergeant Majors homes who retired in our community and you gave me a chance to meet them. It's about relationships. Over the last seven months, I went to homes shook hands, hug 90 year old women, build those relationships and let them know that I care. Not just about code enforcement and our police chief in the back, but it's about commitment and connection and empathy. And thank you chief, when there's something that goes down, I have you on speed dial and we get right to the issue. So it's a combination, it's a multi-faceted situation here in the town of Spring Lake. We have a very unique town. so i'm very committed to code enforcement it's expensive it's expensive and it's unsafe it could cost us upwards too mr well as you are we just had this conversation uh in our in our meeting an hour ago it's expensive we're looking at probably what 70 000 to knock down some of these abandoned homes but we will do it we have five properties that we're targeting right now And I'm working directly again with my chief. You're right. We cannot have enough police officers. We will never have enough police officers. We might want to bring back what you mentioned, Ms. Johnson. We might want to bring back the neighborhood captain. I'm open to that. Going and talking to each neighborhood and finding out who is going to be that captain. And then building that relationship and making sure that we have consistency and a consensus level. And we have a working partnership with each and every one of the neighborhoods that includes here in Spring Lake. So I've been doing it. I don't want to stop the work that I've been doing. The momentum, we do not want to stop the momentum. Let's keep it going. I'm excited, as you all know. Thank you.

Would you like to rebuttal? All right. I think Mr. English is going to come to play. That's good. That's good. I like the competition. All right. So there are some things that Mr. English touched on that are skipped. The first thing is Mr. Douglass.

He said no debate. Oh, he said no debate? My apologies.

My apologies. Can we pause for three seconds?

Can we go ahead and get some more chairs pulled out, because I see we've got more people standing, so I wanted to give you a chance. There's some seats over here as well, if you want to sit down. Bye, Mom.

Question number three for Mr. English. Please discuss how you'll be board and community inclusive in your decision making where policy and time constraints are not at issue yet remain impartial in arriving at your final course of action to ensure the very best outcome for the Town of Spring Lake and its residents. Please discuss how you will be board and community inclusive in your decision making, where policy and time constraints are not at issue, yet remain impartial in arriving at your final course of action to ensure the very best outcome for the town of Spring Lake and its residents. Sure.

As you all know, there's no secret, I came from state government. I was appointed under McCrory as Assistant Secretary in the North Carolina Department of Administration. You all already know my background. I hold the order of a long-legged high. What that says to me is that I have an opportunity to not just engage you as a community, but bring in all the necessary resources to land on the right decision. Mobilizing the resources from the School of Government, the largest organization that helps the town across the state of Oklahoma. We just brought the School of Government in today, and our focus was meeting. There's also organizations that work on issues related to how do we address things like water rates. At some point, we gotta find $80 million in infrastructure improvements. Because I'm not gonna raise rates until I find every dime. I've committed that to you all, and I came in here seven months ago, and I sat down with that finance manager, Mr. Overton, and he knows that we fought to not raise you all rates. And I'll do it again if I have to. This community cannot lean on the backs of you all continuing to raise rates. We did it without communicating before. It won't happen under my watch. So what I'm committed to is making sure the next time we have a real conversation about what direction we go in and it's going to be quick and I won't have the time, it will come from someone who can professionally give us a non-biased approach and a third party opportunity for you to hear it, not just coming from my mouth, but it comes from an organization, perhaps a school of government. That's just one example. Okay? So these are just opportunities as the question came up. What's the best approach to bringing new solutions from a policy standpoint? Okay? Department of Environmental Quality, which is right now on speed dial with me, dealing with our water. Drinking, quality drinking water. Those are conversations that we need to have directly with those organizations and I can pick up the phone and call them and get it done. So I'll stop there. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. English. Mr. Douglas, would you like for me to read it again? Oh, absolutely. Okay. Please discuss how you'll be board and community inclusive in your decision making where policy and time constraints are not an issue yet remain impartial in arriving at your final course of action to ensure the very best outcome for the town of Spring Lake and its residents.

So the whole question deals with being impartial and how you are going to feel as if you're part of the process. One of the best things I did, again, is lead the manager, where residents such as yourself come and speak to me one-on-one about issues. Ms. Cooper, who lives in the town of East Spencer, is my biggest, this is where I want to call it, Boom. But I love her. I love her. I love Lydia. She comes, she runs. The last week, week of management meeting, she came in and said, Michael, we have a huge pothole on our street. Can you fix it? Of course. Those are easy ones. Michael, what about this data center that's coming into East Benson? Can we talk about that? Absolutely, Ms. Cooper. Let's talk about the data center. We sat there for an hour just talking about data center, the data center itself. Not knowing that I'm also having discussions with the county and with my state representative about getting everything completed for the time of discussion.

The way we're going to bring the community into this and let them have a choice and a voice is we're going to have community engagement.

We're going to have, excuse me, East Spencer is going to have five meetings in which the community will come out and discuss the data center. The residents will have an opportunity to speak to their elected officials and the town manager and the data center components and ask any question about the data center and how it's going to affect the inspection. The biggest question that they're going to ask is the environment because they've already asked that a few times.

So giving the community an opportunity to speak is significant because it increases transparency. It increases transparency.

Getting it done is what I do. We also bring in the resources to get it done. Mr. Daniels mentioned the School of Government. I've been at the School of Government for 10 years. They've helped me in a number of ways, whether it's writing reports, whether it's writing a city plan. That's where the experience comes in and going through the call. Bringing in other representatives that do engineering, because I'm not an engineer. They were happy. We have We have Bell. We have a multitude of engineers that can come in and give us expert advice on one, how much it's going to cost. And two, is this the right thing to do at this time? We've also gone to commerce. Again, commerce has about $260 million they're trying to spend. And I know who to call on that. Excuse me, I know who called that to help this town get the resources they need in order to facilitate our water and sewer treatment. Also at the federal level, going up to D.C. Don't just call. Everybody calls their representative in D.C. The state of North Carolina has a day every year called North Carolina Works. Every city can send a representative to D.C. and speak with their representative. I've gone through the past two years and it's proven to work for the town of Eastchester because they are getting money. Calling them on the phone is just another person. Seeing them face to face, that's where the impact happens. I'm sorry, can you repeat the last part?

I'll just go ahead and repeat the whole part of it. Please discuss how to be community, excuse me, you'll be forward and community inclusive in your decision making where policy and time constraints are not at issue yet remain impartial in arriving at your final course of action to ensure the very best outcome for the town of Spring Lake and its residents.

Being impartial. Everybody has an agenda. If you say you don't have an agenda, I don't believe that. Everybody has an agenda. If you make, if you're bringing in a million dollars a year of revenue, your agenda is different from somebody that's bringing in 45,000 a year. Means, even impartial, I don't care if you make a million dollars a year, I don't care if you make 40,000 a year. In the town of Kenley, that's exactly what I did in all the other communities. One of the, one of the, Mr. Hennig's Once I left, E. Spencer would say, Michael, one thing I love about you is that you treat everybody the same. And I took that as a badge of honor. So understanding that everybody has a gender, but you treat everyone equally, nobody can say you're doing your plans favoritably on any issue.

Thank you, Mr. Douglas. Even though you're going to be right back up. Question number four. I'm sorry. Please describe your management style relative to employees and department heads.

I am a collaborative manager. Every Monday we have a meeting with staff. Every Monday we have a meeting with staff. And in that meeting we discuss the priorities for the week and what was going on with the priorities for the month. If we don't work together, the town will not go forward. I tell myself this all the time and I will continue to say this. If you're not here to increase the quality of life for residents, you gotta go. Plan something. In local government, that is our job, to increase the quality of life for residents. So, how do you bring everybody together and make them collaborative? Just talk to them every day. Talk to them every day. I've never had a problem with anyone coming to me and saying, Michael, you're addicted. Michael, you're too strong. I'm a military guy through and through, 20 years in the military. Sometimes I can be forceful, I ain't gonna lie. But most of the time, I talk to them, I listen to them, and we make a decision from there. But everyone understands, we can argue all day behind closed doors. Once we step out from behind them doors and report in public, one man, one sample.

Thank you, Mr. Douglas. Mr. English, would you like for me to repeat the question? Sure, go ahead. All right. Please describe your management style relative to employees and department heads.

My management style is I'm a personal law listener. I encourage teamwork. And I'm a strategic banker. And I also like collaboration. You can't lead unless you first of all understand how to follow. And so listening to my department heads, because they're the ones who are the most experienced in their particular areas. I'm sitting here looking at my police chief. Chief Jordan understands public safety. So when we're dealing with an issue, we sit down and we talk. And I listen. And I don't talk over him, but I hear him through and through what that issue is all about. There may be an opportunity to collaborate. We just did that. We just had a collaboration with our National Night Out. We brought in police and fire. And I said I was extremely proud of them as department heads Because not all towns across the state, police and fire departments work together. And so we saw it happen a couple of weeks ago. Town of Spring Lake fire department, police department working hand in hand. We had a great turnout. And you know what I did? I listened and I made sure that we followed through on a rainy day. Because we could have canceled like a lot of other towns did. And we did. So I would say collaboration is big because sometimes it takes several different employees to come together, work on a particular grant. As you all know, I have a very small and nimble staff, particularly in town hall. So I encourage collaboration. We're working on grants and we have to respond to the Office of State Budget Management in a timely manner. I want to make sure that we are collaborating, working together. So I encourage teamwork. But first and foremost, I am a leader. I've been leading for the last 15 years of my career. Again, I was born a leader. And so I'm excited about this opportunity, as you all know, the last seven months, leading the budget, coming in with our finance director, making sure that we receive a budget that was passed with no water rate increases and no property increases, property tax increases. So I've led, demonstrated leadership in the last seven months here in Townsville Lake. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. English, and you actually walked right into the next question.

This is the last one.

This is the last question. Describe your experience working with the finance department generating the town budget.

Perfect. Mr. Overton and I, we started out in February. Now, I will say, when I came to the town of Spring Lake, all the department heads had their budget priorities in place. But I had to sit down and again, listen to each department and find out why they put those numbers in place. What was the expectation from each of those departments? Why were those priorities important? Why were those new vehicles needed for the fire department? Why did we have to have new vehicles for our police department? I needed to understand that. So we made sure that we had meetings with every single department head right in the back where I'm looking at now. to ensure that when we brought that budget to our commissioners, they understood what those priorities were. We sat right here on a Saturday morning with our commissioners and we worked through our budget. We had a retreat that gave them an opportunity to ask questions to each of our department heads. So I dove right in on my first day all the way into the time when we passed the budget working hand in hand with this man back here mr overton tirelessly we didn't always see eye to eye but we got through our budget so i had a crash course in making sure that we got a budget passed so that experience alone gave me an opportunity to see what the priorities of spring lake are we made sure we set aside money for when we have an outage with our infrastructure and our water. We have a million dollars set aside so that when we have an outage, those leaks are fixed. We have consultancy services in our budget. So when I came, the public works director was our fire chief. That was unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable. And he knew it. So it's not no secret that he transitioned and we made sure that we brought in a specialized team. We call them the A team. to make sure that when we have leaks, we're not out here scrambling, spending countless amount of money on contractors and not concerned about training our staff. That had to go in our budget. We budgeted for those dollars. Real practical solutions are in our budget because I came in and saw the problems immediately and now we can fix them. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. English. Last question as well, Mr. Douglas. Describe your experience working with the finance department generating a town budget.

So I've had 10 years of experience working with budgets for towns. Getting a budget done is hard. It's really hard work. There are times when staff and council members want more than what's coming into the town.

In order to get a budget done, you have to start very early.

I typically start my budget process in January before the council members have their retreat. The reason I have that preliminary budget from my staff is when I walk into the retreat for the council members, I know how much they, I know how much my staff wants to spend, and now I just know what the council wants to spend. Those two numbers will never match. In 10 years they have never matched. So once I get the priorities for my, from my council, that's when I go back in March and we start doing the hard work. We sit down with the department heads and we're in the room for eight hours. That was the longest it took, eight hours.

One of the things we had to do last year in the town of East Spencer, the police department wanted a new field.

Parks and Recreation wanted to do more programs for the kids in East Spencer. Those programs were going to cost about $35,000. They were buying tickets to the Carolina Panthers games, the Hornets games, so on and so forth. Now we sold those to the community at a very discounted price, but that was just given back to the community. So what I did was, I told Chief, and Chief, tell you what, if you forgo the truck and your vehicle this year and give those funds to Parks and Recreation, next year I can give you the vehicle because we're gonna be receiving more additional funds. So it's a compromise. Doing a budget is a compromise. It's not one person dictating, at the Department of Recreation you can have $10,000, public works you can have $10,000. It's a compromise. It's all based upon what the town brings in. If the town brings in a million dollars, if the town is only bringing in a million dollars, and yet I have 1.2 million in expenses, that's a delta of $200,000. And I hate using fund balance. Period. I hate using fund balance. Fund balance is for emergencies. It's for those one-time things that, you know, you just got to do. If you're budgeting properly, you can get everything you want in that fiscal year with compromise. Fund balance, yeah. So again, 10 years of experience doing budgets. I've always had a balanced budget for the past 10 years. The state has never come back and said, hey, Michael, you messed this up. So that's a great thing. The town of East Spencer has never been investigated. The town of Canyon has never been investigated. And the town of Greenleaf, all three municipalities that I've worked in while I was there, has never been investigated. I know Kim's been investigated right now, so that ain't me.

So again, working with finance is important. Finance is a purse.

Finance is a purse for the municipality. We have to work with finance even after the budget is done. Because even when you have an approved budget, the budget is a living document. It is a living document. So you can't just make the budget and say, okay, woo, Lord Jesus, give me that. Because when July 1st comes around and that chief purchases something that wasn't in the budget, that manager has to go to the chief and say, hey, I paid off. Why'd you purchase that? That wasn't in the budget. One of the things I've created is a nine by nine budget. It's called the budget justification sheet. It lays out every single thing from wages to how much tax, I mean, how much is going to be taken out in taxes, how much is going to be taken out in social security, so on and so forth. Every line item, every line item has a dollar amount associated with it. So I know the chief of the police department has a budget of $25,000 for fuel for the fiscal year. And I know in month six, he's at $20,000, we got property. we got a problem may have to do an amendment to the budget and that's fine but we ain't touching fund balance okay so again it's a living document it doesn't stop when the budget is passed on june 30th or whenever it is it goes throughout the entire fiscal year and finance again is the purse for the town thank you thank you mr douglas that concludes the questions

Thank you for the reminder. Again, thank you both for being here, being transparent with your answers and hearing directly from our community. We will now end this public forum and we will now entertain a motion to go into closed session pursuant to NCJS 143-318-A6 personnel. Commissioner Cooper? So moved.

Commissioner Jackson?

Any discussion? All in favor? Any opposed? The motion carries. We are now in closed session. Please feel free to stick around and come out of closed session pursuant to NCGS 143-318-1186. Person in? Six? Oh, yeah, I'm remembering it now. Commissioner Cooper? So moved. Commissioner Thompson? I second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Motion carries. I will now entertain a motion to... Announce or select our town manager candidate.

Is that correct?

Anybody like to make a motion? Commissioner Burgess.

I make a motion we select Dennis English as town manager.

Is there a second? Commissioner Jackson. I second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Nay. Motion carries. Congratulations, Mr. English. I don't know if you're playing a motion to adjourn, sweetie. Oh, wait, I don't know.

Never mind.

Well, maybe you could, sure.