Town Council - Regular Meeting

This conference will now be recorded. and a law firm specializing in this work, and we've gotten a lot of free advice. The main thing is that we have to come up with some ideas and a real plan before we seek funding. We're going to hear from Conway City Manager, Mr. Adam Emrick is here, on Conway's successes and challenges encountered in its redevelopment. And if you've been to Conway in the last couple of years, you will have noticed the difference, if the previous Conway was many years ago. Conway is a historic city, but it's small. But it's more dependent on its residents, businesses, and local visitors. Surfside Beach is a small town with a much shorter history, and we are highly dependent upon outside tourism. Still, the downtown district in particular enthusiasm for . There's clear opportunities and targets right in our downtown district as well with the old Kangaroo Station and the King of Carts building. Also, I want to differentiate. We're not Myrtle Beach. I've been sitting on some visit Myrtle Beach meetings, and they're looking to expand tourism in the Grand Strand and considering sports tourism, conventions, large events. We're not going to pursue that. We are going to keep it family beach, small town scale. We're going to ultimately hear from our planning building and zoning director on potential development concepts under consideration and the planning and zoning opportunities and challenges that we might encounter as we go through the process. Through all of this, we will see ties to the comprehensive plan that was approved end of 2023, about two and a half years ago, and we will also be dependent upon public support. So we're glad to see so many of you here. Public meaning the residents and businesses alike. And most of all, we will use our family beach image and we will build upon that as we go forward. So with that, I'd like to thank our Planning Commission. Planning Commission members, stand or raise your hands. We've got a few here. Thank you for being here. Mr. Hustler, when you laugh, look in the back. And our business committee, we have a few members there, too. Thank you. And then, of course, as I said, we have Mr. Adam Emmerich from Conway. We'll hear from him in a little bit. All right. So, Mr. Mutsen, you want to kick it off with the Planning Commission update?

Yeah, I'll be glad to.

You told me you were ready and I could get started. No, I was thinking he was going first. No, he's going later. All right.

One thing I want to say, guys, if you didn't pick one up on the way in, there's a little survey here. It's two questions. Where are you from originally and why did you relocate here? If everybody here could answer those, you don't even have to put your name on it unless you put your email address so we can stay in contact with you, but you don't have to put that. That's important information we're going to build on throughout the process of developing the master plan you're getting ready to hear about so that we know, okay, we have this many people from this area, this area, this area, this area. And then when we make presentations, we can then do the research to find projects that may be from where you're from that you can relate to. So if, I'll get these out, but if we can, all right, my technical knots, this thing has to recognize me before it'll come on. Before the computer. Usually does, there we go. All right, there we go.

Is it on the screen? Yeah. Okay. Well, now you can see what consultants do. All right. So that is, I think that's Mark. Yes.

Mr. Mayor. Yes.

Well, Sean had too.

Yeah. Can we put the one back? There's one up there, too. Yeah. What do you be saying over there? Will that ring, Tim? Well, we usually have microphones on that table.

Uh-huh.

It's up there.

Yeah. Oh, it's only one that they share. That's right. Someday we'll have a new building. Yes, we will.

But the same one. Better not. All right. Planning Commission. You know, folks, I apologize. I was trying to read it off my shared drive.

Yeah.

You know what? We're going to do a quick switcheroo here. We're going to, we're going to let Mark go first with the, we're going to let Conway go first. We're going to reroute because I got to get connected to the internet to get my new display. So with that, we're just going to change the order. Well,

Yeah, I guess technically we should make a motion to change the order. Any discussion? No. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? None. Motion carries.

Come on, Adam. Good evening. I'm going to use the microphone, but I'm also going to turn my laptop around so you guys can sit on council here. Hopefully it's big enough. If you all want to... If it's not big enough, I can hold it around in this way.

I think that'll be better. Let me see if this picks this.

This one should work here too.

Yeah, that'll work. All right.

Can I turn around and put my back to you guys? I hate to do that, but I also can't.

All right.

Whatever you know. We'll deal with it. I'm going to talk to you guys. Thank you. My name is Adam Emmerich. I am the City Administrator for the City of Conway. It is an honor to be here with you. It's kind of weird for me to be here with you, but I'm glad to do it. I love to talk about Conway, so any chance I get, I'm going to do it. I love to brag about my city. I've been with the City of Conway since 2015. I was the planning director for two years before I became the city administrator. Before that, I was at Horry County for eight years as a senior planner. And before that, I was an attorney in Atlanta. So I come to my role in a kind of a roundabout way, but I love what I do and I love to get to do it in the city that I do it in. So John and some of the council asked me to come and talk to you about some of the successes we've had in Conway and why I think they've been there. And I think we'll give you some pitfalls along the way too. And I can tell you, the success of Conway can be really attributed to a master plan that we did in 2017. So in 2017, we were given some property that we didn't formerly have, but we realized that we had a problem. We had people that would come to the city, they'd come downtown and go shopping, they'd eat lunch, and they'd leave and say, well, I thought there was a riverfront in Conway. I thought they had a river walk. We didn't get to see it. And they would come to the river walk and they would leave and go home and have lunch somewhere else and not spend their money in Conway because they didn't know we had a downtown. And those two things, if you've been there recently, they're right there. They're together. But for some reason, we didn't have the connection at the time. So we asked for a consultant to come in and give us some ideas to better connect our downtown and our riverfront. And that was the 2017 master plan that we did. That master plan did way more than just that, though. It made us look more critically at the things that we thought we'd done well at Conway. We thought we had, you know, really nice parks. We thought we had nice alleyways. We thought we had nice things. We thought we were going in the right direction. And that plan said, maybe you need to look a little more carefully. You know, there's the saying, you go nose blind to your own smells. You go into your house, you can't smell it. That was where we were in Conway. We thought we had done a good job on a lot of our stuff, and we just hadn't. So we started looking more critically at the things that we had, and the master plan guided us on some of the things that we had that were unique. We've got a whole system of interconnected alleyways in Conway that's kind of unique, and they were kind of fancy and kind of pretty, but we neglected them. We put some landscaping in, and we called it a guard block. We had some landscaping in, and we called it something else, but none of that stuff was very good. So that plan in 2017 gave us a lot of low-hanging fruit that we needed to focus on. So the first thing we did was Norman Alley, where Trestle Restaurant is now. We have actually licensed that alleyway to them. So they use that alleyway now as outdoor dining. That was our first project. We put overhead stream lights. It cost us $6,500, and it made a huge impact on what we were doing. That was the first project we did. The second project was bigger. It was Kingston Park. I'll show you some before and after pictures of that in a minute. Kingston Park is the park on the corner with the train mural. It was a great park. It was used primarily for people that were at the theater to get to their car on 4th Avenue. And that was what we call a park. It was a cut-through. But we thought it was good. We put money into it. We thought we did a good job. And then we did some other small projects and we'll find out that in about four years we were done with the plan. We implemented almost everything in it. It was a very workable, very usable plan. we started to see the the fruits of that we started to see businesses become more viable more people walking on the street more people using the infrastructure that we put in so we had another plan done in 2022 and that was our five-year update so it was kind of cool to to do that because we brought in a new company but they brought back one of the same consultants so we got to see you know his fruits of his labor and then that plan and get to show it off to him because again i like to show up in the city And that plan did it again. It said, all right, you've done all these little things, now you need to do bigger things. And that was, it was another driving factor. And we did not let this plan sit on the shelf. I think that's the problem with so many plans. We have a plan done, it's great, and then nothing ever happens. So the key to a good plan is to make it implementable. You have to be able to have a plan that has small chunks that you can take right away and be able to put them in place and be able to prove to your residents that it's working. And I think that's what we did. The plant did a lot of really good things. Besides that, it let us, one of the couple things we did is, it's that any time you're putting in landscaping, put in twice as much landscaping as you plant. Because a couple trees can make a big difference. Don't plant twigs, plant trees. So if you can afford bigger trees, buy bigger trees, because bigger trees make an immediate impact. You don't want to have to wait five years for a tree to grow to where it could be. That requires more labor, it requires more watering, it requires those things, but you pay attention to those things and it pays off. Lighting is the second big thing. A little lighting goes a long way. So if you go into any of our alleyways now, you'll see they're very well lit. Sometimes they're broken because they get used, but we fix those all the time as well. So the lighting was very important. Lighting is not near as expensive today as it was 10 years ago. those fancy party lights you can buy anywhere now they used to be a little more expensive they're a little bit more at the table so that was a driving factor but the biggest overall thing in these two plans was this we used to try to attract tourists now we cater to our residents but what we found is that the tourists found us because we made the city a lot more desirable we used to have a mantra from our city council that we should try to get one percent of the tourists that myrtle beach brings in every year and it'll make our city viable and more thriving and all these things. Those folks are coming to Myrtle Beach because they're there from Myrtle Beach. They weren't coming there to come to see comedy. And we were spending money to try to get those tourists who weren't spending the money on our residents. And that's one thing that we changed completely in 2017. And it is the one thing I will say is the biggest reason we were more successful today than we were then. We stopped focusing on chasing somebody else and we focused on keeping our people. And that's where, and I'll say the tourists have found us. so there's no place for us to eat anymore. But we get the city back in November for a little bit, and then it goes away again in December, and then we get it back in January. We are the weird off-season bumper that actually has brought in revenue to the beach, so we'll share it a little bit. Some of the before and after pictures I wanted to show you. Again, a lot of these came out of either one plan or the other. And for the most part, every single one of these projects, I'll point out the ones that weren't, were done by city staff internally. We have become very nimble, very proficient in doing our own projects. We don't like to wait on procurement. We don't like to wait on contracts. We don't like to wait on those kind of things. So if we do it in-house, we can do it faster, and we can usually do it cheaper. Sometimes that becomes a problem when all of a sudden you're a month over budget, and they're a month over and over budget, and all of a sudden it's on you instead of on somebody else. But for the most part, it's been very successful. So this is the building that you see right at the foot of the Main Street Bridge. This is what it looked like just a few short years ago. It's kind of a baby poop ground. Our HR department is in there. We have a small police station in there, and we have our IT department in that building. And we bought it from somebody else that color and did nothing with it. And for a long time it was fine. And then we decided to do something better with it. And this is what it looks like now. This mural was painted, was actually 100% designed and painted by city staff. We took the picture, we edited it, we traced it on the wall and 200 employees painted it. And it is one of my favorite projects because someday a lifeguard who was 16 that painted that wall is gonna drive over with his family and say, I painted number 53 right there. It was that brown color. And that to me is a piece of pride, not only in who we are as a city, but who we are as city employees. And it's beautiful. It was fun too, because it's kind of abstract from up close. So we had lots of people coming up and saying, what is it? What is it? Right up to the very end. And if they'd just taken a few steps back, they could have seen that it was the bridge in the fall. So it's pretty fun. This is private investment. This is right across the street from City Hall. This is where Papa's General Store is. This is what it looked like before we started putting money into the downtown. And once we did, the private sector said, we want to be part of this too. And they painted a very nice Coca-Cola mural on this property. It now is what they've identified themselves as, the nice building on the corner of the Coke mural. This is Kingston Park that I mentioned before. This is what it looked like. Again, this is the people would walk from 4th Avenue, from Main Street to 4th Avenue to get from the theater to their car. You can see we put a nice historic brick there for them to walk on. And that's what it looks like now. There are some components that are, it's kind of like planning science, that make a space more attractive, more vibrant, more functional. This this part is sort of a lesson in that people want to have a sidewalk under them. They want to have a tree canopy over them. They want to have a park car on their side and they want to have a building on their other side. It's kind of like a tunnel. There's four parts to an active street. If one of those parts is missing, people don't want to walk down the street. So if you're walking next to a parking lot, you're like, I'm going to turn around the other way. That's why, because you're missing a piece of that kind of fundamental science. So we had to try to fake that this part. because it's open on all four sides. So we built the little knee wall. We put the Italian cypress in to give that feeling of a building. There's some street trees there. There's the sidewalk there. It's at an intersection. So we're missing one component, which is that park car. So you don't feel quite as safe when you're in that park. So we added music. We added a fountain to give you the water sound. And then we added the coolest train mural, I think, in the state, which is the Shoe Fly, which used to go right down the center of Main Street, so it's also historic to us. And that was at Tommy Simpson Bureau, just like the one on the other building. This is the Big Ugly Wall. For as long as anyone can remember, that Big Ugly Wall greeted everybody coming from the north down Main Street into the city. At one point, where the building is on the corner, which is now Leone's, a lot of people remember it as Crady's Restaurant. It was a great restaurant in downtown. At one point, there was a three-story building there that was a hotel and drugstore. It's been gone for generations. And what was left was a big ugly wall because that building burned down and left a soot-covered party wall that nobody wanted to claim. The people who owned the building next to it said it's not ours. The people who owned the building on this side said it's not ours. And you get a big ugly wall that nobody wants to claim ownership of. And for years, we drove by this and were like, oh, I wish we could do something about it. So we did. We just primed it and painted it. And we got an agreement from both of them that says, yeah, you can do it. We don't care. And we did it. And then we didn't touch it again. So it's not our wall either. But now it's not the big ugly wall anymore. And people don't notice it anymore. They used to notice the ugly wall. Now there's just the park on the other side. This is the corner of Kingston and 4th Avenue. this used to be the jerry cox company it was it's a historic staple in our downtown today is pound meadow taps if you've come to conway great little tap room it looked like crap and we knew it and that parking lot we actually we acquired it in 2016 and we didn't know what to do with it it didn't it wasn't logically sized you couldn't get parking spaces where you wanted and it was kind of a free-for-all There was concrete in the middle. There was asphalt that was failing. It was just ugly. No landscaping. So we redid it. And now it has a bioswale to catch the water. It is organized. We got a grant for the welcome sign here. That welcome sign actually hides a garbage facility called IRFs. I'll talk more about that in a minute. We have these throughout downtown to catch the garbage for everybody downtown. It eliminates all the garbage cans that you see nobody wants to pay attention to. So this is that on the corner. Hopefully this time next year we'll have a downtown hotel. We'll be right across the street from this. And so part of the reason we put it in is because we knew this was coming and we were trying to prepare for it. This is the garden walk. This was the third project we did in that 2017 master plan. We thought this was pretty. We called it the garden walk. And that's what it looked like. That's on Google Maps. You can still see it today. I love Google Maps because it reminds us how far we've come. And I ran out to get this picture yesterday. This is what the garden walk looks like today. And next week, it'll have mandated plants in it for Halloween. And it'll be more fun. It won't be quite as pretty, but it'll be more fun. But again, we ripped everything out of it in 2017 and said, screw this. We're doing it again. We've spent way more money on landscaping than we thought we had before and it has turned out. People changed the way they walked to work because we redid this alleyway. You had to stand in line in this alleyway to get your picture taken in an alleyway. People were getting their wedding pictures in here. It was the coolest thing. And we didn't know how bad it was until it was pointed out to us. This is the alleyway behind City Hall. This is called Scarborough Alley. This is what it looked like a few years ago. It had a thousand cars a day down this alleyway. We have the biggest public parking lot in the city to the left of this, and most of the places people were going to the right of this, and we were letting a thousand cars from both directions down this narrow road where we were telling pedestrians it was safe to walk. And it was not safe to walk. Trust me, outside the city hall, every day you took your light into your own hands getting across. We tried to convince city council to let us close it and make it only pedestrians. They would not let us do that. Instead, we went one way and then landscaped the heck out of it. It now gets 400 cars a day. And they go really, really slow. And during October, we close it all together. And during December, we close it all together because it's too dangerous for cars to go through there because there's so many people now walking down this. At the end of this alleyway, you see the public restrooms as well. We built public restrooms. And instead of building one locker room style restroom that most public restrooms are, each restroom stall has its own kind of closet. So you get your own private stall. And I think there's seven of them in there. At Halloween, they're so busy that we have somebody on staff all the time. They'll start with one and clean it and stock it, and by the time they get back to it, they start it again because it's so busy. And that's Scarborough Alley. And I think I got one more. Oh, two more. This is our planning and building department where they are now. This was the solicitor's drug court. So for a long time, this building kind of smelled like cigarettes and despair. and it had that feeling about it. It just was kind of dirty and kind of dingy and really was not great for our downtown. So we actually used Arva money during COVID and we bought this building and renovated it in house. We had a good deal on it and it has like 30 offices in it and it has our warehouse where we build all of our Halloween and holiday props in it now. It is a fantastic looking building, and it also became where Holiday Alley is right next to it. It's sort of that public building that is way more public than you think it should be for what it is. It also has a meeting space in it, and it was a fantastic find. The backside of this building, this is what it used to look like. This was Todd's Electric. They redid electric motors. When Mr. Todd retired and pulled out all the stuff, the building fell down. The only thing holding it up was his motors. It would have been great to save, but it also looks a heck of a lot better now. This is the terrace. This is our small special event facility we built behind that building you saw in the video. We show our holiday movies here on Friday nights. We have small concerts here. People get married here. And the cool thing about it is the cypress you see on the right is our first earth. So there's a garbage facility right there, and people get married right behind it and have no idea it's there. When we built this, you would not believe how many people thought we had just ruined the city. We put it behind the peanut warehouse, the big, best building in downtown, which is arguable. And it was going to smell terrible. It was going to be awful. And nobody can understand why in the world we did it. And so we said, you know what? We're going to put a special event facility right behind it and prove it. And now we do. Occasionally it smells, but not very often. There's a fix to it. So as long as people do what they're supposed to do. And so that's kind of the before and after. This all has happened in the last 10 years. Some things cost more than others. Some things were pretty cheap. But all of it required us to see what we weren't seeing before. And now we've moved on to much bigger projects. We acquired 825 acres from Sandy Cooper that we're gonna do a massive, the last estimate I heard was a $400 million project on it with a private developer. It's very exciting. It is pretty much in the downtown. So you can imagine what that will do for the lifeblood of what we have already. It's exciting. So John also asked me to talk about some return on our investments. So this is our budget over the last 10 years. So from 2017 until now. It has gone up 215%. In 2017, our budget was $35 million. Last year, for this current year, it's $111 million. We are growing rapidly. We have a lot more people, but everything we have is now worth more than it was before. We have a 0% vacancy rate commercially in our downtown and pretty much throughout the city. We had a developer come in and redo our old mall, our derelict mall, where the emergency belt is. It's where Kmart used to be. And when they were redoing that mall, they ran out of space for all the retailers that wanted to be in Fenway. And that's new to us because we used to chase the retailers. And every time we bring one in, they'd see the beach and be like, well, there's 20 million people there and there's only 31,000 in Conway. So we're going to get out of the street. But now they're coming to Conway and they're seeing what we're doing and they're excited by it. So the developer that redid Coastal Mall had such good success. He's working on building one from the ground up just around the corner, which is going to be another $100 million investment. So each one of these things is starting to bring more things. And again, a 0% vacancy rate is a great problem to have, but it is a problem. So for our downtown, we have a list of people that want to be in, and we can't fill it. We need people to build downtown, and that does not happen in Horry County. Nobody builds downtown in Horry County. So we have to go out and try to find people to build, and that takes longer than we want to wait. So it's coming. But it all started with looking at the stuff that didn't work.

Can I ask you just one thing, Adam? So the increase in... general revenue to the city from $38 million to $111 million. Well, that's great for those people. Can you talk about what that means for these people? Sure. What you've been able to do because of that.

Let me use this one instead. This is our hospitality fee revenue. This is a more fun pot. And I don't know if you guys collect hospitality fees here. Oh, yeah. All right. So this is the money that you can do fun things with. And you can do things that have a very great impact on what you do. Every project I just showed you, except for the redoing in that building, done with hospitality hospitality fee money has to be spent on certain things has to be spent on on generating more hospitality fees number one has to be spent on tourism related expenses has to be spent on bettering usually your downtown or your riverfront or your parks or your probably your oceanfront here it is it is the one thing you can use to make your quality of life better and it's limited to that which means you can't spend it on potholes you can't spend it on those things that that sometimes get wrapped up in the nitty-gritty of budget. This is our general fund graph, the same years. In 2017, we had $800,000 in hospitality fee revenue. Next year, we might hit five million. And the wow, I feel it too. Because I remember there was, I don't know how long y'all have been here, but in 2019, there was a lawsuit. Myrtle Beach sued the county over hospitality fee revenue. and that allowed our fees to go up by twice so we went from 800 000 to 1.6 million because of that lawsuit and i remember talking to the county administrator at the time because he wanted us to commit to spending some of that money back in the in the big pot and i said look man if you just give me one or two years of that 1.6 i can make some things happen And we did. It's the investment we made in the public infrastructure in our downtown that has directly funded the additional money. And this money is what's going to allow us to do the next big project, which will then drive the next big project. So it's exciting to see this. it's fun to try to budget hospitality fee money because you get to do really fun projects every bit of our holiday expenditures comes from this pot of money not one that comes from property tax revenue not one that comes from business license revenue it all comes from hospitality fee revenue and we can track like our hospitality fees are fantastic during the month of october they drive a whole they we more than pay for everything we do in one month what we do for the whole year for holidays I'm not going to talk a lot about the holidays. If there's questions about them, I'll talk about them. But it is really exciting. For instance, last year for October, we had 460,000 visitors to our downtown, which was crazy. And we did not know how to do that. Hopefully, we do better this year. Social media is a curse. And it doesn't matter what you do, it's a curse. The better you get, it just changes what the comments are. So I actually had to look for negative today. I went and tried to find it in the popular list. It was harder than I thought it would be. It feels like it's all negative, but I really dug through some of the posts we made recently and I found these four. I think one's complaining about running out of toilet paper. One complains about not being able to find a parking space, but I guarantee you they found a parking space. Some complain about traffic. The biggest one is, I think the biggest complaint we get, that isn't people who just don't like Halloween. I can't fix that. But they think that because we're not doing one thing or we're spending money on one thing, we're not doing something else. And there is a lot of people in Conway, and I think it's universal, that are just intentionally uninformed and want to complain. And what we have finally done in Conaway, and I think my council stays on pretty good, and I'll tell this to their face, they ignore them. We've got to ignore them. There are people who don't want to be happy, and we can't give in to that. We've got to do things that are fun and exciting and better the city. And there's an acronym that I've heard. It's called the same 10 people, STP. The same 10 people complain about everything. It doesn't matter what they've got. They'll find a reason to complain. And usually, they're the loudest voice in the room. And it's just hard. We take it personally. And I know everybody every y'all do it too, but I do this 24-7 I don't ever turn off what I do So when someone criticizes one of my staff members or something we've done You take it to heart and you get mad and you really want to respond I have deleted thousands of comments that I really wanted some of them were really funny And occasionally if you ever see something from the city of Conway, that's really snarky. That's probably me doing something I shouldn't have done have to stop and i think this is this is universal through every city we've got to stop giving voice to the people who just want to be troublemakers because they're not doing anything to help the city they're not giving us ideas they're not volunteering and they're not putting in the work so stop giving them a voice and that's pretty much my presentation thank you sir you're welcome thank you guys

I want to be very mindful of time, but does anybody in council have any questions for Mr. Emmerich? I think that's a sign that you communicated well. We need to see how this is going to work for us, but I really appreciate that. Mr. Munson, you good to go now? And Adam, you're free to stay, free to go if you...

I'll hang out, not to disrupt anything, if anybody has any questions on the app.

Very good, sir. Thank you.

Chris, can you wake that up?

under the strap she says oh that's where it's near the back okay of course we had to put it under the strap

I'll do the same thing that Adam did. I'll turn my laptop around because my splitter that was supposed to make that visible is not functional.

My screen's not as big as his. So, Sammy, you're out of luck. Man, you're a long ways away.

Anyway. We got the presentation.

We got you. That's right. There we go. All right.

Actually, if you want to show, I mean, not many people will see it, but is the TV hooked up? Do they see that? Oh, the TV's been on the whole time. Okay. I wasn't sure if they were looking at the laptop or the TV.

No, no. I didn't know how much we got hooked up. TV is a good part. all right guys so thanks again for coming out so as the mayor said we're going to share a little bit with you now about what the city has been doing um i've got copies of this can i give some to this side and some to that side so y'all flip those around give your vote so much there's some more of them up here if you run out of those so in the We had the last workshop in January, similar to this. And it was at that point that we all kind of the light bulb clicked on and said, Hey, there's more we could do to improve the community. I think a lot of that was just because not everybody realized what resources were available to us throughout the state. So we started doing some due diligence by both the planning commission and the business committee. And so what I'm going to share with you right now is some of the some of the things that we found through the Planning Commission.

That's not the same.

That's not the same report.

That's Mark's presentation? Yes. Okay.

Well, Mark's going to be giving his. Okay. We'll be able to follow up with General Stewart. Okay. So, from the perspective of the Planning Commission, So I'm sure everybody knows, you know, basically our job is zoning, okay, and zoning regulations, everything about zoning. We report under Mark, who will have a presentation in just a few minutes. And so the things that we're looking at are, number one, improving the Highway 17 corridor. Is there, by a show of hands, is there anybody in this room that thinks our Highway 17 corridor is just drop-dead gorgeous, beautiful, and you wouldn't change a thing?

Is there anybody?

Yeah, okay, good. Now, what we want to change is going to be up to y'all, but I want to just begin with the consensus that we all agree something needs to be done about that 17 corridor. The other thing is protecting coastal corridors. so as mark will tell you in a minute everything we're talking about tonight is only the business districts okay that's where we are right now in this general area the 17th quarter and it may include what i don't know if we officially call it the e district or not but the area down there by the pier yeah the pier village um the commercial uses need to be uh developed and managed well planned well um the high impact areas. Again, this area in downtown, the E district and the 17 corridor. And then I know you've noticed we've got the tree regulations right now that we are trying our best to get through, but we're really focused with Mark's help and with our chairman's help, Carolyn Pravlich, to get the regulations clearer, okay? So you're not reading it going, What is this telling me I need to do? So those have been the primary focus for everything we've done. We want to create a more attractive and compatible commercial corridor on 17. We want to have stronger development standards for all of our landscaping, our trees, our canopy. And we've got that. that at the next council meeting. Ensuring that new businesses fit into their locations and surroundings. God knows we could use some new and better businesses. And then providing more predictable and consistent projects for future review. So that's been kind of the focus for the Planning Commission. And I want to turn it over now to Tom to talk to you about what the the business committee has been up to.

I'll tell you what the business committee has been up to, but then I'm just going to tell you about where we're going to transition to. One of the things we've tried to do over the last three and a half years, four years, is make the business committee known to people and have them participate with us. to that end we've started a business social every month which is a networking meeting and we get 30 to 40 people every time a lot of people are coming from out of town right now but people are finding out about it they're all they're using it as a good opportunity to network with people we do a business spotlight every week and that highlights business in town costs them nothing it goes on facebook but it shows people that business community and the business community are working together We also do a business of the month and We've been doing that for about three years now and It's it's a way of attracting attention to a specific business at a specific time, but they're they're happening all over town We've got two months ago. We had the Omega Pancake House last month was Mulligan's got placed on the street and this week this one's in 12 o'clock so it's all different people that get get recognized but it's another way of pointing out the businesses that are here um you can see what what john has up here economic vitality design promotion organization what we're trying to do is create the business committee that can do all these things and so with that i'm going to turn over to one of these people

Good evening, everyone. I want to spend just a few minutes discussing an opportunity, I believe.

Can you not hear me?

Okay, I'll start over. I want to spend just a few minutes discussing an opportunity I believe deserves some further exploration. It's called Main Street South Carolina and how a community development foundation could work alongside each other. Main Street is much more than beautification, festivals or marketing. It is a nationally established approach to economic and community development implemented through the Main Street program in South Carolina. It's built on four pillars, economic vitality, which strengthens the businesses, encourages entrepreneurship and attracts investment, Design, which focuses on our physical environment, appearances, walkability, and sense of place. The promotion, which builds on our identity and gives people reasons to visit, reasons to shop, reasons to dine, and reasons to return. And organization. It brings together the people, partnerships, and resources to make that happen. What I like most about this approach is that we don't have to become another community. The goal is to become the best version of Surfside Beach. The second opportunity is exploring a Surfside Beach Community Development Foundation structured as a 501c3. This would be an independent, nonprofit working alongside the town, not replacing the town, working alongside the town. It could bring businesses, residents, property owners, and community leaders together while creating additional opportunities for grants, charitable contributions, sponsorships, private investment, and volunteers. I have firsthand knowledge of this. Prior to here, I lived in Mount Holly, North Carolina, and I was part of the original board of the Mount Holly Community Development Foundation right outside of Charlotte. I served not only as the vice chair, the chair, and the past chair, and a regular board member, I also spent a period of time as their executive director. Creating the foundation, Did you switch that again?

Yeah.

One more time?

Am I going forward?

Yeah. Creating the foundation requires a lot of careful planning. We would establish the mission, form the board, incorporate, seek 501c3 status, develop funding and partnerships, and identify projects that provide measurable community benefits. I'm not suggesting that we create this organization tonight. I'm suggesting that we determine whether the model is right for Surfside Beach. I apologize, I'm reading because I'm not very good at talking. This is where the two ideas come together. Main Street, South Carolina provides the framework, training, the expertise and strategy that we need, while the Community Development Foundation provides another vehicle for funding, partnerships, volunteers, and implementation. And the town provides the municipal leadership and partnership. All three work together, and the town provides the most critical part, which is simply making sure that we do what the citizens want us to do. We do that in other ways as well by asking questions and creating opportunity. So tonight I'm not asking the council to approve a program or create an organization or even commit funding at this point. I'm asking for the opportunity for us to explore the possibility. Let's determine whether Main Street, South Carolina would require what it would cost and whether a community development foundation could become a private public partner that helps make it successful. I've seen this type of partnership work before. I believe it's worth finding out what it could do for Surfside Beach. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I think we'll let Mark go and then we may have council questions for any of you.

Yeah, on the bottom. Glasses.

Yeah, big screen here. You work just not for us. Yeah. I don't know what the best place is. I get to do the fun part of the presentation. And that's the planning of this. And one of the really cool things about doing this is, as Adam.

Yeah, make sure you're speaking to the mic. It's there, but can you hear it? Is it coming over? Yeah, it might be better at the podium. And if you need to slide it over to see better. Oh my God, I can't see better.

Yeah, just move the mic over here.

Yeah, it's just the height I think that was the problem.

That seems more sensitive, I don't know. Stereo, can you hear me now? It sounds better. Are you going to be the mic holder? Okay. John's the podium. Okay, this is the fun part. As you all know, first of all, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Mark Broder. I'm your Planning Community Development Director. Most of the time, my work is involved in just doing zoning and code enforcement. This is the fun stuff. This is where I get to do some planning. And that's what I spent basically the last four decades of my career doing, was planning. And I can tell you from doing several corridor plans in Texas and California and here, this is the fun part. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where we develop a master plan that gives us the ideas of how we're going to move the ball forward here. I'm not even going to look at the slide. I'm going to just talk about how these plans come together and how they work. And the first thing I want to do, and I want to make sure that everybody's clear on, this isn't going to be my plan. This isn't going to be the council's plan. It's going to be the town's plan. The people in this community are the people who are going to formulate this plan. You all are going to decide what the most important things are to do. You all are going to decide on one of the most important projects that we're going to do. Those are the types of things that gain what I call gain momentum. And when Adam talked about low-hanging fruit, That's how we're gonna start this. We're not gonna start out with a mega project as part of the master plan. We're gonna develop a series of what I call base hits. And base hits get your runs. We're not gonna go for a grand slam home run over the fence. And I've always thought that that's the way, that's the best way to develop master plans. But I wanted you all to be clear that you're gonna be the primary drivers behind this plan. as we plan a series of public workshops, one-on-one interviews, those sorts of things. So those are the types of things that we're gonna move forward on. Next slide, please. One of the things that we're gonna move through is that Looking at Conway's process is probably a really good idea for us to sort of follow what I would call a roadmap for us to move forward. I remember when I first came here, I'm going to tell a little story because I think these are more interesting sometimes. When I first came here about a year ago, One of the things that I've told everybody that I noticed when I first came here, I'm not from the area, I live in Somerville, and I live up here five days a week, in Somerville, two days a week. And I remember the first time I drove into town, and I drove up Highway 17 from Georgetown, and I noticed how Highway 17 changed in every community that I went through. And as I was going through there, I was looking at places like Pauley's, Neural's, and those types of communities, and I thought to myself, yeah, these really look nice. And as I got to Garden City, where I currently reside, I thought, ooh, wow, what happened to the corridor here? And then I arrived in Surfside Beach, and Surfside Beach was actually picked up from what Garden City was. And I remember asking, almost like the first week I was here, there's something called a design overlay. How long has the design overlay been in place? If you don't know what the design overlay, it's a serious set of regulations and design guidelines for the improvement of properties along Highway 17. The plan had been in place for 10 years. And I said to members of my planning commission, so how's that going for you? I don't think... I said to them, I don't think there's been any vast improvements in the corridor's appearance based on the overlay district. We need something a bit more powerful than a series of design guidelines, you know, moving us forward, moving the ball forward on Highway 17. So one of the things, yeah, that's probably easier for me to read. You know, one of the most important things, and I always say, what is Surfside Beach going to do. First of all, one of the things that you've developed is a brand. And your brand is the Family Beach. And I can tell you from working in other communities across the United States, being authentic to yourself is probably one of the most important things that we can't hope for, is that we need to build on our authenticity. We're not going to try to be somebody else. We're not going to steal ideas from somebody else. We're going to do things in an authentic way and move that process forward. These are some fun pictures. When I first came here, somebody said, well, wouldn't it be nice if we had a better entry sign? And I started playing around with entry signs, and I thought, okay, Family Beach. What should be on our entry side? So I started playing with some ideas about like playing in the sand and little shovels that kids use and little buckets and things like that. And then I went really crazy, as you can see on the light bulbs. One of the easiest ways to develop a signature element on Highway 17 is to use our light poles and to put what I call medallions on the light poles that portray who we are, what we want to be, what our message is to the community as people drive from Pawleys to Myrtle Beach. So some of the things that we wanted to do is we wanted to make sure that... Okay, you want to go to the next slide?

No, no, no, I was just...

Okay, okay. All right, thanks. One of the things that I do want to make clear, though, is whenever a planner or planners work on master plans, one of the key issues is who we're going to impact and who we're not going to impact. And I think it's probably more important to talk about tonight about who we're not going to impact. not going to impede beachfront residential properties we're not going to be working in residential neighborhoods we're not going to be using eminent domain or forced action to get what we want this has got to be a plan that everybody buys into and goes along with and purpose system is to get more and better investment in our downtown, in our downtown area and on our Highway 17 corridor. And I think that's probably one of the keys to improving the commercial area. So... Bouncing back and forth here.

No, this is printed on both sides. Sorry.

Let's stand out here where I can see the slides. Every plan has got segments in the plan that have to be accommodated. And this slide is a lot of words, but what I'm going to tell you is what this slide basically says. is the master plan that we're going to develop is going to be consistent with and married to our comprehensive plan. Comprehensive plan, if you don't know what that is, that's basically a city's statement or vision of what it wants to be when it grows up. And all of the elements that you see here, all elements that are already established in our comprehensive plan as being the most important things to this community. So I take every day every action I take Every action the Planning Commission takes it has to be consistent with the comprehensive plan So we're going to make sure that we move it forward and use the comprehensive plan as our main guidepost So just to sort of summarize here I The plan has to be family friendly, has to be scaled with family, has to be a series of, like I call, really cool, authentic projects like Adam's got. I mean, some of the projects super cool. We want it to be relaxed. We want it to be warm. We want to... play upon our family needs, but we're different than Adam. We are a tourist economy, and making sure that we're true to ourselves, true to the tourist economy, but also having the types of uses in our downtown that are relevant to our residents, so that our residents are the main drivers of the economy for places in our downtown. one of the things that um that adam talked about that i believe is really important here in terms of the master plan is once the master plan starts to take shape what you want to do is you want to have some early wins and i call yeah i call them base hits you want to create a series of base hits things that the community can see and say gee would seem to be headed in the right direction here what are some of the things that we can do here we have a series of atoms And I was around downtown. We have hours down in the district. Thank you. The parking lots. And one of the key big. I'll call it a grand slam home run that we have that we can play off of. As you all know that this building is going to be replaced by a new brand new Civic Center. And I believe that connecting the Civic Center to the downtown right across this parking lot are going to be one of the more important base hits that we do for ourselves in terms of getting people from the downtown Civic Center to the downtown. Those are the types of things that don't cost a lot of money, create pedestrian activity, which is what fuels a downtown, and making sure that pedestrians from civic center, police station, fire station, downtown, all start to work into a sort of a series of alleyways and passageways for pedestrians to move around the downtown.

Yeah.

You can see here some of the concepts here. If you look at one of the images of what our alley looks like now and what an artist's rendering would look like of what that alley could look like, you can see you start to change the character and the feel. our alleys from utilitarian passageways to really rich sort of pedestrian environments, pedestrian places that people want to be, people want to hang out in. You know, John talked to me before the presentation today. One of the biggest things that Adam had to deal with in his downtown is where's everybody going to dump their trash, right? That was one of the big problems. There are ways to create collective, if you will, trash collection projects. Yeah, that will actually help you do that. And creating this pedestrian environment with pedestrian lights, paving, landscaping, are all sorts of base hits that I think make a really strong statement for us to start. doing some of the things that we want to do. So I'm just going to go over these really quickly. What are some of the early wins that we can do? So wayfinding and signature, you saw some of the entry sign things. We could do some wayfinding stuff in the downtown. I think the wayfinding in the e-district could be improved. We want to have event-ready public spaces. We've all talked about it. We've commonly talked about when we close the street down around the pier, how that should become more of what I call a convertible space. Functions 90% of the time is a street. traffic and for people to move across. But we also need to be able to close that and make that an event space for ourselves. We really need to celebrate that event space. Right now, it still looks more like a street than it does an event space. Decorative lighting, golf cart connectivity. As I told you, this is my first year here, and I've got to tell you, one of the most amazing things that I experienced in the last six months is just how many people drive golf carts here. It's incredible. So having a wayfinding system for people driving golf carts and knowing where they're going and driving around town. So yeah, we can do this, right? So with the support of the community, the support of the council, support of the Planning Commission, I think we can make a series of small, precise basics that will get us moving along toward developing this. And what I want to make, and I'm just going to close with this, because it's the hallmark of good planning, and Adam will tell you the same thing, is that without public participation, without knowing what the community wants, we can't really develop a great plan. A great plan really comes from ideas from the community. And one of the things that I'm always surprised with is just how many resources in the community we have that we don't know about. There are people here who have done festivals. There are people here who have been on Main Street boards. I served as the president of a downtown association for a statewide downtown association. amount of resources that we have here in town really we have the horsepower all we need now is the blueprint the blueprint to move this stuff forward and john's been very very helpful in helping us if you will started to put those ideas together put those ideas down on paper and ultimately the plan process will proceed as an idea that we'll push forward. We'll probably end up hiring a planning and design firm to help us design some of these great ideas. We might steal some of the consultants that Adam had. They look like they did a great job for them. So with that, I'll turn it back over to John, and we'll go from there. Thanks, John.

Thank you, Mark. Yeah, so that's what everybody other than the elected officials up here, what the Planning Commission and the Business Committee's been working on. I do want to encourage, I'll go around with these. We're getting ready to do some Q&A from you guys. Adam's going to hang around, especially for any attendees in the business community. you have questions i really really really want you to or concerns or anything i really want you to come up and speak and uh while adam's here asking because there is it's unlikely that anything you're concerned about there wasn't a business concerned about the same thing in conway and um We want to make sure that the residents are happy, but we also equally want to make sure our business community is happy with what we're doing. So I'm going to throw it back to the mayor now, and then I believe we're going to go into citizen Q&A. Thanks. All right.

Thank you, sir. And thanks to all of our presenters. We'll give them a hand. So before we get into the public comment portion, I just want to open up for counsel. We heard a lot of different stuff from from Wendy and Tom, from John, from Adam, from Mark. I think that's everybody who spoke. Anybody had any questions for any of them? I got one. Okay, I'll start for Wendy. Speaking about getting started on the 501 and I'd have to go back to your last slide the main street and the foundation working together so what would you need from council to get started i mean would the business committee take that on first of all no we well we would do the main street part through the business community yeah yeah yes please i'm sorry they can't hear me okay now that i can now that i'm not trying to read a script it's the computer okay so

We would take Main Street part and work with Main Street, and it would not only be the business committee that does that, that would also mean that there has to be a few council members that are gonna, like the mayor's gonna have to be involved for sure, and perhaps our liaison at that point. There's usually four or five people that learn and then push it forward to your planning. All we need for a 501c3 is direction. And so we're not particularly ready for the foundation, but we are because we need to get started. It takes a while to get the word out. But until we can do that, we need to know what our mission is. And our mission is what the town wants. So I'll just back up and tell you about Mount Holly quickly. We wanted to build a greenway system down the Catawba River. So we owned 12 miles of the Catawba River, the frontage of the Catawba River. So there were other, like Duke Energy and several other places that owned as well that we would have to get across. And it was a lot of work. In addition to that, we also had wanted to go into some revitalization of the downtown. We did a national registry. There was art and all kinds of crazy things that came out of a very first meeting of the citizens and what they wanted. So what the foundation did is the foundation was the tool that we used to raise the money, to assist in the building of the greenways and such. I will tell you that it's not finished. We started in 2005. We have seven miles. Not we, not me, but they have seven miles. And they just put in one of the most beautiful walking bridges across a creek area that comes, that dumps straight into the Catawba River. And it is beautiful. But it took time, and it took money, and it took finding investors. You know, you always have to go to your friendly banks first. And you get some of those big fellas involved, and they have to give me a five-year pledge, and then we, you know, they get to say a lot, you know. But they, we also want our citizens to give money. We want a membership opportunity. But what we do is what you can't do. We can go after grants that aren't municipality grants or grants that are offered from different systems, different companies, foundations that we can go after that you can't go after. We can also give grants, which that is a whole lot better than you having to give it. So it saves our taxpayers. Main Street itself is very inexpensive. I thought maybe it might be a good tool to keep us in track because that's kind of what it does. It does help you take some classes and learn about how to really find what you want for your town. So it's not something you have to stay a member of forever. We did not stay a member of Main Street Mount Holly but it we started there and it's very inexpensive to start that so it's just something else to look forward to but foundation can be done by forming a board and we have to find those people that are interested and usually we try to get benefactors that are going to give us money to be part of that as well all right thank you I think mr. Hyatt wanted to

I just had a question about what is it you need from town council to take the next step?

Well, we just need you to say, hey, get to it. And so then the business committee will put forth a recommendation. So that's basically what we are.

So you would like to see us maybe pass a resolution to support going forward? that kind of what you're asking from town council well i'm not asking anything i was just finding information but but the business committee would like to be able to do that things seem to die if we don't not tonight but we can't do it tonight we can't do it tonight you will come for that so we don't need to worry about it at this point no thank you that's what i needed to know mr walsh go ahead mr mayor yeah i'm sorry go ahead uh i

as I understand it, you are, you guys are going to help develop a business, a master plan for us that you, that you will submit. I'm just trying to follow the flow of where we're going that you would submit to us, uh, for approval, uh, after going through the public hearings and stuff like that.

Okay. So the master plan is a, formal process all right that develops what we want to see what we want to do that would take place after the next budget cycle you have to be included in that yeah so that is at least 10 months from now because our fiscal year runs july to june right yeah so in the meantime the suggestion has been made a plan will be shared with you an action plan not a master that will provide for meetings with the citizens for two reasons to listen to the citizens and also to educate the citizens right to ensure they understand what it is and what it is because i think adam made a great point about social media and what they do in the vacuum with explicit letter by letter. So you don't really need to worry about the master plan right now. It's just part of the process. We're just talking about it. That won't become a part of the process until probably May, whenever you, where do y'all, when do y'all do the budget?

Actually, we start, staff starts in about November, December. Okay. So, I mean, they start rolling out by April. Yeah.

reviewing it oh okay so it'd be january or february yeah so we're not gonna have that okay thank you mr mayor stanley go ahead i'd like to start out with saying i see a lot of guys in here from small businesses here around town and i appreciate y'all being here but my question is to uh to john and adam both how do we get the corridor 17 out here how do we get these big businesses to buy in. The small businesses is going to be a little bit easier to buy into this, to where our big business, what we brought up is corridor 17. How do we get them people involved? How does the process go to that? I'll throw a spitball out.

Yeah, sure. 40% of my day trying to bring development to the city of Conway in a positive way. And if you don't have someone doing that all day every day, it's really difficult. Every developer that comes in that wants to build a subdivision, I ask them what else they build. Everyone that comes in to build a Popeyes, I say, what else do you build? And we try to give them a good enough experience when they're there that they want to come back for the second project. Getting a project that big done is not going to be an easy task. I would say you try to bite off pieces of it, frontage of it, make it more attractive so that it's easier to redevelop. But we have the same problem in Conway. If you come down 501 Business Church Street through Conway, it's 50 years of bad design, bad planning that you're trying to undo. And it can't be done overnight. So you'd be biting off a little chunk at a time and it's getting better.

It's really changing.

Well, thank you. Thank you. So the answer is, it's too far. You need to, and it's different for you guys because we are growing at an astronomical rate. So we've got new developers coming in every day that I have the ability then to have that conversation with. And that has paid off time and time again. And that isn't happening in Surfside just because you're locked. So there are tools out there to try to get a positive development in, to redevelop those plates. Try to form a relationship with the owners of those properties and try to get them to come do something by whatever means you can. And sometimes there's a carrot, sometimes there's a stick, and sometimes you gotta use both. And one's more fun than the other one for staff, I'll tell you that. And I don't know if there's a clean answer, but that's it. It's not going to be an easy task. It's going to be a long process, and you're all going to get tired of hearing about it. But you've just got to keep incrementally trying to get there until all of a sudden one day you've got something huge. There is another way you can do it, and I don't know that it'll work and it'll cost you money, and that would be to redesign the site yourself and then try to

Mark, are you kind of working on some of these kind of plans and trying to get to some of these? The small businesses, it's easy to talk to these. But these people who own these huge complexes over here are not in town. They ain't around here. They don't care less in this town whether they do something to that corridor or whether we don't. We have a good example going right into our tank. Very, very, very nice place, very good location if somebody would do something. Are we trying our best to do something about these things?

We are, however. all we have right now is what i call the stick of the carrot and the stick and the stick is the design overlay and that is an incremental approach on a property by property basis it's not a comprehensive master plan it's basically spot spot corrections as we go along how do you get people like a shopping center across the street to play you have to offer them something And what I've seen done on big shopping centers like that before is take a look at that shopping center and tell me the last time you saw that parking lot completely full. You never saw it completely full. And the reason is because that project was developed in the 1960s when the parking regulations for shopping centers said you had to have so many parking spaces per square foot. Those numbers don't play out anymore. So what could we do? Here's what we could do. We could offer them the ability to reduce the amount of parking at the front of the property to develop what we call development pads at the front of the property to be able to allow them to redevelop that site by putting in some new uses in front. And with the return that they're gonna improve the front of the existing structure, they're gonna redo that parking lot, they're gonna put in some landscaping, but it's gotta be a quid pro quo kind of a thing. We'll let you develop more of that property than, right now they think they're locked in over there. They don't think they can develop any more of that property, but I'm telling you they could, and I've seen it done. And it's just taking that excess parking that sits up near Highway 17, That's the parking spaces that you can remove and put in pads. How do you know that? Look at an aerial photograph of that shopping center. You know how you look at it? You look at the oil stains of the parking spaces in there and they're all closest to the buildings because nobody parks at the back and wants to lock. Everybody drives around that parking lot looking for the front space, right? Those parking spaces along Highway 17, the asphalt is so old and dry that because nobody has ever parked there. So we can't offer development incentives in that way because if you don't come to them with some kind of ROI, they're not talking to you. They want to turn on your investment. So we've got to be creative in the types of things that we can offer them to do.

With saying that, would you, are you, what I'm getting at is, or sometime along the way, are you going to have some kind of plan to bring the council to look at for maybe doing something like that? Or are we going to just do what we've always done for the last 10 years?

No, I'm hoping we're not going to do the same thing we've done for the last 10 years. Because like I said, the design organization has been in place for 10 years. And can anybody look at me? 2019 looks really better for it. It's got to be a bigger punch than that. And the master plan that we're talking about, the thing that we're going to budget for isn't going to be my work. I will work with the consulting firms on ideas because I've done this stuff in the past, but I don't have the daily know if you will time to develop the master plan so the master plan would come up with some of those ideas formalize those ideas have the council endorse those ideas and then we can go out and start doing some active economic development thank you mr coleman go ahead

I keep hearing you want to get residents in all the time. And I'm just like, who's done this before? Tell us how you got the residents to do anything. I look in this room and I see maybe three faces that I never saw before. Same thing at every meeting. Same thing at every election. We have probably 4,000 people in here and we have 1,000 people who might vote. We got people who all they care about is getting their garbage picked up in the mail delivery and don't want anything else. Don't think we need anything else. I'm all for residents getting about, but it's the same people who are on the committees, the same people who come through meetings. It's the same people that sit up here in the front So I'm just curious, did you get people involved? And how did you get people involved?

Because it's great to say it, but- Yeah, we actually had really good turnout for our master plan, all of our plan meetings. And we recently did a trails plan and our consultants did something pretty unique in that they set up a table at our Christmas tree lighting and took surveys where people were. Instead of waiting for people to come to us, we went to where they were. We're also redoing our comp plan right now, and we had a survey that was open for a couple months and got good response online. But now we're going out and we're doing game night at the senior center. And we're gonna play a game, but we're also gonna ask for feedback from that group. That's underrepresented in a lot of these polls. So we're taking the planning efforts to where the people are, rather than hoping that people come to us and respond. And I think that's been very, very valuable. And Conway's a little different now. I use the holidays as part of the reason. We get out of the house a lot more, so we come to things, and when we have a meeting, we have a better response. Unless it's usually related to a road project, then no one shows up. But that's the thing that people complain the loudest about. So if it's something that they feel very strongly about, they should come, and if they don't, you've got to go to them. And that's what we did.

And we have a lot of events, and we have a lot of people come. But if we did surveys, in my opinion, 75% of the people who answered the surveys don't even live here.

So don't make it about a survey. Make it about the conversation. Don't give them a form. Go talk to them and keep track of what you're talking about. It's less formal. It's harder to... It's harder to memorialize in writing, but you're more likely to get better feedback. And sometimes it's less about just saying, in general, here, please come and tell us, and it's about making an appointment and going to talk to them. So small businesses walk into every business and ask them. That's what we do. And we don't do it as good as we should, but that's what we do.

I think to answer your question, we need to start building momentum. That's what this is all about. It has to start somewhere, and we're starting now. And then as people find out, nobody knew what it was for you. Now people know what it is, and they listen to what we talk. That's what we have to do as a council, as a town, is build the momentum so that brings people in.

I just had a question for Mark. I think, in my opinion, the biggest eyesore is 17 corridor. And hand in hand with that is I think the frontage road is terrible. Is there any ideas to possibly get rid of it and redevelop the whole area? Because if you go to other places, I don't know any place that has frontage roads other than Surfside Beach. It's a wasted space and it's Looks terrible. I'm going to be kind.

Frontage road sucks. It does nothing for us. It really doesn't. It doesn't make Highway 17 any more attractive. I'm thinking to myself, if you didn't have that frontage road, what you could do in terms of enticing, now you've got private properties adjacent to a property that we might be able to work with, have them encroach perhaps into that possibly, or a linear park, create a linear park out of the frontage road. But the frontage road really doesn't do us any service. And in fact, if you look at it from just a traffic perspective, it's dangerous as heck. I mean, I don't know how many of you have ever backed up on one of those and tried to get out across before you get whacked sideways. Highway 17 is going to be a two-part answer. First part is going to be private development. What are we going to expect private development to do? And what can we do to offer incentives to private development to do what we want them to do? How can we do that? Number two is the design of the public right away. What can we do today? And that's some of the low-hanging fruit. What could we do to Highway 17 tomorrow that would change the appearance of Highway 17? And I'll tell you just some of the crazy ideas that I have done in other places. Tomorrow, send out the public works department, work with, you're gonna have to call SCDOT on this, and paint all the light bulbs up, a unique color that's unique only to Surfside Beach. instant instant uh gratification in terms of just changing the appearance of them because every light pole out there is the same color that is in hollies that's in myrtle that's in any other depth so what if we went out there and we painted all of those light poles Surfside Beach blue Surfside Beach white I mean, just the low-hanging fruit out there, for me, as a corridor revitalization guy, are things that we could do within the next two or three years. And those would be instant, I call them, base hits. And again, I'm gonna keep saying that to y'all, base hits. We're not going for grand slam home runs here. But the frontage road could be one of those doubles or triples. if we could do something with that frontage road and how do we take that frontage road back and do something really distributed.

Okay, I would like to get to the public comment soon. So can we, any of council, if there's any other questions that we need to cover, let's do it right now and then let's try to get to public. Go ahead, Michelle.

This goes to Adam. Your alleyways are fantastic.

you think you're right people want to take pictures whatever any of your alleyways were they ever driven on so norman alley which is now the trestle was a was a one-way drivable alleyway but really served no purpose that we could and make a shortcut. And so closing it was not without some heartache and some fight. But we actually, yeah, we closed it during COVID to give people an opportunity to eat outside. And it worked so well that we're like, let's just keep it going. And we just changed the orientation of the parks that were in the back. So they went from one direction to the other direction and made it a different way. And it worked out fine. The other alleys that we've done besides Scarborough Alley, which I showed pictures of, were all pedestrian alleys. We have a few that are vehicular and we've not tackled those yet. One of them, we are very stuck on how to redesign it. Where Tio Alley and Platts Alley come together, they don't quite come together. You got to go through a nasty parking area. We're going to figure that out. But part of the problem was we didn't have a garbage facility in that area. We've built one. Now we just have to convince the property owners there that they've got to get rid of their garbage cans, which is another challenge, but it's coming. And we've done something in the past to try to fix that one, and it was terrible. Sometimes you make bad decisions, and we're fixing those. But it was before my time, so I won't take any credit for it.

The reason why I'm asking that is thank you for your comments. Sure. My next part is just a FYI. When you start talking about redoing alleyways, just make sure we reinsure the businesses like coupon. There's no way in my mind, you would have a lot of convincing for me to make that an alleyway because those restaurants use the back end of that for deliveries. So when you start making pictures like this, people are going to, I think we have to walk cautiously and you have to say, Like I would have never put that picture in this. It's too many like fire alarms going off in the business. So how am I going to get my food truck out? How am I going to get my beer?

Do you want an answer? The picture, as your mind is interpreting it, is that it is not accessible for delivery trucks.

Right.

It is. Half of the paradigm shift.

Okay, I'll wait for it.

I mean, the picture is designed in conjunction with the others. With all of those pictures, they're still accessible for emergency use because the wants and warrants will require that for safety. So what you're envisioning is you saw his pictures where they were solely pedestrian. They're essentially a sidewall. If you focus on that picture again, you'll notice it's still the same width as the street. It's just got lighting on it, and it's enhanced. So the answer to your question about how am I going to get my delivery trucks in, they're just going to drive in like they do today.

just one quick because i want to get to public comments um and it's it's more of a comment um what we're talking about i what i heard from adam is when they went down this road they had a vision they had a strategy and then they said about executing you know finding the funding whatever that's what we need to be thinking in terms of right now we're looking to develop a strategy a vision and a strategy. The funding, what Wendy talked about, that's a tool potentially for funding. There's some other avenues that I expect will go down to look for funding as well. So incremental wins are great, all four, we need to do those too, but I think we need to raise our focus to where we're thinking about what this should look like 10 years from now. as opposed to whether this is an alley or that's it. That's my, I mean, that's my view anyway. So I think that's where you'll get better comments from residents, because if you put them into place, what do you want this to look like 10 years from now? And what this may not be here, but that's beside the point, you know, it's for the next generation. What is Surfside going to look like for the future? So that's it. I just wanted to comment on that because I think We all have a tendency to jump back into the here and now, and that's not really what this exercise is about.

All right, thank you. I'm going to open up the public comment, but with the consent of council, I'm going to allow a little interaction in this public comment. Not so much with council, but if the public has points they want to make and get answers from the presenters, Unless anybody disagrees, I'm going to allow that. But I'm going to ask everybody to keep it very short so that we can, I mean, we allow five minutes for comment, but I'm really going to ask you to be on point, make a point, or ask a question so that we can entertain as many people as possible. Is there any objection to allowing the interaction? All right, then we're going to do that. Anybody who wants to do public comment, come on up.

Announce our name and all that.

Yeah, do the usual. All right.

Tina Carlson, 330-15th Avenue South. First, I want to say I'm super excited about everything I've heard tonight, for the most part. I actually like the furniture roads because I think they're safe and I can drive my golf cart to more places. But, you know, two quick comments. One is I don't think we can expect the best out of the businesses on 17 when we're not putting out our best. For example, why don't we have some beautiful palm trees, a beautiful sign, things like that on 17. So I think once we do our best, then we can ask other people for their best. And second, if we want to get residents involved, one idea would be to get an ambassador for each street. and i'll volunteer alan to do a street and i'll do a street we know of course everybody on 15th avenue south um and we know a lot of people on 14th and 16th so and then i'll volunteer the rest of this family that lives right off the street so basically that's it thank you

Robin Parton, 514 Pine Drive. And I also own Surfside Shore Decor at 825 Surfside Drive. And my business would be one of the ones that's affected by the alleys. And I love the plan. If you ever drive down that alley, it is the worst place in Surfside. It looks awful. There's garbage out there from some of the other businesses where they pile it, you know, 10 feet high, it's just ridiculous. But I would love to see something happen on that alley. But I think we need to really, somebody needs to spend some time looking and talking to the businesses and finding out about deliveries, about how many we get a week, how much that is used by the delivery trucks, our employees park back there. Um, so that, that needs to be taken into account how much it is used as a working alley. And then we also need to think about the trucks that are coming in there. Um, there are, I get sometimes two a week, 18 wheelers coming down there. Um, so if we're going to put pavers in there, we got to think seriously about what we're going to be doing about that because pavers will be destroyed by 18 wheeler in minutes. So I would love for, and then we also have to think about if we're doing lights above, we're gonna have to have them high enough so that they're not gonna be affected. And then we also have to think about if we do a walking alley back there, are we gonna have the businesses open doorways from their back so that it's usable for the people who are walking by? And if that's the case, then you might wanna think about an incentive to the businesses to have to do renovations to have a back door that's available for people coming and going from this walkway. So there's a lot more to think about than just, you know, landscaping. I think there's going to be a lot of thought process. And I just want to throw that out there and find out, you know, maybe you can tell us how you handle that really working alleys, how you were able to figure out a way to balance it so that it was walkable, but then you also had it for the businesses that use it daily.

Do you want to comment on that? I mean, I don't know if you had that situation much.

Scarborough Alley is a working alley. It still is. That's the one that had a thousand cars a day. And rather than close it both ways, we made it one way, which gave us the ability to landscape it and do those things. We don't have overhead lights, but we do have lights in the landscaping, which is good. I like the pictures. I mean, that makes me wanna, that made me happy. Sometimes you, and I'm not gonna say a paradigm shift, but sometimes the proof is in the pudding. Is it an ugly alley? Then do something about it. Even if it's not what's in the picture, do something um garbage being piled up is not not something anybody wants in their community so um i think i think there is a common ground for all the businesses that probably will agree on and that's where you start um when we did scarborough alley we we um we were dealing with private property that had access to parking in the back of the properties that we had preserved We wanted to go sidewalk back there to make it safer. So we had to build on grade because it had to be transfer. You had to be able to drive over it. And there were some weird property lines along there and it's tight. But we drew up the plans and we went to every business and said, this is what we're looking at doing. And we get adjusted the plans and we went back and did it again. We added landscaping, took landscaping away, and we came up with a plan that worked for everybody. And I would guarantee you every property owner along there now is pleased with the project. Their property's worth way more than it was before. And the business owners that come in and out of there, they can only go one way when they leave and one way when they come in, but they're not fighting for their lives when they do it. And I think they would say it's a win. But that kind of answers your question, but I think there is common ground. And I think that's where you have to try to find the answer. But make it pretty no matter what you do, and I think that's the way.

All right, thank you. More public comment?

Come on up. John Gilchrist, 314 Mallard Lane. I'm sitting here and listen to all this stuff. A couple things I was really impressed with was the frontage road. I didn't realize it. I thought that was part of the state highway. I guess from what I understand, it's our property, so we can do whatever we want to with it.

Not sure. Not sure either. I'm just commenting. I think frontage road is still controlled by DOT. Am I wrong? I mean, I know that we need to look inside and all that. That's DOD.

We need to look into that. And the other thing, I love that idea about the parking lots like the Piggly Whimmy and stuff like that. They're right. Nobody uses those. They just sit there and rot and stuff like that. Great landscaping and stuff like that. Things that we talked about on the business committee years ago was trees up and down. That idea of painting those poles sounds fantastic to me. I mean, I've heard some really good stuff today. I'm very impressed.

Thank you. Thank you. Can I comment back to the road, the front road up there? The state is actually wanting towns to take over roads. So in that sense, that might be a road that Surfside might want to take over in some time or another that we could look at and do it because they sure want to get rid of them.

We need to look into it. I mean, it's a U.S. highway, so I don't know if that changes anything or not, but. All right. We're not going to solve it right now.

Bill King in 1312 North Talbot. I talked to Director Broder. Our problem with the overlay has been the new constructions follow the overlay. It's the existing properties, which most of them are existing, that we don't have a trigger that moves them forward. So we've got to come up with a trigger. And I like a carrot, but There's got to be a stick at some point. You've got 10 years to do it or five years, whatever you want to do. But at some point, it has to be done. And we'll help you do it, but you're going to have to do it. And I don't know what that is. I'm excited that we're looking at it. I talked about this when I was running a campaign. I had four or five people ask me, is there something we can do to 17th? And the next cycle, I went to some of the meetings and talked to people that came to talk to candidates. And they asked me the same thing, different people. So I think there's a real interest in town to get 17 looking better. And I do have a question. On your alleyway, the town improved the alleyway, but how did you get the builders, owners of the building, to improve the looks of their building? Because that's, again, it's, they don't have a lot of money to spend. And I just feel like we have to have a carrot to move this forward. Thank you.

This is going to further the Main Street conversation. We have an organization that used to be a Main Street program that has evolved beyond that. And they give facade grants every year. and they focus where that effort is so if we're doing a project on third avenue that's going to bring revitalization they try to target the business on third avenue to offer a 50 matching brand for facade renovation it can include signs it can be the awnings it could be the actual storefronts we did scarborough alley which is traditionally the back of a building they went and said we want you to fix up the back of your building and make it look prettier for the percent back on the dollar improve your storefront that is a way to immediately put money back in so that that is a non-profit partner that we work with that is able to do that project and it like I said used to be the main street program that did the same grant program but again we've evolved past what the main street is but it is a good program thank you again I have a question if I could just try to get the public on that same line did you cap your facade You mean how much we get each year?

Yes, you said 50%.

Yeah, there's a certain amount each business can get, and then there's a certain amount they have each year. I think in very rare exceptions, they will go above that if it's an exceptional project.

Okay.

If it has a bigger impact than what a normal project would be.

All right, any other public comment? We're all gonna get a turn again. Any other? All right, well. okay um well that's the end of the public comment i did uh want to allow a round of council comment in this case because some of us have been partially involved in this um i have uh mr longhorn who's the business uh committee liaison and mr hyatt who's the planning commission liaison have been uh in a couple of meetings uh including with uh mr emery from uh city of conway so I'm going to just start the comments this time and then I'm going to give everybody else here on council a chance so we talked about a vision statement and You know, we don't have a vision statement at this point But I think what we've heard we're going to have to develop one if we want to pursue this It's going to have to relate to the family beach You know trade on that identity enhance that identity And it's going to also have to look at developing the commercial commercial districts of Surfside Beach, including Business 17, our downtown, and to a slight extent, even the Pier Village. There's work that could be done there. But to develop all of them to their full potentials to serve the residents and visitors to Surfside Beach while also supporting the business and property owners. I think that's gonna be the framework that we will use to set up a vision statement. And I think ultimately we wanna make Surfside Beach attractive in all ways so that the property owners and the businesses want to come and spend their money to improve properties and that residents and visitor customers want to spend their money here to support those businesses. We'll need to look at all funding opportunities, and there are several as we touched upon. We're not going to get into that today. But we're going to have to spend some town money to get started. There's no doubt about it. We need to show that we are serious if we want the business and property owners to be serious. And that's where I'll leave it right now. So with that, Mr. Stamey, any comments you want to make? Yes.

As I said earlier, I see several business people here. I wish y'all would have came up and gave us a little bit more feedback about what y'all would like to see in these things. But saying that, I am glad to see you here. That's the biggest thing. And I think we are looking at trying to get something started because this is, I've lived here quite a while, and this has been a big deal of 17, trying to get it straightened out. And I hope that in the near future that we can get that little bit started. It ain't going to be completed, but a little bit. All right, Mr. Coleman.

I agree with Ms. Carlson. We have to beautify 17. It's a mess. It really is. It's a lot better than it was a few years back. We didn't have any landscaping in the mediums. I'm with the infrastructure subcommittee and we were discussing this. I think you could possibly think about putting some landscaping on the mediums between the road and the frontage road. But if the 17 corridor looks terrible, who would want to put your business here? That's a start. We have to start getting people who own buildings here. They've owned buildings here for 40 years. And they really don't care. They're getting their rents. They're not looking to improve. There's really no incentive to do anything different. And that's why we look like We're in the 60s here. But we really have to start doing something. And once we do, I think it's going to roll. It's going to get bigger and better. That's it.

All right. Thank you. Mr. Walsh. First of all, please, just let me thank everybody for the hard work on this thing. This is getting closer to 15 years than it is 10 years now since we have actually implemented this plan and it's nice to see that so many intelligent, productive, experienced people are involved in it now. I'm excited that it's finally moving forward and I'll just throw it out there that whatever I can do to assist in any way. I'll be a street volunteer. That was a good idea. I'll go up and down and ask people what they want. But anyway, yeah, just thanks for everything you're doing. I appreciate it. And I look forward to seeing the next steps come out of you, Mark.

All right, thank you, sir. Mr. Lawhart. Yeah, I'm not going to add too much to what I already said, other than to just reemphasize that this is an opportunity to create a strategy and vision for the town for the future. I don't think we can overemphasize the importance of this master plan and getting public input for that. So whatever needs to happen. If we need to have people walking down the street with signs over their head, tell all your friends, whatever. We need to get people to participate to understand what they want. But as I said, this is a completely different way of looking at things. I mean, I've been around Surfside for 20-some-plus years, then living here almost seven. Surfside, from what I've seen, has never looked at it strategically. It's always been incremental change, trying to improve some things. Bill's point about needing to have an incentive or a stick, whatever it is, carrot or stick for the existing businesses and landowners. This master plan is how we fix that. We can put that in there. And the stuff that Wendy's working on, some of the stuff that John's been working on, it's exciting because there are avenues out there that I don't think anybody in this town ever thought about in terms of funding to try to get private funding and maybe even some public funding to help attract businesses and beautify the community and stuff like that. So let's take advantage of it. And I do want to, I just want to, I want to appreciate what the planning commission has done, John, a particular business committee, what they're doing all these, because I mean, that whole group is moving fast ever since Ellen got involved. But anyway, Thanks for coming. Please do tell your friends because this is an exciting time for us, I think. It's an opportunity. So let's take advantage of it. Thank you, sir. Mr. Hyatt.

Yeah, just a few quick things. One of the things I realize is that surveys are extremely important. When I worked on the peer committee, we had great success using surveys to decide what it was the public wanted most for the peer. We were able to analyze the results and list the top items. And that's kind of something we'll have to do here. I know it might be great to have oral surveys, but the problem with those is it's real hard to analyze them and put them into a one, two, three, four, five priority list. Another thing I'd like to say is that this obviously at some point is going to require professional help, which means that it's going to have to be a budget item, which means it's going to have to be an investment with a reward that comes later. And I know a lot of people knee jerk at that, but we need to understand that unless we invest in our town, we can't expect anybody else to. The success breeds success and we have to start small and build to the greater. And that's what I think we all need to look to do. The low hanging fruit concepts that Mark provided and Adam provided are certainly the good places to start. Once you start, other people get aboard. Once businesses come aboard, the bigger businesses come aboard. Maybe there'll be businesses that'll want to buy out the stubborn businesses. So we need to just have some faith that if we start the work, it's kind of like that old movie. If you build it, they will come. And maybe if we build it, they will come. And that's what we need to work for. So anyway, thank you all for being here, participating. I hope you continue to do so and inspire your friends. Thank you. All right, thank you, Mr. Hyatt. Ms. Shaw.

One thing is I thought we are the peer village. I keep hearing the E-District. I thought we had agreed that it was the village. One thing I ask is, because honestly, village reminds me of our small town. The E-District reminds me of something I go see in New York City. So let's start changing our language as universal and that'll help us go along. As far as business 17, I think there's some things we could do now. There are some businesses that have left and their old sign is still standing there. It's covered up. So why can't town take them down? I mean, the business is not there. So it's just something I'm throwing out there. I think there's some things that we should be able to do now. All right, I'm talking. Thank you.

I appreciate it.

I gave you all time to talk. So with that said, I just think as a group, I love what planning commission's doing. I used to be their liaison. I've been here 10 years, nothing's changed. So I hope this momentum picks up. I love the ideas, but we've got to make it happen. And I know it's just not one entity. It's the planning commission. It's getting the money. And I hope we can make this move because I've been waiting for something to change for 10 years. And there's nothing that's changed on 17 that I can see. And if you want to say I'm wrong, you can point it out to me. It's still ugly.

Don't interact. Yeah, just finish, please.

With that said, I'm going to say goodnight.

Okay, thank you. so we'll wrap up i do want a couple points uh i do want to mention that the murals that we saw in conway tommy simpson painted for those of you don't know the suicide lady that is his mural and uh so we've benefited from that before in the past um next steps i think what we need to do is uh the key stakeholder group that kind of has been working with uh planning commission and business committee members uh will meet and that's the liaisons and me, and we'll just flesh this out, how to set up some public workshop input things, similar, I think, to how we do the comprehensive plan, where we sit there and put some ideas in, and you walk around with the dots and all that, and you comment on it. I think that's the way to get people in informally. We'll kick around ideas like that and see if that will help generate a little bit of interest in what we might be doing. So with that, we can conclude this. All I need is a motion to adjourn. Mr. Mayor.

Mr. Walsh. Make a motion that we adjourn this joint council workshop meeting.

Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? None. Meeting adjourned. Thank you all.