Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

All right. Good evening everybody. Thank you very much for joining us at this Town of Waxaw Board of Commissioners regular meeting this May 12th, 2026. Uh please rise for the pledge of allegiance and a moment of silence to give thanks and praise. I

pledge allegiance to the flag to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. All righty. First up, we have the adoption of tonight's agenda. Are there any adjustments or amendments to this evening's agenda? Hearing none, then can I get a motar? None. Then, can I get a motion to adopt tonight's agenda as presented?

All in favor?

I. Any opposed? Hearing? None. The motion carries. Uh, general public comments. Tonight we have a grand total of zero people speaking, so hopefully we can get through that quickly. Um, without further ado, uh, board of commissioner response to these vast quantities of public comments. I didn't think so. Please, people, don't be shy. Uh, sign up anytime. Uh, we're here every month. You have three whole minutes. They are yours. These are general public comments. It's an opportunity for us to hear what people think and what they're concerned about most. So, please um don't hesitate to step on up. I know it's a little nerve-wracking from time to time, but we don't bite. Uh next up is the consent agenda. Can I get a motion to adopt tonight's consent agenda?

So, move. All in favor? I I. Any opposed? Hearing none. Motion carries. Uh next up is a recognition for America 250NC. Janet See another good shirt. You got to forward these websites to where are you finding these? Well, the blue America 2501 was from the America 250 website and they have tons of merchandise. Anything you could put America 250 on, they got it. They got it. This was Amazon.

Um, there we go. Okay. Uh so the um America 250 North Carolina Flag Contest. Um America 250NC is the official state organization leading the commemoration of the United States 250th anniversary. The flag contest created by the America 250NC team invited fourth grade students from across North Carolina to design county flags that reflect how they see their region of the state. Students were encouraged to think about what makes Union County special and why they love living here. The goal was to inspire students to think deeply about local history, culture, and geography through symbolism while establishing relationships between local families, the school system, and local America 250 committees. The flag designs and essays created will not only showcase student creativity, but also provide a lasting legacy of their county during this moment in time. The Blacksaw America 250 committee scored the flags and essays using a rubric that weighed representation of county identity, use of symbolism, creativity and originality, design quality and visual clarity, and the written explanation and connection to America 250 themes. The committee chose six semi- finalists and then our communications manager ran a poll on social media to allow residents to choose the top three entries. Tonight, we are pleased to recognize the winners of the contest. Each winner will be awarded a certificate and a gift bag that includes gift certificates which were generously donated by the John Foster chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. And I'd like to recognize Miss Glattis Carr. Um Miss Glattis represents the D on the Waxaw America 250 committee. At this time I would like to call up the children to receive their awards. Um and please stay by the front so we can take your photo. Um the third place winner, I was not

here. Um but herk flag um included the Waxaw overhead bridge, the Belt Brothers store along with various crops and poultry farms and Union County School, the best school in Union County. The second place winner is Matthew with a colorful flag that includes a star because Union County is the star of North Carolina. And the first place winner is Luke. His flag includes the historic overhead bridge. That's stay there. The railroad and a barn and crops to represent agriculture. His use of color includes blue to represent the great weather, red to show the colors of the barn and firefighters, and brown to show the wood of the bridge. Luke's essay states that Union County is the best home he could ever have. All right.

Well, thank you very much. That was really exciting. And I think these things are really cool. It's fun because they give you a good sense of what Union County looks like through the eyes of our young kids. So, it's very, very fun to see. Thank you. All righty. Next up, we have Waxaw's African-American Heritage Project. Okay. So, if you remember way back in the fall of 2024, WAXA was uh granted awarded a grant from the National Park Service through the Historic Preservation Funds for certified local governments. Um, and that grant was um to help fund this Waxaw African-American History Project. Uh the timeline was uh September of 2024. We were awarded the grant. Um in December, an RFP was circulated. In January of 2025, we selected New South Associates and our steering committee was established. In February, the uh consultant started on the historic context research. Um in May and June, we had some community input sessions. Uh we had a tent at Kayfest. Um, and then we did a community history event at First Presbyterian Church and uh we also had an HPC tent at the Junth event uh where we interviewed uh members of the community. Uh in the summer of 25 we began oral histories. There were 13 oral histories recorded and those um have been sent to the state archives. Uh and then resources were selected for surveys and the draft survey forms were submitted to the state historic preservation office. Um in August we had the end of the shipo review period and resources were

selected for the North Carolina study list. The study list um are recommendations from Shipo for which of those resources should be added to the national register. Uh and then in October we met with the uh national register committee and draft then draft reports were submitted for the steering committee and shipo review and then in February we received our final materials. So the historic context uh was a lot of background research and review of existing scholarship including the National Register historic places nominations and Shipo's architectural survey files. Primary and secondary sources on file at local and state archives. Uh newspaper archives including the Star of Zion and the Charlotte Post which were newspapers that were produced at historically black colleges throughout this region. Um and then documents that were found in the heritage room in Monroe. Uh we did a brief history of Union County from the colonial period through the reconstruction. And then there's a history of Waxaw from 1888 to present day which includes a lot of census data. Through the oral histories, uh we focused on several different areas. One was trying to find the geographic boundaries of where our African-American his uh community lived. Um, we identified two areas. One along Howy Mine Road, which was called the low end, uh, and then along Waxaw Marvin Road or Sandy Ridge. We talked about education. Um, schooling was often disrupted to have children harvest the cotton crop. Uh, when cotton was picked, the children could return to school, you know, once the cotton was all done. Um, and then the Waxaw School was a Rosenald school which was constructed in 1924 on land that was

donated for the purpose of erecting a public school and burying burial ground for the colored population that served as a school until the 1960s and then it was transformed into a community center. Western Union High School served our black community from 1940 until it burned down in 1954. Uh, and then it was reopened in 1965 to black students in all grades. And then by 1970, schools were being integrated. And during the transition, black students could choose whether to go to Western Union High School or go to Parkwood School. There were a few African-American businesses that were identified in town. uh Sally Gladen or Stinson's Hotel which was on the corner of North Broom Street and Howie Mine uh where the Crossroads Coffee Shop is now. Uh Jack Green's store on the south side of Howie Mine and then Rudolph Higgins store and there was also uh Willie Malone's shoe shop and pool room on the south side of Howi Mine near the Wesley Chapel Zion Church. As far as work life, uh workers were primarily farm laborers, sharecroppers. Uh a lot of the females were domestic servants. There, like I mentioned, were a few small business owners. Uh and then several of the men worked for the railroad or were Draymond. Um and then brick layers. There were a large number of brick layers and concrete finishers um in town. And you'll see the buildings there. um how they're unique to Waxaw and how the um pattern of the brick, how they mixed in the light colored brick with the red brick. For social life, what we found out was that the 4th of July was a huge celebration for our African-American community. Um people would come, it was a homecoming, uh and people would come

back to Waxaw. The big attraction was the um Fourth of July picnic and the baseball games that were played at the field next to the east side cemetery um with horseshoe tournaments and pig runs and a lot of food. Um and then in addition to the Fourth of July baseball games, there were other games where Waxaw teams competed against one another. For social life, there was a Masonic lodge which focused on social and benevolent activities and the women were members of the Order of the Eastern Star. Uh there was a movie theater that was located where Provisions is now. Um and then the corner um the corner is a corner of Broom Street and North Maine. Uh and that's where people gathered. It was a social gathering spot. It was also a spot where day workers met to get rides up into Charlotte. Uh and then Waxaw Elementary School, um that Rosenwald School, after the school closed, it became a community center. There were a lot of weddings and special events held at that building. For religious life, we found um several different school uh churches, Presbyterian, the Bethl Presbyterian and First Presbyterian, the Ebenezer Zion Church, the Piney Grove Baptist Church, the Mount Pisga Baptist Church, uh Wesley Chapel and Mount Nebo Nebo Missionary Baptist Church. Um there were several places that we did architectural surveys of um and that requires an historical architect to come out and look at each of the buildings. Um do a description and a brief history on them and those are submitted to the state historic preservation office for selection for that study list. So recommendations for the um from that

came out of the report were that we could add places to our Waxos history story map. Um they suggested that we do more research into the African-American master masons uh because there are significant number of ma of brick homes in the area. Um, but we need more information before we can actually qualify them to be listed on the National Register. Um, and then the East Side Cemetery that contains a lot of unmarked graves. It's one of the focal points of the African-American community. That's where they met to play baseball. Um, the fields were there. That's where the school was built all in that area. Um, so it would be great if we could document that cemetery and one of the recommendations is to do ground penetrating radar um to try and identify those grave sites. Uh other recommendations were historic markers, um places like the corner where people met and gathered, uh the Western Union School, um the churches, and then maybe a marker for the low end on the east side or the Howie Mine Road neighborhood just to identify those neighborhoods. Uh a walking tour, we do a walking tour occasionally downtown. we could add either an in separate walking tour for the um African-American neighborhoods or incorporate it into one walking tour of downtown. Um again, there were the National Register of Historic Place nominations. There were only two buildings that qualified for that at this time. Neither one of them is actually within Waxaw Town limits. Um, so the Bethl Presbyterian Church and the Western Union School, uh, they've been added to the study list, but that's probably as far as we'll go with that because they are not within

town limits. Um, so it's not something that the town could promote. Um, and then exhibits. We can do exhibits similar to the exhibits that we had here for for America 250. Something that um, banners like that that we could share at the museum or at schools or or the library. um something that we could travel. Um and then another recommendation was for publications um because we need a way to gather this information and share it with the community. And that's all I have. Well, thank you Janet. That's really interesting. Um a lot of great history going on. Yes.

Any questions or comments from the board? You mentioned the east side cemetery and um doing a type of ground penetrating radar. How does how does one go about doing that? Is that something the state helps with? Um that was my question as well. Well, we can we can look into applying for a grant for that. Again, it's not property that's owned by the town, so we have to work with the oper the owners of the property. Um, but it's something we'll definitely look into and probably bring back before you. Is that privately owned or is it in the county? It's done by I think it's owned by two churches together. Okay.

Is this something we can get universities attention of just so they're aware and maybe their archaeology and or anthropology departments might be interested in maybe helping fund said survey. I can look into that. Yeah. Or loaning interns to do said survey. the anthropology or archaeology interns. Well, and and we can get help from the state too, from the state historic preservation office. They have a an archaeological department. Um but again, we don't own it. So, our first step is to get in touch with the property owners and see if they're willing to allow us, you know, to to do any work. It'd be helpful if we can provide them with alternatives or ideas on what can be done and

how we can kind of honor those that are there. Yes. Great. Well, thank you. All righty. What next? Let's see here. Battle of the Waxalls reenactment and living history. Janet, once again. Yes, once again. So, I would like to introduce

Megan Plyer, who you probably all already know, and I did have a brief presentation, but I think I'll let her take over. So, we are now I serve on the board at the museum, the Waxaws. I also teach at Wax Elementary, and I'm a lifelong Waxall resident. So, Waxawall has my heart. This is our at the museum. This is our third year bringing the Battle of the Waxalls to life. It's an American Revolution living history and reenactment weekend that we host. We um in our third year, we're going into about hosting about 200 reenactors. That's living historians, reenactment units, including calvary units. So, we have the horses. That picture is from last march into downtown. For our third year, we're going to continue with the march into downtown to kick off our battle of the waxaws. and we have the drum and F leading us off. Um, we host the Battle of the Waxaws, which is an American Revolution reenactment and event that happened in May. So, we're coming up on the 246th anniversary in just a couple weeks for the Battle of the Waxaws. So, it's a big part of our history and it's bringing awareness that the American Revolution did happen in Waxaw. We also host the Battle of Walkup Plantation which was um two miles away from here almost. So we host that on Sunday reenactment and it's truly just bringing living history to Waxall, bringing the American Revolution to life and immersing our community in our American Revolution history.

Thank you. Well, thank you. I don't have anything to add to that. Something I had the pleasure to attend that last year. It was definitely a fun event. It's kind of a great way to spend an afternoon and see everybody that does it. The folks that do that that are involved in it are so enthusiastic and so knowledgeable. So, it's it's fun to just kind of hang out with them and chat and learn a lot. Yeah. Anyone who's interested in the history of the Revolutionary War should definitely go because, you know, uh they had a saying back then, remember the Waxaws, right? Or remember the battle of the Waxaw of Waxaw. Uh it was considered pivotal. So, great history.

Thank you. And I have to say I think the if parents can bring their children and speak to the reenactors, they are a wealth of information and you really do feel like you're stepping back in time, it's a lot of fun. And I will say the downtown takeover is pretty exciting when they come through with the horses and um the drums and and last year they really did take over downtown more so than we thought. And so this year we'll be more prepared, but we're excited and and I'm looking forward to it and spread the word everyone.

Well, great. And as part of our consent agenda, we did have a proclamation for this uh this evening. So we will go ahead and read this into the official record. Procla proclamation declaring the battle of the wax halls reenactment and living history weekend on June 5th and 7th uh 2026. Whereas the history of our community is a living legacy built upon courage, perseverance, and the vision of those who came before us whose stories continue to shape our identity and guide our future. Whereas the preservation and sharing of this history is not merely an academic exercise but a vital act of remembrance that strengthens the bonds between generations instills pride and our shared heritage and deepens our understanding of the challenges and the triumphs that have defined our journey. Whereas the Battle of the Waxalls reenactment and living history weekend is a true collaboration of reenactors, the Museum of the Waxalls, the Waxaw America 250 committee and the America 250NC committee and the town of Waxhall where history where history, community and education do come together to keep the past alive and keep people learning. Whereas the Battle of the Waxall's reenactment and living history weekend offers a unique and immersive opportunity for residents and visitors to step back in time to witness firsthand the daily lives, traditions and pivotal moments of early eras through dedication of history through dedicated historians, reenactors, educators, and volunteers. Whereas such events provide more than entertainment, they serve as an open air classroom where the lessons of the past are brought vividly to life, inspiring curiosity, empathy, and a renewed appreciation for the freedoms and responsibilities that we all enjoy today. Whereas the reenactments, demonstrations, and interpretive programs presented during the Battle of

the Waxalls reenactment and living history weekend honor the sacrifices of those who served in times of war, peace, celebrate, and the ingenuity and resilience of our forebears and remind us of the history is not confined to books, but lives on in the people, places, and traditions we cherish. And whereas it is both fitting and proper that we as a community set aside a dedicated time to honor our past and engage with our heritage and ensure that the stories of those who came before us are preserved for generations yet to come. Now therefore be it proclaimed that I, Robert J. Murray III by the virtue of the authority vested in me as the mayor of the town of Waxaw in the state of North Carolina do hereby proclaimed this the weekend of June 5th through 7th as Battle of the Waxall's reenactment and living history weekend in the town of Waxall. Be it further proclaimed that we encourage all citizens to take part in the scheduled activities and to listen to the voices of history as told by the interpreters and to reflect upon the enduring legacy that has been entrusted to our care. A duly adopted effective today the 12th day of May 2026.

Thank you. It was an honor to read that and a pleasure to read that. So thank you.

Thank you so much. Yeah, it's I I can't say enough about learning history, studying history, and and remembering our history because there's a lot of folks out there trying to help us forget it. Um so, let's bear that in mind. Um the history is not a dead thing. It's a living thing there for us to learn and appreciate. All righty. Next on the agenda, we have a public hearing on the text amendment petition TA 002 2026. Kevin presenting. Mr. Kevin, what do you got?

One second. Mayor, one second. I have Yeah. Make the full screen PowerPoint. Thank you. Sorry, I'm uh we'll do prefer to have a screen in front of me. Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to read that up there. Okay. All right. Thank you, Mayor and uh commissioners. Um this is the first of uh what will be Excuse me, Mayor. You need to open the public hearing.

Commissioner Dant was just asking me if we need to do that. So win for Commissioner Daunt. Um all righty then. Could I get a motion to open this public hearing regarding the text amendment petition TA00002 2026? All in favor? I. Any opposed? Okay. For the record, that was Commissioner Daunt that initiate. Anyway, take it away, Kevin.

Thank you, Mayor. Um, so this is this will be the first of what will probably be be about five or six different um, text amendments that'll be brought to y'all. Um, we have a total of about probably 16 different sections that we've identified or that you have mentioned to us that need to be addressed um, over the past several months. Um, so we're trying to wait our way through that list. Um, some of these are directly related. We'll try to group those together. um those that aren't um um then we've got um then we got some that are a little bit um separate and don't really relate well, but we're just trying to kind of get through them. So um this is the first round. Um and the items that we're looking to uh take care of in this one are in chapters 5, 7, and 13 of the LDC. Um those related to uh sub minor subdivisions, private streets, and lot coverage in conservation subdivisions. uh minor subdivisions is the first of these uh minor subdivisions and um the uh private streets. We're really just trying to kind of close some loopholes on try to uh clarify the intent of the ordinance as it is right now. So, state law uh provides specific criteria for exempt subdivisions, but it also permits towns to distinguish between minor subdivisions and major subdivisions of land. Uh currently, we go up to nine units. Um and then anything over that is a major subdivision. Um whether it has new roads or not. Um the intent of this this allows property owners to create small-cale subdivisions of land that do not require major increases in infrastructure or adoption by the board. Uh it's a much faster process for staff and more convenient for property owners. Staff's identified loopholes in the current LDC text which permit minor subdivisions utilizing private streets to be platted and lots sold without design or provision for infrastructure. Uh these are commonly referred to as

paper streets or paper lots. Um you've probably seen some of them in our GIS such as those on the right there. Um this was common a long time back in the day. They would just do a plat, they'd record it. they'd sell them off one by one and maybe somebody would build the street out, maybe uh you know, maybe whoever bought it would build it out, but it causes problems later on down the road. Um we don't want to do that anymore. Um and we we we really don't do much of that. Um on the left is a more typical minor subdivision with the existing uh infrastructure. Um this is not an actual subdivision, just an example. Uh so you see there is a road there with sewer and water, everything available. you were just drawing the lines and dividing the tract of land in accordance with the LDC. We've changed the wording on this. Um and actually let me um let me jump ahead. Um is this the old one? Is this the old one that was put in there? Thought I had some that were on here that were highlighted. Oh, maybe that was in the next section. Sorry about that. um too many different versions of this going around. Um so those will still be those that have no more than nine lots. Um they um and then also do not require the dedication of public rideway or the installation or extension of public or private infrastructure and or shared amenities for the purpose of providing required access or service to the lots. And this shall include public and private streets required for access, water and sewer lines except for private taps. um dedicated open space and shared amenities, public easements or lands to be deed to the town and or other agencies, and shared storm water drainage and detention features and other improvements the zoning administrator or town engineer deem as requiring detailed plans and further review.

Um private streets is the next section. Um and the intent of this is to provide for some reasonable limit but limited use of private streets where appropriate. um that will reduce potential long-term cost to the town in the future and minimize conflict between property owners. I just want to do this as we go. I hope nobody else minds because I know we've got a lot of content here and it's pretty deep. Yeah. So, I don't want to get all the way at the end and then ask questions from the beginning and I'm not I apologize. I'm not sure. I had a a slide that actually had some changes that were made in there and they were supposed to be highlighted. I'm not sure why it's not showing up. Well, I just wanted to ask a question in your last slide when we were talking about storm water drainage.

Right. Um, if you're doing eight or nine homes, you're not mandated to do a storm water mitigation or is that something that's under review by the town? And if the engineering department says, "Yeah, you need to do something," then that owner would have to do something. If it meets certain thresholds by, you know, by the engineer, it's usually over a certain uh certain acreage. So, there is a engineering review is kind of my point that there are our engineering staff will look at it and assess whether or not some sort of mitigation is going to be required. Correct. Even if it's as small as eight or five, five or six or eight homes. Correct. Okay. Yeah, I think that's how I was interpreting. It's usually it's a per lot. Um it's a per lot, but then there's also the combined the what the whole development is going to contribute as well. So,

Yep, that makes sense. Thank you. Yeah, that was one of my questions because we don't want to get to a place where we're just allowing it and then later we have an issue with storm water and now we have to pay to fix it. I mean, I don't know who would be respons who would be responsible at that point, right? If we okay it is it on us then?

Yeah, that's that's and that's really where we want to be at also with it is that anything that has to be installed um in terms of infrastructure we want to have fully engineered and approved ahead of time. We don't want to be going back afterwards after lots are already subdivided. You may have multiple property owners and trying to figure out, you know, how do we install streets? How do we make sure that everything's draining properly off everybody's lots? it makes for a big mess that way. So, we're we're really trying to prevent that as much as possible. Okay.

Um and the private streets is somewhat similar. Um we don't want to have future um conflict between property owners or the town in terms of who's supposed to maintain the roads, who has access to them. Um so, we want to ensure that private streets when allowed are also designed in accordance with town standards to ensure consistency across the town and continued access and safety. Um and uh also as I mentioned prevent the long-term issues with maintenance, the ability to develop properties and continued access to both property owners and public safety and services. Understanding that there are some useful smallcale applications for small streets which we don't want to entirely prevent. Um there's some different examples here of private streets. I've circled those in the green, those that we uh would typically approve. um such as a private alley um behind uh town homes. Uh that is a secondary access, something we would not really regulate in terms of design. Um they are on they have primary access to the street. Um if they have a driveway um to uh garages or anything else in the back there, that's more of a private thing. Um public safety, fire, uh EMS, mail, everybody can get to the front of their buildings uh there. Um, and we have public maintenance as well on that street. We also have exemptions uh for those um when they front on a public uh park. Um, so that lot on the bottom, the the the one below that there, those lots, they could have a private street. Um, it's overall it's limited in length. Um, it would have to meet uh standards. So, it would have to be a minimum of 20 ft wide and meet um town engineering standards to make sure that it's not just gravel or is just going to fall apart because that is their primary access as well.

I have a question while you're there. Yeah. So, sorry. When you say private street, who's responsible for maintaining that street? Uh that would be in this case would be on the HOA. And what if there's no HOA? Well, they would have to have they would have to have something like that in order to have them. You can't have a private street, not have anybody maintaining it. So then, would we require a minor subdivision of let's say not let's say it's less than five homes? Mhm. Do we have will we require them to have an HOA? I don't know that we could do that, right?

If there's a I mean, if if you have any public features like that that are shared, you really need some kind of mechanism to maintain them. So yeah, I think in case that code or is that a statute that they have to follow or once they build five homes then commissioner you can you can also do it through covenants that would be recorded for the land owners who wish to have it maintained as a private street and it does remain their responsibility and then it would be through us though like is that something that we require and we have covenants the covenants are private right covenants are like my I have CCNRs in in my HOA but if I know there's some areas here that don't have HOAs, but there's five, six homes and now it's like

it's half-hazardly maintained. So, I don't know. The covenant would spell that would would clearly spell that out what the legal responsibility is for the property owners. We we do have a couple like you're referring to. There's there's no documentation existing anywhere for that. And that's part of the problem with that, too. Yeah. That's just my concern moving forward. I don't want it to be our responsibility.

Right. Absolutely. Um the um uh the subdivision on the top right there um that is that is that's actually a a commercial subdivision that I mentioned earlier um that was done kind of as a loophole and um it's one that we really want to prevent anything like that. First, we don't want to have major streets that connect to other properties that are being done as private that could cause issues with um access and connectivity um later on in the future. Um, and then also they've got um they've got lots there that are on that going back to the the the minor subdivision. They've got lots there that aren't developed. Um they don't actually have a street or anything like that out there at this time. So those two kind of come together with that. And then acceptable versus not recommended. Um that's we actually a development that we have. Those are all public, but those are those green are some examples of some smaller streets that could probably function okay as uh a private uh street. um not overall going to greatly impact um the development or access to lots there. Okay, we do have this is the right section. Um we did make some changes to this. Um this is the uh definitions um this is what was previously shown um to y'all at the um um the first review of this. Um we have made a couple changes um at the after um we received some input from the from the board. Um so private ungated streets are permitted on a limited basis when the following conditions can be met. Um they do not provide primary access to any lots or larger parcels. They border except for those listed in sections 5.13. Um those are specifically cottages, town homes, and commercial uh properties. We're not we're not proposing to change that at all. Um we're going to keep that as it is. We just want to kind of make sure that we're addressing private streets better when they are used in those situations. Uh for those listed in

513, they should provide direct access to a limited number of lots or smaller parcels in a development and are short in overall length. Um there was some question about uh block sizes. Um we've gone ahead and referenced section 7.2.1 um which spells out different block uh standard lengths for different zoning districts. Uh, private streets shall not serve as collectors or through streets and are not intended to be the sole connection to or from future development on neighboring tracks or subdivisions which could hinder future development or access to said properties. And then when providing primary access to lots or parcels, private streets should be designed and constructed in accordance with the design standards for public streets set forth in this code and the town's engineering design and construction standards manual. uh private alleys, drives, and other improvements which provide only secondary access to lots or serve other purposes are not considered private streets for the purposes of this code. So, trying to differentiate between the two. And then those that are going to be primary access do need to meet all town code um when it comes to streets uh street development, street widths, um depth, all the above. And then also some um some suggestions here um just to kind of strengthen this up a little bit. The zoning administrator and town engineer may review proposed exceptions to this section, in the case of non-conforming lots and other rare circumstances when it is deemed that private streets would serve a lot or lots better than public streets and when the general intent of this code is met. Um, in such cases, staff would make recommendations uh to the uh board that would be approving the plat um case of a major subdivision. Um the last one, um lot coverage and conservation subdivisions. Um and I'll just try to explain real quick. We do have um some some standards for lot sizes in our just standard subdivisions. The conservation subdivision allows the same density. So you can have the same

number of lots, but it allows those lot sizes to be um pretty uh significantly reduced. Um, and the trade-off is that all of the remaining land from that be conserved um in a conservation easement uh in its natural state uh for either agriculture or uh natural land. Um however, when going through there um we do we allow for increased lot coverage. That is the amount of imperous surface um buildings, driveways, uh even pools which even though they have water, they're still considered impervious. Um those all add up to give what your your total lot coverage is on on your lots. And um we did not include a lot coverage increase for R1 and R2 with conservation subdivisions. Um it did appear to be an oversight because it was included in R3. Um and the standard coverages, they may not be significant for sufficient for all aspects of single family um living on smaller lots. Once you get down to those smaller lot sizes in those conservation subdivisions, we're suggesting a proportional increase in percentage of lot coverage to provide more flexible buildable areas as as lots get smaller while also still providing a large reduction in overall impervious surface in a subdivision. An across the board increase we thought would potentially allow for more surface area in some of those medium-sized lots um that are just slightly below the standard but all of a sudden have a very significant increase. um we didn't feel that met the intent of the ordinance. Um R3 is slightly modified. Um and we make no change to proposed R4 because R4 already allows for a lot of other options and already has very significant lot uh pretty substantial lot coverage. And just to explain the conservation subdivisions again, um the square on the

right is a 5 acre parcel in R1. Um so it is it allows for one unit per acre. So you see five lots there. Those are the smallest size you can make them. The rest of that land would be required for streets, infrastructure, and some required open space. The conservation um subdivision on the right uh shows also five lots, much smaller um with a ample amount of land that can be added to that for conservation land as well. And this is a little bit confusing, but the um the lots on the top, those are an R1 lot, kind of standard size, standard minimum size in a standard subdivision through R4 um with a house on it, driveway, maybe a little patio. And then you could see the area in the gray would be uh the remainder of the land that could be used um that you could build on. You could put a shed, you could put a um patio, more driveway, etc. things that people would typically have um on a residential lot. Uh shows how much more you could add to those lots. Um once you get to the smaller size um in the uh conservation subdivision, there's not much room, if any, to um to add some of those things. And some it even gets hard to really have a substantial house and and parking um and other outside features. So what we've suggested doing is changing um in R1 going from uh 40 um originally we had proposed up to uh 55 uh% at the um at the max and it would increase 1% per 1,000 square foot decrease in the lot size. We're actually going to step that back um after the last review. Um, I think it's very reasonable. Uh, make that 50%. Um, which in R1 I believe would be

around 10,000 to 9,000 square ft. At that point, you would be maxed out in terms of your percentages. You could still do 50% after that, but you're not going to get any additional. Um, and I think that would be that's pretty reasonable and pretty workable for most subdivisions. Um, we did the same thing in in R2. Uh, that standard is 50. We suggested that go to 60. Um R3 originally we had proposed to leave alone um at the 75%. There was some concern that because that was already listed that if we try to change that too much we might you know we might run into some issues with that. But after talking about it, um that is something we can also um potentially do. Make that change to 70 and that'll be clean as well to go 50 60 70 just up from uh 40 50 60. So there will be um and I will present some of those additional suggestions to y'all in just a second here. And that's going to change some of this. I I got this uh put this presentation uh together before we had made those last uh recommendations. So that was proposed and then this is what it would look like now. Um I'll just read the first one and the second one are very similar but R1 and R2 um limits the total to 50 and or or or 60 depending on the district. Um and then unless conditionally approved during preliminary subdivision approval um which in this case would go through the board um or by variance uh by the board of adjustment that would happen on individual lots afterwards if somebody came in and they absolutely wanted to put a larger shed or do an addition that was going to be over. Um that could be considered as a variance at that point. Um similarly on R3 um we did leave that at 75%. Um, the reason we did not do the 1% per 1,000 ft² is just simply that the lots do not decrease by that much. They

only increase uh decrease by about 8,000 ft. So, it was just harder to kind of uh bracket that in there. So, we went with 2% instead. Um, this just shows an example in R1 and R2. um how making some of those changes in percent, you can actually have a little bit more room to put some stuff and increase the house size a little bit, have some more room for some of the things you would typically see in a backyard. These are small lots, um but it would allow them to be uh functional for what most people associate with single family homes. Um, as you can see right here, um, this shows the table, um, with the increasing, uh, the decreasing lot sizes in the conservation subdivision as well as the increase in coverage. And the highlighted areas right there are really where the the amendment, the most recent amendments we're talking about making would be to the 50% cap there in R1. We kind of stop right there and then 60% in R2. Um similarly if you went to 70% in R3 um you could see that would go down to about 6,200 and then after that you would not get any additional um percent increase. Um before I do this can I can you can you pull up that word document? Can you pull up that word document I have in there? Okay. Um I don't believe I can scroll. Um Okay. This this shows um that recent change. Um it was suggested changing the R3 to 70%. So we've made that. If you can kind of keep scrolling, Nick, u we've made that in there. We've also um

we've fixed some of the typos that were in there um with the numbers. You'll see right here in R3 uh we've taken that from 75 to 70 um as recommended. It's also reflected there in the dimensional table. Um and then this rep represents we also got an item for that in there as well. 70%. Um, and if you'll keep going, Nick, there was one other area there. Okay. Um, right here, um, there was also some concern about the private water and sewer systems in, um, in the, uh, minor subdivisions. Um, I think they were really already covered. Um, if you could just Yeah, we've seen those. Can you go back down? Okay. Right there. Um, thanks, Nick. Um um I think they were already covered in the um in our ordinance um either um either through the the the text we had there or uh by virtue of having to have an SUP in order to put those systems in. I think that kind of covers that, but we went ahead just to make double sure uh and we can make a change here as well, add in private water and sewer systems serving multiple lots um andor public water and sewer lines except for private taps to individual lots just to help clarify there. Um as was one of the um recommended changes. Okay. Can you go back to the PowerPoint?

Okay. All right. Thank you. Um on April 21st, planning board heard and recommended for approval by five uh five to zero 5 to0 vote and Yep. Um, go two slides, please. Oh, I guess I can do that, can't I? Sorry. Okay. Um, and they also voted for a land use plan consistency. The text amendment is consistent with the Waxaw 2040 comprehensive plan and reasonable in the public interest and that it improves site design to improve residential development, maximize environmental conservation and improve transportation connectivity and provision of public and private infrastructure. Um this was done with the first um iteration of the uh of the ordinances. However, the suggestions that are being made are pretty much in line with what was already in there. The changes are relatively uh moderate. tonight. Um after the public hearing, um you can consider this if you would like to um and you can consider approval uh approval with conditions or denial. Um staff does recommend a motion recommending approval of proposed text amendments to LDC and I would recommend it with those most recent changes as well um to um was to all three sections. Okay, thank you very much, Kevin. Any questions or comments from the board?

Yeah. Uh, regarding the private streets amendment, would it make any currently constrained or impractical residential parcels newly developable developable? Uh, no, I don't believe so. I mean, it's I mean, if you could put a private street in, you could put a public street in. I I would believe. I mean, okay. Yeah. Not not not to my knowledge. And uh for the conservation subdivisions, I was reading like your email earlier. Um I did like the um I think it would be easier to use the 1% increase formula for the R3 conservation lots, same as R1 and R2.

And I like the suggestion also of going with that 70% cap as well. Yeah, it it it just was it the only it just the math just didn't work. It just wasn't clean. You couldn't go from there was only an 8,000 It only decreases by 8,000 only. You can only go down by 8,000 uh square feet and you've got uh 10% there that you're looking at still. So, it was just uh wasn't it more consistent though to have these? It is more consistent. It just doesn't really work. There's no way you could get to 70% with it. So, you'd never get down to 70%. If you do that, you'd have to go 68% or something like that. Oh, okay.

Yeah, because it only the lots only decrease. There's only a difference of 8,000 square feet between the the standard and the minimum that you can do in the conservation. There's just there's not as much of a range as there is in the other um the other two districts.

Okay. and um the private water and sewer systems. I mean, unless anyone else disagrees, um I think we should completely eliminate those from the LDC. Um so I the amended uh section that you put in here, um private water and sewer systems serving multiple lots. I mean, at a minimum, it would be nice to cross off serving multiple lots and just prohibit private water and sewer systems altogether. Um,

I don't know that we can entirely do that by state law. I mean, that would most likely get into septic systems and well systems, which if there's not sewer available, I think you have to allow it on a individual lot basis. But for the minor subdivision, we could have it as a condition of like that they're not allowed, right? Because that's the current. No, that's how it currently is is it's it's not allowed for it's allowed for only one lot at a time. Yeah. At the moment, right?

Yeah. You would have you can do a you do septic and well on each one of those lots. And that's per state. I mean, I think it's basically state law that if you if you can't get water and sewer to the site that that's the option, but they have to be on individual lots. You can't have a shared system in there. That's where you get into the packaging plant stuff. Yeah, that's what our I think that's what we're talking about more of the shared package plant because the verdict's still out on who maintains them, what happens if they fail, right? And I wouldn't want an HOA in charge of that.

And I'm I I think it's it's fine to include that in there right now. Uh it doesn't it won't hurt anything. Um but if you want to address those later on, you really need to look into the sections that we have um on package plants and um the SUP um them being allowed as SUPs um in our list of uses. Yeah. I just from the experts I've spoken to, I've heard bad things about these package plants and so uh anything we can do to reduce or eliminate them, I would be in favor of. Um, you know, uh, I I do appreciate all your work on this and your energy for all these changes and, uh, you know, just bear with us. We're not experts. You're the expert.

Uh, no, I don't know a whole lot about package plants to be honest with you. I know about as much as you do. So, yeah. Well, in general, uh, just all of these changes, um, are feel kind of like a lot. Um, you know, I I'm a bit hesitant to make a lot of changes because we're right now laboring under this downzoning prohibition. And so, you know, it would be really easy for us to accidentally upzone ourselves um and be trapped because of the downzoning prohibition. You know what I mean? And there is a bill currently in the state house that um correct is

looking to restore that. So, We'd love to see that implemented and then maybe we can um move a little faster on some of these type of changes. Sure. Right. I understand. Um unfortunately a lot of the stuff that we're looking to address I mean could kind of fall into that territory. So I really just ask I mean take a look at whether or not you feel it's reasonable and sensible or not before you do it. That's you know that's all. Yeah. I guess for me this was a lot to digest. I think I must have read this about 45 times. Okay.

And then gone through and said, "Well, that's a negative. That's a positive, but that says no, so that means yes, because it's crossed out." And I felt like I was in like eighth grade logic class again, and I didn't enjoy it back then. I understand. Yeah. And it's it's I So, if we could maybe put it in smaller chunks, that would be helpful. But Okay. I just just to remind you, I mean, we've got, you know, we've got about 16 17 different sections. This is three of them right here. So, Oh, no. I I understand that. I'm not saying don't address them. I'm just saying if there's no sense of urgency, if there's not something if something's not on fire, let's just take it in chunks unless there's something

there's an emergency situation and we need to I know that the paper streets and the private streets that was something some of those I would like to have has come to a head addressed. Yeah. But if it's not something that's happening tomorrow, then maybe we could just digest it in smaller chunks. That would just be my suggestion.

Well, and of the three, so you know, there's three major pieces here. There's private streets, minor subdivisions, and conservation subdivisions. Um, seems like maybe the conservation subdivisions is the least uh difficult. Um, is that the one, you know, for just to ask the rest of the board, is that would you say that's possibly the one that's um Well, that was the easiest to digest, I would say.

Um, just because, you know, we went through the conservation subdivision, I don't want to call it training, but presentation a couple of years ago, so you kind of got a handle on that and then we worked with Lisa uh when we adopted it a couple years ago. So, we've we've seen it before and we kind of understand and you know, I like the fact I like the fact of a conservation subdivision. I like that it leaves the open space. It leaves more natural space. So, that's great. Um, it's just that alto together it was a lot, but I think the changes uh have been made are good. Any other questions or comments from the board?

Mr. Mr. Mayor, I I would have to agree with the commissioners. Kevin, question. Is there any level of interest or any appetite right now? Have you been notified as far as moving forward with the conservation subdivision? We have a conservation subdivision. We have a concept plan in place for it. It's not going to be anywhere near coming before y'all for several months at this point. Um, it's they have to do I mean, they've still got to get their entire subdivision figured out. They've got to go through the TIA process and all that. So, yeah. Okay. I was just trying to weigh the sense of urgency like we were talking about if we can. It was a lot to take in. Uh yeah, I understand that it's but we're not voting on it tonight. Yeah.

So, we have a couple more weeks to digest if we have more questions. Right. Okay. Anything else? All righty. All right. Thank you, Mr. Kevin. Thank you. All righty. Next up, old business. Uh the adoption of please. You need to close. That's right. I jumped the gun. Can I get a motion to close this public hearing? So move. All in favor?

Any opposed? This public hearing is now closed and we will move on to old business. Thank you, Barbie. Once again, um, old business, the adoption of resolution 202611 endorsing the town of Waxaw's application to the Safe Streets for All SS4A implementation grant. James and Susan. Yes. And it's just Susan tonight. James took ill this afternoon. So lucky. Um, I'm gonna try and get through this and we'll see how we do. There you

go. And of course this is the safe streets and roads for all grant. This is the implementation portion. We had uh have updated you guys throughout and you had approved originally just the preliminary budget for it. this is just the next step in the process and we're moving quite along. Um we've been working and meeting weekly with our consultant through the league that is helping us write this application and um we are in the final stages and uh we are requesting of course the resolution tonight but by Friday we should be about 95% done hoping to submit either Friday afternoon or the first of next week about 10 days before our deadline to give us time if there are any snafoos we have plenty of time uh and just like We had said previously this is focuses on the targeted set of improvements within the downtown area and those key corridors being Howy Mine, North Church and McDonald Price, Caldwell Street and even some of the overhead bridge connections. Uh and it's just prioritizing safety, advancing some improvements with that 8020 match. So trying to use our dollars uh successfully with minimal input from the town. Still at the same 7.5 million total with the town command of 1.5 million or that $300,000 per year. A few things when we got into the notice of funding opportunity that we did not anticipate and our our consultant worked with us on this is implementation is still the same. We're still working on how we mine North Church and those McDonald streets. What

we found was to improve our application is this is a very competitive grant. Our consultant recommended some type of supplemental planning and demonstration grant. And uh we that's what has changed since probably the last update we had provided you folks. And see, and what that means for us is in the notice of funding opportunity, what we found is they threw a little um kicker in there that they wanted to see some type of prehosp blood transfusion program. Unexpected. We did not expect that. So what we did is we are working now under that same budget umbrella with Union EMS Atrian Health to address postc crash care. So it's not only the safety of of improving the safety side. What do we do if there is a serious accident? Because um most of the fatalities are from severe blood loss. So, what could we do on site on the scene to try and keep that patient alive till they could get to more care? And so, that's what this is all about. It's um they are administering blood at the scene. ES EMS teams can increase survival rates by up to four times, stabilize patients for transport and prevent death before reaching the hospital is the ultimate goal. So again, we are partnering with Union EMS, Atrian Health to get and this is a planning program to see how this would work, what we need to get it off the ground and get it up and running. What this will probably eventually involve is then coming back to you guys at a later date because of that safety action plan is a living breathing document to update our safety action plan to to add this into that as part of our program. So, but right now we're just more than anything we're presenting

it as a planning proposal as part of our application. If they approve, then we would delve into this further. Um, also they had our consultant had recommended a demonstration grant or a demonstration program as part of this application too. So, based on what we found with the down downtown Waxaw plan at North Church Broom Street, they had recommended long-range planning of some type of roundabout there. Uh so what we are looking at is a demonstration program to just a little study at that intersection to kind of if we put a roundabout in there, what's it going to look like? What's it going to involve? So showing just some activity there and what James had proposed is some type of rubber barricades. he could speak to this unfortunately more than I can. But just again showing the Federal Highway Administration that we are committed to this. We are thinking outside the box and uh abiding by what that notice of funding opportunity is requesting to just make us as competitive as possible. The nice part is James did a wonderful job on the budget and building in enough contingency with this. uh we chose on the original budget he had put in about an extra 10% contingency which was more than enough to cover the extra cost of these programs and what we found is we were floating more closer to 15 or 20%. So that still gives us enough play and walle room with anticipating increased construction costs and that type of thing to still withstay within our budget parameters. So kudos to James for for doing all that for us. Um, and finally, a thank you uh to Mayor Murray, Commissioner Wedra. Part of this program is letters of support and without that, our application is kind of

dead in the water and uh James and I teamed on this and Atrium Health has given us a letter of support. The CARTPO board, CSX Transportation gave us a letter of support. We've worked with Aara and the downtown businesses in the downtown Waxaw Association to get letters of support from those groups. Janet with the HPC, NC DOT, uh, Commissioner Wedro was instrumental in having some of our federal senators and representatives help us on that. To date, we have letters of support, but all from one um the last senator's office once we get our application submitted um to reach out to them and let them know and they will submit a letter directly to the the um transportation secretary Duffy on our behalf. Um Union Medical Services, the Waxaw Planning Board, the police and fire departments. So, thank you everyone for your support on this. Those letters are instrumental and just overall I would like to give a shout out too to Representative Willis who personalized his letter and just shows his his just commitment to the town of Waxaw and Senator Johnson's office from the state as well. So just the relationship you folks have built with them was instrumental. I just reached out and asked within a few days we had letters from both of them. So thank you all for that. Uh but like I said, we are at this point uh just continuing onward. Um thank you all for if anybody hasn't part of this program too is the vision zero pledge. We are hoping for a hundred uh folks to participate and take that pledge. So if anybody hasn't, you can go online at waxaw.com vision zero. And thank you commissioners for doing that for us. I think we still have a few on

the dis that we still might need to grab. Hint hint, Scott. Um I already have a picture and signed. I was number 100. Yay. Exactly what we needed. Thank you very much. So that but that's a wonderful pledge in program and just goes as part of this initiative and our application as well. So with that, it just we hope you adopt this motion and we will continue onward and provide further updates. Uh one item just for clarification. Um if we were awarded this grant, it's not a single $7 million award. Correct. It's individual projects and pieces that might get awarded.

It's project pieces. We've broken that budget up into project pieces. And also to clarify, even if we're awarded that grant at that point, if the board still is not comfortable, just depending on budget talks as we move forward, you can always turn down or decline that that grant as well until a contract is signed. There is no commitment from the board at this point. You are just endorsing our application to move forward and it is pieces. It's over a fiveyear time span. So that too.

Okay. Any other questions or comments from the board? I'll just like to formally thank uh Todd Johnson and David Willis for their support. Um hearing that they were so quick to respond for their letters of approval and recommendation was very encouraging. So we were happy to see that. So thank you to them for that. It was and this is the first we've got the support from our federal representatives as well. So that was instrumental. We're reaching out on that and um to get the support from everyone on the federal side too was was just amazing. And our consultant was quite impressed. we were able to pull that off. So, thank you to all those folks as well. We certainly appreciate their support.

Exactly. All righty. Well, without further ado, then could I get a motion to adopt resolution 2026 011 endorsing the town of Waxaw's application for the safe streets for all and roads for all implementation grant uh by James Kelly and Susan Lee. So moved. All in favor? I I. Any opposed? Hearing none. This motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you, Sue. And good job. Uh, thank you to the entire staff for all your hard work. Sorry James isn't here, but I know the whole team did a lot of work on this one. So, thank you.

And I will say a huge thank you to James. Uh, we have each of us have our areas of expertise and he's been the number cruncher and the budget guy and answering a lot of their questions. So, I'm sorry he couldn't be here tonight, but he's been instrumental in getting this going. So, thank you to him. Great. Thank you. All righty. Next up, we have approval for the downtown Waxaw Association's memorandum of understanding and renewal.

Excuse me. Little short there. Okay. All right. Good evening. Uh so tonight, uh is a formal consideration of the amended memorandum of understanding between the town and the downtown Waxaw Association. Um, as discussed during the work session, the agreement outlines a partnership structure between the town and the downtown wax association. It helps clarify the roles, responsibility, coordination, and shared priorities related to downtown revital revitalization and main street implementation. Uh, so following that work session discussion, staff reviewed the agreement and incorporated the feedback and direction provided by the board. Um and then the downtown waxaw association board also reviewed the updated agreement and was supportive of moving forward with only a minor clarif clarifying recommendation. So the changes made were intentionally minor and primarily focused on clarifying language updating the agreement term from three years to five years and making a few administrative and grammatical updates. So that one clarifying recommendation from the DWA board was adding language clarifying that the town would continue supporting and facilitating the time and place for the DWA board meetings which was incorporated into the updated uh draft under duties of the town item E. Other than that no major structural changes were proposed or recommended by either party. So overall both the town and the DWA felt the agreement continues to reflect a strong and collaborative partners partnership model. So staff is recommending approval of the amend amended memorandum of understanding as presented and authorization for the town manager to execute the agreement. So happy to answer any questions if you had any

questions or comments from the board. All righty. Can I get a motion then? Uh, can I get a motion then to adopt um Can I get a motion to adopt and approve the memorandum of understanding between the town of Waxaw and the downtown Waxaw Association? So, all in favor? I I Any opposed? Hearing none, this motion carries. Thank you.

Thank you for all your hard work on this one. Thank you. All righty. Next up is the consider the increase in the Waxaw Youth Council membership. Miss Barbie, lots of kids want to participate, which is awesome. Thank you, board. Um we have a couple of Waxaw Youth Council members here tonight as part of their requirements from for um for the um membership there. Um the council is has experienced a significant increase in interest of of the council and we currently establish them with uh 15 members to start the uh the council. Um but since we've had the increase of interest, we felt or the council felt that they were ready to move forward to uh develop their subcommittees and get into their uh community projects. They have several in mind that they want to explore but without uh the increase in membership uh they can't seem to do that. So, they are seeking an increase to go up to 30 members on that board, which would pretty much max them out for right now. Um, however, um, they could grow a little bit more. Um, so tonight, we're just asking for the board to consider increasing that membership to 30 members. Um, and if so, choose.

Any comments or questions from the board? I'll just make a motion to increase the Waxaw Youth Council membership to 30 members as presented. All in favor? I I

Any hearing? None. This motion carries it. It was very exciting to know that the youth council got such a strong interest, strong level of interest. So, and the fact that you got committees and subcommittees and projects that you're already envisioning and planning, I'm excited to see what you all come up with. So, thank you. Yeah. And they have a they have a lot of great ideas, but they do need subcommittees to get those accomplished so that they can meet and then um help us out and get the youth down to wax off because it's where where it's happening. Where it's happening. Town government. Yay. Thank you. They look excited right now. It's a thrill.

I like the uh point system that they have for attendance.

Nice. Uh let's see here. Uh did that did that. Uh let's see here. All right. Next up, we will consider the adoption of the capital improvements plan budget FY27 to 31. Mr. Scott, mayor and board of commissioners, uh you folks have been working on both of these action items um for the last really for the last couple of months. The first in front of you is a resolution which is a policy of the board action to adopt a five-year CIP plan. The plan does not does not appropriate dollars. It is a planning tool for both the board and staff and the citizens to work through the process. It is our recommendation that you adopt this and that every year you evaluate this prior to the budget process in the in the manner that we've recommended. So uh that total uh budget uh just two points in that uh resolution itself. One, you're not starting from zero. You do have monies that you have designated in your uh savings accounts and we'll talk about that in the second action to start from. It's about a 12.5 million dollar um plan over five years. The board has the ability to appropriate through the year through the budget process and every year it has a the ability to look at the plan. So that's the first action. The second action is actually an ordinance and that is in line with uh the uh assignment of uh savings funds and other funds that the board has specifically in what's called

fund 403. That's your CIP reserve fund. Those are where we have been designating funds over time. And in the ordinance itself, it actually reads out that you will designate you will move monies from an unassigned position in your savings account to an assigned position in your savings account and commit restrict um those funds for um various capital improvement programs. So that is the action that takes place in the ordinance and that's about 1.5 million that will move from other savings accounts that you have basically fund 120 and the unassigned to assigned areas within the savings areas fund 403 406 407 and various funds but that's what will move in that second action. One's an ordinance one's a resolution. Can I answer any questions of the board?

Any questions from the board? I know we've been going through this a lot and you've I think Scott, you've done a great job in clarifying the reason for all of this and and why we're doing it. So, thank you. Thank you. Um I there was a link in the soft copy version of this, but didn't seem to actually link anywhere. Um there's a list I guess of all the items. These are the ones we discussed in the uh yes we made those as part of your ordinance right

first in the resolution you have a spreadsheet and that's how that list in the plan in the ordinance it is a I believe it's called a u not an amendment but a an attachment to uh do you want to help me with that Barbie the uh appropriation about where the monies will go we call that u we we made it an attachment ment to the ordinance itself. I believe that's the amendment the ordinance amendment. Right.

So in that list uh commissioner uh should be the list of where those monies are going and then what will happen is finance will then do journal adjusting and journal entries and make all those things happen at the end of the year. Okay, I think I found it. It's not as it's not the um exact itemized list that we went over before. It's it's more of the funds, right? Big picture type thing. Yeah. Not the big spreadsheet again. Yeah.

The actual actions that you're taking are in the ordinance themselves. So, in the now therefore section, you're actually making those moves uh according uh to what we've recommended to you folks. Any other questions or comments? All righty. Hearing none, we have a few motions to go through. Then could I get a motion to adopt the capital improvements plan budget for FY2027 and 2031 or two 2031? So move. All in favor? I I.

Any opposed? Hearing none, that motion carries. Can I get a motion then to adopt resolution res 20260009 the CIP budget plan for FY27 to31? So moved. All in favor? I I. Any opposed? Hearing none. This motion carries. Can I get a motion to adopt ordinance 2026008 establishing the CIP fund for FY27 to31? So moved. All in favor? I. I.

None opposed. Motion carries. Thank you very much, board. That organizes our CIP quite nicely and gets us ready to approve things as time comes. Next on the list is new business, approval of the building exterior grant request, 116 South Providence. Miss Janet Pirano, what do you got?

Welcome back. Thank you. Okay. So, uh this is a building exterior improvement grant uh request by property owner Will Howy for improvements to a commercial building located at 116 South Providence Street. A little bit of history about this building. It was built as a dry cleaning plant in the mid1 1950s. Uh, this utilitarian concrete block building retains its original eight light metal windows and cast concrete window sills, original doors, and the original hardware. The steel windows and doors are in good shape, need only basic maintenance, paint removal and repainting. The door glazing is a unique type of mini prism glass, most likely manufactured by the Luxer Prism Company of Chicago, a well-known manufacturer of prism glass from approximately 1890 into the 1950s. This is the only existing prism glass left in Waxaw. The door hardware is original and the current owner has refurbished the hardware so that it can be retained. So, the work that he is requesting is to um paint the building and replace the awnings. Uh he's gotten two quotes on the paint and three quotes on the awning. Uh grants year to date. Um, we started with $89,000 because there was money left in last year's fund that got transferred. Uh, we have a balance right now of $79463. Um, so we are requesting a budget amendment in the amount of $5,500 to help fund this one. Uh, the Historic Preservation Commission considered the grant request at their April 9th regular meeting. Um there was some discussion about paint color, awnings and shutters. Um members of the HPC remembered the building as being white. Uh we cannot

dictate paint color. Um and changing it from the light gray that it is now to white would require just more layers of paint and um be more expensive. So the owner preferred to keep it the same color. Um the awnings were added later, but um our land development code and our design standards allow for those types of awnings because they do provide shade um and help to keep the building cooler. Um and then the shutters, the HPC had requested that the shutters not be reapplied to the building that we that they are removed. Um and that makes sense. It's a utilitarian type building. it would not have had any kind of decorative shutters on it, you know, in the 1950s when it was built. Uh, and the property owner has agreed to remove those shutters. Um, Oops. So, after that discussion, the HPC uh voted unanimously for a favorable recommendation for the project and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Is that building vacant now? Pardon me. Is it vacant now or is it Yes, it is vacant. There is no tenant in there right now. Oh, okay. So, once this is done, hopefully we can It will be an office building. Correct. The um applicant is here if you have questions. Just curious what we were what was going there if we knew. But if it's an office, do you don't have a current tenant for office?

Okay, sounds good. Okay, just to repeat that so folks can hear at home. Um, yes, it has been upfitted to be an office, but there is not a tenant right now. Okay, so I don't want to nitpick, but the shutters, I think, add to it because it is just a big cinder block building. It is utilitarian in appearance. So, I'm just the the need to remove the shutters. Is that just a maintenance thing? Are they It is just to restore it to its original form. I mean, it was built utilitarian, strictly just a plain, not pretty block building. Um, so it would not have had any decorative shutters on there.

And the awning is just the main awning over the doors, not over the window. Uh, there's awning awning over the window, too. Just that. Well, I see the two doors have Oh, I'm sorry. That is a door. Yeah, you're right. Okay. So, it's just those two awnings. Three. There's one on the side. On the side. So, all the doors have awnings. Okay. So, the shutters have to go because they weren't part of the original building, but the awnings were. I'm just I mean, so sounds like a silly question, but

the shutters were added later. Um, I guess in an attempt to make the building a bit more attractive. Um, so they would not have been original to the structure and not really would have been on a utilitarian type building like that. Uh the awnings probably were not um on the building originally either. Um however, our design standards and our land development code allow for those types of awnings um because they do provide some shade for for the building. Okay. Any other questions from the board? All righty. Thank you again, Janet.

Okay. Um and I need a motion. Motion to approve building exterior improvement grant petition BIEG 002 2026 as presented for up to 50% of the actual cost of work not to exceed $6,1456. All in favor? I. Any opposed? Hearing none. The motion carries. Thank you. All righty. Okay. So, consider the appointment to fill the midterm vacancies for the Waxaw Historic Preservation Commission. Miss Barbie, you missed one.

Oh, I did. The adoption of resolution 20206010 opposing the state legislation that limits local property tax authority. Mr. Datson, you know, we have another batch of laws going forward in Raleigh that we would at least like the town of Waxall's opinion known on these. Yes, that's exactly right. Um, and what the board is would consider this evening in the resolution is just saying to the legislature, let us make those decisions at the local level about what we do. It's not advocating for tax increases or decreases. It's saying allow that local authority to do this. The county commissioners I believe in Union County just adopted a similar one as well. Um some of the reasons I think it's important to articulate on this is not only local control and local conditions and what the citizens of Waxaw might want out of their government. Um but also um that the other things that they are doing in limiting your ability on downzoning or other kinds of zoning discussions that you folks would like to have about growth or manage growth um kind of create the need for better balance um with your your taxing structure system. So, um that ability to control it locally, have that discussion locally with the folks that live here, who have uh property owners here, uh our citizens here, uh you want to maintain that control. So, this resolution is a message uh to the legislature and the mayor is correct that it is moving very quickly now. So, things are coming out of committee. Um, and there are more than just if you folks adopt this and Union County, there's a lot across the state of North Carolina trying to say, "Wait a second, please allow us to to manage our our governments in the way that our citizens and property owners

and uh the folks who come into our town would would most appreciate. So, uh, it's not doing anything else. It's not unlifting caps or lifting caps. It's not doing any of those other things. It's just a saying, give us that local control. So, that's a good general description of what the board has discussed. Can I answer any questions? Questions or comments from the board?

Um, I just want to make it clear like you said that this is just about maintaining local control and that the legislators have named a few municipalities that have taken advantage. And so, my view would be then slap them on the wrist. leave the rest of us who've been responsible alone. So, and I think that's the message that this is you can't, you know, just paint everything with a broad stroke all the time. Um, and so, you know, there are a couple of uh counties and municipalities that do are uh happy to spend and a lot of municipalities that really really careful about it. And so, I I would hope that the state would focus on those and not everyone. Yeah, this is really a case of um the state creating a problem and then offering a supposed solution. Um you know, we're laboring under this downzoning prohibition. Uh last year there was a abominable bill uh 765 which would have really taken all zoning authority away from localities. it would have reszoned the entire state to a minimum of six houses per acre and that would have driven property tax increases and now they want to cap that. It's like you drive the need for higher taxes and then you want to cap it. Um and like uh Mayor Prom said, you know, we're not looking to increase taxes at all. Uh this is about local control and uh no more top-down governance from the state. We can do without this kind of help.

Not to mention that they don't allow us to impose impact fees which would help us not increase taxes.

Yeah. You know, I've been doing this for about 38 years and this has been a constant issue over time. The state legislature has continued uh doesn't matter which part is in control. I'll say it like that. Um has eliminated your menu of choices uh as a board that you can consider that would be best for you to consider um to run your local jurisdiction and provide the services that you and your citizens uh feel is best. Um that's been a constant struggle over a long time. Um, and uh, when you add zoning control to it, which drives values one way or another, it drives cost one way or another. It's best to try to allow that local growth management to to happen at that local level with a sufficient tool bag.

And just one more thing, I'm sorry. And I I did want to say that our local representatives are on board with um, keeping it local, keeping our control local. So I would like to thank them for that.

Very well. Then without further ado, then can I get a motion to adopt resolution 2026 010 opposing state legislation that limits local property tax authority and affirming the importance of local control. So move. All in favor? I.

I. Any opposed? Hearing? None. This motion carries. All righty. Now we have the lovely Miss Barbie. Thank you once again. um a midterm vacancy had um was created by due to a resignation on the historic preservation commission. Um so the OAB that is made up of just the HPC chair, two commissioners from the board and the staff liaison and myself um met to uh review the applications and to interview the candidates that applied for the vacant seat. Um we had two very strong candidates. Um and with that we um we conducted those interviews and then uh the board made their selection based off of a ranking matrix um with a score of uh one to five meaning that one is the lowest score, five is the highest score. So, um, from the two candidates, the board had, uh, unanimously, um, elected Madison Miller to fill that midterm vacancy slot for the remainder of, um, ending with that term ending in September 30th of 2027. So, um I they are seeking uh um an

appointment to the HPC and um appointing Madison Miller to fill that slot. Any questions or comments from the board? All righty then. Well, can I get a motion to appoint Madison Miller to fill the midterm vacancy for the historic preservation committee with the term ending at September 30th of 27? So moved. All in favor? I. Seeing none opposed. This motion carries. Thank you, Barbie. Alrighty. Next up, we have leadership reports. Town manager Scott Datson. What do you have? I'll do my report from here. If that's okay with you, Mr. Mayor,

please go right ahead. We will be talking after this meeting when the board goes into work session about a lot more detail uh that would be found in the financial reports. But for April 30th, 2026 um where we would be at about 83% of funds received or expended, we have received to date 86% of revenues and expended 68%. So the department heads continue to maintain their um um good uh management practices on expenditures. Um as of this date uh we have also received all of our local property tax dollars in um and where we are lagging behind is in our state revenues as they come back especially in sales tax and franchise tax. Uh we're going to talk about that a little bit more in the work session, but that is something that uh has me a bit concerned. Um for the public, you can find our dashboards. We do put these on online in the finance section page on our website. So if you go to www.waxaw.com and go to the finance page, you can find uh the financial dashboards on that page. And uh people are welcome to read them. We try to fill them with with with as much information as possible so that folks know where we are. That's all I have, sir.

Well, thank you. Thank you. Uh, next up, we have a development services quarterly report. Kevin Robinson, come on down. Okay. All right. So, this is the uh spring 26 quarter 1 development report. Um, I did mention we're going to try to do these every quarter for you as best we can. This would be through uh January through March 30th, 31st of this year. Um, not a lot to speak of. Um, we are in a little bit of a lull. Um, while we don't have a whole lot of permits coming in, however, um, we did have several units that were completed during this time. We had a total of uh 20 uh 23 units which you can see there at the tail end of the uh the year is actually stronger than um all all four of the quarters last year except for the last quarter. So um doing pretty well in that actual home construction. Uh permitting is where we're lagging behind right now. Um most of this did not change. Um you will see the total new residential units built down there on the bottom left. Um that's where we're at right now. We beat out 24 already. Um got a ways to go to get get up to our average of 266. I doubt that's going to happen this year. Um we are looking pretty strong for uh for the following year though. We did not have any new uh non-residential construction completed at this time. We had a uh good number of upfits um and um additions and and um um things like that that were done, but we didn't have any actual new uh construction done during this quarter. So hopefully that'll change a little bit next quarter.

Um overall the uh since 2016, the project valuations have averaged 6.8 8 million per year for new non-residential, 37.7 million for new residential and 7.8 million for all repairs and upfits. And we've added on this year, as you can see, there's the red is your new residential or your new non-residential construction that is missing. Um but we have seen a little bit of both um upfits and uh additions um on the uh permitting side as well as new residential units. And there's actual new construction as you can see just uh uh town homes and single family homes um in about uh four different locations throughout the town. Most of those are projects that are finishing out. So relatively quiet quarter overall. That's all I got.

Any questions, comments from the board? Thank you for those. Um, what's the age out time or the vesting period or whatever of of all of these? Um, do you happen to know uh between permit and CO? Is that what you mean? From when they get approved to let's say nothing happens, how long till they age out? Oh, from like the actual development itself. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Um it's most of those that we're seeing right there that are coed, most of those are were approved back in 23, 22, 23, some in 24. Um but it's usually taken about four or five years to see most of these larger developments actually start to get built out. Um just the nature of the beast. It's a uh approval process with us, then long permitting with the county and and um then also they've got to get financing in a lot of cases, too. So, it it takes several years. Oh, yeah. I'm not impatient for them to be

I know I know you're not. I know you're not, but yeah, it's um I would I would say anywhere from anywhere from um probably uh two years to uh four plus um on, you know, on average that that window there. What I'm asking though is um and I believe this is set at the state level. Um you know, let's say they just don't build it. How long till the approval itself ages out? Oh. Oh. Oh. Um Matt, is that in 160D? Is that seven years now? I think it's seven years. Once you get to once you get to the actual once you've got your actual construction plans and everything approved, I think it becomes seven years at that point. It's two years on preliminary subdivision.

That sounds great. Yeah, we could get seven years at that point. So, but then there are extensions throughout, right? They if they don't if they don't have it built out in seven years, let's say they start it, they stop it. Do they get an extension on that seven years or does it have to be built out in that seven years? There's I would need to look into that. There's there's if you're out there moving dirt, you've done some stuff, that's considered a significant investment. Okay. Um so I'm not sure if that would your seven years would start over would start at that point or Yeah. Does it

The only time I've usually had to had to call a development on it was when it was a very significant amount of time and nothing had really happened there. Um it was an easy call say, "Hey, this was approved at the subdivision phase. It's been four or five years now. You haven't done anything. You need to bring it back through for approval again." Yeah. Yes, I guess. And you probably don't know now, but is there anything like that? You know, I see some nonmovement. I don't know how long it's been on a specific development that's kind of just lingering.

Yeah, I would I I don't want to give you an exact number without going back and looking at them, but we've got about 13 residential or mixeduse developments right now that are kind of in the hopper, so to speak. Um, one of those is pretty dormant and I don't know if anything's going to happen with it. Um, there are another two or three you can include onto that that I don't know that anything's going to happen with them at all. Um, but I would need to go and actually check all the dates on those to get you. Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah, I'll do is towards the end of the year we can add a um um actual kind of where we're at with the developments as well onto this if you'd like to kind of do that update. I don't know that it's helpful on a quarterly basis, but at the end of the year, the the development report, we can add that on to and kind of give you the timeline where each one are at if that's helpful. I think that's a great idea. Yeah. Okay. Sure.

Thank you. Anything else? All righty. And that concludes this general meeting. Any comments from the board of commissioners? Closing comments. All righty. Hearing none, then could I get a motion to recess as we reconfigure the room? So, we will continue. No, you'll you'll adjourn this meeting. I do need to adjourn. Yes. Make a motion to adjourn. All in favor? I.

Any opposed? All righty. This motion is now or this meeting is now adjourned. We will now take a few minutes to reconfigure the room and prepare for a special meeting. Also a public meeting which will still be on YouTube I believe Nick and um so yeah stay tuned for that

Hello. Mic check. Oh, it is on. Daniel's not coming back. Wear a tie.

It's why it's why you have a tie. That's right. that. And Um, Call this meeting to order. Good evening and welcome to this special meeting May 12th, 2026 Waxall Board of Commissioners. This is a special meeting regarding the budget. So, good evening all. Um, can I get a motion to adopt the special meeting agenda as presented before you?

So, move. All in favor? I seeing no nays, this motion carries. Tonight's agenda is now adopted and budget workshop fiscal year 2627. Do we have any money left? It's a loaded question. Very loaded question. Way to start a meeting. Exactly.

Get right to it, Robert. So what we're going to try to do through this work session is give you um just very briefly some overall and then uh we can dive into at at any depth that you have. But let me remind everyone this is a manager's working budget. So let's remind everyone of timelines so we just know what we're playing against. tomorrow um we will put an a uh our ad to the paper days from that it will advertise 10 days

10 days I'm sorry uh we'll advertise those numbers and that is based upon my recommended expenditures and revenues next week next Wednesday you will get a physical copy most likely on on on the computer

copy and there will be a physical copy in of my recommended budget Then we'll have a uh work session uh regular work session. My recommendation is depending on where you folks are and questions you have, you can spend some of that time at that work session as well catching up on anything you might need to catch up on. We will do the public hearing. After the public hearing, let me be very clear, the budget needs to be adopted by the end of June. by law, by state law. You have a regular meeting on the 9th. Yeah.

Then you have a meeting on the 23rd, which is your work session. You actually have a week in between that if you need to have work sessions. So, I'm not I'm trying to make sure that the board knows that it has time to react if you feel you need to do that. But that's the schedule. Does that make sense to everyone? Yes. How we're moving along. Okay. All right. Yes, sir. Is that okay? And just to clarify from the standpoint of the board, is the board okay that one basically one month from now we will have the public hearings and the public comment session for the budget that will be in 10 days. June 2nd. June second. We're going to do it,

Mr. Mayor. We're going to do it on June 2nd, sir. Yes. So that um you've held the uh legal statutory um public hearing and then your next meeting on the 9th you can adopt if so so if you so choose but you must adopt by the end of the month. So public hearing is going to be on June second. Second. Yeah. We're going to segregate it from your other part of your meeting.

Understood. Um, if the board needs to hold a work session after that, it can do that and walk through anything it may have heard in the in the u in the public session if you need to. Um, otherwise uh we can move towards the 9th if the board feels it needs more time. You need to communicate with Barbie and I and we'll work with you to make sure that you're sitting around table and your public space and and doing what you need to do your due diligence. Fair enough. Okay, understood.

Okay. So, just to give again just a quick overview. Uh, we do have folks watching and I want to make sure that they know how we're moving along. So, if we're talking you folks talking about things, I try to put things up on the the board so they they can see them. Uh, let's start with an overview of uh revenues and expenditures. Again, this is the manager's working budget. We're off a little bit. I have a little bit more revenue than expenditure. However, I will tell you right now that's going to get eaten up. We are very concerned about electric prices and that is for everything. Street lights that's for um uh prices in buildings. We're concerned about gas prices. Uh we have held fairly steady but we have a lot of road miles to drive. We have you know we have things we have to do. We feel that those things are there. Um and uh you will need to deal with that. So, um, it it it gets eaten up on the expenditure side. So, um, it looks out of balance right now, but it's out out of balance in favor right now. We've kept the the expenditures are below that. I intend um to do some of that on that revenue side in expenditure in gasoline, electricity and some of those things only simply because the folks have done a good job of controlling their cost but those things we have no control over whatsoever. We just don't have those control mechanisms built into it. So that's an overview. Um for those on online or uh in the room who are looking at that again uh the majority of uh we've broken down your u majority of which departments get u those revenues receive those revenues or cost uh that way and where most of your revenues come from. Again the majority comes from property tax. Um but the remaining balance is really really important. you

are able to maintain that property tax because you have those other revenues there to balance those out. This is where I'm concerned. So, what I have here, it's hard to read if you're sitting down here. I apologize for that. But essentially, the blue line is my budgetary line. So, that's my budget for sales tax, what I should receive through the year. Uh the second graph is for um franchise taxes and between those two things they are trending well below about 3.9%. Um, now that could change between now and then, but I don't know for those who like to do regression analysis, that's not a really good trend line towards kicking up positive real hard, especially that last move in sales tax that was down actually about 3.9%. Um, again, you don't control that. I don't control that. The citizens of town don't control that. You can't ask them to go consume more and all of a sudden that line kicks up. One point of um education for everyone, the sales tax that we get in Union County, and Union County reaffirmed this at their April meeting, I believe, is reimbursed. Uh it's collected through the state. It's then reimbursed back through the counties. Um and they get to select their methodology. The methodology that Union County uses is based upon your adorum rate. So Monroe gets the most reimburse because they have the highest population, but they really have the highest. They don't have the highest population. They have the highest advalor.

Second is us. Third is Indian Trail. Everybody else then sloths off fairly quickly. Union County of course takes its off the top. So in that redistribution method that they choose by statute and they have to select every year they choose the advalorum methodology. They don't do per capita. If you lived in uh a county with a very low population without a big market center in the middle of it, you'd probably choose per capita. It would spread it differently.

If you were in a tourism town, it would spread it differently. But we're in a sub high suburban area. um high county population next to a large regional center things move across and all around. This is the method that I believe the county has for years felt it was the best way to redistribute. So that's how that gets redistributed. So lesson learned if you lower your advorum rate you will lower the amount you will receive in sales tax. So you will not only lower the amount you will get in property tax, but you will lower the amount you'll get in sales tax. So don't mean to be preachy, just want to make sure you understand the relationship between those two things. Franchise shouldn't have any relationship at all. And considering the number of street lights that have come on and and houses and everything else that's bubbling around, you would think that that would be a stronger number. We just haven't seen it, especially with rate increases. But we're not seeing that strength. So, um, what we're going to do is we're going to I'm going to put up through the board what I sent you folks what you have. So, it's in the agenda packet. So, if the public wants to see it, they can go in and and look at the agenda packet and they can uh motor along if they would like to. So, there's you have in front of it a narrative and then you have my draft budget. Um, um, we use an accounting budgetary style. So, it's a line item budget and then what is in the ordinance is the bottom line of what you folks approve. So, the three boxes I'll just kind of point out to so folks in the room can see it. The first is what was adopted in the current year you're in. The second column is where you are as of 430 2026. And then folks have done their work.

we've done all this work. They've gotten the things back into me and I'm now well and you actually have seen these numbers in the last two work sessions. So these are the uh you haven't seen the specific line items but you've seen that bottom line uh for example with board of commissioners.

So that line sits in that cumulative total and makes up that total amount of expenditure. These are the line items. This is how we do this under our system. Just so everybody knows at the beginning of it though what we did give you was a narrative. So the narrative is not up here. It's too many words for everyone to see. Yeah. It would just be blank conversation. But what we tried to do is explain the narrative uh personnel services, training and development, board meeting expenses, professional meetings and dues. For example, in board of commissioners, you have a a more limited um budget. It's really just uh the elected officials and those costs for doing things throughout the year uh things like FICA all that training uh board meetings cost and things like that. So uh we also put a couple dues in there some travel in there if you folks choose to travel to a league meeting if you choose to travel to uh to those kinds of things. So that's an example of what we do. We put the narrative up front though. So you have a narrative and you have that. Okay. Based upon that um the board of commissioners uh 128 850 um that is actually down. Good job you guys. You guys did really great controlling your expenses.

No election this year. No election. Well, you know, I mean that's true. You guys have elections in off years. You don't have elections in uh uh the cycle. Well, if you had them in the cycle, the county would pay for them. So, you'd never see that bill. But because you guys are in off years, you you have a election bill. So, in your election years, you're you're going to always have a probably about an additional 30,000 or so

and in cost structure for that. Okay. So, you have board of commissioners. Um the next one is administration. Now, in administration, we do a couple of things. Um we have the debt service for the building. So that's uh the line item is uh 12412 206 and 207. That's your debt principle and debt interest on this building and uh public service. Uh so the whole complex um that's your debt service and that's where that comes out of. You have legal fees in there. We put in that's where I put my contingency. I put about $200,000 worth of contingency in a year hoping we won't spend it, but it's there from a budgetary control perspective. When things come up, you want me to be able to handle things. We handle things out of contingency.

Questions or any comments. Finance, uh, again, a a fairly administrative overhead. You would really blank a lot. ad, admin, finance, um, HR, you would put them in your normal overheads of your businesses. So, in finance, we have, um, basically employees. Um, and we've added, uh, some, uh, our increase in auditing fees. Those are just going up. Um, and, uh, one thing I'll say on auditors, they're really hard to find anymore auditing. Um, I guess the kids coming out of accounting school just want to go make money at the big banks or something, but uh they don't want to come and do auditing, which is John, you and I have talked. It's an exciting thing, isn't it? Yeah, that's right.

So, it's it's it's not a really exciting thing to do and apparently they don't want to do it. But I it's really important for us to show transparency. You folks got a copy of the audit and it's really important for our public to know state requires it. So, we have our fees in there. We've also added in some assistance. If you recall, in the last three audit cycles, we were asked to uh strengthen our ability on both adjusting journal entries and on prepping our financials. So when we talked to our auditor um he was very enthusiastic quite frankly for us to bring on uh someone who we a consultancy that would come in quarterly and help us arrange our financials so that we're prepping our financials. So the auditor finan uh audits us way it works now is they prepare the financials and audit themselves which I think is kind of an interesting thing. It's not uncommon in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia. It's not uncommon. Uh but I feel much better if we're prepping our financials. We've made our adjusting journal entries. We've presented the best uh financial picture we can. And then it's audited and uh the board has a little bit more control of that because it gets to see those financials and feel those financials um through the process.

Just a quick question. I know we approved software for finance last year. Is that working out? And is that in the IT budget? It is in here. And we're going to go into what we uh so as a as a note, we move all it into one budget. Okay.

So everybody's it is in one budget because we wanted to do two things. We wanted to gatekeep better. We wanted to know what our baseline I am no IT person. Okay? So you're you're getting the best attempt at me describing this to you. we know what our baseline is, licenses, hardware, software, the things that operate our systems, um, and do those kinds of things. Um, and then there's the departmental specifics. So, yes, uh, we put finance software upgrades, uh, and those maintaining costs after that fact in there.

So, we tried to move all of that. We have, for example, all street lights sit in streets. Sanitation sits in one. We have all debt service for uh vehicles in and public services. After this year's payoff, you will not see that again. You will see that in a separate capital outlay debt structure and we'll come back to you and have that conversation with you. But yes, ma'am, we did move that. The next one is tax. This is the portion you get to pay the county for collecting your taxes.

Before you had a tax collector. Yeah. So you paid someone to run that and a computer system and so the county collects it and then takes Rosie is it 1%. 1.25 1.25%. The bill actually went down. Uh yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Just for you guys because they like you so much. I doubt that. Yes. We like them. You know, we get along very very well with those folks up there and we try to keep that up. The next one is it.

Okay, so in it again um the numbers look much bigger than they ever did before. However, understand we've moved everything into here when we've done this. Um we've broken it between operational support and professional. So there's the cost of running the IT department. We have three people. Um you all have met them at various times as they set up your computers or talk to you about various issues. Um this is the way we talk to each other, communicate, store materials, store information, do financials, communicate outside of this building, communicate with our citizenry. We do it all through it. Uh we also own lines, fiber lines in between us our building. So we maintain those and um we also have our things like sonatrol in there. So our our safety uh and emergency management stuff that's for buildings all sits in it because they're really maintaining those systems for us. Um we have in there uh broken down uh the difference between corporatewide technology infrastructure of that number uh that's that 170 number on line 421292 I believe. Did I get that number right?

I think I did. Thank you. Um so we put that there. Um, we also separated out police specific because police have very specific software that they deal with or hardware that they deal with. Um, they communicate with the FBI, with other law enforcement agencies, with um the FBI, you know, so they have a very different software and they communicate differently with each other than the rest of us would. They have other protection measures built into their system. So we segregate their system out so you can see that. And then there is basically the software of everything. Now we break that down into some key areas. Cyber security and network protection, enterprise software and cloud services, um communication and public engagement. Uh so that's how those break down. And then what we tried to add in our numbers here, I won't go into too much depth about them tonight, but I want you want to just make sure I go over them with you. You have Oh gosh, look at that. That's just one big spreadsheet up on the online. But but what we've tried to do is break this stuff down into and give it some color coding. So what's department specific? Uh for example on the second page of that uh Commissioner Weedra uh you can see where finance has its software

um number is there of all the various things that's about 229,000 of that um it breaks down between different departments I want go back to the original statement we're trying to gatekeep better so that we don't trip over techn uh trip over softwares are we using duplicates We are still working through that. We did find some in this year. Um and we'll continue to try to improve that to try to both lower cost and to not have unnecessary duplications of effort uh effort but necessary redundancies. You mean duplication of function within the

Thank you. That's a much better term. I like your words much better than mine. Thank you. But yes, that's what we're trying to do. So we're trying to identify that better, get a better handle on that, better control, see where our costs are. Um, yeah, even in, you know, private companies, they have this issue of, you know, one department buys this software and another department buys this software and it does the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

So we're trying to reduce some of that redundancy, but we also want to respect that different departments are trying to do different things to achieve what the department needs to do. But our baseline of IT corporatewide technology is around 333,000 of that total cost across all departments. Um and that really is the anti virus, the you know all the things, the Microsoft licenses, all the things we do to operate. And uh I have found that the lure issues are the biggest drivers. I now know how they make money. Yeah. I've got them. Yeah. Got it.

And and so are we also just analyzing software that we might not use anymore or Yeah. If it's not usable and we don't know. They did eliminate some things. It wasn't a lot. Um but we've organized it better now. Now gatekeeping it was important to us. that cyber security event really kind of helped us where are we where are we exposed those kinds of things but secondly who needs what right so I think we we feel a lot better about where we're at it's a big number but again it's all in one spot and across and so it's serving across so that's how we've tried to organize that information does that help yes okay good so

um yes sir just um in the weeds a little bit Sorry. Uh, so it looks like we got rid of Zoom, which makes sense. Uh, we're dedicated mostly to Teams. I've seen that. And then I noticed, um, we only have one AI subscription for Claude. Um, are others using AI in any way, shape, or form? Uh, the nonspendable kind, you know, the uh, introductory get a get a an app kind of thing. Actually, everything in front of you was clawed. Yeah. So, but we did it in a competitive way. We actually had people using different systems with the same data. Yes.

Asking the same question and different questions. We are by no means experts at AI. Um, we have found in going through this, it's how you ask the question, right? Yeah. How you ask the followup, how you frame it. Yeah. So, we're learning. We're in that learning process. We only have one license. will pick which one we want in the long run. Chat GDP has been used. Um our software like Google comes with Gemini. Our our Microsoft 365 comes with co-pilot co-pilot. Um okay

some folks had to double it up. It was kind of interesting. They threw it through JBT and it didn't do right. So they threw it through Copilot and cleaned it up better. So that was a double the effort kind of thing. We're learning. It's a learning process for us. I want to be really careful with AI and the public thing because we do at least three to four times in editing in time. So our our time is all spent on editing. We're editing on the other side. It's it's we're really having to figure out how to do that and because we're use the words trust but verify. Yeah. Trust but verify and do all those kinds of things. can be very helpful but it's also

it can be very stupid too like so we have discovered that as well so new for us but we are going through that but that's why we only have one right now yeah and and that's I pointed out because I know it's it's one of those things I've used it personally in my office um for a variety of reasons and it just and I see you have Grammarly on here as well that's just a an indication that you guys are using the tools to make things faster and more efficient Y and turn out better product more quickly. Yeah, I think Barbie use you use it a little bit as well and trying to craft I use chat and we use HA for the minutes and that's generating talking about that. Yeah.

Yeah. So we're, you know, we're we're we're getting in there financially. My background, maybe you folks know something different, tells me that Claude's a lot better with the graphs and the charts and the budgets and the and the numbers. Um, I'm not sure we found that 100% yet, but yeah. Um, my understanding is it's it's it's fairly good with that. I think it depends on how you feed the data into it as well. Yeah, I g I gave uh I gave gro 13 data points and it spit back the mean for 12. So for what you

for all kinds of other reasons but right right now what I found is that um the one that is used consistently is clawed internally u that we we use and chat GTP so the you know folks are doing those we're moving into that but it's learning curve yep I see something on here called placer AI and it's split between three departments it must be like a $15,000 licensing or something. It is split between because they're all gathering different kinds of information in different ways. Parks and Wreck uses it especially during events and you know trying to calculate numbers of people and interactions contract tracing software.

Yeah. Yeah. And then uh we'll use it downtown count cell phones and we used to contract that out or how was that data come? Th these are just softwares that we use uh staff uses as it as it programs and works along its business. These are aids for them. Um like I said, this is not a judgment or a grading thing for us right now. This is a gatekeeping process for us in a budget season. Uh but we're now aware of where everything is. And for example, you can see on that same thing, we got rid of two accounts because we saw a redundancy. So it you can't see it until you see it

sitting in front of us. So, we feel like we're we're starting there first and working through it. When asked, do you need this to do your um do your jobs? Yes, that's the answer right now. But everybody also knows that we're going to try to reduce redundancy or unnecessary and function and then try to maybe maybe even find newer things that would work better for everyone. So, until you kind of put it out there, you just don't know. It sounds like you guys are still doing a value ad. you're going through everything and and and I think it's great that we're looking for new tools. Absolutely. The fact that we're subscribing to cloud for instance is an example of searching for new tools to work faster and more efficient.

I will tell you it's it is an interesting world out there. Everybody's got something for sale for us. Um our procurement system is clunky because it's public. It's not efficient because it's public. It's not designed It's designed to watch out for the taxpayer dollars, right? That that's the way the purchasing system works. It's not

You folks may work in areas where you're trying to find an innovation very quickly or it it helps. It machine learns. It it replaces the cost structure for you guys. We're still trying to figure that out. You know, we know we need it to communicate. It's up here. It's in your laptop. It's it's all that kind of stuff. But for us, we're working our way through it. Some of us are farther advanced than others. Me, I am when I retire one day, I'm going to throw both my computer and phone in the water. And I've already bought a a rotary dial phone that my kids make fun of me for.

So, um, public services is the next one. Public services has a lot of things going on. We put two things in public services. Facilities It also is missing some numbers here. You're folks are like where do where do we charge against trees? Where do we do sidewalks? Those are in two other funds in your capital outlay. There are segregated funds and special funds. 385 is one and then pow bills the other. Uh so those sit in segregated forms and we charge against those for materials or contractors or supplies based upon those things that by law we can do with those two funds. But this is where the people are. This is where the equipment is. This is where we uh operate out of is in this area. Some big numbers to point out. Street lights, we've gone from 255 to 280. I'm going to recommend probably 330 on street lights. You've added a lot of roads. The other thing is there is a huge differential in cost between Duke and Union Power.

Yeah. It'd be really nice if it was all the same thing, but it's not. Now, what we are trying to do is standardize. So, when a a subdivision comes in, which we have a couple that we've started these conversations with, we want them all standardized in the types of lights. We get a lot of requests for special shades for this, isn't that? We can't afford to do that kind of specialization in street light. We provide a type of street light. We try to maintain that cost per pole per month. Um, but that's increasing. Electricity is going up. I'm concerned about that as well as gas and oil because we charge everything in that. That's everybody all in that one line. So, every every vehicle that's floating around is is being charged back into this line item. So, public services manages that. Um, and then the lease vehicles. Rosie, is this our last year or second to last year? last year, right?

We have a small number at 28. We may recommend to you that we get rid of it totally. We'd like it to go away. Mhm. So, a small number left in 28. Yeah. 28. Okay. Almost done.

We'll probably recommend if as we go along through the year, hopefully we'll be able to turn around and recommend that we can eliminate that totally and and take that out. I am going to recommend that we go back and figure out the life. That's the asset management program is about the life cycles of vehicles, the life cycle, some other things. How can we borrow against that and keep a control number over time um uh that we can manage? But for right now, Matt and his crew get to house that in their budget. They don't spend it all. Matter of fact, I think they might have one or two things in it. One is that it is that I get out of it. So, you're carrying Dex's weight.

Is Dex in here? Oh yeah. Can we see him in the room? Okay. Okay. So carry indexes weight. How's that Matt? All right. Yes sir. Okay. But that's I mean that is where we put our vehicles. We have to put it someplace. We like to keep it in some place we can centralize it. So that's why we've done that. Facilities management uh does show some increase but it's also because again uh we show a lower electricity service in there. That's because they're managing the assets. So, they're turning things off. They're figuring out ways to lower that that cost structure. I'm probably going to recommend a little bit more because I'm not comfortable there yet.

So, you you know what my thinking is. We do still they manage some of our contracted services. They cannot do everything in the building. They simply are not certified to do everything in the building. So, they we have to contract out certain services as well as cleaning and some other things. Although you will occasionally walk in and they'll they're they're cleaning something up. So, I mean, it's uh they really are uh wearing a lot of hats when they're in there. Um the next is sanitation. Now, this is the one that bumped up last year if you'll recall during budget because you added that many more customers. I think this year we've added uh this quarter we've added 11 more. Yes, sir.

Yeah. So there, if you look at the CO uh COS that are released in the building, that's about how many customers you can estimate you're going to keep adding on in that. Um that is going I'm just going to give some fair warning to the board now. I've got it in as being paid for with tax dollars. In the long run, I don't think that's going to be the wisest thing. For example, and there's a reason. If I have a 7 50,000 house. I pay a lot more for garbage than I do if I have a house valued at 425. It's manageable now, but as you add, it will become less manageable and it will become a little bit more disparent over time. Um, so one of the more level ways to do that is probably through fee. Um, I just want the board to understand that. I'm not recommending it now, but I think you're going to have to look at that. Um, it also has its own kickers built into it that are outside of your control mechanisms with taxes and with CPI and other controls and fuel.

We do have in our contract, I believe, a section in there that if fuel really goes up on them, they can add a fuel search charge in there. Now, how often? So, there's a built-in 4% increase per year. Not well, it depends on the CPI. Yeah, they they have a CPI kicker in there. They pick it and the contractor picks it. And how often do we shop around or is is this like the contract is three years? And so we'll at as we get towards the end of it, we'll take a look at it again. When is the end of it? Two more years.

28. Yeah. So, we'll look at it again. There's a lot of competition in this market, but there's also a lot of consolidation in this marketplace and I'm sure they kind of get together and figure out their rates and there's kind of like cable, right? Commissioner, I make no assumption on the things that happen in bar rooms and back alleys. So, I don't I don't know. There is a

garbage should be a commodity. There should be enough competition in the marketplace to do it. But as you all have seen it, they end up gobbling folks up. Um, and that's that's just where it ends up. Now, I'm not defending or not defending. There may be ways for us to deal with that, but again, yeah, we'll have a chance to look at it for for next fiscal year, but again, that price is not going to go the other direction. No. And one of the things I think you and I have discussed well as well is is partnering with other communities maybe and and working out some sort of authority that might help everybody potentially, but we'll have to look into that in a couple.

So, we'll have to see how that might might work. Okay. So, the next uh one is police. Again, um I've tried to give a written narrative. You've got a good written narrative in here about where those expenses are and what's going on with that in here. Um I am recommending at the halfway year point uh for new officers and that price is baked in. Also baked into the cost of personnel is the full year of the four that we added halfway through this year.

Does that make sense? So that's that that really eats up most of that rollup effect in the in that pricing structure um is in that and yet still it's fairly contained. So that's good. um they're not asking for anything uh outside of capital outlay for vehicles that would be done at that time. So, and then as I said, the one that sits in the public facilities uh public services line item, we're going to try to consolidate and start managing our uh turnover uh cost and capital on capital outlay moving forward. But we got to get past these leases first. Um, and hopefully we'll be able to streamline that a little bit better and contain those costs. So, uh, that's what's in there. The next one's emergency management. Um, that is, um, we have our fire marshall in there. We have, um, those kinds of things that exist in there. um and it has gone up minimally. Building inspections is a self sustaining department. So, one of the things that Rosie and I will do was is balance out. They have reserve funds that will pull into both this fiscal year and into next fiscal year while we're in the trough. And um because those monies cannot be spent on anything else, the board recognizes that uh when we had discussions with you before on that. So we'll move those monies into that position um and work through that. Um they are also doing other duties uh throughout the organization while the building number of build permits is down and that's um turning out to be a good thing throughout the organization right

now. But we have our own building inspections department. Um it's it's it took us one of the things uh folks need to understand we have level threes. So we have folks with really high levels and a lot of them have those high levels that allows us to do all of our inspections. That's a lot of talent developed over time uh to keep those things. That means we can do various levels of that. That budget goes down a bit. engineering, planning, code enforcement are all in developmental services, but we do break them out. So we break them out with engineering and there is nothing new in there just uh the cost of people but there's nothing outstanding in in material supplies or any uh services in that that we're not already in contract for planning and zoning we go down a little bit. Um we we lost one personnel we were able to hire at the beginning end of that. So we're excited about that. uh bringing on that talent, but saved us money. You know, people uh are there for a while. The cost increased, so that number actually comes down, so that's good. Um any standouts in there? No. Um we do have 65,000 in there for the building improvement grant. So, we go back to the same number and you start that way and you move your way through the year. Code enforcement does have some extra money in it. And one of the things we're trying to recommend, you've got at least one building that u the Masonic on how mine

um is at a point where we don't have the ability to lock onto someone to do it. It is a hazard. We're going to recommend that you take that down. So you would bid that out. You would do that. you would lean the property until the property is sold and then that's when you would get your money back. But North Carolina law is very very tight on that. They do not um allow other more creative methods to make that happen. U but that's just one of those buildings that's a that's a problem in that neighborhood down there and it's a not only an eyesore but it's a safety hazard down there and so um we're going to recommend doing that. So that's the only larger number that's sitting in there that has anything to do with that business development. Um we have two in that department and Brandy um uh who moved over there to she was u she was kind of floating back and forth between Barbie and and over there and um is going to be their full-time person with her over there. that that budget has decreased in in size and cost and scope. Um but they're working towards those things. Now, what's in there are the leases um your downtown projects that that you folks have on your list of things to get done um down there as well as marketing. Uh those folks are really doing a lot of that. They're they use a couple cool pieces of software to help them through their processes in recruitment and retention. Um, and that's what's down there. And that also supports the Main Street program. So that's your Main Street downtown waxall association. Um, uh, support is built into that narrative, business development, human resources. Uh, this is what keeps us uh, making sure we're compliant with law and recruiting well

and retaining well. Uh, this is Emily and Gabriella up there and they do a a super job. their budget is uh rising a little bit on uh but one of the things we're going to come back to we put uh the workers comp insurance had a really large increase in it 29,000 of it as well as some meetings and wellness to try to curb some of those things in those um uh workers comp issues. So, you have to you have to spend a little bit to to knock that number down and hopefully get that in control. Um, Emily, we don't put in the merit pool in there. That's a number that is peppered across the

That's right. It's peppered across. Okay. So, um, these are things to prevent us from having issues and things like that. They do a good job of recruiting, retaining, and we also put workers comp in there. So, welcome to the big number. That's the one that really went up. Yeah.

Next is parks and wreck. Um um lots of descriptive stuff on top of that. Uh but in that um we have um let me see what stands out. the event expense is staying uh at and below u the current cost that you folks had instructed prior. Um buildings grounds and maintenance goes up a little bit. We have some things to maintain and and and get done as they age. Um and then the other thing that we did is we put a employee pool in there for coverage of uh recreck barn and learning center. those things come on. Instead of doing that in billets or people, we've done that in an amount of money so that Dena and her staff can rearrange their expectations as well as add hours throughout and figure out what the best coverage times are. So, we did it in a dollar format as opposed to a billet. Um, it could be people covering an hour a day. It could be somebody covering a couple hours a week. uh that gives a bit of flexibility, controls some cost, and we can see where that's going and if that coverage is working. We we need to cover those two buildings for a couple different reasons. They're ours, they're open, if they're open to the public, we need to make sure we have a presence in there and we don't want to leave people by themselves in buildings. So, we want to make sure that we cover uh certain things properly, but we did that as a dollar amount for control purposes as opposed to a billet. So, we're not adding billets. We're just adding time for that uh for part-time coverage of those things.

Where's that at? The wreck barn and the I think we threw that. Well, no, we would have thrown that into salaries. So, we would have just number there. It's a control number there. I'll stop looking for a single line. Yeah, stop stop looking for that. Yeah, it's not a single line. We'll we'll control it through salary. Yep. Because it's still got a FICA effect. It still has a, you know, it has all those other effects. Um, the board has had some good conversations. I I've got capital in parks and wreck for um a match to a grant for 12 mile Dena. Yes, sir.

Thank you. Because uh uh you received a graph for half of that and I've and I've uh scheduled money to go in for the other half. It doesn't sit in here. that sits in the CIP. Um, but you have money in there for that. I think the board has identified it needs to have a conversation about how it really wants to maintain some of these assets like NESBIT and things like that. Who do you want your partners to be? Who do you want your partners to be in some capital? Uh, we've had some of those discussions internally, but I think it demands a a board discussion at a further time uh to really get your head around some of these things. um especially some of the capital outlay, some things like lights and some other things like concession stands and other things like that that have that. I think the board needs to have a conversation with parks and wreck at the table and its other partners and figure out a strategy moving forward to pay for some of these things. Um, so that is where I have. Now, the other thing I added to your budget is Dina and her staff did a really great job of doing some event analysis for you. We threw that in as a separate just a separate uh discussion piece when the board's ready to have that discussion.

Um, but we try they did a really good job of capturing where your event costs were. Um, so we've thrown that in um in other information that we sent you. I just want to make the board aware of that. So when you're ready to have that discussion, let us know. Um and then next thing on my list. Okay. So this should be I put it up here on on the big page. This is um will be the second ordinance that you're having a you're having a you're required to have a public hearing on your general operating budget. We do your CIP appropriations at the same time. And so um this is that draft that number will come out tomorrow. So, when you folks made your plan, that's a plan, but when you uh move those monies in that ordinance tonight, you've been having a lot of discussions about that. They all show up here. For example,

this is what tonight put it all in the 403. This puts it all in appropriation. Um appropriations. Yeah. So, let me see. Is it the top thing? No. Oh, that's weird. No, I Do I have a little pointy thing on it? Is that the middle? Is that the middle? I think it's the middle. Middle.

Ah, look at that. How do um on the revenue side um for example, parks and wreck general fund, I've recommended moving 250 over um to meet our match. Then you get 250 from the grant. So that has that shows up here. Then it moves over in the expenditure side. Helm's design. Now, the rest of these are all transport. That's facility expenses that we're expecting next year for grants that we had received or about to receive.

Yes, that's exactly right. And then you'll notice here you see fund 406, fund 403, fund 403, fund 470, fund 120. So outside of the 250, you're not pulling anything over from general fund this year. Uh my recommendation in the budget is you're going to add to capital outlay in fund 403 at an amount of 300,000 and another 300,000 for capital um for future capital reserves in fund 403. You have to do that as a principled amount or you you know in future years you have expenses coming back. So, if we don't do it now, we need to do that. On the expenditure side, though, you see what these specifically are for. There's the grant. That's that $500,000 total. Um, and that is for 12 Mile Creek, Dina.

Yes, sir. Yeah, I got it. All right. Um, I'm getting better. Um, Helms Design at 750. Helms Design uh rightway is there. Pine Oak signal. This is the amount um that will finish Pine Oak Signal. You have monies in the reserve of this amount. That's what will come out there. Milbridge Signal. There's your Millbridge Signal. Um 75. I always get these messed up, but the at Old Providence

is 710. Uh the Broom Street amount you'll need for this year is 967, and that'll make that project whole. Um, you will also have Kensington. That's the part you're seeing dug up right now and all of those things going on. That's that amount that comes from fund 470. You have a baseline. We're moving it over. Um, and then you're getting a grant from Campo at 374 that'll add up to this project right here. So other than 250, everything is pulling from reserve, but you can see the amounts. They're big.

They may they're also in I will tell you they're also in this year's budget. We just did some maneuvering to maneuver them around though. Um so in this year you had uh about 2.8 million in capital cost. In your last action, you move you move some of those and we'll move the balance of them which we can do within the general fund and they'll show up in these things as expenditures and or savings for future projects. So um that's um as you can see though in your budget you're beginning to tighten your expenses and your revenues are beginning to flatline within each other. Um that's a concern. I will tell the board I am concerned about that. um like a lot of suburban cities around big metropolitan areas, uh we're very addicted to growth as a panacea for new monies. Um you also have that and values that have gone up, you know, so you you get the double whammy of that. Uh but you're still flatlining because your cost over the last five to six years have just risen. They just have it's the cost of people, the cost of goods, the cost supply shock after supply shock is affecting all kinds of cost structures that are really hard to manage except for to pay for them. So

or or not a Ponzi scheme, right? Because you get the new money coming in from the new people, but then later on you've got to pay for the Yeah. greater services. Yeah. The trash. It's it's a and it's a tough balancing act.

You're it's a tough balancing act for this board. And and I'll give an example. Um Indian Trail has 45,000 people. We have 26. They're worth 1 billion more than us in total valuation. We're about 4.8. They're about 5.7 billion. They have 19% non-residential. We have eight. However, we get more in sales tax because they're at lower rate. Yeah, that's right. Right. But they have the commercial business to offset.

They do. But remember all remember things about real estate, especially on the business side of things. They depreciate as assets. So there's more consideration given in that especially in a reassessment year than you will get on your house unless the trend is that all square footage for homes is decreasing evenly across a spectrum. Appraisals are tough things. I wish I understood them 100%. I don't. But it that's a good example. Their house our house house value is around 475. Mhm. Yours is about 670 700 somewhere in that range.

Uh you have higher values. Um but remember that the other thing is with commercial comes cost. I will tell you this much. I love our downtown. We do not have to send our cops down in our downtown like we would if we had a Walmart 24 center.

Matter of fact, we'd have to almost literally set You see it a lot of times, especially in small towns, they set up a shop there from 10:00 to 4 in the morning. It's a grand experience at the Walmart. So, um it's not when I go, but I have run there for diapers before in my career. So, um it's a it it's you know, commercial comes with cost trade-offs, too. It also comes with traffic trade-offs as well. So, there's a lot going on. And Indian Trail is an interesting comparison. um they do not have um a water and sewer uh control either like we don't. Um so

you say that the value to the town's budget of commercial would come more from the property taxes than the adorum revenue because of all the filtering that happens with the adorum. Yes, it would in this particular case because of the way the county does the redistribution on that, but that's the only reason. If they went per capita, uh it would flip out of our favor very quickly. Mhm. So then even though we obviously want our businesses to be successful thing,

it doesn't necessarily ped the budget very much if they get a lot more in sales this year than last year. Your sales are Lauren. This year was the year I would expect that we would have gotten more and it may be that next year we do get more but in my estimation of revenues for you folks for the town for for the departments for the citizens is simply that I'm going very conservative on those that 37% of revenues that we get in from and I'm keeping the tax rate level

in my budget. So, um, I'm not increasing it, but I can't afford I don't think you can afford to decrease it. Not with the amount of of of capital, not now, but that you'll have to replace, right? That's a tremendous amount. And the reality with the CIP, for instance, is because of the grants and the funding that we're getting help with and the need to match, we need to continue to save so we have that match. That's exactly right. And if we're not putting money in the bank for those matches, we're missing out. And we also have things that we can't control. Gas, electricity, I mean, all of that stuff.

I am recommending at least 300,000 uh to go into capital outlay, which are items under 50. That's your rolling stock. Um, and I'm recommending another three to go into capital reserve. Um, it's well below what I would like to recommend, but that would require an increase in revenues that I just don't see happening right now. Now what we've done in the past is that we've overestimated our expenditures. We have underestimated our revenues. That has given us a balance. And that balance allows the board to fill its unassigned keep it healthy and then move monies like you just did into an assigned position or a committed or a restricted position. Um, I'm seeing that trend tighten and that concerns me without new growth. And, uh, back to your point, Commissioner, um, is it a Pond game? Yeah, it costs more money to handle growth. It just does. Um, what is the perfect blend? It would be great if we had more commercial. It would be really great if you had, I don't know, a1 billion dollar Intel sitting in the middle of like a clean plant sitting in in the middle. I mean, that'd be the ultimate thing you would have, but the only way you get that is you have to give it enough tax incentives, you'd never see it.

So, there's trade-offs in that world. Um, exactly. Uh, so, so it's really hard. So, I think the way we're doing it incrementally, filling it in, um, building up that, uh, presence on 16 with the broom project to try to get that done. I, if I had to guess, our biggest two concerns are 16's not finished. Well, and not even started.

Well, well, that's right. So from 75 up to a certain point in downtown that Broom Street project is going to do some of it, right? Turn lane effects and some improvements improvements to meet that 16 when it comes in, but 16 is what drives it because the commercial developers don't want to pay exactions or or fees or uh development structure ideas. Uh maybe they do, but I don't think they do. And um that tells me their ROI isn't quite there yet um to do that. So they're waiting for someone else to pay for it. That's the DOT. Um the second thing is you don't control your sewer. Now, in not a lot of places would I say that sewer is a is a not a cost center, but a uh a profit center. And it is a profit center here because it's a controlled mechanism. You know what you can do. You only have so much capacity coming online. Um question is how you distribute that and how you you best deal with it. So um those two things are out of your you know right now they're out of your control. Um we could lobby harder for 16. That's certainly time but it won't be done next year.

No. So you have that reality to deal with. So that that's probably what's keeping the eight from growing, that 8% from growing at leaps and bounds. It's marginal right now. I mean, we get lots of good conversations with people. Lara does lots of great conversations with people in our downtown. Our downtown's full. It's lovely to go through it and see it. There's people in it. There's businesses in it. There's activity and complaints and all the problems that come along with that as well. But, you know, you want you want that, right? Um events and people want to come to it. We have a really great thing in our downtown, but it grows incrementally. It it's its style grows incrementally.

And the thing is, we can't really depend on the downtown. We have to look at 16 and and and those 16 and 75 and 75. Um, but in reality, some of these uh property owners on 16 are asking astronomical figures that it just doesn't pencil out. I've spoken to a couple of commercial developers that were interested in a couple of properties and when they tried to buy it, they're like, "We can't swing that." They're just asking just way way like millions for property that Yep. You know, there's not a structure, third or fourth one. Right. Right. So,

so there's a there there's a lot going on, but you know, we're not in a horrible position. You have cash in the bank. We have great staff. We have new stuff. have a board that's working together, sitting around and having these conversations. Those are good things to keep working on moving forward. So, um those are all that's really high level 30,000 foot. I apologize for that, but I think that's worth saying out loud. My concerns are in the 37% of revenues. Again, yeah, uh some of the things we don't control. That's a that's a trend I'm not really happy about right now, but I don't control it either. Most of the sales tax we get is comes off that 74 strip between Indian trail and Monroe

and we get the we get the ability to share on that which is nice. So um we all use all those roads. All of us use they use our roads. Everybody you know it it has a a nice big benefit all the way around. But anyways that's where it's at. So that's that's my draft. Are there any questions that you folks have um that would like to go into or anything else I can cover for you right now? Uh one thing stood out for me as I was just glancing at the numbers. Yes, sir. Is there a reason and I'm just curious um that's it. Sorry. On the facilities page, okay,

the medical and life went from 18 to 28 and going to 39. Is it because we got guys in boom trucks and climbing trees in facilities that that has gone up so much? Because it's it stands out from what the other departments have done in regards to medical and life insurance. I'm just curious if there's a reason for that out outlier. I want to go back to that page up here just so people know where we're talking about. I'm sorry, Dad.

Rosie, Rosie, Emily, why don't you guys come on up? What were you looking at? It's medical and life. It goes from 18 to 28 to 39. Just all went up. The medical and life insurance. Yeah. I mean, it's just everything way more than other departments have gone up. That's the only reason I'm asking. Oh, it's it's different from all the other departments basically in terms of its level of increase. Okay. Headcount could be headcount.

Okay. So, last year when we budgeted, we budgeted for one full-time person. I don't think we budgeted for Paul for the full year. We had him the full year. Okay. So it could be that we didn't copy the number over correctly. We'll I'll double check it. Okay. But um so it's mainly related to headc count. Yeah. So I mean there's a certain cost for each certainly

for each individual and we calculated um the cost of the the the health insurance the the dental the vision and the life insurance. So it's it is about $25,000 a piece. Okay. So that's just driven by headcount primarily. I'm just curious why that increase was so different from all the other departments because there weren't big jumps like that in other departments. So that's fine because again I I'd forgotten that our facilities it's not that many people. So but we will check all the numbers though again. Okay.

But and we're going to tomorrow we will spend time you know making sure everything's cleaned up so that the number that goes out is is tight. We'll check that. Thank you for noticing that. And then for the business development, I noticed the parking um is going up to 34. Is there another lot that's going to come online or Yeah, there's another lot that's going to go up in price. And there's another lot going up in price. Trying to think which one. And the second thing we did is we moved cost from this year over into next year because we're not going to be able to finish how we mine this year. We're going to have to finish it next year. So, so some of this year's costs are coming in next year.

Yeah. And then we're also doing other improvements in the rideway as well, right? Okay. Are we bundling parking improvements in that line item? Yeah. Not just the leases. Yeah. Okay. Those are my questions at the moment. I'm okay.

Um, yeah, I probably need to spend more time looking at these numbers. Um but uh there was some really good stuff in your uh manager's uh report. Um it was great to see the uh facility rental revenue increased a lot. Um you know there's sort of a balance between uh public good and sort of upselling your residents, you know.

Yeah. You don't want to force everyone to pay for something they don't really want, but then you also for those who do want it, you know, maybe they should pay a little more in fees and they are and we've increased that. We've also recommended increases in uh some other fees as well for you folks. But um yeah, I think that's a good recognition. I mean, they they are trying to recover back more and I I mean, they do so much work with the community. It's appreciated. Um, a lot of the programs like the senior bingo, which is fun. Oh, they love that. I like senior bingo. They're they're friendly.

Although Although Dena has some staff people that will um get you pretty good on bingo. Yes. Is that a fair statement, Dina? Is that a fair statement? Yeah, I've lost money to some of those folks down there in bingo. It's like really if it was poker it'd be one thing, but no, it's bingo. So, anyway. So, okay. Well, I'm Thank you for that feedback. I appreciate that because that's the direction you wanted them to go in. Yeah. I think I hope they've shown you a good effort to get that there that the costs have been contained and they're increasing those those returns. Well, it takes a couple years to figure that out and with the program and

the summer camps that happen and the adult um with disabilities programs that that they're incorporating um which I like to see and I think the word is getting out that we're providing those and I think um there will be more of a need and I know that sometimes people may say well I already pay taxes but that doesn't cover everything and we have to staff and we have to, you know, get prizes and we give snacks and and so, um, you know, I do appreciate that because, uh, you know, I do attend a lot of the events and and they do put a tremendous effort on being innovative, finding new things to do with the kids and adults, too.

They're safe events. Y a Zumba class here and there. So, it's it's all good. Oh, Zumba class. Yes. I won't do that because we don't need to be doing that. It's like me and Pilates. You don't want to see do that. Any other food truck comparison was interesting, too. Food truck fees. Um, looks like we're on par or maybe a little higher than other places for food truck fees. Um, and um, you know, the feedback that we sometimes hear from businesses is that they don't like food trucks competing, you know. Um, and that's fair enough. Um,

I think it's less of an issue when there's a big festival. Yeah. Uh, but on a regular basis, they feel like they're a brickandmortar building, they're paying rent, they're paying insurance, they have to deal with the health department, and then a food truck can just roll up, may not even be registered in Union County. And so what happens then with the with the revenues from that? that's problematic. And so, you know, with all the costs going up, everyone's struggling a little bit. And so, I would like to be sensitive to our brickandmortar uh restaurants. Yeah. Whenever we have food trucks banging down the door to come in,

maybe the fees could be a little higher, you know. Uh I don't know. I don't know if they're banging down the door or not, but maybe a place where they're not right next to right a restaurant, right? So, I wouldn't appreciate it if I opened up a restaurant and now there's a food truck parked on the side of my business where people that are waiting for a table might now go to the food truck and not wait 15 more minutes because they have, you know, an upset child or whatever the case may be. I want to be sensitive to that. Sure.

Yep. Yep. I think Allara does a great job of keeping her ear to the ground and and trying to hear that as does Dena and her events and uh they do try to coordinate these things. It's not 100% perfect all the time, but it it is a good effort on everyone's part to places we can improve, but I'm glad that report uh was what you needed. Yeah, it's good. It's good. Thank you. They did a good job on that. Any other questions in the budget? Scott, what is it tracking right now from year last year for FY 2627 percentage up increased? Was it run around 10%. I saw 2.8. No, the total is I calculated 2.8 when you have those two numbers.

Yeah, it's it's it's it's lower than you think. It's around the two and a 4%. 4%. Yeah. Where did I write it? Oh, I wrote it here. Yeah, you're at 252 going up to 258. Yep. At 600,000. So that's 2.38%. So yeah, that's subinflation number. And that's a really good number. Budget increase. A really good number. Yeah. Yeah, that's good because you know the history of this town, it's gone up a lot more than that, right? Uh in the last six years, it went up

way beyond what population and inflation would dictate. You know, to me, the fair raising of the cost of running a town would be based on those two main factors really is inflation and population growth. That those those two things are legitimate drivers of a higher budget. But our budget went up a lot more than that over the last six years. And uh well, it's probably this building reason why we're here. This building had a lot to do with it, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You know, we hadn't had a building. We do have it now. Should last 50, 60, 70, 80 years, 100 years from now. Matt's going to be here still.

Matt says he's still going to be here. He'll be here. 100 years from now. There you go. It'll be a cattle barn by that point in time, but it it'll still be here. Anything else from the board then? Oh, good. Thank you. All righty. Well, can I get a motion to adjurnn? Motion to adjurnn. All in favor? I. All righty. Motion carries. We are adjourned.