Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Call the meeting to order. I'm gonna do a roll call at this time. Mayor Pro Tem, are you here?

Here.

Councilmember Joyner, I believe, is here. Councilmember Andrews?

Here.

Councilmember Lau?

Here.

Councilmember Santaguida?

Here.

Councilmember Clinton Quintana?

Here.

And the chair's here. Everybody's here and accounted for. Two proclamations tomorrow night. We also have the consent agenda, C1. Resolution rejecting the bid received for the Downtown Alley Improvements Project. C2 is a resolution designating official depositories for city funds. C3 is a resolution adopting comments on the proposed programmatic agreement between the multiple state and federal agencies and the North Carolina Historic Preservation Office regarding the transportation program in North Carolina. C4 is approval of the minutes. We have public information, public hearings, and of course ordinances. 01 is the ordinance amending the Wilmington City Code Section 8-5 on criminal history background checks and or credit history checks required of applicants and employees. This is being read on a second reading. Item 02A is an ordinance making appropriations to the general fund, grant projects, financial plans, enterprise fund, debit service fund, special tax district, and convention center for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2026. O2B is an ordinance making appropriations to the capital projects funds for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2026. And then O2C is an ordinance amending various chapters of the City of Wilmington fee schedule for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2026. O3 is an ordinance to amend various funds for the issuance of limited obligation bonds series 2026. And then O4 is an ordinance to amend the stormwater management fund for the refunding of revenue bonds series 2015A. And then O5 is an ordinance to amend the Parks and Recreation Capital Projects Fund to comply with governmental accounting standards for the recording of the Greenville Loop Road future park property and the gross purchase price. O6 is an ordinance amending various projects and grant funds for adjustments from budget to actual funding and expenditures. And then O7A is a resolution accepting public streets and storm drainage facilities at Kando Street and Connolly Alley. 07B is an ordinance making supplemental appropriations of $12,011 from a payment in lieu for Kando Street improvements to the city streets and sidewalks capital projects fund. And then 08A is a resolution accepting public streets and storm drainage facilities within Woodlands and Echo Farms track number two. And then 08B is an ordinance establishing a speed limit of 25 miles per hour Lanyon due court, Muscat Bay Drive, and Old Titanium Court. And then resolutions, R1 is a resolution urging the North Carolina Department of Transportation to consider traffic impacts related to the simultaneously undertaken of the Eastwood Road overpass project and bridge replacement projects at Wrightsville Beach. And then R2 is a resolution expressing support for North Carolina Senate Bill 970 slash House Bill 1084. And then R3 is a resolution expressing support for Navy Week to return to Wilmington, North Carolina. And with that, this concludes this agenda. Are there any questions that any council member would like to hear separately?

Can we get back to the top of the consent agenda, please?

Yes, we can.

For C1, rejecting the bid for the downtown improvement projects, can we just get an update on that? I wanna highlight that since there was a request from the Municipal Services District Advisory Committee to do some alleyway improvements. And I think the funds that they were requesting anticipated that we would be moving forward with these bids.

Yes, sir, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, members of council. My name is Justin Carter. I'm the director of our design and construction group. So right now we only got one bid on that project. We did have to actually extend the bids because we only got one. We believe that bid came in higher than what we would anticipate that doing. We also heard a lot of feedback during our pre-bid process that we think we can go in and improve what we have to bring those prices down to a better price for the project. So we would like to reject these bids or reject this bid and then go back, make some of those improvements such as providing a staging area, removing some items in terms of things that we don't think are needed. We've been coordinating with CFP way. There are items that are coming out and that should bring our prices down to a much more reasonable level to allow us to spend those dollars a little bit better. But we are still planning on moving forward. We're looking at probably a month to month and a half to make those changes and coordination with some of the utility companies to put that back out to bid, um, to see what we, if we can get more interest in a better bidding environment. And can you just describe what the improvements are? Yep. Um, so if we do have this presentation here, I won't go all the way through it. Um, but I absolutely can. Um, but if we look at, we have Quince Henderson and Wilkinson alley are the three alleys we were looking at. If we look at all the utilities, so part of this really is looking at the infrastructure in the base layer of what is out there. So it's improving the foundation of our project so that when we look at coming back, we can do other improvements such as lighting, maybe greenery, making these much more pedestrian friendly. But this first step of this project is to improve the infrastructure. So this shows us all of the utilities that are out there that we are coordinating with. It gives you an idea of storm, sewer, water, gas, and electric all being down these alleyways. Here's some of the pictures of those alleyways. You can see just how busy they are, how bad they need new brickwork, and paving and infrastructure at the bottom. Again, we can look at some of the storm drains that come down. So when we talk about this project, what we're looking at is taking the historic brick pavement surface and redoing the entire paving surface with the historic brick. looking at taking all of our underground conduits for those dry utilities data communications electricity and pulling those underground rather than overhead so if we kind of go back and look at the picture real quick you can see on that picture there on the left side of the screen just how busy it is up above right trying to bring a lot of those underground storm drain system we have all of the water that comes off the roof of those buildings that come down in the storm drain utilities into the alleyway itself We want to pull those into pipes underground and drain those into the system along with AC condensation units. Those will be going underground as well. When we look at from an engineering perspective, the number one thing that really affects our infrastructure in a negative way is water, water, water, water. Getting that away from the buildings will not only help the business owners and the owners of those buildings, it also helps us as a city with the infrastructure for our roads and having to maintain longer, so those are going underground. Natural gas systems are going to be replacing and upgrading their systems while we have everything open, so we'll make adjustments to those. We originally had water and sanitary sewer that was part of this that they were going to upgrade. CFPUA has since told us right now at this point at least they're going to line their pipes instead of replace them. So that will help us when we go back out to bid that we don't have to dig as deep, which means it should be cheaper for us. And we were coordinating with CFPUA as part of this for them to reimburse us for a lot of those costs. But when we don't have shoring and things like that to the depth they were going, it will help our project have less risk, which should hopefully mean more bidders and hopefully lower prices. And so that's really the extent of those improvements. Thank you.

Any other questions?

Okay. Thank you.

Ms. Hawk, do we have anything else?

There are no presentations this morning, Mr. Mayor.

Okay. With that, we will stand adjourned. And I know that we have an Appointments Committee meeting right after this. So, we stand adjourned.