The Town Council will hold its regular business meeting on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. in the Pitts Center. The Dare County Board of Commissioners (Dare BOC) will meet earlier that day at 9 a.m. in Manteo for a special public meeting concerning efforts to create essential workforce housing in Dare.
For the Town’s agenda and meeting packet, see: https://mccmeetings.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/soshoresnc-pubu/MEET-Packet-38cd44eae64343eba573eed122bd2f69.pdf.
For the Dare Commissioners’ meeting, see: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/NCDARECOUNTY/bulletins/394004b.
You may live-stream the Dare BOC meeting at https://www.youtube. com/DareCounty.
A livestream of the Town Council meeting is available at https://www.youtube.com/@SouthernShores/streams.
The Board of Commissioners will make a decision Tuesday on “where we go from here,” Board Chairman Robert Woodard promised in a press release about the special meeting.
“We’ll open it up and have everything on the table with respects to three and a half years ago when we started,” he elaborated, “what’s been done, what hasn’t been done and what the future might look like.
“This board needs to make a decision on what direction we’re going to go from moving forward with respects to essential housing . . .,” he concluded.
The meeting will be held in the Dare BOC meeting room at the Dare County Administration Bldg., 954 Marshall C. Collins Drive, Manteo.
The Dare County Housing Task Force will next meet on April 16, 9 a.m., in Room 168 of the Dare County Administration Bldg.
TOWN’S ANTICIPATED FY 2024-25 BUDGET HAS NEW MAJOR EXPENDITURES
The Town of Southern Shores is into its budget season, and we would like to catch you up on the planning for the Town’s fiscal year 2024-25 budget, which must be adopted by June 30.
At the March 12 Town Council meeting, Town Manager Cliff Ogburn presented the FY 2024-25 budget calendar and a list of estimated “big-ticket” capital-improvement costs. The calendar is as follows:
March 7: The heads of the Town’s various departments, such as public works, police, and fire, submitted their projected FY 2024-25 budgets to the Town Manager. Mr. Ogburn anticipated meeting with them in March to discuss their numbers and possible pare-downs.
April 16: Mr. Ogburn will present a preliminary budget to the Town Council at a 9 a.m. workshop in the Pitts Center and seek the Council’s “input and priorities,” he said. The public may comment at this meeting.
May 7: Mr. Ogburn will present his recommended FY 2024-25 budget to the Town Council at its regular first-Tuesday monthly meeting. The Council may or may not discuss the budget then. The public will have its customary two comment periods.
May 21: The Council has the option to hold a 9 a.m. workshop on this Tuesday for further discussions about the Town Manager’s recommended budget.
June 4: A public hearing will be held on the recommended FY 2024-25 budget at the Town Council’s regular monthly meeting, after which the Council may adopt the budget, as it has tended to do in recent years. Alternatively, it may decide to have another 9 a.m. budget workshop on June 18.
The “big-ticket” items, and their cost estimates, that “we need to approach,” Mr. Ogburn told the Town Council at its last meeting are:
Juniper/Chicahauk bridge/culvert replacement: $1,600,000
Duck Road multi-use path extension: $ 325,000
Multi-use path (sidewalk) repairs: $ 150,000
Document scanning: $ 180,000
Town building renovations $ 250,000
TOTAL: $2,505,000
The Duck Road (N.C. Hwy. 12) path extension would be on the west side and run for about a half-mile from East Dogwood Trail to Hickory Trail.
The document scanning project came about during Town staff-Town Council discussions about physically expanding the space for the Planning and Code Enforcement Department’s file room, where documents about individual properties are stored.
A 101-square-foot addition to the file room, whose “floor’s about to cave in,” Mr. Ogburn said, has been proposed.
The room currently holds 3,240 individual files, each of which represents a different property address, according to the Town Manager.
Sentiment expressed by Town Council members and the public has been to digitize these documents so that they may be accessed electronically, as well as to retain paper copies of them.
To “purge” the paper documents—i.e., physically remove them from the files—going back 20 or so years, Mr. Ogburn told the Town Council, “would just take forever.” Scanning every document could be done “much more efficiently,” he said.
(Of course, you could scan everything and purge at the same time, but we like our visits to Town Hall to peruse paper documents, some of which are quite large.)
The Town already owns the software required to make the scanned documents electronically available, Mr. Ogburn said.
The cost of building the file room addition and making some improvements and security upgrades to the Town Hall complex is included in “building renovations.” The Town Council has had such upgrades on its radar for years.
Mr. Ogburn reported that revenue from land-transfer taxes during FY 2023-24 is down 12 percent from the previous fiscal year, and revenue from occupancy and sales taxes is up only about 3-4 percent. The combined total of revenue from these taxes in FY 2022-23 was $3,876,770.
The Town’s unassigned fund balance, he said, is a healthy $7.8 million, as of the last audit, but $3.5 million of that is reserved and cannot be used for budget expenses.
The Town Manager advised the Council that the Town may need either to cut services or increase taxes to balance the budget, which is expected to be well over $10 million.
Mayor Elizabeth Morey encouraged residents to make their views known about line items in the budget.
TOWN COUNCIL MEETING AGENDA HIGHLIGHTS
Speaking of cost—and returning to Tuesday’s meeting, the Town Council will discuss a $34,882 proposal submitted by Coastal Protection Engineering of North Carolina for services associated with its 2024 annual beach profile monitoring. CPE’s cost is broken down into two tasks: 2024 annual beach profile data acquisition ($19,217) and 2024 annual beach profile data analysis and report ($15,665).
As previously reported, the public hearing on ZTA 24-02, the tree-removal permit provision for commercial property owners, which we analyzed 4/5/24, will be held Tuesday.
In other meeting highlights, Town Manager Ogburn will address the excessive rate increase proposed by GWWTP, LLC, a subsidiary of SAGA Realty & Construction, for the use of its [Ginguite Woods] Wastewater Treatment Plant by residents of Southern Shores Landing; and the Town Council will consider whether it would like to follow the Town of Duck’s lead and adopt a Town Code ordinance that would ban the release of balloons in Southern Shores.
The Town Council unanimously approved at its March 12 meeting a resolution to oppose the release of balloons in town because of the hazards they pose for wildlife and the environment. It also asked Town staff for examples of ordinances enacted in other N.C. coastal communities.
The Duck Town Council considered both a resolution and an ordinance at its April 3 meeting and opted for a legally enforceable prohibition. The text of Duck’s new ordinance, which exempts balloons used for scientific or meteorological purposes, is in the meeting packet for Tuesday’s Council meeting.
Debbie Swick of Chicahauk has spearheaded the campaign on the Outer Banks to ban the release of balloons into the coastal environment. Duck’s ordinance is the first of its kind in our region. The Town Council meeting packet includes balloon-ban ordinances from Wrightsville Beach, Swansboro, Topsail Beach, and Surf City, N.C.
By Ann G. Sjoerdsma, 4/7/24
The Southern Shores Beacon 