Dare County will hold its annual hazardous waste collection in Kitty Hawk Thursday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Town Hall, 101 Veterans Memorial Drive.
Collections are also scheduled in Buxton on Friday and in Manteo at the Dare County Public Works Dept. on Saturday.
This is a great opportunity to clear your garage of old paint cans and brushes, pesticides, pool chemicals, automotive fluids, and other hazardous clutter.
The list of acceptable materials, along with the times and addresses for the Buxton and Manteo collections, is accessible here:
The three-day event is sponsored by the Dare County Public Works Dept., the N.C. Dept. of Agriculture & Consumer Services (Pesticide Division), and the N.C. Cooperative Extension at N.C. State and N.C. A&T State universities.
It is only for Dare County residents and the agricultural community.
Town Manager Cliff Ogburn will present his recommended fiscal year 2025-26 Town of Southern Shores budget to the Town Council at its regular meeting Tuesday, May 6, after which the budget will be available on the Town website for the public to view.
Tuesday’s meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m. in the Pitts Center.
The Town Council will schedule a public hearing on the budget in June before it votes on its approval. The Council has until June 30 to finalize the budget, which starts on July 1, 2025.
You may access the agenda and meeting packet here:
You may live-steam the meeting at the Southern Shores You Tube website.
Mr. Ogburn also will give status reports Tuesday on the construction of the Trinite Trail Bridge replacement, which previously has been projected to conclude by the end of June or early July, at the latest, and on the Town’s acquisition of the Southern Shores Volunteer Fire Dept.
For background on the FY 2025-26 budget and on the transition of the SSVFD to a department of the Town of Southern Shores, see The Beacon, 4/10/25.
Another important item on the agenda is a discussion about House Bill 765 and similar legislation currently in the N.C. General Assembly that would limit the planning and zoning authority of municipalities.
The Town Council will consider, and undoubtedly approve unanimously, a resolution expressing its opposition to H.B. 765, which is designed to usurp local control of development regulations, and other similar bills.
H.B. 765 is an omnibus bill that is making its way through House committees. For a listing of its many proposed regulatory changes, see an analysis by the N.C. League of Municipalities included in the Town Council meeting packet at pages 58-62.
The Manager’s budget presentation is currently on the agenda after a public hearing on Zoning Text Amendment 25-02, which was submitted by Anthony S. Mina of 75 East Dogwood Trail. Mr. Mina has been engaged with the Town since the Planning Dept. denied his request to subdivide his property. He is responsible for savesouthernshores.com.
(We wrote about Mr. Mina’s situation last October when the Planning Board held a five-hour-plus hearing on a variance request submitted by Mr. Mina, and we decline comment now. Mr. Mina will appear at the ZTA hearing by Zoom because the Town Council has banned him from Town property for a year.)
We trust the Town Council will see the wisdom in reversing the order of this new business so that Mr. Ogburn’s discussion of his recommended budget will occur before the ZTA hearing.
The Planning Board voted unanimously at its April 21 meeting to recommend that the Town Council disapprove ZTA 25-02 after it spent nearly two hours in a hearing.
As we previously announced, we will not be covering this meeting, but we will review the budget in a subsequent blog post as soon as we can.
MAYOR’S CHAT SCHEDULED MAY 14, 5 P.M., IN PITTS CENTER
Mayor Elizabeth Morey will host an informal Mayor’s Chat on Wed., May 14, at 5 p.m., in the Pitts Center to discuss “anything Southern Shores,” according to the Town’s notice.
In our experience, other Town officials, including the Town Manager and Police Chief David Kole, attend these chats and respond to inquiries, as well.
With a new budget that is expected to rely upon an increase in the Town’s ad valorem tax rate to be balanced; a new municipal fire department to structure, staff, and fund; and the prospect of the State legislative overreach of H.B. 765 becoming law, there would seem to be much to talk about with Mayor Morey.
In a FY 2025-26 budget workshop this morning that primarily focused on staffing the new municipal Fire Department in its first year, the Southern Shores Town Council discussed a potential general property (ad valorem) tax-rate increase of 4 to 5 cents in order to cover additional costs.
This tax-rate increase would be on top of the revenue-neutral tax rate of 12.16 cents per $100 of property value that Town Manager Cliff Ogburn presented in his report to the Council of a “draft of a Manager’s recommended budget” for fiscal year 2025-26.
“We still have a ways to go” Mr. Ogburn said of the Town’s draft budget, which has expenses exceeding revenues by $1,111,500, an amount that a tax increase of 4 cents would cover.
That budget, however, only includes costs for hiring three new full-time fire captains, who would work 24 hours on and 48 hours off, instead of four new full-time fire captains, who would work 24 hours on and 72 hours off, as recommended by Fire Chief Ed Limbacher and approved by Town Council consensus this morning.
Mr. Ogburn has currently budgeted $1,680,958 for the Fire Department next year, which is about $650,000 less than has been tentatively budgeted for the Police Department.
The four new Fire Department employees would join the Fire Chief, the Deputy Chief, and the Assistant Chief as full-time salaried employees and enable the department to have four people on duty during the busy weekday hours. The department also has two part-time salaried administrative employees.
None of the current salaried employees receive benefits. In FY 2025-26, with the transition to a municipal department, all full-time salaried employees also would receive benefits.
In an extended discussion involving all Council members, Mayor Elizabeth Morey and Mayor Pro Tem Matt Neal expressed some interest in eliminating the Assistant Chief position, but Chief Limbacher strongly argued against that as a “quality of life” issue.
Such an elimination would reduce the free time of the remaining two chiefs—increasing weekend work—he said, and the Chief is committed to improving the “work-life balance” of all members of the department, who view it as a major concern.
Mr. Ogburn will submit his proposed FY 2025-26 Annual Operating Budget to the Town Council at its May 6 meeting. The public hearing on the budget will be held at the Town Council’s June 3 meeting, after which the Council will likely vote on its approval, although the Town has until June 30 to adopt the FY 2025-26 budget.
If the Town Council approves a proposed tax-rate increase of 4 cents or 5 cents, property owners would pay 16.16 cents or 17.16 cents per $100 of property value next year, which would be less than the 19.58 cents per $100 that they paid in the current fiscal year because of Dare County’s reappraisal.
Taxes for the beach nourishment project would be additional, of course, but they, too, would have a new revenue-neutral tax rate. According to Mr. Ogburn, the townwide beach nourishment tax rate would drop from 4 cents to 2.48 cents; the multiservice district (MSD) 1 tax rate would drop from 7.15 cents to 4.94 cents; and the MSD2 tax rate would drop from 3 cents to 1.74 cents
(As we explained in our post yesterday, a “revenue-neutral” tax rate is a tax rate estimated to produce revenue for the next fiscal year (2025-26) equal to the revenue that would have been produced by the current tax rate (19.58 cents in 2024-25) if no reappraisal had occurred. See The Beacon, 4/10/25, for more information.)
The last time the Town Council raised the ad valorem tax rate was in 2012. According to Mr. Ogburn, the rate went from 14 cents per $100 of value to 16 cents per $100 of value. All other increases since then, he said, have been revenue-neutral. (We’re unclear about the distinction; certainly, the tax rate has gone up since 2012 to the present 19.58. With the townwide beach-nourishment tax added on, the lowest tax rate in Southern Shores in FY 2024-25 was 23.58.)
Dare County reassessed property values twice during the past 13 years: in 2013 and 2020, observing what was once a fairly standard seven- to eight-year cycle. (We remember the revaluations of 2005, 1998, and 1989.) This year, the County embarked on a new five-year revaluation schedule.
According to Mr. Ogburn, the County-assessed value of all property in Southern Shores in FY 2025-26 increased 74 percent over last year: from $1,628,760,000 to $2,832,200,000.
Longtime Town Finance Officer Bonnie Swain said at the meeting that the Town can expect a downward adjustment to about $2.6 billion when successful assessment appeals are factored in.
Property owners have until April 30 to file appeals of assessments, either by mail or online at Dare County’s website page for revaluations.
Mr. Ogburn’s draft FY 2025-26 Southern Shores budget anticipates $5,641,397 in ad valorem tax revenue and $3,858,358 in occupancy, sales, and land-transfer taxes.
SPEAK TO YOUR TOWN COUNCIL MEMBERS
The Town Council left no doubt during its meeting this morning that the ad valorem tax rate will go up in FY 2025-26, perhaps by as much as 5 cents.
No Council member is very happy about raising taxes, but, as Councilman Rob Neilson said, seemingly for all: “Something’s gotta give somewhere.”
Councilman Neilson and his colleague, Councilman Mark Batenic, met with volunteer firefighters to find out how they feel about the Southern Shores Volunteer Fire Department’s municipal transformation. They encountered a tightly knit group of young people who are dedicated to serving the town and enjoy what they do.
Both Council members strongly supported the higher tax-rate increase to ensure that the Fire Department’s high-quality service reliably continues, and it remains an attractive place to work.
The Council, and the Town Manager, briefly discussed trimming the costs of some Town services, to save some money, but the services that they mentioned, such as recycling, chipping, and limb and branch pickup, are generally well-liked by property owners. No one seemed eager to cut services, but surely there are some costs within the budget that can be eliminated.
In at least the past two fiscal years, the Town Manager has dipped into the Unassigned Fund Balance, which is essentially a multi-million-dollar emergency disaster reserve, to balance the budgets, but doing so again is not favored by the Town Council.
We will pass along Mr. Ogburn’s recommended FY 2025-26 budget, as soon as he has revised and circulated it.
Mayor Morey appealed to all Southern Shores citizens to express their views on the potential tax-rate increase to Council members. They would like to hear from you.
After the budget meeting, The Beacon spoke with the Mayor informally, and she advised us that she is not committed to doing beach nourishment to the extent it was done in 2022-23 every five years just as a matter of course.
Mayor Morey said she would not “do” beach nourishment “just to be doing it”–a view that we find to be refreshing. Dare County Manager Bobby Outten has spoken of the five-year cycle as a given for sand replenishment.
Sharing mobilization costs with other towns might make a five-year schedule appealing, Mayor Morey noted. That remains to be seen.
The Mayor also told us when we asked if she was running for reelection in November that she would give it “serious consideration.”
Town Councilwoman Paula Sherlock’s four-year term is also ending this year.
[On a personal note, I would like to say that May 6 is my birthday, and I do not plan to spend it at Town Hall. If there are any enterprising journalists out there who would like to cover the Town Council’s meeting that night, please contact me at ssbeaconeditor@gmail.com. Thank you!]
By Ann G. Sjoerdsma, The Southern Shores Beacon, 4/10/25
The Town Council’s budget workshop tomorrow at 9 a.m. in the Pitts Center is being held for a preliminary review of the Town Manager’s projected General Fund expenses and revenues for fiscal year 2025-26, according to the meeting agenda posted on the Town website.
Town Manager Cliff Ogburn, who also serves as the Town Budget Officer, will submit his proposed FY 2025-26 Annual Operating Budget to the Town Council at its May 6 meeting. The projected expenses and revenues he presents tomorrow constitute a draft of that budget.
Because FY 2025-26 is a property reappraisal year, Mr. Ogburn also should reveal the revenue-neutral tax rate in the Town of Southern Shores. (See below.)
A public hearing on the proposed FY 2025-26 budget will be held during the Town Council’s June 3 meeting. No public comments will be heard tomorrow.
COUNTY COMMITS TO ‘REVENUE-NEUTRAL’ TAX RATE
Dare County Board of Commissioners Chair Bob Woodward announced at the Board’s meeting Monday that the Commissioners have committed to a revenue-neutral tax rate for FY 2025-26, according to a report Monday by The Outer Banks Voice.
If the Southern Shores Town Council observes the precedent set by previous Councils during property reappraisal years, it will do the same.
A “revenue-neutral” tax rate is a tax rate estimated to produce revenue for the next fiscal year (2025-26) equal to the revenue that would have been produced by the current tax rate (as assessed in 2024-25) if no reappraisal had occurred.
The budget officer of the governing board—in the case of the county, that is Town Manager Bobby Outten—is required by N.C. law to include a statement of the revenue-neutral property tax rate for the proposed budget in a year in which a general property reappraisal has occurred. (See N.C. Gen. Statutes sec. 159-11(e).)
According to The Voice, Mr. Woodward said that the revenue-neutral rate in the county will be 26.32 cents per $100 of property value, a reduction of about 35 percent from the current tax rate of 40.05 cents per $100 of value.
Although N.C. statute requires calculation and publication of this tax rate, it does not require a municipality to adopt it.
The Southern Shores Town Council will hold a fiscal year 2025-26 budget workshop on Thursday, April 10, at 9 a.m., in the Pitts Center.
The special meeting will be open to the public, as well as live-streamed on the Town’s You Tube website. You also may access a You Tube videotape of the meeting after its conclusion.
It is customary for the Town Council to hold its mandatory public hearing and vote on the next fiscal year budget during its regular June meeting. The fiscal year starts July 1.
The Beacon will suspend its publication suspension to attend next Thursday’s meeting and report on any salient issues, including discussion about the Town’s FY 2025-26 ad valorem tax rate.
The Town has not yet posted a meeting agenda on its website. If and when it does, we will provide a link.
Today’s day-long Town Council retreat at the Pitts Center is not being live-streamed, as we earlier reported it would be. We regret making an erroneous assumption. (See The Beacon, 3/1/25.)
We attended part of the retreat this afternoon and were told that the business discussed would only be reported through official minutes. No videotape was recorded.
The Town Manager should be updating residents and property owners soon about the conclusion of the SSVFD study that the Town should incorporate the fire department into the municipal government. Cliff Ogburn told us that the change could occur as soon as July 1.
We also heard considerable enthusiasm by the Town Council for the creation of a Public Information Officer position.
Last night’s Town Council meeting was live-streamed.
We spotted an osprey on Monday, Feb. 24, in the nest closest to the Soundside Park shore (above) on North Dogwood Trail. Ospreys, which are birds of prey, return to their Outer Banks nests in late February or early March every year to mate, lay eggs, and launch their chicks into the world. The male arrives ahead of the female to prepare the nest for their months-long occupancy.
As many of you know, we announced on Feb. 2 an indefinite suspension of The Beacon’s publication, effective immediately, because of a significant change in our circumstances. Because of the suspension, we did not cover the Town Council’s Feb. 4 meeting.
We are publishing today only to advise you of a retreat the Town Council will be holding in the Pitts Center on Wednesday, from 8:30 a.m. until possibly as late as 3 p.m., to discuss a wide-ranging, “ambitious” agenda of issues confronting the Town of Southern Shores—or so the Council believes—in the future, both near and distant.
According to the agenda, the retreat will start at 8:30 a.m. with a light breakfast, and business will convene at 9 a.m. The Council will work through a lunch break starting at 12:30 p.m. and take up its last list of topics at 1:30 p.m.
Unlike at previous retreats, there is no public-comment period scheduled.
Printed atop the retreat agenda posted on the Town website is the note that not every item on it may be discussed. Assigned times for agenda items “are not meant to be strict,” the note reads, and the Council may choose to rearrange both times and items.
The posted agenda is as follows:
8:30 a.m. Light breakfast
9:00 a.m. Introduction: “13 Ways to Kill a Community” by Doug Griffiths*
Comments from the Southern Shores Civic Assn., by Board member Jeff Johnson, and the Chicahauk Property Owners Assn., by Karen Kranda, president
Budget summary
9:30 a.m. SERVICE LEVEL
1. Fire study report discussion
2. Are we providing the right level of service?
a. Do we need a Public Information Officer?
b. More use of social media
c. Access to information including digitally and use of AI
10:30 a.m. INFRASTRUCTURE
1. Stormwater
a. BRIC grant for project at 13th/Sea Oats *
b. Hickory/Wax Myrtle project
2. Access
a. Sidewalks
b. Linking to commercial sites
c. Golf carts
3. Community park/pockets parks
a. Purchasing property
b. Central gathering place
12:30 p.m. WORKING LUNCH
6. Discussion of items to reconsider
a. Tree ordinance
b. Speed limit on Route 12
c. Facility master planning
1:30 PLANNING
7. Entry Corridor Committee update
8. Non-conforming lots
9. Engaging outside resources
**Doug Griffiths, 52, is a Canadian who formerly served in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta as a Progressive Conservative and founded the consulting company, 13 Ways, Inc., 10 years ago.
According to Wikipedia.org, 13 Ways began as a book, “13 Ways to Kill Your Community,” that detailed in an entertaining satirical style the various ways in which one might “kill a community,” for example, through a failure to provide clean water, reliable Internet service, and a place where young people might return to raise families and retire.
(Beacon note: Clearly, a coastal resort area is different from the usual American community.)
**BRIC stands for Building Resilient Infrastructure in Communities. It is a funding program of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
We will not be attending or reporting upon the retreat.
If you view the video after the event is over, be sure to click on the “Live” link on the menu bar.
REGULAR TOWN MEETING ON TUESDAY, MARCH 4
The Town Council will hold its regular monthly meeting the evening before the retreat, starting at 5:30 p.m., in the Pitts Center.
Besides Town staff reports, Chairperson Donna Creef will be presenting the 2024 Dare Community Housing Task Force report.
Ms. Creef, a longtime member of the Dare County Planning Dept., who served for about a dozen years as Dare Planning Director, is currently director of government affairs for the Outer Banks Assn. of Realtors. She has been personally presenting the task force report to all Dare County town governments.
It has come to our attention that the sale listing for 23 and 27 Dolphin Run, which were sold as a “single offering,” clearly notified all prospective buyers that “Anyone thinking of developing this as two separate lots should make themselves informed regarding the Southern Shores Town Development Code Section 36-132.”
There is no mistaking this notification. The shame is that both of the brokers associated with this transaction are longtime Southern Shores homeowners.
The Town Council is scheduled to hold a public hearing tomorrow at its regular meeting to consider Zoning Text Amendment (ZTA) 25-01, which would give the purchaser of the three Dolphin Run lots, Melvin Garrison III of Fredericksburg, Va., an exemption from the recombination requirement of Code Sec. 36-132(a).
The current Town Code requires Mr. Garrison, doing business as Garrison Beach, LLC, to recombine all three lots into one. ZTA 25-01 allows Mr. Garrison to build on the two lots (43 and 44) that make up 23 Dolphin Run, without recombining them, and to maintain the third lot (45) separately. (Please see The Beacon’s reports on 1/28/25 and 1/31/25 for factual background and an aerial photo of the properties.)
The Town Could must not approve this ZTA.
According to realtor.com (listing content above), the listing agent for the Dolphin Run properties was John Leatherwood, a broker with Coldwell Banker Seaside Realty who goes by the name “the Sandman.”
Surely, Mr. Leatherwood knows after decades of doing business in Southern Shores how to read its Code of Ordinances: Section 36-132(a)(2)(e) clearly required his client to recombine the three lots comprising these properties before selling them. Mr. Leatherwood could have done more than notify prospective buyers of the recombination: He could have notified the Town of an impending sale.
The buyer was represented by broker Gray Berryman, who is with Carolina Designs Realty and has often appeared at Town Council meetings, most recently in The Beacon’s recollection, to advocate for sidewalks in town.
Mr. Berryman, a former member of the Town Planning Board, was one of the investors who profited from the purchase and division of a developed 100-foot-wide lot in the oceanside area of Southern Shores into two 50-foot-wide-lots—before the Town rewrote the nonconforming lots/recombination ordinance in 2018-2019 to unambiguously prevent what he did.
In fact, Mr. Berryman and his wife currently own two nonconforming lots in Southern Shores that escaped the reach of the new Town Code sec. 36-132: 22 Porpoise Run (7,500 square feet) and 172 Wax Myrtle Trail (10,000 square feet).
Mr. Berryman is quite familiar with the nonconforming lots controversy and the process that the Town went through in order to draft and enact the current version of Town Code sec. 36-132. ZTA 25-01 proposes to amend sec. 36-132(a) to give Mr. Berryman’s former client, Mr. Garrison, an exemption from recombination that is uniquely tailored to his personal situation. This should not be allowed.
In light of this background, we strongly urge the Town Council to reject ZTA 25-01 and to defend the nonconforming lots/recombination ordinance, as it is written and has been in effect for the past five years. Mr. Garrison should not be able to buy a change in the law of which he was aware, but simply chose to disregard.
The Town should defend the ordinance and the rest of the property owners in Southern Shores. It has the winning argument, and the money expended in proving it is worth it.
By Ann G. Sjoerdsma, The Southern Shores Beacon, 2/3/25
The agenda for the Town Council’s regular meeting Tuesday ranges broadly from a special presentation by Dare County EMS Chief Jennie L. Collins and the swearing in of new Police Officer Austin Jones to an update by the Town Manager about the Juniper/Trinitie Trail Bridge Replacement Project to proposed amendments to the Town Code ordinance governing the Southern Shores Cemetery to a Town proposal to reduce the number of public-comment periods held during Council meetings from two to one.
And, of course, as we have written in reports on 1/28/25 and 1/31/25, the Town Council will hold a public hearing on Zoning Text Amendment 25-01, which gives a wealthy investor from Fredericksburg, Va., a personalized exemption to the nonconforming lots/recombination ordinance, Code sec. 36-132, in order for the Town to avoid going to court.
The meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m. in the Pitts Center and may be live-streamed on the Southern Shores You Tube website.
In addition to the above agenda items, the Town Council will be:
• Approving appropriations from the Unassigned Fund Balance of $9,975 to fund the Southern Shores Volunteer Fire Dept.-Town merger feasibility study (see The Beacon, 1/8/25) and $4,965 for unspecified commercial garbage collection as part of its consent agenda;
• Supporting a resolution by the non-profit N.C. Beach, Inlet, and Waterway Assn. (NCBIWA) to update the 2016 Beach and Inlet Management Plan, also part of the consent agenda;
• Recognizing Southern Shores Police Sgt. Eric P. Brinkley for his years of service;
• Moving forward with renting the Town-owned flat top at 13 Skyline Road to the Southern Shores Civic Assn. and the Chicahauk Property Owners Assn., which currently rent space in the Pitts Center; and
• Discussing “meeting specifics and topic ideas” for the Council’s March retreat, which is open to the public.
REDUCTION OF PUBLIC-COMMENT PERIODS
The Beacon strongly opposes the Town’s proposal to amend the Town Council’s Rules of Procedure to eliminate the requirement that two public-comment periods must be held at the Council’s regular meetings. Under the proposal, the language of Rules Section 17, which is titled “Public address to the Council,” would be changed from:
“The Council shall provide two periods for public comment at regular meetings . . . for anyone to address the Council on any matter not on the agenda for public hearing.”
To:
“The council shall provide at least one period for public comment per month at a regular meeting of the council . . . [etc., as above].”
Although Section 17 cites a section of North Carolina General Statutes Chapter 160A, which pertains to cities and towns, this action is not mandated by it.
NCGS sec. 160A-81.1, which is the public-comment section of Chapter 160A, specifies the language that the Town seeks to adopt (i.e., “shall provide at least one period for public comment”), but it does not prohibit the Town from mandating more than one public-comment period.
We do not believe the scheduling of a second public-comment period should be discretionary.
The two public-comment periods that have been held for years have not been disruptive to Town Council meetings nor have they consumed an undue amount of time. Speakers are limited to three minutes, and they respect that limitation.
We would think that Town Council members would want to hear more from the public they have been elected to serve, not less. With two public-comment periods, Southern Shores property owners and residents are able to comment before the Town Council’s business agenda, as well as after, thus offering an immediate response to action that the Council may have taken.
Mayor Elizabeth Morey has been gracious about allowing members of the public to speak during these comment periods, even though they did not sign up to do so. She has invited people to the lectern. We urge her to continue this graciousness and not curtail the Council’s commitment to allotting time for public comments.
CHANGES TO SOUTHERN SHORES CEMETERY ORDINANCE
The Town has introduced Town Code Amendment 25-1 to amend the ordinance establishing and governing the Southern Shores Cemetery, which is Section 10-1 of the Town Code.
Regrettably, we have not had an opportunity to do more than skim the proposed changes, which are numerous. The only change that leaped out at us as inappropriate is a limitation on the number of cemetery lots that a family can buy. That number is four.
Is the Town trying to conserve space in the cemetery for more families by legislating this restriction? Certainly, it’s not trying to “break up” families.
Eventually, the cemetery will run out of space, but with cremation becoming more popular, that may not be for quite some time. We do not approve of an arbitrary restriction that discriminates against large families. If the Town is trying to prevent the hoarding of lots by families, it should find another way to do so.
You will find a report about TCA 25-1 and the proposed amendment on pages 33-38 of the meeting packet.
HEARING TO EXTEND BAN OF HOMEOWNER FROM TOWN PROPERTIES
The Town Council will hold a public hearing at 3 p.m. Tuesday to extend a temporary ban of homeowner Anthony Mina, of 75 E. Dogwood Trail, from all Town-owned properties. As evidence for the hearing, Town Manager Cliff Ogburn has posted in the hearing packet 37 of the more than 1,000 emails that Mr. Mina has sent to the Town.
We wrote about Mr. Mina’s property situation, which is the source of his complaints, on 10/19/24 and 10/22/24. Starting Dec. 23, we, too, have been on his email list.
If you have been to a Town Council meeting in recent months, you will have noticed an increased police presence. Mr. Mina is the reason why.
We hope he is not the reason for the proposed change in the public-comment periods.
The hearing will be live-streamed on the Town’s You Tube website.
TAKING A BREAK
We are unable to cover either of the Town Council’s meetings Tuesday. In fact, because of changed circumstances, we are taking an extended break from publishing The Beacon, effective immediately.
We regret having to make this decision, but we need to focus our time and energies elsewhere. In the event that something momentous happens in town that demands coverage, we may step back into reporting temporarily to cover it.
PLEASE NOTE: Dare County’s property reevaluation notices are now scheduled to be mailed in March, not February.
By Ann G. Sjoerdsma, The Southern Shores Beacon, 2/2/25
Despite considerable reluctance by four of its members, the Southern Shores Planning Board unanimously recommended approval Wednesday of an amendment to the Town’s nonconforming lots/recombination ordinance that is exclusively designed to give a new property owner who refused to comply with the existing ordinance an exemption from its operation.
Only Board Chairperson Andy Ward supported Zoning Text Amendment (“ZTA”) 25-01, which adds a tailormade exemption to the recombination mandate in Town Code sec. 36-132, in order to be a “good neighbor” to wealthy investor Melvin L. Garrison III of Fredericksburg, Va.
Mr. Ward, who participated five years ago in “carving out” exemptions from sec. 36-132, also advocated approving ZTA 25-01 in order to avoid litigation and the expenditure of more Town Attorney’s fees than the Town has already paid.
FACTUAL AND LEGAL BACKGROUND
Last August, Mr. Garrison, doing business as Garrison Beach LLC, bought three lots on Dolphin Run that are each smaller than the minimum 20,000 square feet required of lots in the RS-1 single family residential district.
When Deputy Town Manager/Planning Director Wes Haskett issued a formal interpretation of sec. 36-132 stating that Mr. Harrison had to recombine the three lots into one, the nonresident landowner rejected it. Instead, Mr. Harrison hired local attorney Casey Varnell of Sharp, Graham, Baker & Varnell to appeal the interpretation.
Please see our 1/28/25 report for further details.
Louis J. (“Johnny”) Hallow III, a young associate in the Elizabeth City office of Hornthal, Riley, Ellis & Maland, which represents the Town, presided at the Planning Board’s meeting Wednesday and acknowledged that he had spent “weeks” grappling with Code sec. 36-132 and drafting the language of ZTA 25-01 to allow Mr. Harrison to legally disregard the ordinance.
Mr. Varnell stated that he had not had a hand in writing the amendment.
ZTA 25-01 principally addresses sec. 36-132(a)(1), which lists property scenarios that are exempted from the requirement in sec. 36-132(b) that all adjacent nonconforming lots owned by the same owner must be recombined (or combined) into one lot upon sale or development.
As Mr. Ward recalled, the current exemptions were “carved out” for known property owners whom the Town thought were unduly harmed by a 2018 rewrite of the ordinance that sought to prevent property owners from selling 100-foot-wide land tracts consisting of two 50-foot-wide lots as two lots, rather than one.
A trend emerged in 2017 of property owners dividing up such 100-foot-wide parcels, which were located on or near the oceanfront—the first area developed in Southern Shores—and the Town had to catch up with it. At risk was the loss of the low-density environment for which Southern Shores is known and loved.
Before the Town took corrective action, the Planning Board, sitting as the Board of Adjustment, granted side-setback variances to property owners of some newly created 50-foot-wide building lots. They were allowed to reduce the side setback width from 15 feet to 10 feet.
Mr. Garrison’s lots consist of 23 Dolphin Run, a 15,000-square-foot tract of land made up of two 50-foot-wide lots (43 and 44); and 27 Dolphin Run, a 10,500-square-foot, 70-foot-wide lot (45), on which a flat-top home currently sits. (See photo above.)
As Mr. Haskett summarized the action of ZTA 25-01 in his Staff Report, it would: “permit the construction of a single-family dwelling and customary accessory building on two or more currently nonconforming adjacent lots as a single development site, if at least one of two or more nonconforming adjacent lots is located adjacent to a single nonconforming lot that is under the same ownership and on which there is located an existing single-family dwelling, and the adjacent improved land is made up of no more than two lots all of which are nonconforming.”
ZTA 25-01, therefore, allows Mr. Garrison to build on lots 43 and 44 without having to recombine them. Should he decide to sell the lots, and they are vacant, the ZTA requires him then to recombine them.
Neither the confusing and complicated language of the zoning text amendment nor the fact that it does not require Mr. Garrison to recombine lots 43 and 44 sat well with the four reluctant Planning Board members.
Mr. Ward participated in the drafting of the current ordinance, which was finalized in September 2019 after more than a year of discussions in the Planning Board and the Town Council. He told his colleagues Wednesday that former Town Attorney Ben Gallop, the ordinance’s principal author, predicted the Town would have problems with it. We are not sure this is what Mr. Gallop had in mind.
“I just want to send [the ZTA] to the Town Council, I don’t want to approve it,” said Board Member Robert McClendon. “. . . This is more complicated than it might need to be.”
Board Member Jan Collins asked what would happen if they sent the ZTA to the Town Council without taking action on it. Mr. Haskett replied that no action was equivalent to a recommendation, but he did not explain why.
“I’m hamstrung by the language,” Mr. McClendon said later in exploring the ZTA’s meaning and expressing exasperation with it.
He also thought that lots 43 and 44 should be recombined, to create a 15,000-square-foot building site. Mr. Garrison plans to build on that, regardless, he probed, so why not require a recombination? Others agreed.
“This is probably the most complicated ordinance I have read” in the Town Code, said Board Vice-Chairperson Tony DiBernardo. “A layman should be able to pick [an ordinance] up, read it, and understand what it says.”
That is not the case here, Mr. DiBernardo said, emphasizing the point by reading some of the language from sec. 36-132. He received no argument from Mr. Hallow.
Mr. DiBernardo also asked about the “next exemption” request. Isn’t ZTA 25-01 opening the door for other property owners, with two or more adjacent nonconforming lots, to ask for preferential treatment? Mr. Haskett replied that Mr. Garrison’s scenario was unique.
Ed Lawler, who joined the Planning Board in January 2019 during the discussions about a new nonconforming lots/recombination ordinance, posed hypotheticals about what would happen to Mr. Garrison’s property if he built a residence on lots 43 and 44 that later burned down. And suppose Mr. Garrison had removed the flat top on lot 45 after the house’s construction?
The recombination exemption in ZTA 25-01 applies only if there is an “existing single family dwelling” on an adjacent tract of land that is no more than two nonconforming lots.
It also provides that if the exempted lots are sold later as vacant lots, Mr. Harrison loses his exemption and must recombine them.
Indeed, the sellers from whom Mr. Harrison bought the lots were required by Code sec. 36-132(2)(e) to recombine them first, but they did not, and the Town, presumably unaware of the sale, did not enforce the ordinance.
Although Mr. Hallow argued that enforcement by the Town was not realistic, and Mr. Varnell agreed, saying that the buyer (his client) bought at his/her/their own risk, we believe otherwise.
Five years ago, Mr. Haskett identified, with the assistance of the Dare County Tax Dept. and the Tax Mapping Dept., the total number of lots in Southern Shores (3,037) and the number of those lots that are nonconforming because they are less than 20,000 square feet in area (846). Of those 846, according to Mr. Haskett’s data, there were 241 parcels with multiple lots, of which 55 were nonconforming in total land size.
We do not believe it would have been difficult for the Town to have sent out notices to the owners of those 55 properties, two of which were 23 and 27 Dolphin Run, and advised them of the operation of sec. 36-132. Nor do we think it would have been that difficult to monitor those 55 properties on the Multi-Listing Service. Someone would just have had to have done it.
After much discussion, Chairperson Ward made a motion to recommend approving ZTA 25-01 and waited some time before he got an unenthusiastic second from Ms. Collins.
TOWN COUNCIL PUBLIC HEARING
ZTA 25-01 is scheduled for a public hearing before the Town Council at its regular meeting next Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. in the Pitts Center.
We will preview the agenda in a blog post Sunday. Among the items to be discussed is an amendment to the Town Council’s Rules of Procedure to eliminate the requirement that two public-comment periods be held at the Council’s regular meetings.
Based on what we saw and heard at the Planning Board meeting, we have no doubt that the Town Council will pass ZTA 25-01, most likely unanimously.
Mayor Elizabeth Morey has made clear her motivation to “stay out of court,” and enactment of ZTA 25-01 allows the Town to do that. In fact, Mr. Haskett stated in his Staff Report that ZTA 25-01 was drafted in order to “avoid an appeal” by Mr. Garrison to Dare County Superior Court.
We also have seen repeatedly in the past 10 years that the Town Council will not second-guess nor decline to adopt Code language that a Town Attorney has devoted considerable time drafting. It just isn’t done.
We would have preferred a settlement that required Mr. Harrison to recombine lots 43 and 44, but gave him a variance for lot 45 so that it could remain separate. There is precedent for single lots of its size.
We agree with the Planning Board majority that the language of ZTA 25-01 and Town Code sec. 36-132 is dreadful. We said the same thing five years ago. But what bothers us more is that Mr. Harrison apparently will be able to buy a change in the Town law that benefits only him.
By Ann G. Sjoerdsma, The Southern Shores Beacon, 1/31/25
The Southern Shores Beacon 