Tropical Storm Isaias may cause some soundside flooding in low-lying areas in Southern Shores that are affected by southerly winds, according to Dare County Emergency Management.
A Tropical Storm Watch became effective in Dare County at 11 a.m. today, indicating that tropical storm conditions are possible locally through Tuesday, according to a bulletin issued this afternoon by Dare County Emergency Management.
In its Isaias Bulletin #3, DCEM also acknowledges the disappointment that vacationers to Hatteras Island feel over having been ordered by Dare County to evacuate yesterday, starting at noon. Hatteras Island residents and property owners were ordered to leave today, starting at 6 a.m.
“[I]t is important to understand that evacuation decisions are made in the interest of public health and safety,” DCEM says in defense of the county’s evacuation orders.
Referring again to the vulnerability of N.C. Hwy. 12 on Hatteras Island, DCEM continues: “. . . As roads become covered with sand and water, it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, for law enforcement, fire and emergency medical service personnel to respond to calls for assistance in a timely manner. In recent years, storms with forecasts similar to Isaias have caused road closures and the loss of personal property. Safety of residents and visitors is our top priority.”
The remainder of Bulletin #3, which was issued at 4:14 p.m., repeats the content of this morning’s Bulletin #2.
Southern Shores will have its regular trash collection tomorrow. The Town has not issued any special instructions or bulletins related to the tropical storm.
As of 2 p.m. today, Tropical Storm Isaias was 75 miles east-southeast of Vero Beach, Fla., moving northwesterly at 9 mph. Its center has remained off-shore.
Because Isaias’s heaviest rains and strongest winds have been to the east of its center, according to the National Weather Service, the Florida coast has been spared severe damage.
Dare County officials decided not to take any further preventive action this morning in response to Isaias, which is now a slow-moving tropical storm, not a hurricane, after receiving an update from the National Weather Service.
“While an evacuation order is not anticipated,” Dare County Emergency Management reported in a 10 a.m. bulletin, “it is imperative for everyone to keep their guard up and pay close attention to updated weather forecasts from the National Weather Service because the Outer Banks will experience impacts.”
Dare County remains under a State of Emergency, according to DCEM’s Isaias Bulletin #2, and the mandatory evacuation orders issued yesterday for Hatteras Island are still in effect, because of the “vulnerability” of N.C. Hwy 12, which is the only road access to and from the island.
As of 8 a.m., Tropical Storm Isaias was located 40 miles southeast of West Palm Beach, Fla., according to the National Weather Service. It has maximum sustained winds of 65 mph. and is moving slowly northwest at 8 mph.
An updated storm track today shows the storm passing by the Outer Banks on Tuesday. Wind effects from Isaias may be experienced locally late on Monday.
Ordinarily, the warm water Isaias is passing over would support the tropical storm’s intensification, but it is having to contend with dry air and wind shear that have not allowed it to become “well-organized,” according to the National Hurricane Center.
Forecast models “do not show the shear abating,” the NHC reported this morning, and “that window of opportunity for it to re-strengthen is closing.”
This morning’s DCEM bulletin warns of “storm surge inundation” on the Outer Banks that may produce ocean overwash and soundside flooding of “1 to 2 feet above normally dry ground, and up to 3 feet in some areas.”
“Some vulnerable spots along Hwy. 12 on Hatteras Island “are already experiencing minor ocean overwash during periods of high tide,” the bulletin reports.
Soundside flooding is likely to occur “in low-lying areas, at spots that are impacted by southerly winds,” the bulletin warns, particularly from Manteo to Kitty Hawk.
A high risk of rip currents and hazardous ocean conditions exists at all Outer Banks beaches over the next few days, according to the DCEM bulletin, which advises all beachgoers to stay out of the water and obey red-flag warnings.
In yesterday’s emergency declaration, Dare County prohibited ocean swimming off of Hatteras Island, but it made an exception for surfers. (See The Beacon, 8/1/20.)
For updated information from DCEM, the National Park Service, and the towns of Southern Shores, Duck, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, Nags Head, and Manteo, visit darenc.com/isaias.
Dare County’s state of emergency also includes a ban on ocean swimming off Hatteras Island. It does not address ocean conditions on the northern Dare beaches.
Dare County issued a state of emergency at 11 a.m. today and ordered a mandatory evacuation for Hatteras Island, starting at noon, according to a Hurricane Isaias bulletin issued by Dare County Emergency Management.
Local decision-making officials will meet tomorrow morning, the bulletin announced, to determine whether a mandatory evacuation order will be issued for the Dare County towns north of Oregon Inlet, which include Manteo, Nags Head, Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, Southern Shores, and Duck.
According to Hurricane Isaias Bulletin #1, “local officials”—who were not identified—met this morning via video conference to receive a briefing from the National Weather Service about the potential effects of Isaias on Dare County. They concluded that ordering a state of emergency and an evacuation of Hatteras Island was prudent.
Today’s “declaration of a state of emergency” was signed by Bob Woodard, chairman of the Dare County Board of Commissioners, with the consent of all of the town mayors, who sit on the Dare County Control Group, except Manteo Mayor Bobby Owens, who named a designee to give consent.
As of 11 a.m., the storm was still over the Bahamas and moving northwesterly at 12 mph, five mph slower than its rate of speed yesterday. Its strongest winds have been reported to be 80 mph.
Dare County’s mandatory evacuation order applies to what is known as “Evacuation Zone A,” which covers all areas of Hatteras Island, including the unincorporated villages of Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, and Hatteras Village.
“Evacuation Zone B” covers the Dare County areas north of Oregon Inlet.
Visitors to Hatteras Island must start evacuating today at noon, while residents and property owners have until 6 a.m. tomorrow before the evacuation order directed to them takes effect.
Today’s DCEM bulletin also calls attention to Dare County’s new online reentry permitting system, which is now in effect.
According to the bulletin, only reentry permits for the current calendar year are valid, but residents may still use a valid driver’s license with a Dare County address or a current tax bill or parcel data sheet with matching government-issued ID for reentry.
A left turn on to South Dogwood Trail from U.S. Hwy. 158-east will be prohibited today and tomorrow from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. to deter vacationers from cutting through the Southern Shores residential area instead of remaining on the thoroughfare to the northern beaches.
Northbound motorists in vehicles with out-of-town license plates poured through Southern Shores today ahead of the 11 a.m. prohibition of the left turn at U.S. Hwy. 158-east and South Dogwood Trail.
From what we observed on Hickory Trail this morning, vacationers have not been deterred by the threat of Hurricane Isaias—at least, not enough to postpone their arrivals.
As you know, the left-turn prohibition will be in effect today and tomorrow from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. during the fourth and last no-left-turn weekend of the summer.
So far, there is no word from the Dare County Control Group about an evacuation order ahead of Hurricane Isaias, which is likely to have weakened by the time it reaches an area near the northern Outer Banks on Monday.
Hyde County issued a mandatory evacuation order yesterday for all visitors and property owners on Ocracoke Island. Visitors were ordered to leave yesterday at noon, and non-resident and resident property owners were ordered to evacuate at 6 a.m. today.
N.C. Governor Roy Cooper also declared a state of emergency yesterday because of the potential impact of Isaias to the North Carolina coastline.
Please feel free to post comments here or on The Beacon’s Facebook page about traffic conditions today or about any issues related to the storm.
We will report on any official action taken by Dare County. Dare County Emergency Management announced yesterday that an update bulletin on the storm would be posted on its website by noon today.
The Dare County resident whose death from COVID-19 complications was reported yesterday was a man in his late 70s who tested positive for the virus on July 17 and was immediately hospitalized outside of the area, according to information provided today and previously by the Dare County Dept. of Health and Human Services.
In her COVID-19 case update today, Dr. Sheila Davies, DCDHHS director, gives the man’s approximate age, the date of his diagnosis, and the fact of his hospitalization, but nothing else about his circumstances. She does not even confirm that the man died yesterday, only that the DCDHHS was “notified” yesterday of his death.
(See The Beacon, 7/30/20, for more details.)
On July 17, the day that the late resident’s positive test result was recorded on the DCDHHS dashboard, Dr. Davies reported in a case update that 22 Dare County residents had been diagnosed with COVID-19 since her last update on July 14.
Of those 22 residents, she said, 18 were symptomatic. Of those 18, nine were known to have acquired the virus by direct contact with an infected individual, and the other nine, who had no connection to each other, acquired the virus by “unclear” means.
Among the nine who were known to have come in contact with an infected person, seven acquired the virus from a family member or a close friend.
This is as close as we can get to understanding how a member of our community lost his life, unless his family chooses to share details in order to inform others.
TODAY’S CASE UPDATE
Since Dr. Davies’s Tuesday update, 12 new COVID-19 cases have been diagnosed locally, 10 residents and two nonresidents.
The two nonresidents are both women between the ages of 25 and 29 whose cases were added today to the dashboard. One is in isolation in Dare County, and the other has transferred to isolation in her home county.
Nine of the new COVID-19 resident cases were reported yesterday on the dashboard: Eight of them appear from the update to have been diagnosed at the testing event held Tuesday in Manteo.
The nine residents are four men and five women who range in age from the “17 and under” age category to the “50 to 64” age category, as follows:
One is age 17 and under;
Two are between the ages of 18 and 24;
Three are between the ages of 25 and 49;
Three are between the ages of 50 and 64.
The tenth Dare County resident diagnosed with COVID-19 is a woman age 65 or older whose case was reported on Wednesday. She was hospitalized, but is now in home isolation, as are the nine people whose diagnoses were reported yesterday.
There currently are no Dare County residents hospitalized for COVID-19, according to the DCDHHS dashboard.
Today’s update reports a total of 347 COVID-19-positive cases in Dare County, 197 of them local residents and 150 nonresidents. About half are male and half are female—173 men to 172 women—and the age breakdown is as follows:
51 are age 17 and under;
82 are between the ages of 18 and 24;
123 are between the ages of 25 and 49;
56 are between the ages of 50 and 64;
35 are age 65 or older.
Dare County currently has 39 active cases; 156 people have recovered.
Among the 194 COVID-19 antibody tests conducted through Tuesday’s clinic, only eight were positive.
The Dare County Control Group is likely to make a decision tomorrow morning about whether to issue a mandatory evacuation order.
An ominous bulletin issued this morning by Dare County Emergency Management advises visitors who are scheduled to arrive in the Outer Banks this weekend to “closely watch updated information from the National Weather Service Center and consider delaying arrival until after the storm has passed.”
DCEM is also advising residents and visitors who are already here to begin implementing their hurricane preparedness plans.
Local officials will confer tomorrow morning to “determine whether protective measures are necessary to ensure public safety,” according to the advisory.
Currently, Isaias, which is being described on The Weather Channel as a “borderline”-Category One hurricane, is approaching the northwestern Bahamas. It is expected to head toward the eastern coast of Florida.
A likely scenario presented by the National Weather Service calls for the storm to stay off-shore as it continues in a northeasterly direction away from Florida.
A mandatory evacuation of all visitors and property owners is already in effect for Ocracoke Island.
Hyde County commissioners ordered all visitors to evacuate Ocracoke Island, effective at noon today. Non-resident and resident Ocracoke property owners have been ordered to evacuate the island, effective tomorrow at 6 a.m.
The left turn on to South Dogwood Trail from U.S. Hwy. 158-east will be blocked this weekend from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., as Southern Shores winds up its summertime experiment in diverting northbound vacationer traffic from the main cut-through route.
This is assuming that Isaisis, a tropical storm in the Atlantic that has been upgraded to a Category One hurricane, does not effect a change in plans. (See story below.)
The Beacon again will be encouraging homeowners on residential roads to post comments on our blog and Facebook page about traffic conditions, especially on Saturday, when the vehicle volume is the heaviest.
Based on feedback during the previous three no-left-turn weekends, we conclude that the left-turn prohibition has not adversely affected Chicahauk. Motorists do not use Juniper Trail as an alternate to South Dogwood Trail.
We also conclude that, although the turn prohibition lessens the volume of traffic on South Dogwood Trail, East Dogwood Trail, Hickory Trail, and Hillcrest Drive, it does not eliminate backups on Sea Oats Trail and other residential roads that intersect with Duck Road (N.C. Hwy. 12).
We will be interested to learn what the vehicle counts show about motorists’ use of all monitored residential roads when the U.S. 158-South Dogwood Trail turn is blocked.
MUCH UNCERTAINTY STILL EXISTS ABOUT ISAISIS
The East Coast path of Isaisis and its wind and rain effects for North Carolina remain uncertain today, according to the Wilmington office of the National Weather Service.
Yesterday Isaisis brought tropical-storm-force winds and heavy rain to Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Moving northwesterly at 17 mph, a strengthened Isaisis is expected to hit the Bahamas this morning with hurricane-force conditions and continue on to the east coast of Florida.
If Isaisis takes the track that is currently being forecasted, the Outer Banks would not experience any storm conditions—wind, rain, surge—until Monday.
We will report on any emergency actions that Dare County decides to takes. We personally are inclined to check in with the storm again on Sunday.
TOWN COUNCIL MEETING ON TUES, AUG. 4, 5:30 p.m.
The Town Council meets for its regular monthly meeting next Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. in the Pitts Center.
A second Dare County resident has died as a result of COVID-19, after being hospitalized in critical condition, according to a status change posted today at 10:45 a.m. on the Dare County Dept. of Health and Human Services’ website.
The DCDHHS has provided no further details about the person, but it is possible to obtain some identifying information by examining the department’s online record of “July 2020 Numbers.”
In July, the DCDHHS reported the following hospitalizations of Dare County residents for COVID-19:
On July 8, a male between the ages of 25 and 49;
On July 15, a female age 65 or older;
On July 17, a male age 65 or older;
On July 21, the DCDHHS reported that one of these individuals had been moved to home isolation.
On July 26, a female between the ages of 50 and 64;
Just yesterday, the DCDHHS reported that a Dare County woman age 65 or older had been hospitalized. The dashboard currently shows three active hospitalizations.
The first local fatality related to COVID-19 was of a man in his 90s who was a resident at Peak Resources, the skilled nursing facility in Nags Head. This gentleman was described by DCDHHS as having underlying medical conditions that predisposed him to a poor outcome with a COVID-19 infection.
Statewide, 1,903 people have died as a result of COVID-19, according to today’s N.C. Dept. of Health and Human Services’ dashboard.
Yesterday the NCDHHS reported a single-day record-high 1,291 hospitalizations and 1,763 new lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases. Today’s single-day cases jumped to 2,355, for a positivity rate of 8 percent, while hospitalizations declined to 1,239.
The Beacon extends our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of the Dare County resident who has died. Although we do not feel your personal grief, we readily empathize with you and share in your sadness.
We also extend our best wishes for an uneventful recovery to the three people who are currently hospitalized.
(UPDATE LATER IN THE DAY: Two hospitalized patients were upgraded to home isolation on the DCDHHS dashboard at 5:35 p.m. That is good news. We hope the third patients will be going home soon.)
Although the acknowledgments page of CodeWright Planners’ draft of a new Southern Shores Town Code shows a copyright date of 2019, the draft actually dates to December 2018. The consultant’s website is no longer online. [Wordpress did not pick up our photo of the acknowledgments page. It appears on The Beacon’s Facebook page.]The sore subject of the revision of the Southern Shores Town Code of Ordinances by CodeWright Planners, LLC, of Durham—a budgeted $100,000 project that began in the summer of 2015—came up at the July 21 workshop meeting of the Town Council, courtesy of the always-prepared and well-informed Councilman Matt Neal.
Thank you, Mr. Neal. It’s about time.
Misrepresented to the public by former Town Manager Peter Rascoe at the Town’s fiscal year 2015-16 budget hearings, and subsequently, as an “update” and an organizational cleanup, not the wholesale rewrite it is, CodeWright owner Chad Meadows’s draft of the proposed new Town Code has been in Town Attorney Ben Gallop’s hands since Jan. 31, 2019.
That’s 18 months, more than a year longer than we have been living with the coronavirus pandemic.
It is also 17 months longer than Mr. Meadows envisioned Mr. Gallop spending on his review of the entire bloated 381-page draft, not just the zoning code section to which the Town Attorney alluded last week.
Even more significantly, it has been more than 4 ½ years since more than 900 Southern Shores property owners and/or residents completed—in good faith—a citizens’ survey for the “update.” Survey topics included limiting maximum house size and maximum lot clearance for construction, controlling stormwater runoff, and regulating noise and outdoor lighting.
The survey was rightly criticized for bias in the framing of questions, upon which we will elaborate below. But, regardless, people trusted that their responses were being taken seriously by Mr. Meadows and the Town, and that results would flow. Such accountability and professionalism have proved too much to ask for.
(The Beacon critiqued Mr. Meadows’s draft Town Code on 2/1/19, giving it low marks.)
In response to Mr. Neal’s question at last week’s meeting about the status of the CodeWright project, Mr. Gallop said that he had the draft and could review the zoning provisions and make his recommendations, if he had “two non-stop days of work” to devote to it. He suggested that he might be able to finish the job by next Tuesday’s Town Council meeting, but we are not holding our breath.
In fact, The Beacon does not believe Mr. Gallop should bother. The Town should not spend another penny on this failed project, which produced, according to Mayor Pro Tem Elizabeth Morey, who had the misfortune to be on the Planning Board when it spent more than a year critiquing the draft, “an unacceptable work product.”
THE TOWN COUNCIL’S ROLE IN THE FIASCO
The Town Council “dumped the Code rewrite on us,” Ms. Morey told The Beacon in a telephone interview June 29, 2018, “and it doubled or tripled our workload.”
The Planning Board’s review, she continued, “was made more difficult by how the consultant presented the Code. . . . It was extremely difficult to determine what was old and what was new.”
Mr. Gallop referred to this same difficulty in explaining to the Town Council last week his labor-intensive task in reviewing the draft. Just the computer process involved, as he described it, is labyrinthine.
For The Beacon, Ms. Morey’s silence during the Town Council’s discussion about the CodeWright draft—which was driven by Mr. Neal—was conspicuous, and unfortunate. She knows what a mess the draft is and could have supported what Mr. Gallop said. She also could have suggested cutting off all of the heads of this hydra and killing it.
The obvious difficulty that both Ms. Morey and Mr. Gallop identified should have been corrected by the consultant after he submitted his draft assessment in December 2018, but no one in the Town government held Mr. Meadows or the Town staff who communicated with him on the project, accountable.
We would be surprised if any of the Town Council members, other than Ms. Morey and Mr. Neal, have looked at the draft—even though they, not Mr. Meadows, who is a professional planner, not an attorney, make policy and law in Southern Shores.
The Town Code of Ordinances is a compilation and codification of the town’s ordinances, which are enforceable regulations and policies.
When Councilman Jim Conners complained at the July 21 meeting about the “five or six years” that the “albatross” of the CodeWright draft has been “around the neck” of the Town Council, we wondered where he has been the past 18 months.
In office since December 2017, we do not recall Mr. Conners ever inquiring in a public meeting about the status of the project or seeking to follow it up, nor do we recall any other Town Council members doing so.
The Beacon has twice publicly brought up the CodeWright draft, most recently in February at the hearing for the new town manager search. We asked the Town Council to hire a town manager who would follow up on both the Codewright project and the land-use plan revision, which we will address in a future blog posting.
“I’m not blaming you,” Mr. Conners said to Mr. Gallop. “It’s the whole town. This thing has just languished forever.”
But who is “the whole town,” if not the Town Council? Who holds the Town Manager and the Interim Town Manager accountable, if not the Town Council? The Town Attorney reports to the Town Council.
Town Councilman Leo Holland was one of the Town “stakeholders” interviewed by Mr. Meadows for the project early on—along with three Council incumbents who were defeated for reelection two months after they were interviewed. (Property owners cried foul about this, but to no avail.)
Mr. Meadows also interviewed select building and real-estate professionals who would benefit from changes in the Southern Shores zoning code. The Town Manager and the Town Council made no attempt to identify stakeholders with a diversity of opinion. (More foul-crying.)
Councilman Holland previously served on the Town Council from December 2013 to December 2017 before being re-elected for a new four-year term last November.
His contribution last week was to laugh about Mr. Gallop finishing his responsibility and putting “the monkey somewhere else.” Mr. Holland had more to say about the “monkey” on Mr. Gallop’s back than he did about the Code project.
Unlike Councilman Holland, we don’t find any of this funny.
DELIBERATE MISINFORMATION AND PUBLIC PROTEST
You may well ask how the CodeWright project arrived at this point. If you did not live in Southern Shores five years ago and/or if you did not participate in the citizens’ survey, which was administered on the Internet from Dec. 18, 2015 through Jan. 31, 2016, you may not be familiar with Chad Meadows and CodeWright.
We will bring you up to speed because you are governed locally by the Town Code of Ordinances: It directly affects how you live and how Southern Shores’ future will evolve. You should know something about the Town Code draft that Mr. Meadows authored and sometimes referred to in public as a “development code.”
There is little doubt that the current bloated draft that Mr. Gallop (understandably) has avoided for 18 months goes far beyond the Code cleanup that Town Manager Rascoe described in FY 2015-16 budget hearings: Mr. Meadows did not just “edit for consistency, clarity, and conformity with state and federal law,” as Mr. Rascoe told the public he would. (I attended every hearing.) He rewrote the Code and essentially created a new planning document for Southern Shores.
In June 2015, the Town Council approved an appropriation of $100,000 for what was called the “Town Code Update Project.” Serving then were Mayor Tom Bennett, Mr. Holland, and the three incumbents who were defeated that fall. (It is unclear from line-item fiscal-year budgets on the Town website how much of this $100,000 has been spent.)
Then-Planning Director Wes Haskett, who is now Deputy Town Manager and served as an acting/interim town manager for 10 months—from August 2019 until late June—identified Mr. Meadows as the professional consultant to hire for the job because he had worked with other Dare County towns.
Our recollection is that Mr. Meadows signed a contract with the Town in July or August 2015, but we are unable to confirm that recollection or pinpoint the date because we could not find the contract on the Town website or locate it among our files.
Besides interviewing all members of the 2011-15 Town Council, three of whom were out of office by the end of 2015, Mr. Meadows and his team early on sought “input” from other people he identified as “stakeholders,” including members of the Planning Board, Town Manager Rascoe, and other Town staff.
The so-called “project team” also relied on building-industry professionals as stakeholders, some of whom were not residents of Southern Shores and all of whom stood to gain financially from Town Code revisions, in determining town objectives and goals. Even the team’s technical advisory group had members who stood to gain financially from substantive changes to the Town Code.
Among them were architect Christopher Nason, who was elected to the Town Council in November 2015 and was on record for disparaging the then-current Town Code as both obsolete and disadvantageous to his clients; Gray Berryman, a real-estate agent and former Planning Board member who would later profit personally from confusion in the Town Code’s regulation of nonconforming lots; and Joseph Anlauf, a Kitty Hawk engineer who has enjoyed favor with the Town for years.
Many members of the public saw a development agenda being implemented, not a document being updated, corrected, and rendered more readable.
In its Dec. 22, 2015 holiday newsletter, the Town again insisted that the Codewright project team would be merely “correcting conflicting and ambiguous language in the Code, addressing recent changes in state and federal laws, and reorganiz[ing] some sections to make the Code more user-friendly and easier to understand.”
We were falsely assured that a rewrite was not the Town’s intention or CodeWright’s goal, but once we saw the survey questions, we no longer had any doubts. Mr. Rascoe deliberately misled the public.
In a Jan. 4, 2016 letter to Mayor Bennett and the Town Council, 44 informed resident homeowners asked that our elected officials immediately suspend the consultant’s authority. (I was one of the signees.)
The letter strongly objected to the “organization, conduct, and activities to date of the Town Code Update Project,” and said that the “project’s now-apparent power and purpose far exceed that which Town Manager Peter Rascoe, the mayor, and the previous sitting town council described in response to repeated resident inquiries about the project before, during, and after the 2015-16 budget hearings.”
The truth was that, from the outset, Mr. Meadows and his team had been substantively assessing the Town Code for the purpose of drafting new policies and laws to propose to the Town for codification, the most important and controversial of which concerned zoning restrictions on new construction.
BIASED CITIZENS’ SURVEY, RESULTS RELEASED FEB. 18, 2016
According to the summary, Codewright received 932 responses, including six in hard-copy form, but it excluded 137 of them from tabulation because the respondents did not provide their street addresses. That’s an exclusion rate of 15 percent.
For most of the survey’s 23 questions, the 795 respondents answered whether they strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree, or don’t care about basic statements that covered such issues as:
*Regulating “excess light” and “light pollution” from exterior residential fixtures;
*Regulating noise from private homes or vacation rentals;
*Regulating new home size [This was before the Town Council enacted in January 2016, by a 3-2 vote, the 6,000-square-foot maximum house size, in response to SAGA’s plan to build a 16-bedroom wedding-destination venue on the Southern Shores oceanfront; Town Councilmen Fred Newberry, Gary McDonald, and Leo Holland were in the majority; Mayor Bennett and Councilman Nason opposed the size limitation.];
*Reducing the maximum number of occupants in proposed new homes [This matter was dealt with last year in response to SAGA’s two “mini-hotels” at 98 and 134 Ocean Blvd.; after considerable effort by the Town Planning Board, which received much assistance from Mr. Neal, the Town Council enacted an ordinance that limits overnight occupancy in vacation homes to 14 persons.];
*Regulating stormwater runoff between properties and into the road [The Town Council has yet to address this important concern, despite advocacy by the Southern Shores Civic Assn. and serious concerns expressed publicly by homeowners, and its own acknowledgment of the problems.];
*Regulating tree removal as part of house construction;
*Regulating deer “overpopulation”;
*Regulating design standards for commercial development;
*Increasing the allowable residential building height [This matter has been taken up by the Planning Board and settled for the time being by the Town Council.];
*Increasing the maximum allowable lot coverage for single-family homes [This matter also has been settled. Former Town Councilman Nason pushed hard to increase the allowable lot coverage by changing the means of calculating it, but he was defeated. Lot coverage is limited to 30 percent.]
The most obviously biased questions were those that juxtaposed two unrelated issues that were not mutually exclusive and asked the respondent which was the “most important for the Town Code to address?” This exercise in illogical thinking included:
*“Design controls to make sure new businesses ‘fit in’ aesthetically with the rest of Town” versus “Encouraging new businesses to open in the Town.”
*“Making it easier for cars to move around town” versus “Making it safer and easier to bike and walk about town.” (Take note, those of you who live on the cut-through route.)
*“Preserving trees” versus “Keeping our streets safe to drive, bike, and walk on.” (Can’t we easily do both?)
*“Streets with controlled or limited access with added enforcement paid for by increased taxes or fees” [The bias in that statement is as subtle as a kick in the face.] versus “Streets with full access (current conditions).” (Another alert for cut-through route homeowners.)
Needless to say, public opinion ran high on many of these issues and still does. But, as we noted, a number have been resolved since the survey.
In October 2016, Mr. Meadows prepared a “Code Assessment” that purportedly summarized the “input” he received from the old Town Council; the Planning Board; the Town Manager and other Town staff; the technical advisory group; and the citizens’ survey.
The Planning Board began its review of Mr. Meadows’s Code draft, which was organized into several “modules,” in April 2017. It did not surface again for public consideration until December 2018. (See Ms. Morey’s comments, above.)
The Town Planning Board, under former Chairman Sam Williams, spent many tedious months painstakingly scrutinizing the CodeWright draft, before the public had a chance to examine a revised version and Mr. Gallop received it.
The draft that Mr. Meadows presented at the January 2019 public forum, and which Mr. Gallop has, did not look the same as the version that the Planning Board toiled over, but it still suffered in content and presentation.
At the Jan. 31, 2019 public forum, Mr. Meadows advised the audience that the Town Attorney would review the draft in February and the Planning Board would consider it in March and April, with an eye toward recommending those chapters that Mr. Meadows said the Board is required by North Carolina law to recommend. They include chapters 22 (zoning); 26 (subdivisions); 28 (flood damage prevention); and parts of chapters two (administration) and four (definitions).
Only after the Planning Board makes its final recommendations would the draft Code—presumed to be an “adoptable” document—reach the Town Council, where, we feel certain that Councilman Neal (and perhaps Mayor Pro Tem Morey) would give it the attention a local lawmaker should give it.
No elected Town official should approve something as vital and important to a town and its future as a code of ordinances without reading it thoroughly first.
Mr. Meadows considers his draft basically complete, according to Mr. Neal, but he is operating in a different reality than the one that the Town Attorney, Town Manager, and Town Council should operate in. He stands by his work; the Town does not have to.
Those property owners who still remained engaged by the Town Code project—more than three years after they participated in the citizens’ survey—keyed in during the January 2019 forum on sections of the proposed new ordinances pertaining to exterior lighting, street parking, and noise.
Read aloud at the meeting, these sections left little doubt that they needed substantial change. They were confusing, not illuminating. They made the language of the current Code seem precise. Indeed, Mr. Meadows himself referred to the language of the proposed new noise ordinance as “loosey-goosey.”
The Beacon objected to CodeWright’s revised page layout, the new graphics and illustrations, and, most of all, to the excess verbiage that obscures the core substantive content. We described the draft as bloated. We did not find it user-friendly, just overblown and annoying.
We are not fans of the font size, the “navigational aids,” the heading text, etc., that Mr. Meadows refers to as “technical changes” and justifies as “modern.” We think they, as well as illustrations and graphics (for example, flow charts, summary tables), just get in the way of important business. They make the Town Code of Ordinances appear busy, distracting, and even frivolous.
We prefer precise and unambiguous words and straightforward language to all of the excess in the CodeWright draft.
We also believe Mr. Meadows should be required to prepare a summary of all of the substantive changes that he integrated into the current Town Code—which already has changed in a number of significant sections, such as those on nonconforming lots, since December 2018.
What key regulations, or sections thereof did Mr. Meadows delete, revise, or add? These should be readily identifiable.
As the draft is now, you have to go painstakingly through it, finding the new number for the chapter you’re interested in and then perusing a lot of verbiage, much of it unnecessary, to find what you’re looking for.
While doing such perusing, we had the same thought that Ms. Morey expressed in June 2018, but no one in a responsible Town position has insisted upon: “The consultant needs to do a better job.”
If this monstrosity goes forward, we encourage all property owners at least to peruse chapter 22, which is the new zoning chapter.
MOVING FORWARD
Mr. Gallop suggested last week that the best way to deal with updating or rewriting sections of the Town Code may be by making “smaller incremental changes,” as is done when the Planning Board considers and the Town Council rejects or approves proposed zoning text amendments, or when the Town Council takes up other proposed Code amendments over which it has sole authority.
We agree with the Town Attorney. This wholesale revision is a nightmare.
Mr. Gallop also suggested adopting parts of Mr. Meadows’s work product, but not all of it. This could be accomplished with the advice and counsel of Town Manager Cliff Ogburn, Mr. Haskett, and Mr. Gallop, who together could identify those parts that are problem-free and ready for adoption.
If the Town Council rejects Mr. Gallop’s suggestions and does not kill the hydra, we trust that its members will invest the necessary time to ensure that they know and approve all significant changes within the proposed draft and communicate them to Southern Shores property owners. They were not elected to be mere rubber-stampers.
Of the 17 non-resident cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in Dare County since last Friday, nine clearly acquired the virus by direct contact with an infected person outside of Dare County, while the other eight became infected by an “unclear” mode of transmission, according to the Dare County Dept. of Health and Human Services’ case update yesterday.
What do these numbers mean in terms of the threat of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus to Outer Bankers? We do not really know.
Of the 13 resident cases of COVID-19 diagnosed since DCDHHS’s Friday update, five acquired it by direct contact with an infected Dare County resident, and eight became infected by an “unclear” mode of transmission.
How thoroughly does the DCDHHS probe the recent actions of people who test positive with COVID-19? How does it decide that the mode of transmission could not have been by direct contact and is, therefore, “unclear”? We do not know.
Although DCDHHS Director Dr. Sheila Davies’s update yesterday says, as her many other updates have, that the inability to identify a direct source of virus transmission “indicates” a case acquired the virus by community spread, it does not confirm community spread.
Are there any common elements to these “unclear” cases other than a failure to identify known direct contacts? If so, the DCDHHS is not telling the public.
If the DCDHHS is relying solely on a patient’s self-reporting of possible direct contacts—reporting that depends upon the person’s memory, perceptiveness, and even truthfulness—then its conclusions about community spread are inherently biased and faulty. That is the nature of self-reporting.
It is also of little use to Dare County residents to be told that infected nonresidents likely acquired the virus by community spread, if the community in which the spread occurred is not identified. The DCDHHS never specifies in its updates if the presumed community spread that infected a nonresident is spread to which he/she was exposed outside or inside Dare County.
It may not always be possible to determine this, but in some cases, it should be. For example, a nonresident diagnosed with COVID-19 a day or two after arriving in Dare County certainly was infected outside of the area.
The incubation period for COVID-19–the time period between exposure to the virus and the appearance of symptoms–varies from person to person, but it is no less than two days. The average incubation time, according to medical experts, is five days.
Over the past week, according to Dr. Davies, about half of the 54 COVID-19 cases reported locally “acquired the virus by direct contact with known positive cases.” In the other half, she observes, “the individuals were not able to identify how they acquired the virus.” They, too, may have acquired the virus by direct contact of which they were unaware or which they were unwilling to disclose.
Fifty-three percent of the nonresidents who tested positive for COVID-19 in Dare County since Friday are known to have acquired the virus by direct contact before they arrived, and the other 47 percent may have done the same because the means of transmission is “unclear.” The DCDHHS’s public- information update says no more than that.
Likewise, 38 percent of the Dare County residents who tested positive for COVID-19 since Friday acquired the virus by a direct contact locally, and the other 62 percent may have done the same, without knowing it.
The Beacon believes it is long past time for the DCDHHS to do more to determine where and how COVID-19 is being transmitted—or, at least, to explain to the public the extent of its efforts—and then to communicate its findings.
We believe the DCDHHS’s lack of specificity in reporting details about diagnosed cases contributes to the public’s noncompliance with basic infection-control measures such as wearing a face covering, washing hands frequently, and social distancing.
For too many people, the public-health threat of COVID-19 is not real because it has not been brought home by public-health officials, on both the local and state level. To do so would not violate the privacy of people who have been diagnosed–they are mere case numbers–and do much to inform people about the safety of their community.
The number of COVID-19 cases diagnosed in Dare County is now 335. Four new cases—three residents and one nonresident—were added to the DCDHHS dashboard after Dr. Davies’s update. All are in home isolation in their respective home counties.
According to Dr. Davies, among the now-59 active cases in Dare County, three people remain hospitalized in critical condition.
ON THE STATE LEVEL, ALCOHOL SALES CURFEW: Governor Roy Cooper issued an executive order yesterday to stop all on-site alcoholic beverage sales statewide in restaurants, breweries, wineries, and distilleries at 11 p.m., starting at 11 p.m. Friday.
Bars statewide are currently closed, so they are not included in Executive Order 153.
The ban applies to alcoholic beverages sold at restaurants and the other target businesses from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m. The Executive Order will expire at 11 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 31, if it is not repealed, replaced, or rescinded earlier.
Executive Order 153 does not apply to grocery stores, convenience stores, or other entities that are permitted to sell alcohol for off-premises consumption. It is focused on discouraging social gatherings among people, especially young people, who do not take adequate precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
The number of hospitalizations reported yesterday on the N.C. Dept. of Health and Human Services dashboard, was 1,244, a new single-day record high, but the State still has hospital capacity, Dr. Mandy Cohen, Secretary of the NCDHHS, announced.
Dr. Cohen also said that “glimmers of potential progress” have emerged in the other COVID-19 metrics that the State is following. In particular, the trajectory of lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases, although still high, is leveling. Also, the trajectory in the positivity rate of tests is declining, although it is still above 5 percent. The last time the positivity rate was above 10 percent was July 19.
The Southern Shores Beacon 