 |
 |
 |
|
| The following summary minutes have not been approved by Simpsonville City Council. An official copy of the minutes will be available after adopted by City Council at City Hall 118 NE Main St. Simpsonville. Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, notice of this meeting date, time, place and Agenda was posted on the bulletin board at City Hall and faxed to the newspapers, radio stations, television stations and any concerned citizens. |
|
 |
SIMPSONVILLE CITY COUNCIL MINUTES WORKSHOP SESSION April 24, 2007 6:30 P.M.
CALL TO ORDER: Mayor: I’ll call the meeting of Simpsonville City Council to order. I’d like to welcome you all here tonight. Ms. Bodkins would you call the roll please.
ROLL CALL: Ms. Bodkins: Yes sir: Councilmember Bridges: Here Councilmember Garrett: Here Councilmember Lawrence: Here Councilmember Gecy: Here Councilmember Zitricki: Here Councilmember Larson: Here Mayor Waldrop: Here
Mayor: Thank you Ms. Bodkins.
PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
INVOCATION
CITIZEN COMMENTS Mayor: All right, this is the portion of the program where we have citizen comments. Do we have anyone signed up.
Ms. Bodkins: No sir.
Mayor: All right, so we don’t have any citizen comments tonight. Next on the agenda is Council Comments.
COUNCIL COMMENTS Mayor: Anyone have anything they’d like to get off their chest. Ms. Lawrence
Ms. Lawrence: Well it’s not anything off my chest –
Mayor: Well that was probably a poor choice of words – I’m sorry.
Ms. Lawrence: That’s all right. I went to a meeting of the – on the Capewood property the other night and it was pretty good attendance of residents and met with the engineer and the new property owner and actually what was explained to them – the property owners were happy. They liked the new plan and so it will be coming to the Planning Commission I think June the 2 nd I believe it is. Oh me, I’m poor – I can’t afford a note book. Oh, the – I noticed you said in your blog about the Planning and Zoning Administrator, that you were looking over their resumes. How many did we get.
Mr. Hawes: Five
Ms. Lawrence: Well that’s pretty good turn out. And you’ll have something for us
Mr. Hawes: I’ll be doing interviews actually –
Ms. Lawrence: Whenever you get it done. I’m not rushing you. Uhm – well just an update on the Kitten Action Team. I’ve got 7 little kittens at the house. Three of them I’m having to bottle feed so – that’s an every two hour job around the clock. The other 4 are only eating like 5 times a day. So I just want you all to remember that. And please remember the open house of the Kitten Action Team that I gave you those cards about this coming weekend. Okay. That’s all I’ve got.
Mayor: I notice you’ve got a note there about giving the Mayor a raise to $60,000 – do you want to talk about that – right there.
Ms. Lawrence: That’s budget notes.
Mayor: Sorry, I shouldn’t have been looking over your shoulder. Anyone else like to make a comment or two or three. Mr. Gecy
Mr. Gecy: Mr. Hawes on the paving contract that’s been issued to Sloan I think it is. We initially talked about including the fire stations in there. How are we going to deal with the concrete at the fire station – which are inevitably concrete instead of paving.
Mr. Hawes: Correct. What we did is we did the asphalt portion of the bond funding for the repair of the streets. The concrete portion will be bid separately.
Mr. Gecy: So is that going to come out of the $800,000
Mr. Hawes: Yes, that’s the intent.
Mr. Gecy: Is there a hard number on the deep patching – what is our worst case scenario. I just fear that we’re going to have – I mean I understand that you inspected the roads – but what’s under it is the fear is that there might be more expense to do some of the roads and we might not finish all of the roads. I mean is there
Mr. Hawes: There is no hard number on deep patching. It’s an estimate and the work will determine how much deep patching is required.
Mr. Gecy: Okay then we have that – that will be in a separate fund like my motion stated
Mr. Hawes: Certainly
Mr. Gecy: We just want to be –
Mr. Hawes: It’s held in a different bank
Mr. Gecy: We want to keep track of that money and add a street to it if we can and just stay on top of that from the very beginning. And let’s jump to the Hunters Woods sewer line. What’s the latest information on that. Did you have time to study the report that – since we met last.
Mr. Hawes: Yes I did. Certainly, as a matter of fact I have it before me right now. The information that was provided to us by Frazier Engineering that you read from at the last meeting I believe it was did have an inconsistency and was incorrect with regard to the amount of peak flow at the Arbors location. They used a technique whereby peak flow was determined on 1 minute intervals and that 1 minute interval created a surging when the pumps fired up. So it adversely affected the readings. It showed more flow going through when equalized through the day than actually went through those monitors so they changed their calibration to 15 minute intervals using the same data and everything – they just determined the peak flow on a 15 minute basis vs a 1 minute basis. And that determined that the flow coming out of the Arbors was 89,000 gallons per day – yes 89,000 gallons per day. The flow at Hunters Woods at the location of the second manhole up from Fairview was 192,000 gallons per day. So, that is about 2/5 of capacity or 40% of capacity at that location. And that is according to Frazier Engineering. And that includes their analysis of peak flow based on rain events and inflow and infiltration as well as inflow and infiltration on that line was found to be virtually zero. Therefore these peak flow numbers would hold during rain events or not during rain events. So the peak flow at that point was 192,000 gallons per day. The capacity at that point was 501,000 gallons per day.
Mr. Gecy: So what does that interpret to you.
Mr. Hawes: The way I would interpret that is that we’re at last than 50% of capacity at peak flow. There may or may not be a rational from this point to go forward with any upgrades or diversions of flow. We’re going to speak further with Frazier about that situation. As a matter of fact I was expecting to have Mr. Frazier here at the council meeting tonight as was requested by you, Mr. Gecy and he was unable to make it tonight.
Mr. Gecy: Well one of the things I see is a different projection. We always heard 65,000 gallons was coming from the Arbors, because that’s the amount we were going to turn on the Bi-Lo line. So if you’ve got 89 there – you’ve got 24,000 more gallons that we’re dealing with – but yet we have a lower number coming in to Hunters Woods than we first had. I just still – I’m not a sewer engineer so I’m not going to have any qualified discrepancy in it – it just – if we don’t have a problem I don’t want there to be a problem – but if it needs to be fixed and we’ve actually borrowed money to fix this then I – I mean how do we look. I mean we’ve paid for how many surveys. We borrowed money to fix this line to do something to it. We have it – I hope we still have it – I know we still have it – I’ll be confident
Mr. Hawes: We’ve got it. We have $234,000 sitting there.
Mr. Gecy: Okay, but what I’m saying we borrowed money to do this – now we got after 2-3 different reports – we’re finding out we don’t need to do anything – but yet we’ve had – we still have a grade problem there. And that’s got to have some effect on it
Mr. Hawes: It’s a shallow line
Mr. Gecy: It’s got to have some effect on the whole thing. I don’t know I just – we’re not putting this to bed yet. I just want to continue to bring it up and continue to look at it and I’d like to talk to them about these figures because that’s completely – that’s 24,000 gallons a day difference than what we’ve always been told. So that’s by – and I can’t for the life of me imagine anything less is coming through that line unless you guys have routed around in the middle of the night over to the Bi-Lo line or something – just to appease us but – no I’m only kidding – but you know what I mean. I hope we can have a dialogue on this – we have neighbors that are just waiting for something to be done and to go back and say we don’t believe anything needs to be done. I mean I’ll certainly defend what this council decides to do and with all the engineers saying – but we’ve had an issue where we had a back-up and it backed up enough to run into people’s homes and we got that fixed. Is the grade of that line still leave us open to a back up. I think it does. The flow’s not powerful enough there. I’ve watched that line – 8 inch line – in fact when Frazier put that in he measured the line at 5 ½ inches of depth at that point. That’s more than the capacity that we’re talking about here now. If you have a good grade you could put a million gallons through that line if you had the grade from my house down to the line. But that is so
Mr. Hawes: And that’s perhaps something we could look at is a change of grade or rerouting the line down the creek right of way with a 10 inch line.
Mr. Gecy: Well just from what you know and what you may have talked to Mr. Carter about is that possible to adjust that grade because when you get to the stop sign you start downhill. Could you – is there any way to do that Joe. Would that be an option.
Mr. Carter: You’d have to dig the street up
Mr. Hawes: Yeah, you’d have to dig the street up that’s what it would require – but it could be done.
Mr. Gecy: Well I mean – a solution – some times it’s pain and pleasure you know – we just have to decide how much pain we want to go through in order to get it fixed. Any way let’s keep that on the burner.
Mr. Hawes: It absolutely is and I expect Mr. Frazier to come and address council regarding this particular report.
Mr. Gecy: Okay – and our service orders are all continuing to be worked on with a lot of our staff working at Heritage Park ?
Mr. Hawes: Absolutely
Mr. Gecy: Okay, because we’re getting – some service work is delayed at least – I’m kind of looking at some of the what do you call it – what is your Q-Alert
Mr. Hawes: Q-Alert
Mr. Gecy: There’s several reports I’ve got with certain numbers that haven’t been processed and the comment was that you can’t get to them because they’re working at Heritage Park . Now we know that we were going to pay a price to do Heritage Park , I just want to be on the ball with when those guys are out there they’re not doing something else and we’ve got to
Mr. Hawes: Well I know of one example where there was a request for a no-outlet sign in your neighborhood at Fox Hollow Court .
Mr. Gecy: Yeah, I think Mike Newman sent that
Mr. Hawes: Right, and that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that we had people working at the Heritage Park site.
Mr. Gecy: Well that was just another – that was just another number – there was a couple of other issues but
Mr. Hawes: But those that we can address quickly are addressed quickly. Those aren’t have nothing to do with Heritage Park
Mr. Gecy: Okay, I just want you to say that. We’ve got no problems with getting the job done in the City is that what you’re saying
Mr. Hawes: That’s correct
Mr. Gecy: The jobs are getting done?
Mr. Hawes: They are.
Mr. Gecy: Okay. All right, that’s all I’ve got.
Mayor: Okay, anyone else. Mr. Larson
Mr. Larson: Were we going to have an Administrator’s Report this evening I don’t see it on the Agenda
Mr. Hawes: Not on the workshop agenda
Mr. Larson: Because I was going to ask a couple of things – I wanted to ask as far as the State roads that are in the City do we have a procedure for requesting that those be repaved at the same time the other roads are being repaved.
Mr. Hawes: We’ve talked about approaches with the State and the best way to tackle that is – as a matter of fact I’ve spoken with our State Representative on that, among other issues, so we’ll be coming to a consensus on exactly the best way to approach that.
Mr. Larson: I noticed that sink hole on Richardson Street by the railroad tracks
Mr. Hawes: That was addressed within one day. DOT – if they know of a dangerous situation and you make it clear to them that it’s dangerous they’ll come out fairly quickly. I have observed that on a number of occasions with DOT.
Mr. Larson: It had a steel plate over it that night and then it was paved the next day.
Mr. Hawes: The next day right.
Mr. Larson: That would be nice if they could kind of coordinate their streets with our streets at the same time.
Mr. Hawes: I would agree.
Mr. Larson: Whether that could happen is another question I guess. And I had another – at the corner of W. Georgia Road and Neely Ferry where the Bloom went in – where they dug up Neely Ferry to put in the sewer across there – it’s paved but it’s very rough – is that part of the –
Mr. Hawes: I think that’s all going to be topped when they finish the project.
Mr. Larson: I felt like it might be I just didn’t know if you knew for sure.
Mr. Hawes: I believe so. I believe it extends through that intersection.
Mayor: Okay, Mr. Zitricki
Mr. Zitricki: Mr. Hawes can you give us an update on the downtown streetscape. Any complaints or concerns from the business owners down here
Mr. Hawes: Yes. No, no I haven’t heard a complaint or concern. We have done the bulk of what we can do before Freedom Weekend Aloft at this point. Because any further work would actually deteriorate the aesthetics of downtown. Because further work would involve taking out stretches of the sidewalk at this point for the placement of utilities underground and rather than have that aesthetic as people go through the down town. I’d rather they see it right now the way it is if they’re from out of state and so forth or out of town and we’ll hit it hard after Freedom Weekend Aloft. So Memorial Day or after is when we’ll be hitting the streetscape hard.
Mr. Zitricki: Thank you.
Mayor: Okay – anyone down that way. Then we’ll start round two.
Ms. Lawrence: I was hoping to see Mr. Spain here because they’re putting a car wash in in Hunters Place and I mean we have notoriously had problems with the sewer over there and in fact had a lot of trouble giving that oral surgeon just a few gallons and now we’ve got this car wash and I was wanting to know
Mr. Hawes: I’m not familiar with it Ms. Lawrence
Ms. Lawrence: Well they’re putting it in and I mean it’s up and going almost. But, back to what Mr. Gecy was saying about Hunters Woods Drive- I understood there was a swag in that 8 inch line
Mr. Hawes: That may be a possibility.
Ms. Lawrence: So – Mr. Carter if you could just say yes or no – is there a swag in that line – am I correct.
Mr. Carter: Yes ma’am. It’s got a slow drain
Ms. Lawrence: Okay so – I mean that’s going to hold some solids – a swag. So I would like to see us do something – even if it’s get a price – what it would cost to put that more on a grade and get rid of that swag.
Mr. Hawes: That’s something that we’re aware of and we’re looking into.
Ms. Lawrence: Okay, thank you.
Mayor: Okay anyone else
Mr. Gecy: I have a question. Is there any wisdom in asking the state to give us all the streets that are supposed to be ours and then just taking them over. Why are there still some state roads out there Mr. Mayor
Mr. Mayor: Well because they own them and if we take them then we’ll have to maintain them.
Mr. Gecy: We should
Mayor: Well I respectfully disagree. We pay state taxes for them to maintain their roads and they should be returning them to us by maintaining them.
Mr. Gecy: All right but then you see this problem of we’re having a paving system for having our citizens having the luxuries that they think they deserve, should get, but yet we have to wait on the state and through their system to get things done. Clearly they’re not doing it. Like why would Fernwood be a state road.
Mayor: I suppose back when the village was being developed – long before you and I were here – I think most of the – we had Main Street which I think was state road and I think most of the cross roads then were connectors to other state roads. For instance Fernwood connected out to Hwy 417 through a kind of a funny way out through there but that’s the only answer I know and that’s an assumption. I don’t know. Nobody’s every told me how that all happened. But you can imagine as a small town develops, when there was nothing but State highways, that it just ended up that way.
Ms. Lawrence: My road is a state road
Mr. Gecy: Is there any communities that have like gotten fed up with that and just went ahead and asked the State to give them the roads, that they can take care of them themselves.
Mr. Hawes: I’m not aware of any.
Mayor: If they would give us the revenue along with it it might be a good deal, but if they’re not going to give us the revenue, and the Lord knows we’re having enough trouble getting our gas tax money, which is actually state revenue that’s returned to us, we could dig a pretty big hole if we took over keeping those state roads, I believe, since you asked me the question.
Mr. Gecy: Well, that’s what I was getting at. I’m just looking at the projection of giving the citizen a good solid road but yet relying on another entity to do it. They’re not going to do it and we owe these citizens something else. The state hasn’t shown any indication in the five years I’ve been here of coming and paving any roads. So I don’t know when that’s going to start or how they’re going to get caught up or what kind of schedule they would ever get on. But these people still need their roads paved I think. I don’t know.
Mayor: We have a huge surplus this year and I’m sure they’re going to share that with us. (The record can’t show the tongue in my cheek). All right, anyone else. All right thank you folks. Good comments.
GREENVILLE COUNTY RECREATION DISTRICT • Camp Spearhead – Mike Teachey Mayor: Next item on the Agenda, do we have a Mike Teachey here. Mr. Teachey you’re I assume from the Greenville County Recreation District and you’re going to tell us about Camp Spearhead
Mr. Teachey: Yes sir. I walked out of the office this morning with a big stack of material to bring you all and I ended up giving a presentation just a little while ago and I had a lady come up begging me to give her some more that she wanted to hand out. So I’ve got about 1 and I’ll get some others in the mail to you, but ultimately I wanted to talk to you about Camp Spearhead , before I do that though, on behalf of the Greenville County Recreation District, one of the things that we’ve been working on is building collaborative relationships with the other recreation providers. And we just wanted to tell you all how proud we are that you all got Freedom Weekend Aloft back to our area. And I know you’ve got your hands full and if there’s anything that we can do from the recreation agency to provide any kind of help in getting any of that ready, I know Gene Smith our Director would more than enjoy talking to you all about that. And like I said one of the things if you look in the past our agencies haven’t always played nice together, but we’ve got a new leader, some new blood on the board and a new direction. Which our belief is that we all sort of rise and fall together and we all should help each other out. And so I hope you taken us up on that if there’s anything we can do to help please let us know.
Mayor: Did you bring your checkbook with you?
Mr. Teachey: Exactly. Now, I live in Hunters Woods and the good news is I’m not here to talk about the sewer, so, anyway, I do appreciate you all looking into all that situation and we’ll trust whatever you all come up with that. But getting back to the point. All you all familiar with Camp Spearhead at all. It’s the Camp that’s been around since 1968, used to be run by the Department of Special Needs and Services for individuals with special needs and disabilities. And it’s a tremendous asset to our community. It has been operating at the Civitan Camp facility up north of Cleveland for many, many years and that land has been sold to Natural Land Trust – it’s going to be retained as a public place for people to go, but given the sale we need to locate Camp Spearhead. And about two years ago when the issue came up on the site where it’s at night, the Department of Special Needs asked our agency if we would take over Camp Spearhead and so we gladly did – it fit our mission. And so we now operate Camp Spearhead , but it only has the ability to use this facility for the next two possibly three years. We’d be bad partners if we stayed there much longer than that. We looked all over to find another facility that would meet the needs of our population. The current facility doesn’t really meet the needs of our population. It’s not even handicap accessible. It’s a very old facility – gravel roads and we determined that there wasn’t another facility to meet those needs and that we had a park – Pleasant Ridge Park which is just down the road from the current place where it operates out of the Civitan and we have made plans to build a new facility at Pleasant Ridge Park. This facility will have a lodge, approximately 8 cabins, pools, some other amenities there and our goal is to utilize that for the 8 weeks during the summer that the camp operates and then in the off-season rent that out to other groups. Really focusing on – we’ve got a possibility of building a relationship with a camp that serves kids with cancer. We’ve had a veterans group that are in wheel chairs call us about the possible use of the facility. So we think the facility itself might be a great asset to our over-all community. And the Camp Spearhead program is a tremendous asset to our over all community. When you think about recreation, and a lot of people say you know why all this money for a camp – you know all of us recreate in our own different ways and the fellowship that comes with that and the sense of community with that is tremendous to all of us. And folks with special needs, I don’t know if any of you have any connection with anybody with special needs, but a lot of these individuals live in a world that’s very isolated. I’ve had parents tell me about waiters falling over tables because of looking at their child who is in a wheelchair or this one little girl, one of our campers is 33 years old and has a rare form of dwarfism and they – when they get up to camp their surrounded by people that care about them and a community of peers, and I feel that on some level all of us deserve that. We get it all the time. We get it right here in this meeting, the camaraderie we share as citizens and Spearhead provides that for these folks. As a parent, I’ve got a 2 ½ year old son and I’ll tell you he wears me out and if I imagined having to be as involved with changing and feeding and all of that for the rest of his life until I myself needed help – I’ll tell you – we’re interviewing some parents today and one of them said you know sometimes as parents you just get a little washed out. And Spearhead provides one of the few places where these folks can take their child knowing they’re going to have the time of their lives and spend time with their other children and find a chance to sort of regroup and renew their energy or what have you. The counselors that work at Camp Spearhead are tremendous people. One of our counselors had worked at camp a long time ago decided to go into Special Ed and created her career path and then she ended up adopting a foster child who was so severely handicapped that the foster care people could not find anyone in the country who would take this child. This was a 28 year old single lady who adopted this child which kept him from going into a home and then she found someone to marry her who was a big-hearted man as well to take that on. And he has a degenerative condition and he also is one of our campers as well. All this to say – special needs doesn’t know municipal boundaries. Spearhead, even though we’re an agency that serves the county and the Greenville County Council has provided almost 4.5 million dollars towards our 10 million budget to build the camp, Camp Spearhead is not a county program. It’s not really – even though we operate the program as Greenville County Recreation District – we’re just stewards of the program – it’s a community program. About 12% of our campers actually come from – I think it’s 12% - you’ve got my hand-out there – come from the City of Simpsonville . Only 38% of our campers live strictly within the county and don’t live within a municipality. I’m here tonight wanting to just let you know about more about the campaign. Our goal is to move into the new facility by the summer of 2009. But I’m also here to invite you to participate in the campaign. What I mean by that is like I said, we’ve had 4 ½ million dollars of public investment through Greenville County Council. We’ve had a gift of a million dollars given to us from the Cliffs Communities. We’re in the state budget right now for a million dollars. I’m in charge of running the campaign to generate the remaining amount of money. I have total confidence that generating the rest of the money we need is not going to be a problem at all. But, my mission is not just to raise the money – it’s really to bring Simpsonville awareness to the camp and Simpsonville awareness to people with special needs and disabilities and to create a sense of all of us working collectively as a community to show these families and these campers that we care about them. That they’re valued citizens within our community and to show our support for all that. So when I say I’m here to invite you to participate in the campaign, I’m not now nor will I ever ask you for an amount of money. The amount of money that could come out of something like this, whether it’s talking with you, or I’ve talked to Ft. Inn, I’ve talked to the City of Greenville and I’m going to talk to all of the others – is really irrelevant. What’s relevant is that I would love to say that we have 100% municipal participation in helping make camp a reality, which is the partnership between county government, city government, our agency, private individuals, corporate individuals, because I think it demonstrates ultimately the compassion of our collective community which is Simpsonville, Greer, and the County and Greenville and everybody else out there. So I’m hoping that you’ll take upon consideration participating with us and making Camp Spearhead a reality and I think that it would be a great thing for all of us to work together to make that happen for these individuals. I appreciate the opportunity to come and talk to you and I’m happy to entertain any questions if there are any, and if not I do appreciate the opportunity to come speak with you and I’ll get some information in the mail to you.
Mayor: Okay, well I have a question. If there’s a person that qualifies for that – well if there’s a person that thinks they qualify for that do they now contact the Greenville County Recreation District to get qualified and to get scheduled.
Mr. Teachey: Yes sir, and the only qualification is – is we serve campers from 8 years old until literally for lack of a better word – death. We’ve got some campers that are 80 years old. One of the things that makes our camp different – there’s only one other camp in the area that serves special needs and that’s Camp – well there’s one down in Columbia, there’s one in Clemson – Camp Hope and in order for a camper to go there they have to be able to walk, talk, feed themselves and communicate. We take campers regardless of their level of disability – so a lot of our campers require one on one care. Now one thing, I know even though a lot of our programs there’s an in-district and out-of-district fee, for example, I live in the City of Simpsonville so for me to participate in one of our own programs I pay a different fee than a County resident. But there is no in-district out-of-district fee from Camp Spearhead . Our cost is about $230-$260 dollars a week. We’ve never turned away anyone because of the money. We have a camp scholarship program and we try to serve as many folks as we can.
Mayor: Okay, anyone else have any other questions for Mr. Teachey. Mr. Bridges
Mr. Bridges: What was the total budget for rebuilding the camp
Mr. Teachey: 10 million dollars. The land is already paid for. It’s one of our parks. And so all that will go directly towards the capital elements of the campaign or the project.
Mayor: Okay anyone else. Mr. Larson
Mr. Larson: What part of the park are you building the camp in.
Mr. Teachey: Are you familiar with Pleasant Ridge Park . If you drive up the road – there’s a campground here but if you take the road up to the left it goes up and curves around down to where the pond is. When you get to the top of that curve if you went straight up there’s a little saddle up there – about 40 acres of a saddle right between that road and the Cliff’s property on the other side that we’re going to use to develop the camp site.
Mr. Larson: That’s a great location
Mr. Teachey: Oh it’s a wonderful location and it’s a great use of the park. All of our trails and paths within it will be paved. Right now we make our current site handicap accessible by brute force. And I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to push a wheel chair down a gravel road but this will allow our campers to be a little more mobile and create a safer environment. So it really is a nice location and it’s nice not to have to spend money on land, because as you know land is very expensive. So we can take all of that and build a nicer better facility.
Mayor: Very good. Any other questions. Thank you very much for coming and making us aware of that.
OLD BUSINESS • Vision Statement Mayor: All right, old business. Mr. Hawes let’s talk about a vision.
Mr. Hawes: Yes sir, Mayor and Council, a couple weeks back, really after the retreat, more than a couple weeks back, probably a month plus back, we passed out synopsis vision statements of what was discussed at the retreat. They are basically draft vision statements and council asked that they be allowed to rate the choice for a vision statement from these synopsized. I’m going to read the synopsized vision statements because they really touch on what council had been talking about at the retreat and you can get a feel for some of the elements that council wants to hit on here.
The first one was: Simpsonville will be recognized as a place for families to visit, shop and stroll and above all to call home.
The next one is: Simpsonville strives to be a clean, safe, vibrant destination for families.
The next is: Simpsonville vision is a City that has managed growth while preserving a small town feel with a downtown that is safe and vibrant, all with the purpose of being a place that families will consider home.
Simpsonville strives to be a City that meets the health, safety, and cultural needs of families.
And fifth was: Simpsonville is a community that promotes healthy families spending time together in a clean, safe, well-managed City with facilities and infrastructure that support new demands in growth and enhance quality of life for all citizens.
City Council graciously selected their favorite – or the ones that best matched what they felt a vision statement should be for the City and got those back to me. And from that – from those selections I created a single sentence that tried to capture the heart and the sole of what you all believe and indicated to me you believed should be in a vision statement. And that is a simple one sentence statement that says:
Simpsonville will be a community that manages growth, while preserving a small town feel, and provides and enhanced quality of life for all it’s citizens in a clean, safe, well-managed City with a vibrant downtown.
A little bit of a run-on sentence but it’s one sentence. I think that captures and indicates a direction moving forward as we get into comprehensive planning process and we bring a planner on board that can indicate the true feelings of City Council with regard to the direction of the City and what they’re looking for from the City five years from now, 10 years from now and in different time increments. From that, that’s what I’ve prepared for you. You asked that there be a single synopsis there, you call can certainly add, change, delete or write up your own separate one here. This is something I’d like you to review. It’s certainly a workshop there’s no vote at this point. But perhaps at the next meeting when we have first reading on the budget, you could take up this issue as well and consider that as a moving forward vision statement for the City of Simpsonville .
Mayor: Okay, fair enough. Does anyone have any comments on that before we start pondering.
Mr. Bridges: I like it, it sounds good to me.
Mayor: I think it pretty much sums up all of those things. All right, well everybody take that home and when you’re not watching t.v. or something, ponder that.
• CODE OF ORDINANCES Mayor: Next item, Mr. Holmes, you’re going to tell us about the final, final, final review of the Code of Ordinances.
Mr. Holmes: Mr. Mayor you have voted on first reading on the Code of Ordinances. I just wanted to keep this in front o f you for your continued review. There are still comments that are appended to the materials that I gave to you. This is a workshop session, we can talk about those tonight, but it would otherwise be on your agenda for final vote on your next voting meeting.
Mr. Gecy: Mr. Mayor
Mayor: Mr. Gecy
Mr. Gecy: Mr. Holmes is there a particular one that you could share with us briefly on the ordinance that is in place now and a comment from a council member that requested that to be changed and have we accepted that change. Is there one in particular.
Mr. Holmes: No, there’s not one in particular – I mean
Mr. Gecy: Just a synopsis of one maybe.
Mr. Holmes: Well what I can tell you is and I believe it’s in the general government section, there’s a comment from me that says that I think some of these need to be rewritten and I made some suggestions. One council member says I like the way they are I want to leave it like this. Those are the type of things I’m talking about. It has to do with communication with the staff and I had made a suggestion – you’ve got a City Administrator – you might want to direct those comments there based on your City Administrator Ordinance. Others said I want to make sure I have access to employees for discussions. Those are the types. That’s one I can think of.
Mr. Gecy: Just focus on that one. How is that going to be determined.
Mr. Holmes: Your vote. I mean right now a council member has made that suggestion, I have made a suggestion, and unless you all give me direction about which way it’s going to go it will remain as it’s written. That’s what I’m looking for.
Mr. Gecy: How many of those are there.
Mr. Holmes: I would say there’s several dozen of them. And some are comments from staff, not just me or from council members, but some of them are just from staff saying, for example, I can’t think of one right now, but I think I may have a question that maybe we need to work on this, a council member said I want to put it this way, and maybe a staff person says I want to delete that all together. I don’t think that ought to be there. So there’s obviously some different opinions and I just need you all to tell me which way you want me to go.
Mayor: Well I think I see where your going with this – so are you saying the default will always be if one person says this and one person says that the default will always be leave it like it was?
Mr. Holmes: Well you all are voting on this so you all have to tell me what you’re going to vote on.
Mayor: But your going to bring us – you have a document ready right now right and we’re just going to vote on that document in whole, which includes these changes that you were talking about.
Mr. Holmes: No, see you have a CD that has your current ordinances and it has comments all through it that I may say I would like something or I have some questions about this – there are council comments that say it ought to be this way or it ought to be that way and there are staff comments saying. But you all are the final arbiters to tell me what all it should be.
Mayor: So you’re going to expect us to go through this entire document next Tuesday or our next meeting and address each individual item?
Mr. Holmes: No, what I’m telling you is if you don’t except for the changes you’ve already voted on, it’ll stay like it is. Unless there’s a motion made like there was at the last meeting that said I want you to adopt it with all of the comments and I understand that. My only problem is that there are competing comments so I don’t know what to do with it.
Mayor: That’s my question – do you have a default – it sounds like with the example that you just gave it defaults to doing nothing
Mr. Holmes: That’s right
Mayor: I mean if you say this and somebody else says this –
Mr. Holmes: unless the motion is to do
Mayor: All right, what if you give us an example of something that one of the council members saw that needed to be changed and they made that comment – you had no opinion on it and nobody else had any opinion on it – does it automatically change to that or does it default to do nothing or do we look at that as an individual – are we going to look at each individual change.
Mr. Holmes: Well what I’m saying is if for example if only one council member said I want this changed, and the majority of you do not agree with that change then it won’t happen. If the majority of you do agree with the change then it will happen.
Mayor: But the document that you’re going to submit to us to vote – I’m sorry – I don’t mean to make this complicated, maybe I’m just dense, but I just – the document that you’re going to submit to us – the way I have understood this over the last couple of meetings when you’ve talked to us about it. You’re going to submit a document to us that says this is the new Code of Ordinances with changes made perhaps by one council member but the changes will be there and we’re going to vote on it in whole. But now you’re saying – it sounds to me like you’re saying that we’re going to go to paragraph 2 sentence 3 and say somebody said they’d like to see it this way and somebody said they’d like to see it this way so lets vote on that and then we’ll move on down to paragraph 4.
Mr. Holmes: I’m trying not to make this more – but several months ago I gave you the CD and said you all need to give me your comments and I’ve gotten some and I haven’t gotten some and what I’m saying is I’m to the point where I need council to tell me where you want to go with it. And if you go through what I’ve given you it will become abundantly clear what I’m talking about.
Mr. Gecy: Except for the competing.
Mayor: Mr. Garrett’s going to straighten it out.
Mr. Garrett: No, I looked up on the CD and you know you go page after page after page and there’s a lot of notes in there. I have a question, I’m certainly no attorney, but if we change some of this wording is it still going to be legally binding, or as legally binding.
Mr. Holmes: Well I think what you’re – there’s one in there that we have a bunch of shalls and the recommendation is to change it to may as opposed to shall. My preference is it stays shall because that in my opinion is a stronger word but it could be may because the Supreme Court in some cases says that may also means shall. I just personally think that if I tell someone you will – you shall do this – it’s clear that you may do this – it suggests there may be a choice. Maybe maybe not. So there are things like that in there that could be stylistic that are not necessarily – would render it either illegal because it’s one way as opposed to another.
Mayor: Ms. Lawrence
Ms. Lawrence: Well like a lot of this – like I called the Police Department on some of these fines that were in there and stuff and just came up with current amount allowable by law rather than having a definite amount that every time it changes you have to change. There was some other police department things that weren’t right that I changed in there and like for example, Mr. Holmes had put under the City Clerk’s duties it said and perform other duties as may be assigned, and so Mr. Holmes had put, who has the authority to assign additional duties. And so I put may be assigned by City Administrator or Council.
Mayor: Well I understand that you made some comments and he made some comments and some other people made some comments. I just don’t understand how we’re going to ferret through all that and you know determine that each comment is – we’re going to accept a comment from you instead of somebody else’s comment or somebody else’s idea. It seems to me that’s going to be a laborious lengthy, item by item, line by line thing and that was not my understanding up until tonight. I thought you were – I though we were – I understand now that I should pack a lunch when I come to the next meeting, is that accurate.
Ms. Lawrence: But the police department stuff has changed so that has to be changed. It’s just like all the part in here about video poker licenses and stuff, we don’t need that – they outlawed those things how many years ago. So a lot of this is deletions to keep up with the law.
Mr. Holmes: In that case I would hope our attorney would automatically change that and say that is no longer the law. Okay. All right well we’ll
Mr. Holmes: I’m not concerned about those as much as where there are some competing interests or thoughts about how this ought to be done. And one of the reasons I’m doing this is you all re-codified your Code of Ordinances in 1995 and after it was adopted I heard a number of council members express some concern that council as a whole had not gone through the entire document and made comments on it. So what I’ve been trying to do is let council do that so when you come up with this document it’s what all of you want and so I had the Clerk put it on a CD and distribute it so everybody had it and had all that information and I will do whatever council wants done. If you all say you write it I’ll write it and then you can vote on whether what I’ve written is what you want or not. But, we just need – I just need some guidance from council this last effort to get this done.
Mayor: Mr. Gecy
Mr. Gecy: After you’ve reviewed this and accepted a comment from council could it be safe to say that just the comments that you’ve added in and the comments you’ve got from council total 32 let’s just say. Would it be safe to say – a way to stream line it to present the budget – and then just literally somehow list just those and the ones that are competing we default to you as our attorney to make suggestions. If there’s nobody in competition for that we’re willing to let you have – treat us – or legally do the right thing and we’ll encourage that and if you have a competing suggestion that a council person disagrees with we have to vote on that – that’s all we have to vote on and then we would vote on the whole package. So if we came up with a different wording and you suggested the duties of the Clerk would be this and the City Administrator says this and the council person says that we just have to settle that issue and that only adds up to maybe a few issues. So we probably would take your recommendation and then the ones that are competing we would have to decide on those.
Mayor: Well that was my understanding of what we were going to do from the beginning. That you were going to take our comments and make suggestions to us and bring this document with your suggestions and yes perhaps there’s some that needed some debate –
Mr. Holmes: Well that’s fine I guess the way I did that if you look at the CD I have comments and they’re blown out – like I suggest you change this language and it ought to be a certain way and then a council member said I want to delete this and put somebody else in – so they are already in this document – they’re highlighted in different colors – they have initials as to who suggested them – and the way the Code has been prepared for there different chapters so you open each chapter as a separate document and it has all those. Now I can have all of those comments printed out on a separate document. My only problem personally is when you look at them on a computer it’s pretty obvious what those comments are in reference to because they’re right out on the margin. If you print all the comments out separately then you’ve got to go back to the main document and say okay it said this – so the way you’ve got it is just easier for me to look at it. But it may not be easier for you.
Mayor: So everybody charge your batteries on your computers and bring them with you next meeting and have your little disk and we’ll buzz through it. I’m confident we can finish it in a snap. Okay
Mr. Holmes: And there’s a lot of them that you will be able to go through them – there’s a lot of places where there’s not a lot of comments.
Mayor: Okay – let’s try to keep the Agenda short next meeting Mr. Hawes.
EXECUTIVE SESSION • Personnel Matter – Administration Mayor: All right we have the need for an Executive Session tonight to discuss a personnel matter regarding Administration. Do I hear a motion.
Ms. Lawrence: Mr. Mayor I make a motion we go into Executive Session to discuss a personnel matter for administration.
Mr. Garrett: Second
Mayor: Mr. Garrett seconds. All in favor signify by saying Aye (AYE) opposed No. Aye’s have it it’s unanimous. We are in recess and we may or may not be back up here.
ADJOURNMENT CAME OUT OF EXECUTIVE SESSION – NO ACTION WAS TAKEN
Motion made by Ms. Lawrence to adjourn, second by Mr. Larson. Vote unanimous to adjourn the meeting.
Respectfully submitted,
PAMELA J. BODKINS City Clerk |
|
|
| 118 N E Main Street, Simpsonville, SC 29681 |
|