[This transcript was generated automatically from audio using AI and hasn't been reviewed by a person -- it can contain mistakes, including plausible-sounding sentences that were never actually said. Treat it as a starting point, not a verbatim record.]

[1:58] Call to order the Village Council meeting of July 23rd, 2024, and we'll begin as we usually do. We'll have an
[2:08] indication from Reverend Stilman, our neighbor, the Trinity Fellowship Church right down the street,
[2:13] and he'll be followed by a pledge of allegiance that's going to be led by Will Simmons, a seventh
[2:18] greater and Pinehurst resident at O'Neill School. So, Reverend Stilman. Please join me in prayer.
[2:25] In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, God of all nations and peoples,
[2:30] this evening you bless us with gifts of life and health, love and friendship, wisdom and
[2:36] inspiration.
[2:37] Despite our differences, you have gathered us here to work for the improvement of our community.
[2:42] We thank you for your grace and for the labor of those who have made themselves available
[2:46] for the benefit of their neighbors, where we are ignorant and lightness, where we are
[2:54] broken healers. We pray these things in the name of Jesus Christ and for our
[2:59] sex, though He was rich, He became poor. Amen. Thank you. Will Simmons?
[3:11] I
[3:11] pledge allegiance to the flag of United States of America, and to a very
[3:17] public for which it stands, one nation under God, end of Israel, with liberty and
[3:24] us this for all. Thank you Will.
[3:33] We will begin as we usually do with reports and we'll turn
[3:37] to the village manager, Jeff Sanborn, anything you like? Yeah, thank you, Patrick. I want to
[3:41] steal anybody's thunder, but we do have U.S. kids coming back to town next week. Always a
[3:46] big event around here. That kicks off with the parade on Tuesday at six o'clock and then the
[3:53] tournament and play will continue through the weekend so hopefully everybody has a good time
[3:58] with that.
[3:59] Thank you.
[4:03] I just have a two short item, three short items, the past two weeks, I and many of my colleagues
[4:15] tended to the two of the Department of Transportation public meetings on the Pioneer's
[4:20] traffic circle, and there's having another one tonight, they're third, and we later will
[4:25] be talking about that at length as a separate agenda on our item on our agenda, but they
[4:32] were widely attended and look forward to discussing that.
[4:36] Secondly, after a photo of that, yesterday we received a letter or email from the Southern
[4:45] Pines guarding club, dressed to the members of this council, and the members of the Southern
[4:50] Pines, a town council, and to the North Carolina Department of Transportation, and I'll
[4:56] read a couple of sentences from the Southern Pines Garden Club, believe that the NC DOTs plan
[5:04] would be devastating to Pines, and are surrounding community, ripping out the current
[5:10] traffic circle, and paving it with asphalt in the company maze of lanes and traffic
[5:15] like to a more the beauty of the town, so many of us call home and change our appearance forever.
[5:21] It's been submitted by the Southern Pines Garden Club signed by President Elizabeth Webster.
[5:27] So put that for the record.
[5:29] And lastly, last week I had the opportunity to attend a briefing by the...
[5:36] I'll call it the leadership of Fort Liberty.
[5:38] They hosted it for other municipal leaders of Mork County and it was held at the Mork County Courthouse in Carthage.
[5:47] It was very informative. I learned a lot and one of the things I learned is that even though those of us here just referred to the village manager as Jeff Sandborn.
[5:58] When he walked in that room, he was Colonel Sandborn. I just want to let you know that.
[6:03] All the folks in uniform it was like a whole week so anyway, it was a good event and
[6:10] the fort liberty that their leadership that's taking over now obviously is a group will
[6:15] be able to work with down the road so look forward to that Dr. Morgan.
[6:20] Just a short one here, typically give kudos on the reports but I want to give kudos to our citizens.
[6:27] The representation that occurred in the meetings specifically the first meeting that was held at
[6:31] the first elementary was outstanding, and that's an important one of the pilot, but it's
[6:37] going to have a fact.
[6:38] We'll talk about that more later.
[6:40] But our citizens, wait a minute.
[6:45] I attended both the Pinehurst and the Carthage DOT presentations.
[6:51] I would echo Jeff Morgan.
[6:54] Democracy is not just about showing up on election day.
[6:58] It's a lot more participation.
[6:59] It works better when citizens remain actively involved.
[7:03] I thought it was a terrific turn out there.
[7:05] I thought it was a pretty good turn out up in Carthage and to the extent that there weren't quite as many people there, those who turned up probably had a little better opportunity to really engage with the engineers from TOT.
[7:18] I think we're going to talk a little bit more later in the presentation in our meeting about our reactions while I'll just stop there.
[7:26] Okay, thank you.
[7:27] Bob Pickling.
[7:28] Well, I too attended.
[7:30] The DOT presentation at Pinehurst Elementary. And I too want to thank all the people who came out and stood in 100 degree heat in a very long line to get in. And many were disappointed because there was no presentation.
[7:46] Although I have heard many of you got a chance to talk to DOT representatives, which was great.
[7:52] But anyway, our thanks and more to come on that topic. Thank you.
[7:57] The check.
[8:00] The second on the comments on the NCDO team meeting at the Piner's Elementary thought
[8:05] was very interesting.
[8:07] With regards to Fort Liberty, now that you mentioned it, I being on the Board of Directors
[8:13] now that Mr. Sandborn, Colonel Sandborn, has really linked with his position as chair
[8:20] of the Board of Directors, and I'm sitting in now, pretty big shoes to fill although I'm
[8:25] not chair.
[8:25] I did attend the Board of Directors meeting over a spring lake a few weeks ago, where we
[8:31] reviewed the financials and the status and the budget.
[8:33] This is the Port Liberty Regional Land Use Advisory Commission, which is chartered with
[8:41] reviewing land use decisions in adjoining municipalities and counties to see what other could
[8:46] be in a impact on the mission and or environmental concerns in Port Liberty.
[8:52] So it's a very important commission, in my opinion.
[8:55] The Commission reviewed about 125 land use proposals
[8:58] in the second quarter of 2024 from some of the eight counties
[9:04] and 15 municipalities whose land use decisions may affect the base.
[9:09] And we also plan the general meeting for August.
[9:13] You'll welcome, obviously, Jeff.
[9:16] And they express a good deal of interest.
[9:19] We express a good deal of interest in staying
[9:20] on top of the land use plan as being developed by more county
[9:25] as it may or may not affect the mission and at port liberty.
[9:29] So very interesting there.
[9:31] Thank you.
[9:32] Thank you.
[9:33] Check if I could as one follow one of the DOT people
[9:37] with whom I spoke sometime in the last two weeks.
[9:40] Talk about plans to expand the number of people
[9:45] resident in the camp McCall area and possible need
[9:50] or road development down there did that come up and that may not be yet.
[9:54] It has come up in the past, particularly in Jeff, you can elaborate on this, where the
[10:00] Duke power had proposed isproposing and will build cell towers at their stations nearby
[10:08] Cant McCall, and the question was whether or not that would impact the airspace and the
[10:15] flight patterns, because Cant McCall is used quite frequently, is that correct?
[10:19] Yeah, I think they were able to resolve those questions.
[10:23] But the question did also come up in the briefing that Patrick and I got from the New
[10:27] Garrison Commander a week or two ago, and they didn't give us any details, but they did
[10:33] suggest that there is going, there are going to be some future changes that are going to
[10:36] create some more permanent military presence at chemical.
[10:45] Okay.
[10:46] Okay.
[10:46] Other questions?
[10:48] Comments?
[10:50] We'll go on to motion item four.
[10:54] Motion approved consent agenda.
[10:59] I've, again, noted to my colleagues, the item three B or item B on the consent agenda,
[11:08] which is the end of your summary reports for the police and the fire departments.
[11:13] And the past means we've had a presentation, they walked us through their reports.
[11:19] I don't know if they're prepared to do that tonight.
[11:23] The police are fire chief.
[11:24] I don't see Glenn so I think Derek did come tonight in case you had questions, or she
[11:31] know the past precedence was always in the consent of the agenda.
[11:34] One of you asked to have, it pulled on the consent agenda of the last time we did this.
[11:39] We didn't recognize that that was intended to be a new precedent.
[11:43] All right, well, I just think it's because public safety is our number one responsibility as a village council and all.
[11:51] I just think it's good for us and for our residents to hear firsthand from the leadership of the two key public safety organizations,
[11:58] our fire department and our police department, to walk us through that data.
[12:02] So if we want to just move that and place it on a separate item to next week, next council
[12:09] meeting, that would be fine with me.
[12:12] Well, we could add it for this evening as well and take care of the fire part of it.
[12:17] We could do that about, but I think it, I find it useful when both the fire and the police
[12:22] department are together and say, if it's okay with everyone here, we'll just move it to the next
[12:26] meeting.
[12:26] I wouldn't have any problem approving the reports as part of the consent agenda, but I would
[12:30] to hear a presentation of them.
[12:33] I'm fine with that.
[12:34] We can do that.
[12:34] And then we will just place this items separately
[12:37] for a presentation in two weeks.
[12:39] Is that okay?
[12:40] Is that just there?
[12:41] Okay.
[12:43] We will leave it there.
[12:45] And then we will add the appropriate item to the next
[12:49] Council meeting agenda.
[12:51] Excuse me.
[12:52] All the items listed below are considered routine
[12:54] or have been discussed at length in previous meetings
[12:57] and will be enacted by one motion.
[12:59] And no separate discussion will be held unless requested by a member of the Village Council.
[13:04] So the items are the approval of Village Council meeting minutes, and that includes the
[13:12] July 9th, regular meeting, July 9th, work sessions, July 9th, close session, and the
[13:18] year and summary reports that we just referenced, and the budget amendments report.
[13:24] So do I have in motion?
[13:27] I move to approve all the items listed and considered routine on the consent agenda.
[13:33] Second.
[13:34] Motion in a second, all those in favor?
[13:37] Okay.
[13:37] We've adopted that.
[13:39] And that ends a consent agenda.
[13:42] Now we have to go to the public comments.
[13:44] I don't know if anybody was not signed up yet.
[13:50] When we hear from the folks who have signed up, you're welcome to indicate that you'd like to speak.
[13:55] First person is Colette Lasty, yes, okay, Colette, 25 Queen Court.
[14:04] Right, 25 Queen Court, Colette Lasty.
[14:09] I am not a lawyer.
[14:11] Info presented is from extensive research on potential
[14:14] replacement of fine-hurst landmark traffic circle
[14:18] with a CFI or continuous flow intersection.
[14:23] I mentioned NCDOT reps at the two meetings last week, emails that were sent to the Federal
[14:31] Highway Transportation System Administration about the negatives of the Circle Replacement.
[14:39] NCDOT reps responded that the FHWA focuses on highways only.
[14:46] Yes, the 2015 Infrastructure Bill did focus on highways, projects, between $50 and $100 million.
[14:57] But the National Highway Roadway Safe.
[15:00] The strategy, as part of the two, 2021, bipartisan infrastructure law includes highways, bridges, state and local roads, bypass, and even pedestrian trails. The goal is for zero fatalities on all of the above.
[15:17] The FHWA states responsibility to reach these goals,
[15:25] rest not just in all governments, entities,
[15:29] advocacy groups, but traveling public.
[15:32] Objectives include automatic braking systems,
[15:36] and finding and funding for speed cameras.
[15:40] Also, MPO Project Design involvement is important.
[15:44] However, after attending the newly formed More County MPO presentation by the NCDOT and CFI proposal,
[15:56] I was left wondering, was this a DNCDOT administrative push possibly to qualify for 2024 federal funding?
[16:06] Was this a push by selective MPO committee members seeing this as a path to their growth agenda?
[16:13] or were other outline community members, did they understand that removing the circle for future questionable growth was equal to a Western connector or future questionable growth on through roads transsecting their farmlands and equestrian lands.
[16:36] I also wondered if a committee implying her citizens could file an IAR.
[16:42] It's an interior approval request with the FHWA to consider modifying
[16:48] Circle Not Replacement.
[16:51] Suggested context besides the FHWA office could include the infrastructure office
[16:57] or the console office.
[17:00] If FHWA's goal is zero fatalities.
[17:04] how could a CFI even be considered?
[17:07] After research, civil interchange reports on safety
[17:11] a CFI, CFI originally panted in 1995,
[17:17] has for multiple level roads.
[17:21] When applied to a single road, single-level road has many issues.
[17:26] Mainly, the displacement of floaty layers and crashes
[17:30] upstream and downstream of the main intersection.
[17:33] Another major issue is when the left lane crossover merges into the fast lane, especially
[17:40] with increased red light runners.
[17:43] According to April 2024, NCDOT crash maps, Pinehurst Circle, and 10 years has reported zero
[17:53] fatalities and severe crashes.
[17:55] The only CFI in North Carolina open in Huntersville in 2021 has already experienced both fatal and severe crashes.
[18:08] When NCDL is pushed for answers, they say pine hers is a circle, it is not around about, because it's 600 foot diameter.
[18:19] the circle open in 1950. The first round about was pan and patented in 1966. The main reason
[18:29] is because circles originally allowed the right of the way to enter in traffic.
[18:34] We're round about when they were patented. Gayway to traffic in the circle.
[18:39] Collette, can you wrap it up? Thank you.
[18:42] Appreciate it. Thank you. Mr. Bruce Gettys.
[18:51] Good evening, Bruce Gettys. I live in a
[18:53] Piner C. TJ. I want to first thank you for your comments about citizen
[18:57] engagement. I wrote an email this afternoon to all of you and I want to make a few
[19:02] points for the record this evening. I have a written copy I'd like to give the
[19:06] village clerk when I'm done. So I'm writing this email in behalf of the
[19:11] Thousands who have engaged on this issue using social media face the face. I'm a member of a team
[19:18] Joanne Valdez Lynn who taps sharp roar
[19:22] Natalie Hiler and myself have been engaging as many citizens as we can find and pint her and among our neighbors and southern more county and more county at large
[19:30] We understand that we're not the only users of the circle, but we are we are reaching out to as many as we can
[19:37] So to date now our campaign is not going to stop today
[19:41] We're going to continue until the final decision is made one way or another.
[19:45] But today, our online petition, and you can see the link in my email to you all, as received close to 2,300 signatures.
[19:53] That's not trivial.
[19:56] An online social media campaigns for a local issue.
[20:00] That's a significant number.
[20:02] We have a paper petition.
[20:03] A lot of our residents still like paper and pencil or pen.
[20:07] We've received 322 signatures through face-to-face interactions with countless hours of many
[20:15] members of our community reaching out to friends and neighbors to sign a paper petition.
[20:19] We've submitted the signature list from online, the online petition that changed our work
[20:24] to NCDOT at the last two public meetings with updates as we go, and we've also submitted
[20:30] the paper petitions in the evening.
[20:32] Two members of our team are at Aberdeen, they'll be there shortly, and they're going to submit more of the paper petitions as we go.
[20:42] Our Facebook campaign includes two videos of homeowners that are affected by eminent domain, Jerry Delos and Jennifer Zerowski.
[20:50] You can see the links in my email to you all. I encourage you to please watch those videos. They're serious and they're moving.
[20:57] I mean, moving in the sense of emotionally moving, we hope they'll never have to move.
[21:02] Our Facebook campaign is targeted to everyone within a 15-mile radius of the pint-her circle.
[21:09] In Facebook, you can actually put a pin on a mat and draw a line, a radius around the people you want to reach.
[21:16] So imagine that 15-mile radius around the circle itself as a center of this campaign.
[21:24] We've reached over 30,000 people.
[21:26] Now, on Facebook, you know, I get to see the analytics, we're seeing numbers that far exceed your own election campaigns.
[21:35] I've seen some of the analytics of your own election campaigns, we're seeing an order of magnitude higher, result, and analytics.
[21:42] I'm surprised. I'm astounded at how much this issue has energized our base.
[21:49] So please watch those videos.
[21:53] I also posted the videos and several posts on next door.
[21:58] That's reached thousands.
[21:59] I'm getting emails from next door telling us that our campaign
[22:03] is exceeding anything they've seen in our local area.
[22:08] And we've got people organically reposting on next door.
[22:12] People we don't even know are finding the petition.
[22:15] And they themselves are putting it.
[22:17] the petition on our webpage, point her circle.org on next work.
[22:22] So this organic reaction is astounding.
[22:25] Numerous residents have posted yard signs,
[22:28] and we still get requests from more signs.
[22:30] Okay, you can see the signs around town that say, improve the circle, don't destroy it with a reference to our website at pinehurstcircle.org.
[22:40] Now, with respect to the public meetings, we've had well over a thousand turn out. I appreciate your comments. I appreciate your observations.
[22:47] We believe that the word of mouth, the social media campaigns, next to our Facebook, YouTube, the petition, and the website.
[22:55] The Council is going to discuss the NCDOT meeting separately later in the evening.
[23:00] Okay, well I'm just making a public comment in a regard.
[23:03] We believe the social media and the face-to-face and the engagements have really made a significant difference in that turnout.
[23:11] So the bottom line is the taxpayers are footing the bill for any changes proposed by NCDOT.
[23:18] As you can see in my email to you all,
[23:20] War County tax pair of voices are allowed and clear.
[23:24] We urge you to cite the results of this campaign
[23:27] and a resolution that calls for NCDOT
[23:30] to improve the point or circle, not just for you.
[23:33] Thank you.
[23:34] Thank you.
[23:36] Is there anybody else here who would like to speak tonight?
[23:40] Yes, in the back.
[23:42] He's state your name and we're at it.
[23:46] My name is Alana Romero.
[23:47] I'm over at 105 Lake Forest Drive Southwest.
[23:50] over by the lake. I did attend, right, attempted to attend the Pinehurst Elementary School of
[23:56] Line was over an hour long. I got there at 447. So 15 minutes early, it was 105 degrees
[24:03] and due to I brought my daughter with me. We couldn't stand out in the heat. So it was a bit of
[24:09] a failure. I know I talked to people in line and heard them upset that by the time they even
[24:13] got in the door, there were no surveys. There were, you know, not really anyone to talk to.
[24:18] Um, so there were a lot on heavy people.
[24:20] I went to the Carthage and I did speak to several of the DOT representatives.
[24:26] I brought up my concern about their projecting the population growth out 30 years.
[24:32] I did express reasons as to why I had said going past 10 years is a number you just can't grasp.
[24:40] Um, I asked them what models they were using and they did agree that the larger model
[24:45] skills they use are based off the same models used in larger cities like Chicago, LA, New York.
[24:51] And I did bring up the point that a lot of those cities not only missed their projected
[24:55] population growth when they did theirs, they actually are in the negative and, you know,
[25:03] there was comments brought up that while they all came here and while that might be true
[25:07] right now, we don't have the infrastructure as, you know, Raleigh does even. I asked the county
[25:14] Commissioner and the DOT representative, what they thought all these people coming here might do business-wise,
[25:21] and they said, well, a lot of them are coming down from Raleigh because they want to live in more county.
[25:26] And they said, well, why do they want to live here? And he said, well, because it's beautiful.
[25:31] Well, this is beautiful. It's beautiful right now. And there are a lot of people I know up in Raleigh and Kerry,
[25:36] who enjoy the rural aspect of more county, but I can guarantee you that if we start deconstructing all that,
[25:45] as much as I love more county, there's nothing here, there's hospitality, there's military, and as the commissioner pointed out to me, we have the hospital.
[25:54] Yes, we have the hospital, but you and C and Duke are always going to be bigger.
[25:59] And the idea that we're trying to change a traffic circle based on a projected maybe population growth is just kind of dumb-bounding to me.
[26:09] The domino effect that it'll cause is it'll cause traffic to head down to Bula, then we'll be expanding that, then they'll be saying we need to split that into a four-lane road.
[26:17] And I mean, it's just a domino effect of edging out the village of Pinehurst.
[26:22] I would consider that from the people that I've talked to the concern is growing that if we allow the traffic circle to take the hit, we're going to lose the beauty and the history that we had here.
[26:37] And there are a lot of people saying that it is going to affect their decision-making come the next election not just for commissioner, but for our local village team as well.
[26:47] So, I think it is of grave concern.
[26:50] I did see on the poster board that they had some very other nice options like a tunnel or the signaling in.
[26:55] I don't really understand why they're all moving forward with this giant large issue.
[26:59] But I think it would be in the board's best interest to consider that this decision is not only
[27:06] hinging for traffic, but the progression of the village and their term in council.
[27:12] Thank you, Ms. Romero.
[27:13] Is there anyone else who would like to speak?
[27:16] Yes.
[27:25] I, uh, lingo timmer, um, 11 Salem Lane Pinehurst. Um, I'm some kind of that we're having
[27:33] this little discussion because each person that gets up I hear another thing and I'm like,
[27:37] oh, that's good, you know? And to me, that's like the most frustrating part of when I went
[27:42] to Carthage and to Pinehurst Elementary School, expecting that there was going to be a discussion
[27:49] where we could hear each other's ideas and there wasn't. It was just walk around and go to
[27:53] from pieces, and you can leave, you can give your comments, but nobody there was going to hear
[27:59] them.
[28:00] And I thought that was really a missed opportunity, and I, it seemed like basically the states
[28:10] made up their mind that they're going to do this, and we really weren't going to say, we're
[28:14] just getting the impression we were getting us say.
[28:17] And I want to say one of the scariest parts of that is the state seems to have more power
[28:22] than the county and the towns and I think that's quite unfortunate to give them more power
[28:32] than we that local taxpayers that live with the circle get to say.
[28:43] I wanted to also mention we were talking about we should be looking at what with the future
[28:52] of this area of being and you can't always tell and I think there's a strong thing to remember
[28:59] in that because we seem to go through these stages where cities go from being great to
[29:05] being horrible and it come back up and they get horrible. When they get horrible people leave
[29:11] and that's what's happening now and even I mean it's used to be all of you know people from the
[29:21] us, Seattle, Oregon, because they destroyed those areas already.
[29:25] I was living there when the cost of housing quadrupled in four years.
[29:31] Now, all the ten cities they have, that's from what they did.
[29:36] And they're repeating that everywhere, including here.
[29:41] And I think, there's no telling if we start having improved cities.
[29:47] you'd find especially improved cost of living in cities.
[29:51] I think you'll find a lot of people in this area going back.
[29:54] I know when I left New Jersey, I can't go back there now.
[29:58] If it goes down in price, though, I'd love to...
[30:00] Go back. I also wanted to share as we're looking about all these different things. I'd shift to pillow. When I watched a video there, it looked like a horrific Washington D.C. intersection that could not be figured out.
[30:15] What's really confusing and I just want to say that I think if we're I'd like to see us keep it
[30:23] But maybe an option could be an overpass or a tunnel underneath and I just want to say with looking at the possibility of a bridge over
[30:33] When I was in the Coast Guard
[30:35] I participated in a bridge replacement project that took place over the course of approximately eight days. I think it was and
[30:43] what they did is they built the bridge in different locations.
[30:47] They floated them down the river with a safety zone, a vessel in four safety zone around
[30:52] each barge, brought them down and put them in place in a bridge.
[30:56] A whole bridge was installed in just over a week, rather down over the course of several years.
[31:03] So that was quite an accomplishment with it.
[31:07] Would you wrap up?
[31:09] Well, I just also want to say about the people from Raleigh coming down here.
[31:19] When I first moved here, I went up to Raleigh one day and I thought, what a nice little
[31:23] city.
[31:23] I could see moving here.
[31:25] And as I was driving home, I was listening to a radio station where people were calling
[31:29] in about what are your thoughts about installing a light rail system.
[31:34] And people were calling in and then the DJ said, well, you do realize they expect the
[31:40] population here to quadruple within 10 years, don't you?
[31:45] And I'm afraid that's what they had in a trickles down here.
[31:49] And I went to a meeting here with some local people
[31:51] called Partners in Progress, where it seems
[31:55] each town is paying them to basically progress us.
[32:01] And the woman there was going, you know, 30, 40 years ago,
[32:07] there was only 60,000 people here.
[32:09] And now there's over a hundred thousand and by 2050 we expect it to be over a hundred and fifty and because we are over a hundred thousand we are now considered an urban area
[32:21] And I said, did you ask us if we want that?
[32:26] And basically, these people are working behind our backs to create what's happening here
[32:31] to promote more county all over the country and to get people to move here to have a nice quality of life.
[32:41] And we seem to be paying them to do that.
[32:45] And I'm wondering how much is the town of Pinehurst paying them.
[32:49] Now they're called the Economic Development Committee or something along that line.
[32:54] But how much are we, the taxpayers paying them to exist to do something that we don't want?
[33:03] Good question.
[33:04] Thank you for your comments.
[33:08] Is there anybody else who'd like to make a comment?
[33:11] Okay, hearing none, we'll close the public comment period.
[33:15] And we will move on to item six, which deals with ordinances.
[33:19] 6A specifically is a Mending or it is 24-13 Mending the Library Expansion Capital Project Fund.
[33:27] Dana, please.
[33:30] Good afternoon council.
[33:32] So we have a budget amendment we're requesting for the Library Project to cover any additional expense expenditures we may need for design work that's not related to the Oakley Collier contract.
[33:50] This is something that I, it was an oversight on my part when I submitted the prior one thinking
[33:54] that there may be these types of expenditures that come up that we would need additional
[33:58] budget for design, design work related to that.
[34:03] So this is just, we're not increasing the budget at this time, just a transfer between the
[34:08] line items in the budget, to prevent in the future for having to come to council for small
[34:15] adjustments, relatively small adjustments to the budget, I do propose in this ordinance giving the
[34:21] village manager the authority to approve this type of transfer up to $10,000 within the capital
[34:30] project fund and providing an official report to council when that is done at the next regular
[34:35] meeting. What is the current approval range threshold? Has this work? The annual budget ordinance
[34:42] which does not cover this capital project fund has a $25,000 threshold given the smaller budget.
[34:49] I felt a lower threshold of $10,000 would be more appropriate.
[34:53] Okay, you want to drop the threshold. There is authority now.
[34:56] Not within the capital project fund. The the $25,000 that's in the annual budget ordinance
[35:03] only applies to the general fund.
[35:05] This doesn't does not change the overall land expenditure. Is that correct?
[35:10] Correct.
[35:12] And this new threshold would be 10,000, is that what you said?
[35:18] And is that 10,000 one time or 10,000 occurrence of something like this coming up?
[35:23] Oh, occurrence.
[35:25] And Council would receive a report.
[35:27] If it were something larger that was needed, that would need to come to Council for a formal amendment like this for an ordinance.
[35:35] Can you sketch out the types of expenses that you had not previously anticipated that may not be covered by the
[35:42] the contract with Oakley Collier.
[35:44] Yeah, if there's surveys, Doug, do you know of anything else?
[35:49] It's gonna be like that's
[35:54] you.
[35:58] And so the surveys, tree surveys, et cetera.
[36:04] And the precise amount here is 9100, is that right?
[36:08] Yes, okay.
[36:09] And that would, it's not the exact cost of one specific item that's needed,
[36:14] but just to provide some additional dollars in the design budget for small,
[36:19] expenditures that may come up that are outside the scope of the the design contract with Oakley Collier
[36:26] Other questions from council members on this topic now the important thing is nothing change you overall plan at this point in time
[36:32] I mean when we see bits then we'll have a
[36:36] What yes
[36:38] what type of
[36:40] mechanism would the council
[36:43] have
[36:43] sort of a notification mechanism or something that so
[36:47] So, when the village manager is going to do this, is there, you know, there's a difference between approval and just information, and I guess information would be fine if that's going to be built into this.
[36:59] Yes, so the way it's written in the ordinances is exactly like the budget transfers that the village managers authorized to do in the general fund where anything over the $10,000 threshold that he, sorry,
[37:17] It proves there would be an official budget amendment report to council at the next regular meeting.
[37:23] So similar to what was in the consent agenda today reporting a budget amendment that was made in the general fund.
[37:30] It would be included in that same format of report and it would be identified separately from the budget amendments for the general fund.
[37:38] Correct. If there was, it would be likely in the same report. If there was one for the general fund and one for the capital project fund, it would probably be in the same report, but separately identified. Yes.
[37:52] I don't have any other questions, I'm, you know, in the federal government, there are thresholds where the
[37:59] reallocation, which is what this is, reallocation of resources, can be exercised by an executive
[38:07] because of incidents like this where you get small amounts of money that just need to be moved in a pretty quick fashion
[38:16] and don't have to dwell on it.
[38:18] So I'll entertain a motion, or we'll hear other questions.
[38:23] The motion that we have is just to approve the ordinance 24, 13, and many of the library
[38:27] expansion capital project funds.
[38:30] Okay.
[38:30] So that covers everything we're talking about, correct?
[38:32] Yes, sir.
[38:32] So I moved to approve ordinance 24, 13, and many of the library expansion capital project
[38:36] fund.
[38:37] Okay.
[38:40] Now we have discussion?
[38:43] Along that same line,
[38:47] we have a specific instance here with a specific
[38:49] some of money in the grand scheme of things is negligible. But the way it reads it, we're
[38:57] the ordinance, the ordinance remains the fund, does it provide an ongoing process such
[39:05] that future things can also be accommodated? Does? Okay, fine. Thank you. Okay. Any other
[39:13] discussion? Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Hearing no objections. Ordnance is proved.
[39:22] Thank you. Item B, organs 24-14, no parking along the U.S. kids parade route. July 30,
[39:33] from 4 o'clock to 7 p.m.
[39:38] Who's got this one dug? Yes. Yes, so the organiser of the U.S. kids event
[39:43] has asked us to prohibit parking along the parade route during the parade.
[39:48] I think that makes a lot of sense, so you have an ordinance for you to approve, which will
[39:53] allow that to happen.
[39:54] Have we done this every year?
[39:56] No, so in the past they did not have an official no parking plan, and so if you were parked
[40:04] there while the parade is going on, you were just stuck there till after the parade was over.
[40:08] Same route though.
[40:09] It's the same route.
[40:09] I also thought when I first read this, this is something that it was no parking here during parade, but I was reminded, yes, there was, and as I reflected on it, there had been cars in front of me while I was standing on the steps there, so.
[40:23] It really, we won't be talking vehicles, we'll just post it that no parking between four and seven p.m.
[40:28] And if you have some color park there, you know you're stuck there to after seven.
[40:32] And are we going to stake out the street also?
[40:39] That was not the plan.
[40:41] I just ask.
[40:43] So what we're going to try to prevent the parking?
[40:45] So we'll put signage in mostly long chunk of in.
[40:50] And then maybe a little bit on.
[40:52] Is that Magnolia up there?
[40:54] Anyway, but anywhere there's designated parking, we'll put signage.
[40:57] Thank you.
[40:57] But along Caroline and Vista, we were not planning on staking that out.
[41:01] I don't, I don't, but actually not a problem anyway.
[41:05] Dr. Morgan, did you have a question?
[41:07] I just commented the parade last year, and I thought that the parking that was interfering
[41:12] was pretty substantial, and I'd love to see the cars not be on their next time.
[41:17] All right.
[41:18] This is another ordinance.
[41:21] Any more discussion?
[41:22] Otherwise, we'll consider adopting it.
[41:25] I moved to approve ordinance 24-14 no parking along the U.S. kids parade route July 30, 2024 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
[41:37] I can.
[41:39] We have a motion in a second, all those in favor.
[41:42] Hi.
[41:44] I'll set.
[41:48] Now we go on to item A action regular business seven A to be precise.
[41:55] the library design progress update from Oakley or Oakley Collier Architects.
[42:02] Yeah, so we have Jason Gable from Oakley Collier Architects joining us via Zoom, so we'll
[42:08] give them just a second to kind of get the screen set up and him available.
[42:17] Jason, I'm assuming you can hear us, and yeah, there you go.
[42:20] This is good.
[42:22] Great.
[42:24] So while we Jason is going to share his screen to kind of share some of the site plans and designs that we have already designed to this point.
[42:35] Jason can also go over kind of the rough time frame for what we're looking at for the design and beating out the project.
[42:41] We did share with Council some designs that are there today.
[42:46] If you have any questions on those, Jason and I are happy to answer those.
[42:52] Jason, with that, I'll turn it over to you.
[43:36] Yeah,
[43:40] we can see it.
[44:55] I've got a few questions.
[44:57] By the way, I counted thirty.
[45:00] Four parking spots. But again, it could be about what it is to scale, I didn't count 47 back there.
[45:07] So you might want to just, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
[45:14] different.
[45:14] Okay, well that's different, I thought you said the ones back there, or 47.
[45:20] All right, well, that's, okay, that's, of course, obviously.
[45:25] Have we reviewed the interior design and layout with the library staff?
[45:34] Yeah, sorry, so Jason and Rebecca from Oakley Collier and Audrey and I met maybe a week or so ago.
[45:42] We reviewed it, we had a little bit of feedback and Jason and Rebecca were able to walk us through it,
[45:49] and I think we are at a good place.
[45:52] Audrey's here, she can nod her head if she agrees, but we've had a chance to talk about it.
[45:58] Are there any unanswered questions, or what issues that may...
[46:03] Well, like one of our, for example, one of our questions was,
[46:07] Audrey wants to prioritize natural light being into the building, I think we all do.
[46:11] And so Jason and Rebecca showed us, you know, what the windows will look like,
[46:17] especially in like the adult room in the children room, their extra high,
[46:21] so they allow an extra amount of natural light.
[46:24] So, things like that, we discussed the hand, we're satisfied, we're happy with them.
[46:30] I noticed there was no skylights, because I was thinking also about the light issue.
[46:35] I remember we discussed that, not specifically skylights, but when I think of lighting, I think they just usually something led in from the ceiling.
[46:42] Is that intentionally? Is it a cost-saving reason?
[46:45] Is it Jason any comments?
[46:49] Yeah, yeah.
[47:31] Okay.
[47:39] Let me have a couple of the items.
[47:41] I noticed that you have on the HBAC units.
[47:46] They're not on the roof.
[47:47] They're on the side.
[47:49] I'm glad to see that because I know in some cases today these things are put on the rooftop and can be less than attractive.
[47:56] So thank you there.
[47:59] What I will say is that the front, I think, is a,
[48:04] I think that's a good approach, I mean, it's a pretty good first impression, what I can't
[48:11] tell, and maybe you can walk me through in a little bit, is just how much if you get off
[48:17] this sidewalk here at the approach, what is right there? Is it a sort of a drop off zone? Is
[48:26] it a, are there parking spots there? So that's one thing. The second thing is I thought
[48:32] the rear entrance, which I assume most visitors will be entering through the rear, because
[48:38] that's where they're parking.
[48:41] I didn't think it had the curb appeal, I guess that's a word, that this does, and I also
[48:50] noticed in the rear that they had, you have those small, well that's not the, there we go.
[48:58] The rear has a small scale windows there, very tiny as opposed to what we see up front.
[49:09] So I'm just talking out loud here as someone who has read a lot of this material and reviewed it,
[49:16] and those are the things that popped out at me. So, come in away.
[49:38] What is the system that you want?
[49:40] About five degrees, you do not have to have that.
[49:44] I don't know.
[49:48] Yes, yes.
[49:49] Okay.
[49:50] We're living like that.
[49:52] Success.
[49:54] You know.
[49:55] Or.
[49:59] Uh-huh.
[49:59] Okay.
[50:00] Maybe.
[50:05] Or.
[51:04] Or.
[51:05] Or.
[51:05] Or.
[51:05] I'm not going to say it.
[51:07] I'm going to bring you up now.
[51:09] But the good thing is going to go and know that.
[51:12] I can ask if that deserves to be more comfortable.
[51:15] If my last goal is to come on and have another goal.
[51:20] Because it is a year where you can go and know that.
[51:23] I have started to go on a point of time.
[51:25] So I started to go and start to go and start to go and have a good time.
[52:27] Yeah.
[52:30] If that's
[52:38] what sort of prompted a little of my question, I can't tell from the drawing, whether or not there's a little driveway that comes into our off-magnelier road into the, or up to the front of the walkway. So someone is actually dropped off, or they dropped off on the curb of Magnolia, because that is a curve.
[53:02] And you've mentioned there's a sort of a safety consideration there, particularly if you're dropping off the drop-offs are going to tend to be there little kids or maybe people who need accessibility easy accessibility.
[53:18] So I'm not sure is that is it coming off there sort of a semi-circle driveway or is it going to be just on Magnolia where the drop-off takes place?
[54:14] I
[54:18] think it would be helpful to see some options like that.
[54:24] I suppose you could always, I say, always, that's not the right word.
[54:27] But you could consider just moving the structure back a little bit, because you have
[54:32] some space in the back, so you give yourself a little more room up front there.
[54:37] I don't know how we gauge, maybe Mortry does know, how do you gauge what percentages are
[54:44] drop-offs and what percentages are people that are going to park and stay for a while.
[54:52] I just don't know, but there's a sensitivity around that area there for cars and it's
[55:00] sort of a, you know, we're anticipating kids coming to the library.
[55:05] So anyway, I made my statement. Thank you. Other members?
[55:13] You're going to check.
[55:15] I was going to ask, what is the interior wall height of this curious?
[55:23] Based on all that you answer that.
[55:25] They're going to be 9 foot healing, 10 foot 12 foot healing.
[55:30] You know?
[55:39] vaulted ceilings? Okay.
[55:45] So anyway the taller in a way the better to a point obviously.
[55:50] So I'm very confused on the on the roof plan. Sorry the truth.
[55:56] Some other roof plans initially showed did not show a flat roof.
[56:00] This was showing four flat sections, you know, with valleys leading the water right to the flat roof.
[56:07] Um, I have a question about that. Is that, uh, is that the plan?
[56:12] Yes.
[56:58] I don't know.
[57:15] I don't know. I noticed it. I think I think it's quite out.
[57:19] Just a comment a little on that. When you look again at the rear and the front you've got sort of the flat roof with this.
[57:27] What do you, I think you call them shed roofs or something where you have that white thing that distracts us from looking at the
[57:34] flat roof a little which is fine, but in the rear we don't have that. Maybe and that's part of what I think
[57:44] Makes the rear just a little less
[57:46] curb appealing in the front. So I
[57:50] Throw that out to you. I don't know what one citizen's opinion. I think it looked problematic
[57:56] With with the flat roof or just the the look of it or just that it's a flat roof. Well, I'm not a big favor of flat roofs and number one and
[58:07] aesthetically I think it is better with the, you know, with the pitch roofs all the way around, but
[58:13] that's just me. So I think we can, we can talk about that.
[58:16] Yeah, yeah, Jason and I can talk offline, but it doesn't change the interior design to my knowledge.
[58:21] Is that correct?
[58:23] No, no, no, no.
[58:49] That'd be great if you could show what Jack is discussing.
[58:54] No, no, I want to be specific.
[58:56] going to say the things I mentioned with the semi-circle driveway up front and maybe moving
[59:01] things back a little, both feel a little bit with curb appeal rather than other things,
[59:08] but you know off-hand is there a significant cost difference between the shed roofs or
[59:56] I was
[59:56] If you're not probably not nasty, I said I'm not very active.
[1:00:18] I
[1:00:21] don't know of any of our public buildings, particularly up and down Magnolia Road that have that type of rope. Am I right there? Or maybe I miss something?
[1:01:03] Okay, something to talk about, I think my other question is the orientation is on the plans
[1:01:09] we were seeing the orientation is not even noted on the diagrams, but I think the front
[1:01:14] faces what would you say northeast and so a low winter sun would not be coming straight in
[1:01:31] in any of the windows because that can be a real disturbing if you've ever lived in the
[1:01:35] zone area, that's major, major consideration,
[1:01:45] go
[1:01:54] back to the pitch group. I think earlier,
[1:01:57] Jason, you referenced that it would probably leave some attic space in all, if we went
[1:02:04] from, is there a way to have that attic space be useful from a storage standpoint, or is it just
[1:02:11] become a, you know, just a visual.
[1:02:15] That's why I was just thinking of maybe there's a way to capture just a little more.
[1:02:20] I don't think I think of a storage space or equipment space.
[1:02:56] Okay.
[1:02:57] Thanks.
[1:02:57] I get it.
[1:02:58] That's the question.
[1:03:02] Other questions, John?
[1:03:03] You had some.
[1:03:05] Jason, I guess, as I had taken a look at this, and it was really paths first question.
[1:03:11] to crystallize this for me.
[1:03:13] One of the problems we have is what we expect to be the quote-unquote front of the library,
[1:03:19] may or may not be the primary entry point.
[1:03:23] We can't have two front doors, but I'm wondering in terms of the internal layout, right now
[1:03:30] if you enter through the rear, you are right into the, looks like the YA stacks, which
[1:03:35] there's not the optimal way to come into the building.
[1:03:40] And I don't have a solution for that.
[1:03:41] I just, it may not be a solution
[1:03:44] because we can't have two front doors.
[1:03:46] Well, I suppose you could flip the stack.
[1:03:49] If it was something more, for then to the library staff
[1:03:52] to have looked at that pretty carefully as soon
[1:03:54] and realize the travel spot traveled between the door
[1:03:59] and the circulation desk from various entrances, is that correct?
[1:04:04] Yeah, and we have looked at that as it's shown here right now
[1:04:08] There's a table in the middle there, so you can walk through it. We can still address FF and E issues, but
[1:04:15] I think there's flexibility here like if we want to flip the YA stacks and and move some of those couches that are right there
[1:04:23] To that that back door, so it feels like more of an entryway
[1:04:27] I think we have that flexibility even after it's built. I think they're we can do a second observation is at least
[1:04:33] to my eye, the design of the front, the Magnolia Road facing side, is nicer than the back,
[1:04:42] and I'm not saying they should be symmetrical, but I like what you've done on the front,
[1:04:46] and I'm wondering to the extent that the rear may turn out to be, will certainly be a primary entrance,
[1:04:52] whether it's the primary entrance or not who knows. I'm not saying it should be replicated,
[1:04:58] but I'm not an architect. I throw that up as a question.
[1:05:03] Well, you have one point in that the rear is more south facing, and what do you want the
[1:05:09] overhang and the shade in the south facing side to cover those patio areas in the summer
[1:05:15] that could get pretty warm. I don't know that people are going to be out there earlier today
[1:05:20] before it ran. Well, that was actually one of my main questions. Those two patios in the back.
[1:05:25] What's the design to use for those? I mean, those are flexible spaces. So I see, you know,
[1:05:32] The umbrella is out there and people being able to sit out and read a book or bring their
[1:05:36] lunch and enjoy the outdoor space, kind of similar to what you can do on the front side
[1:05:42] underneath the porch.
[1:05:43] So I think we have flexibility, we could add green edge to that area, or like I said, umbrellas
[1:05:51] and picnic tables.
[1:05:56] So my
[1:06:56] last question or point, which again, I'm not sure I even have any answer for, I was
[1:07:05] on the Historic Preservation Commission here in Pinehurst, when we approved the New Elementary
[1:07:10] School.
[1:07:11] And it's a terrific building, but my observation would be, it's not particularly Pinehurst.
[1:07:18] You could put that building in virtually any suburban area, anywhere in the country.
[1:07:26] And that building was sitting in now is not particularly pintor stuff.
[1:07:30] Either, and the design that you have is much more in keeping with village hall, I would say.
[1:07:35] But I'm wondering if there's a way to make the exterior of this a little more pinehurst, admitting
[1:07:41] that the existing given memorial library on the green is a brick facade and what have you.
[1:07:47] So I'd completely aesthetic comment, not structural comment.
[1:07:53] Jason, you can pitch into, but we wanted to have the same campus field as some of these
[1:07:59] other buildings around here. So, that's one of the things, you know, what makes it
[1:08:05] pinehurst more than something else is a pretty eclectic group of buildings in this
[1:08:11] area till it's true. I think that's one of the reasons why we have the porches on there
[1:08:16] because I, you know, has the southern charm feel to it. Someone may ask, why not me, of course,
[1:08:22] is what columns aren't round it's a good question and maybe Jason can make him round
[1:08:32] I don't know what we should
[1:08:37] I like
[1:08:47] that I
[1:08:56] can almost feel do that yeah right
[1:09:00] that we'll put that down a set of jack is someone who would like around
[1:09:06] It didn't pick up on the round versus the square columns, there is a big issue, but okay.
[1:09:11] I'm working.
[1:09:12] Yeah, I'm going to go back to the rear again, the rear view there, and the padios.
[1:09:20] And just utilization.
[1:09:22] And I'm not a library expert in any means, but in our house, we don't have a patio off of our laundry room or our study.
[1:09:29] we have patio off of a living area and a place that's utilized.
[1:09:36] Right now we've got in the
[1:09:37] back there as you have a patio behind a, basically on the left side as we're looking at
[1:09:41] this right now and that's a break room. And then the other side you have a, it looks like
[1:09:46] storages, mechanical rooms, things like that. Seems to me if you want to utilize a patio and
[1:09:52] have it there, I'm not sure if there's a different way of utilizing that space and making
[1:09:56] kind of bigger windows we've talked about before, but use it as a patio. You have a program
[1:10:01] room that's on the right side on the other side of the storage rooms and stuff like that.
[1:10:05] I don't know if there's a possibility of moving that to the area where a patio can be used
[1:10:09] more as a patio and understand these comments are coming from someone who knows nothing about
[1:10:17] a library. I'm just looking at utilization of it. What I don't want to have is build a couple
[1:10:22] and then we throw some bushes on there and it's never used or anything like that.
[1:10:26] You know, the purpose of all this is doing something that's going to be used by folks on there.
[1:10:31] So I throw that as a thought.
[1:10:33] Could you go back to the rear view again?
[1:10:40] Would it be architecturally odd instead of having those three square windows?
[1:10:46] Because you informed us of one of the reasons for that is because of what's going on behind it.
[1:10:51] if you had a sort of two along Windows back there.
[1:10:59] Just I don't know what it, I don't know if it's functional or what it looks like.
[1:11:03] There's something about those three Windows that make it look less like it's less inviting, I guess, is the phrase.
[1:11:12] But I think picking up on Jeff's point.
[1:11:16] On HPC one of the things we try to do is not be the design experts because that's what they do, not what we do.
[1:11:21] But to your point, if that program room, a butted or it was adjacent to, you might even be able
[1:11:28] to throw the doors open and have you as an extension of that.
[1:11:33] I don't like that idea.
[1:11:34] And if you got kids in there that are doing a program or whatever, and that's like, hey,
[1:11:37] it's a beautiful day, let's open the doors and go outside and come back in, that kind
[1:11:40] of thing.
[1:11:41] Again, you could spill out there, particularly if that were to be covered more similarly to
[1:11:50] the front so that you didn't have the sun beating in there.
[1:11:53] And I say this in difference to Audrey and other folks out there that just just thoughts.
[1:12:00] I welcome many of your opinions on there.
[1:12:03] I kind of like the idea of maybe flipping that to the program room can open up right to
[1:12:08] the patio.
[1:12:09] If we can't do it right here, maybe an alternative would be to have a walkway from the exit point
[1:12:17] of the right and or even maybe extend the patio a little bit
[1:12:23] over that way too to just kind of connect them and give it some.
[1:12:25] Getting that none of us are our protection. That was the time to be throwing these ideas out.
[1:12:29] And we'll see what works.
[1:12:30] And I like the front. The front you have the covered areas there for the
[1:12:34] patio is plus it's also coming out of a meeting room.
[1:12:37] That's on there and looks like a work room in there.
[1:12:41] Which again, I could see that being appropriately used as a patio area.
[1:12:47] Right.
[1:12:47] There's not really an opportunity to do it on the other side, the wizard who accomplished
[1:12:52] that same thing.
[1:12:54] That's all real.
[1:12:54] That's all real.
[1:12:55] That works based on that side.
[1:12:56] That's the staff.
[1:12:57] We've got to play out again.
[1:13:06] We've got to study rooms that are put in there.
[1:13:11] Yeah.
[1:13:12] You need to.
[1:13:14] Yeah.
[1:13:14] Down at the bottom.
[1:13:14] Yeah.
[1:13:15] at the back side.
[1:13:16] Book lower.
[1:13:17] Yeah.
[1:13:17] So you have study rooms for three rooms at the top.
[1:13:20] Okay.
[1:13:20] Thank you.
[1:13:20] Then you have, uh, look, study stuff in and break room.
[1:13:24] Now, if you could leave the study rooms there, move the, the break room, or not to excuse
[1:13:28] me that the presentation program room into that zone and have the, the stuff on the,
[1:13:35] the left lower component and put that over by side, storage, you know, IT and make that just
[1:13:41] more of a staff and functionality space on there that seems to make more sense.
[1:13:47] But the utility stuff off, more toward the interior and that's from the window.
[1:13:54] Programming spaces is enough along that back wall if possible.
[1:13:58] I'm both sides so that you can have that same walkout.
[1:14:01] And if you can do that for both of them that'd be great, where you actually move in the program
[1:14:05] room down and move the storage IT up, and then is there something else we can do when
[1:14:11] have staff space, so it's not the patio, but they have a customer space.
[1:14:17] Okay.
[1:14:34] Okay.
[1:14:36] All right. Thank you, Barbara, did you have anything you want to say?
[1:14:40] The only thing I would say is that my first impression is that it is a very contemporary
[1:14:47] square building. And what's not pinehursty about it is that it is a square contemporary
[1:14:59] building.
[1:15:00] And so, if there are things that we can do to make it look a little less institutional, like classical, maybe, traditional, I think your ground columns are a grand idea. I also wonder, and I don't know, I'm another non-professional opinion here.
[1:15:21] Other ways to add arches, maybe around the columns or around the windows,
[1:15:30] I don't know, to soften it to some extent.
[1:15:34] I think your point about changing the elevation in the rear will be critical to change it.
[1:15:41] It's almost, it's so institutional that it, with the fence around it, it kind looks like a prison.
[1:15:50] And not may just be the artist, I know,
[1:15:54] an architectural depiction of the fence,
[1:15:59] so maybe something that is a little more decorative
[1:16:02] and less threatening.
[1:16:04] We could add some barbed wire on top,
[1:16:06] maybe that'll help.
[1:16:07] I'm sorry.
[1:16:08] I'm sorry.
[1:16:08] I'm sorry.
[1:16:10] Keep those kids in.
[1:16:11] That's the final answer.
[1:16:14] Well, I hope that these citizens
[1:16:16] It's going to ford all our design changes.
[1:16:21] It's giving you authority to the village managers.
[1:16:23] So we can keep it under a threshold.
[1:16:25] $1,000 at a time.
[1:16:28] I did have, sorry.
[1:16:31] Jason, I did want to say one thing.
[1:16:33] And that is the program room.
[1:16:35] It has to be able to get dark and I mean really dark in there for certain types of
[1:16:40] programs as well.
[1:16:41] I'm not saying I don't want more light but there needs to be room-darkening shades or something like that as well if we're going to open out to the patio, et cetera.
[1:16:50] That's one of the reasons why it's facing where there isn't a great amount of light coming in, where you would be looking.
[1:16:59] If there were windows right above here where we're looking at you now, it would be difficult to sharpen the image and see it clearly and things like that.
[1:17:06] and so we want to show a movie or something to the children.
[1:17:11] You know, that's just something to consider
[1:17:12] that the room should be able to get dark, if necessary.
[1:17:44] Jason, I think we got a lot of,
[1:17:46] I'll offer you to consider and we'll be in touch, so thank you.
[1:17:50] Yes, thank you, Jason.
[1:17:51] We'll look forward to round two.
[1:17:54] Hopefully next month.
[1:17:56] Keep it moving.
[1:18:00] Thanks for the good work.
[1:18:01] Thank you.
[1:18:02] I
[1:18:06] might just add that the additional 3D was useful as a general comment for around two
[1:18:14] moors.
[1:18:16] Yep.
[1:18:17] Even that way, he shared now maybe I can copy that and put it on our website for public
[1:18:23] to see.
[1:18:30] All right.
[1:18:31] That was a productive.
[1:18:34] We will go on now to seven B, which is a report from Council members on the NC DOT
[1:18:40] listening sessions for the proposed continuous flow intersection replacement of the
[1:18:47] Pinehurst Traffic Circle.
[1:18:51] I think we all, as we referenced earlier, we had all attended one
[1:18:56] or two. I saw some of my colleagues in two of the meetings with me, so we certainly had
[1:19:04] It's a good representation at these meetings.
[1:19:09] I guess I'll kick things off.
[1:19:11] A few comments about it.
[1:19:13] I found that some of the folks who showed up,
[1:19:17] and there was a very large amount,
[1:19:19] particularly at the Pioneer Elementary School,
[1:19:22] it seemed like more of an open house,
[1:19:26] rather than I think what they were anticipating,
[1:19:28] which was a real presentation to the mall from the DOT folks, but they went around and met with the various settings of engineers and had their comment and input.
[1:19:45] I think that the many of the questions that the residents or the attendees raised were the ones that we've all either discussed or been in the paper.
[1:19:59] the the issue of the eminent domain, the midland road, alter alteration and the issue of the
[1:20:07] trees. I must have spoke with about a hundred people at that first meeting. Half of the
[1:20:14] my new half of them I didn't. And not a single person said to me or pulled me aside that this
[1:20:23] what we need to do that you really should do this. They all had reservations for one or all three
[1:20:32] of those reasons, but wanted us to make improvements to it to the circle. And certainly felt
[1:20:41] particularly about some of their neighbors or people they know whose homes were sort of in the line
[1:20:46] of fire.
[1:20:50] I had engaged with the conversation with, I'm going to say, a half a dozen of the
[1:20:54] engineers. And they all were engaging. They were willing to discuss things.
[1:21:05] Nothing I heard
[1:21:07] altered my opinion of the shift of pillow.
[1:21:12] I don't believe it's a good fit for Pinerist.
[1:21:17] And our next meeting in August,
[1:21:23] I intend to propose a formal resolution for us to go on
[1:21:27] record formally regarding the proposal from NCDOT
[1:21:33] and that we can then send forward to, in CDOT and other parties that follow this.
[1:21:43] We heard earlier from Mr. Gettison, the citizen involvement is remarkable.
[1:21:53] I have not seen an issue that has united our community.
[1:22:00] I've seen issues that divide our community, but I had not seen one like this that so unites our community.
[1:22:08] For various reasons, the attachment to the circle or their personal impact regarding their lives and so on.
[1:22:17] But I also have not found anybody who doesn't say there's got to be some improvements that we can make to help with this traffic flow.
[1:22:25] And so I think that's something else we'll need to address.
[1:22:30] And one of the questions that I got that I really couldn't answer to, well, was if this is such an urgent problem, why are they going to wait eight years to finish it?
[1:22:42] And I explained to when they prefer to do construction work between opens and all, but that was not convincing to a lot of people who said, oh, come on.
[1:22:54] You can make some changes before then.
[1:22:56] We're going to wait eight years, even if they did this, and the other comment was one of
[1:23:02] what happens to the traffic flow when there's the two and a half year construction project
[1:23:07] going on right there.
[1:23:10] How are we supposed to navigate then?
[1:23:11] I said, I said engineers have the solutions to these things.
[1:23:17] So we'll see what would happen in the event that this went forward.
[1:23:22] At any rate, those are my general observations, and I'll turn it over to the Mayor Pro Tempher if he has some thoughts, and we'll keep going around the table.
[1:23:36] I happen to have had, well, it's number one, the presentation that we also saw as elected officials from 3 to 5.
[1:23:45] I didn't find informative because I'd already seen it at SMPO, but I thought it was a very
[1:23:50] good presentation and Craig Sheffler, who made a point when I could see him, which was in
[1:23:56] Carthage the next night of saying that I thought he had done his good job as he could have
[1:24:01] done.
[1:24:02] I think the public would have benefited from that.
[1:24:05] I understand why they say they don't do it that way, but unfortunately when you have
[1:24:12] as many people as, as showed up, trying to get them to be able to engage with an engineer
[1:24:17] was virtually impossible and you'd have clutches of eight or 10 or 12 people all trying
[1:24:23] to put, but, but, and trying to get their questions in, and I really don't know how effective
[1:24:27] that was.
[1:24:29] Then you had the people who just gave up, so I'm, I'm, I've been row 14 here and I can't
[1:24:34] get my question answered, and to past point, many of them were seeking me out, well, what
[1:24:39] do you know about this?
[1:24:40] What do you think about this?
[1:24:42] And as it happens, because attending the SMPL,
[1:24:45] I think I could bring certainly some facts to bear
[1:24:49] and what have you.
[1:24:52] I agree, Pat, that we need to go on record.
[1:24:55] I think the public expects us to take it.
[1:24:57] I don't propose we do it tonight.
[1:24:58] I think we may need to do some drafting and wordsmithing,
[1:25:01] but I think we need to be on record.
[1:25:03] I think we need, and certainly in talking with the engineers,
[1:25:08] There are seven other proposals that a prior council made that have not been acted upon,
[1:25:13] maybe they're not all worth acting upon, but that's at least that's one starting point.
[1:25:19] Second starting point, you know, as I think I've said when we discussed this previously,
[1:25:23] the DOT doesn't give you a menu. They have engineers, they study a problem,
[1:25:28] and they say this is what we believe is the best solution. I don't think it's incumbent on us
[1:25:34] come up with an entirely new design. We are not traffic engineers. I don't think we would
[1:25:38] be taken credibly at that. But I do think we want to encourage them to what would
[1:25:44] plan be if not this what next? And all of this is against the backdrop as one of our
[1:25:50] public speakers said of we're going against why do they have eight years to finish because
[1:25:56] from now to 2029 the projected increase in traffic according to the DOT numbers is 8.7%.
[1:26:03] It's kind of nothing, you could ignore that, where the rubber meets the road is when you take
[1:26:08] an assumed growth rate, and I don't care if it's one and a half percent or whatever,
[1:26:12] and you compound that out 25 years.
[1:26:14] Now you get a really big number, and that's where the potential bite could be.
[1:26:19] What I would say just anecdotally at, 12, 16 this afternoon, I was coming north on US-15501.
[1:26:27] I came to almost the stop exactly where the big green sign is, which is the first
[1:26:32] real, right? So that's a pretty long way. It's 45 or 50 cars away. I would estimate from
[1:26:39] the actual traffic circle. It took me three minutes and 48 seconds to get into the traffic circle.
[1:26:47] Yeah, I don't accept them. So in any event, I thought the people who came to Carthage
[1:26:55] got more information because it was not as well attended and they could interact with people.
[1:27:01] And I've passed it along, okay.
[1:27:04] So Dr. Morgan.
[1:27:06] Yeah, I mentioned in the initial reports,
[1:27:09] just a way to go to our citizens.
[1:27:13] You got us to see it back at the table.
[1:27:17] Because you've got to ask your question,
[1:27:19] we all have to ask the question is,
[1:27:21] how come this was rolled out the way it was?
[1:27:24] How come in CDOT just said he were putting in the CFI?
[1:27:29] Well, a couple of years ago, they came up to us and they asked, hey, what are your recommendations?
[1:27:34] We were late and get the recommendations to them.
[1:27:36] We provided some, a few of them to them.
[1:27:40] They adopted two.
[1:27:41] They have not adopted the others.
[1:27:43] And I did ask the question engineers why not.
[1:27:46] And the answer was they didn't feel it would help out.
[1:27:48] That was on there.
[1:27:49] So they did adopt a couple of them.
[1:27:51] But in the presentations, and I'm not sure who heard what.
[1:27:54] They were also labeled one on my OECMU all heard this band-aid type of solutions on there.
[1:28:02] And they're looking for a solution to the traffic that's going on in the traffic circle.
[1:28:06] We can argue about the data, we can argue about the plans, all that kind of stuff.
[1:28:13] But there was a frustration that I perceived from NCDOT on how the council responded then previously.
[1:28:22] And they're trying to come to the table, and as far as I'm concerned, if you look at
[1:28:28] how this rolled out, we lost our seat at the table.
[1:28:33] Well, how do you avoid that?
[1:28:35] You talk to people.
[1:28:37] You try to understand what their problems are, try to understand that problems are going
[1:28:40] to go straight stuff out.
[1:28:42] So
[1:28:44] we lost that, and as this thing has come out and I've talked to some of the engineers,
[1:28:49] like you won't have talked to them, my big hurrah, the citizens of pinders in my opinion got us
[1:28:58] to see back at the table. I don't want to squander it. I don't think your resolution is
[1:29:03] enough. I want to make sure that we are continuing to talk with them and try to negotiate things
[1:29:08] out. Nine days ago I put out an email to the rest of the council proposing that we had a scheduled
[1:29:14] events which are Vulcan and CDOT. We have set people that are doing it, that will well-presinitatives
[1:29:19] coming from the resort as well as the hospital, where major stakeholders in this, and then
[1:29:24] we continue to talk. Now, do I expect to prove a solution that we're going to be had with
[1:29:29] absentant? About the idea that was proposed here of change, don't destroy? I can run with that.
[1:29:37] Okay? But we have entities here that are recognizing a significant problem in CDOT.
[1:29:44] And we're one of the road starts with U.S. 15501.
[1:29:49] That doesn't mean pinders don'ts it.
[1:29:53] So let's recognize the situation for what it is.
[1:29:57] Let's be a council that's trying to represent the people.
[1:30:00] We'll hear in flight for what they want, but we need to do that by having a seat at the table.
[1:30:05] So I want to make sure the five of us here's what's going on, but also work with NCDOT as colleagues.
[1:30:13] Thank you.
[1:30:15] I agree. We do need to continue to work with them and work with them more and hopefully get to a sensible
[1:30:24] practical solution, and I got the feeling that in talking to the engineers that they sort
[1:30:32] of realize that the people they have been meeting with in the community who have come up
[1:30:39] for them are just not convinced of what they proposed.
[1:30:44] I talked to them and that they were very clear we need to make changes.
[1:30:49] And with the last line in the pilot, I don't know if you wrote that or not Matt, but the last line
[1:30:53] when the pilot came from Pat Milanfius on the board,
[1:30:56] talked about willingness to...
[1:30:58] He said, we're not in peace.
[1:30:59] Quote was we're not married to this.
[1:31:00] We're looking for sort of a solution.
[1:31:02] So that's a long cry from here you are.
[1:31:06] That that's exactly right.
[1:31:07] And I attribute the success of that
[1:31:09] to the people of Piner's.
[1:31:10] Thank you for showing up.
[1:31:13] Jack.
[1:31:16] Well, I just sort of, I think,
[1:31:21] you have to think you're right
[1:31:22] that we have to be more proactive and positive in our approach, but I'm just sort of back
[1:31:29] to off and try to figure out why NC DOT and the village in the form of the population
[1:31:35] are taking the position they are and I sort of come down to most decisions that organizations
[1:31:43] and people take are based on a cost benefit analysis.
[1:31:47] What do they explicitly define the cost and benefits or where they're, they just sort of instinctively feel them?
[1:31:56] And I think NC's cost benefit analysis is focused on primarily two benefits that they've articulated,
[1:32:03] which is one is the potential reduction of a few minutes in wait time during the peak hours,
[1:32:09] that occur at least two hours a day possibly a little bit longer but five days a week.
[1:32:14] But they don't seem to be concerned with the delay built into a complex intersection for the other 22 hours a day.
[1:32:22] And there are other big benefits of reduction in crashes, but discounting, although less frequent, the almost certainty of serious crashes that occur at a complex intersection with 14 traffic lights and impatient drivers that seem to be the norm in our area.
[1:32:39] So the NC class side seems to only, they've only reflected the possible $60 million or whatever that is going to cost.
[1:32:49] That's kind of their cost benefit analysis.
[1:32:52] And I can see why I see where they're coming out from.
[1:32:55] But I think the individual is in the area.
[1:32:58] We have a different cost benefit equation.
[1:33:02] That takes into account other factors that seem to be well beyond NC's equation.
[1:33:07] And I think we've acknowledged that NC's benefits with some skepticism, you know, that
[1:33:15] we've acknowledged them, but we don't value them as highly as the cost of losing a fundamental
[1:33:21] element and an important part of our character and community of the history of the village.
[1:33:27] So I certainly understand that NC's roles to take a sort of myoptic view of traffic and
[1:33:35] moving cars through intersections and so forth and safely, but I think that the
[1:33:41] cause of benefit equation for the individuals in the community is weighted
[1:33:46] more toward caring about their community as a whole and what potential loss
[1:33:51] there is in the character. So I think that's a fundamental difference in where
[1:33:55] we're coming from and maybe if we understand our fundamental differences we can
[1:34:00] maybe work on a solution that works for both of us.
[1:34:04] Thanks, Jack.
[1:34:05] That's an important aspect to this.
[1:34:07] There are people involved in this, rather than just roads.
[1:34:14] So, I've brought this up before.
[1:34:16] It struck me again when I watched the presentation and that is very focused on today's traffic
[1:34:25] patterns around the circle, and it does not seem to take into consideration for something
[1:34:33] that's going in eight years from now, technological advances that will occur in transportation.
[1:34:40] What we drive, how we drive, how traffic can be monitored and rerouted instantly in
[1:34:47] the future, enhance GPS systems that will rerout people based on traffic patterns here
[1:34:54] and there.
[1:34:55] So instead, it struck me a so odd that we're looking at a map that has the circumference
[1:35:03] of our traffic circle.
[1:35:06] Instead of what does an orc county look like, and surrounding counties, eight years from
[1:35:13] now, where are the population clusters going to be, how will they affect traffic patterns?
[1:35:18] We also have on DOT's list for improvements in widening roads like Murdoxville Road, North Carolina
[1:35:29] 73, North Carolina 2427, North Carolina 22, all of which will affect traffic patterns.
[1:35:39] And yet we are focused on today's traffic patterns at the circle and I think that is dangerous.
[1:35:46] And I think in eight years, we could be implementing something that is already obsolete.
[1:35:55] And at $54 plus million dollars of taxpayers' money, that makes no sense.
[1:36:02] And that's not to mention the destructive impact it has on the village of Pinehurst.
[1:36:09] That's a big impact.
[1:36:10] I take on to that.
[1:36:11] Sure.
[1:36:11] I think Barbara pointing out that this is more than just what happens in that six acres.
[1:36:19] As the SMPO going forward begins to develop a comprehensive transportation plan that is much beyond just pine hers,
[1:36:27] I think it should be able to help inform whatever the ultimate decision is.
[1:36:32] And again, that's not an excuse for doing nothing now.
[1:36:35] I agree we cannot be the counsel of no.
[1:36:37] We have to look at what is possible and and what I think we are mandated under federal law to have this SMPO and to have it develop a comprehensive transportation plan and to do something as significant as this without at least getting some input from that.
[1:36:55] I think it's probably not good good process.
[1:37:00] Other comments from anybody?
[1:37:02] Just one thing I didn't mention.
[1:37:03] I've got an incredible heartburn on having people lose their homes.
[1:37:09] Welcome. Welcome to the club. Pass the thumbs around.
[1:37:16] Okay. Well, thank you for that discussion.
[1:37:21] I think as our residents probably know,
[1:37:25] we as individual council members attended these meetings.
[1:37:28] You weren't there alone.
[1:37:30] I spoke to many of you, met many of you, and we're listening.
[1:37:35] The last one is going on right now at the Aberdeen Baptist Church.
[1:37:39] You're correct.
[1:37:39] As we speak.
[1:37:42] And along those lines, a couple of weeks ago, we at the suggestion of, and with the very fine drafting ability of Councilman Farrell,
[1:37:54] We discussed sending a letter to the National Park Service, the architectural historian there,
[1:38:01] who we've worked with Ellen Rankin, and we've circulated that around among council members.
[1:38:08] We had a few edits, which we've adopted, Shannon has done an excellent job of incorporating
[1:38:14] all our little knick-knacks, we appreciate that.
[1:38:17] And so I am prepared to sign that, we'll send it on, and we're copying the governor,
[1:38:28] our congressmen because it deals with the National Park Service, the Secretary of Transportation,
[1:38:33] the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, the more county historical association,
[1:38:39] and of course the council members themselves.
[1:38:41] So, I will, we'll put that in the mail probably tomorrow, and we can send an electronic copy around to everybody, the final version.
[1:38:51] And, let me think about, pay a post to you on the website also.
[1:38:55] So, take care of that.
[1:38:57] Thank you.
[1:38:58] And now, we will go to item C, website review.
[1:39:06] Kristen.
[1:39:07] This is our.
[1:39:14] Now we get to talk about different traffic patterns.
[1:39:19] Thank you for the last.
[1:39:21] That was very good.
[1:39:23] I caught it.
[1:39:24] We all got it.
[1:39:25] You got it first.
[1:39:26] Good evening.
[1:39:27] Mayor, council, and Mr. Samborn.
[1:39:30] Thank you for having me tonight to talk about our website.
[1:39:33] I was asked by Mayor earlier this summer to give some brief highlights on some analytics.
[1:39:40] some trends that we see coming forth and other platforms that maybe we'd be interested in.
[1:39:52] So every time I deal with a website or social media, I want to remind myself and everyone
[1:39:58] that has a piece of the every touch point on our website or social media site has an impact,
[1:40:05] whether that's a good first impression or it might be the only touch point we have with
[1:40:11] resident. They may never step foot in town hall, we may never see them at a vet, but they may visit our website.
[1:40:19] So tonight we're going to look at the history of our website.
[1:40:22] And we're going to do a little virtual tour analytics and trends to see what the data says.
[1:40:28] We're going to take a look at some of the external platforms that we use.
[1:40:32] We're going to talk about the maintenance of the website, what goes into it,
[1:40:36] and then the future, where the website is headed.
[1:40:40] Then I'll be glad to answer any questions.
[1:40:43] So there's this fun website called the Wayback Machine,
[1:40:48] everything that you put on the internet stays on the internet.
[1:40:52] That's a good reminder for all of us.
[1:40:54] But I went back and pulled up the 2013 version of our website.
[1:40:58] I wanted to show you kind of the history and the evolution
[1:41:02] of the trends and where we are now.
[1:41:05] So, the 2000 version, you'll see silo tabs across the top, residents, visitors, business
[1:41:11] government.
[1:41:13] That means something a little different to everyone.
[1:41:15] That was the trend back in 2013, every government agency had those siloves.
[1:41:21] That's one of the challenges to government websites is we're all too siloed.
[1:41:27] There was a focus on branding.
[1:41:29] Of course, we won our brand front and center, but the grand scheme of things is that
[1:41:35] appropriate for somebody that's coming to our website to look for information.
[1:41:39] At the time in 2013 it was.
[1:41:41] We wanted our logo and our tagline right where you could see them.
[1:41:46] Search bars in the top right.
[1:41:49] That's had a couple different iterations and we'll go through that.
[1:41:52] It's image light.
[1:41:54] There used to be an image in this center tab that's blank.
[1:41:58] The way that machine did not capture that image because it takes a lot of space and they have
[1:42:03] millions of websites that they keep track of.
[1:42:07] I do want to point out this innovative,
[1:42:11] how do I tab Dropbox?
[1:42:13] I don't know if you can see it.
[1:42:15] But that's kind of what I would call a precursor to AI.
[1:42:20] That was very innovative for 2013 in government
[1:42:25] to have how do I, with a drop down.
[1:42:27] Unfortunately, I can't access it to see what the options were.
[1:42:31] But that was just a testament to our IT department and the management at the time that decided we need a how do I drop down.
[1:42:42] So we'll also look at, just to give you a comparison, this was 2013, this was the town of Davidson's webpage.
[1:42:50] You can see they were brand front and center, college town, late town, your town, and everything is divided into these tabs.
[1:42:59] One thing to mention about these tabs is that you have to click on them, and then it brings up a new page.
[1:43:06] We'll talk about the hover, the invention of the hover's on our website shortly.
[1:43:16] Of course,
[1:43:20] now it's going to skip.
[1:43:21] Oh, now I ruined that.
[1:43:23] Surprise.
[1:43:27] All right.
[1:43:27] So 2018, we did have a lot of iterations for our website between 2013 and 2018,
[1:43:33] but they were very minimal.
[1:43:34] and I wanted to skip ahead when we had large changes.
[1:43:40] So you'll notice that innovative alert banners at the top,
[1:43:43] I believe it says something about, in 2018,
[1:43:47] splitting up the pinehurst historic downtown areas.
[1:43:52] I believe that's what it was.
[1:43:54] So it's a good place to put hot topics.
[1:43:55] We still used it during COVID, so it's a nice alert banner
[1:43:58] that catches your attention right when you come to the website.
[1:44:01] hero images were introduced so instead of this light imagery which also our websites couldn't handle just because of the bandwidth.
[1:44:11] Now we've moved to hero images which catch your eye subtle branding is introduced. You'll see the pine cone is kind of the watermark in the background.
[1:44:21] We've moved the tagline to the bottom. That's not what people come to our website for.
[1:44:27] The search bar moves in 2018 front and center, because when everyone opens their computer to go to Google,
[1:44:35] or to go look at something, they open up the search bar in 2018, and it was very popular to have your top searches,
[1:44:44] on the left hand screen, you'll see that, and you'll also see the top searches underneath the search bar.
[1:44:51] Typically across the government spectrum, the top searches are always going to be joined our team.
[1:45:00] Events, meetings and news. You'll notice that the headers become more active versus passive
[1:45:10] departmental silos, our government, our community doing business, not just business. Connect with us, and I want to.
[1:45:19] and the integration of our social media icons.
[1:45:25] The 2019 version did make a little bit of a switch.
[1:45:29] We header becomes top searches.
[1:45:31] We decided using dead data and analytics
[1:45:34] that searches on government websites typically
[1:45:38] in the past have not worked well
[1:45:40] only because there is so much information
[1:45:43] that is housed on our websites.
[1:45:46] So the search bar goes up to the top right.
[1:45:48] Your image becomes a carousel highlight of news, so it scrolls just like our current website does now.
[1:45:56] And we remove departments as a way to filter information.
[1:46:00] We found that I know that buildings and grounds is in the Parks and Recs department,
[1:46:06] because I just know that.
[1:46:08] I've learned it.
[1:46:09] But as a resident, I might think that that naturally falls in public services, for instance.
[1:46:13] So we found that that wasn't a good way to direct folks on their path to information.
[1:46:22] That's it.
[1:46:24] Any questions?
[1:46:25] That was impressive.
[1:46:28] I don't know what happened there.
[1:46:31] All right, current website.
[1:46:32] So the header continues in the top searches.
[1:46:36] You'll see the very, very top jobs.
[1:46:39] Solid waste schedule, my VOP, and live stream.
[1:46:42] And there's also a moving to Pinehurst tab that we're actually going to transition to the
[1:46:46] SMPO tab.
[1:46:48] We found, find that not a lot of people are clicking the move to Pinehurst tab and SMPO that
[1:46:56] would be a good placeholder for it.
[1:46:58] Search bar remains in the top right.
[1:47:01] Care cell images continue and then we added what I call cards, you'll see below, join our
[1:47:07] team, event venues, etc., people don't like to
[1:47:12] have to click too many times to get the information that they would like.
[1:47:19] So if we can put the most common things in the easiest places, that's the best.
[1:47:25] So real quick, we will go to our website.
[1:47:28] And I talked about the hovering.
[1:47:32] So when you go to our government, it used to be that you click that,
[1:47:36] and then all the stuff populated on a page.
[1:47:38] But now we have this hover, hover, hover that's been in technology for a while, but talking
[1:47:45] about traffic patterns and pathways when we get to the analytics, we'll talk more about
[1:47:53] it.
[1:47:54] But there's at least four different roads or avenues someone can get to go to the SOP, for instance,
[1:48:03] our standard operating procedure, and it's interesting when you're sitting with colleagues
[1:48:07] that work, and you're like, hey, bring up the SOP real quick, everybody goes a different way.
[1:48:12] So everybody's intuitive nature goes a different way.
[1:48:15] I go our government, and then I go to strategic operating plan, underneath the mayor and
[1:48:23] village council.
[1:48:25] But a lot of my colleagues go, I want to view state of the bill or strategic operating plan.
[1:48:32] So I want us to keep this in mind when we're looking at the analytics, because it's going
[1:48:37] to be a little skewed, the bottom pages, especially.
[1:48:44] You'll see, I want to point this one out, buy surplus property.
[1:48:49] So someone wants to come in our website, they want to buy surplus property.
[1:48:55] I would go to doing business, because that's how I view that as a transactional visit.
[1:49:02] But you can also get to it from multiple angles, or multiple places.
[1:49:09] There are any questions about Mac, we could virtually cert, we could virtually tour the website all day.
[1:49:16] Is there anything specific on the website that anybody wants to see?
[1:49:22] No, I'd like you to click on back to our government.
[1:49:28] And you, you, it's where do you stumble across state of the village somewhere?
[1:49:36] I'd like you to click that on.
[1:49:37] Where, where are you? Are you under mayor?
[1:49:43] I mean, I saw you. I saw you over over it, so I don't know where it went.
[1:49:47] I believe it. I want to. I want to.
[1:49:50] I want to. Yep, I'll interview.
[1:49:51] There it is. There it is.
[1:49:53] There it is. So click on that.
[1:49:57] So, this is an internal meeting that we have that the public's welcome to attend,
[1:50:05] it is for all of our employees and volunteers, and we do it once a year, and you can either, you can watch it online, or you can attend in person, and if you attend in person you get to have pizza.
[1:50:17] You have to have one?
[1:50:18] Pizza.
[1:50:19] Pizza.
[1:50:21] Well, I think most of our residents probably aren't aware of that, and that might be something
[1:50:25] to highlight occasionally, I see it's a heads-notting, because I think some would be,
[1:50:29] would want to go to that.
[1:50:30] They'd want to meet some of the people that they're working for the village and learn something.
[1:50:35] So anyway, I'm glad to see any.
[1:50:39] It's helpful, right?
[1:50:40] And the results of our community survey and any other information that the village manager wants to pass along.
[1:50:51] So the community is getting the same information in a little bit different format.
[1:50:56] This one's a little bit more formal and it gets all right.
[1:50:58] It is intended for workforce.
[1:51:01] Excuse me.
[1:51:01] Yes.
[1:51:02] It's intended for a workforce.
[1:51:04] Okay.
[1:51:04] I thought you were saying for all all meetings are public.
[1:51:08] But, oh, okay, I took it to mean that we wanted to encourage people to go to it, okay, more for the workforce.
[1:51:14] Kristen, a couple of times you've referenced, you go this way, but your colleagues go the other way.
[1:51:22] I'm not uninterested in how staff uses the website. I'm more interested in how the public uses it.
[1:51:29] And I wasn't sure when you said my colleagues, whether you specifically meant other people on staff or not.
[1:51:35] both when I work with an AC volunteers they use different methods to go to places when I'm talking
[1:51:44] with residents and showing them ways to get to information.
[1:51:50] Everybody does a little bit different.
[1:51:55] I like our search function. I think it works well. For instance, I'll search US Open.
[1:52:04] And a trick that I will teach everyone is if you are using the search function, filter it by date.
[1:52:15] That brings up.
[1:52:16] So for instance, the NCDOT presentations.
[1:52:19] I think there was a comment from one of you that we had an old presentation.
[1:52:24] Someone found on our website.
[1:52:27] But there's an updated one.
[1:52:30] And so, it's helpful to have the previous ones, so that we can refer back, but it's also helpful to filter this by date so that you get the most recent information that we have.
[1:52:48] All right, can we return to the presentation and
[1:52:53] talking about, I'm glad you brought that up about how to our customers use our website, and that is what's important.
[1:53:00] And that's what's going to be discussed about in the design features.
[1:53:09] What are some of our most popular pages?
[1:53:11] Are you going to get to that?
[1:53:12] Oh, you wait.
[1:53:14] Yes, it's coming.
[1:53:17] Why is this computer does not like me?
[1:53:25] I'll blame it on the thunder.
[1:53:38] Let me do anything.
[1:53:43] See all those graphs coming at you, Mayor.
[1:53:46] They're coming.
[1:53:50] One of the reasons I wanted to put this on the agenda is that
[1:53:54] in going through the strategic operating plans and the E.T.
[1:54:00] So, community survey.
[1:54:04] We have quite a few, at least, I think.
[1:54:07] So, people who actually go to our website,
[1:54:10] in this year numbers, 164,000 number websites.
[1:54:14] So, I thought, you know, I don't know more about this.
[1:54:17] And I spoke to some of my colleagues, they said fine.
[1:54:19] All right, so we'll go over some analytics and trends of 60% of the users that come to our
[1:54:26] website are using mobile or smart devices that's very vital for us to know and design features.
[1:54:32] We want to design mobile first. That becomes a little difficult when you're talking about PDFs,
[1:54:38] permit applications. I don't know if you've tried to do a permit on a cell phone, but it is difficult.
[1:54:46] So, the remaining 40% are coming through using the desktop.
[1:54:51] We have from 1 July, 23 to 1 July, 561,000 views that's number of page views on our website.
[1:55:01] Out of that, we have 1.4 million events triggered.
[1:55:05] What that means is that someone interacted with the website.
[1:55:08] They clicked on something, they opened something, they deleted something, or not deleted.
[1:55:11] They downloaded something, applied, did some kind of engagement with our website.
[1:55:17] I'm not using them.
[1:55:19] He bored anymore.
[1:55:21] That's 1,500 a day.
[1:55:23] That's a lot.
[1:55:24] That's more than I would have expected.
[1:55:26] That's why.
[1:55:27] Is it?
[1:55:28] That's my point.
[1:55:35] You're not doing it with that remote.
[1:55:38] I practice today.
[1:55:40] Make sure everything was working.
[1:55:41] So this is our top 10 list.
[1:55:43] I'm sorry David Lederman's not here to present it.
[1:55:45] But we have a total, and this kind of blew my mind, of 60, 500 pages, individual pages on our website.
[1:55:55] And there's a lot of data on data.
[1:55:58] 41.9% are visiting us from the homepage, and you'll see that that's 88,000 visitors.
[1:56:05] This year was an off-ear because of the open, but I'll be interested to see what the numbers are next year.
[1:56:12] But as you can see, our village is booked in busy.
[1:56:16] They love events.
[1:56:17] They want to know what's going on, where it's going on.
[1:56:19] They love our historical buildings, the Fairbarn, and the Harness Track, Parks and Recreation.
[1:56:30] There's nothing up there that surprises me.
[1:56:33] Solid waste schedules.
[1:56:35] That's why solid waste schedules is always at the top, planning and inspections.
[1:56:38] we expect to be a big number. I will say, 14,500 people went to our website to find out
[1:56:52] about solid waste. In one year? In one year? No. Could have won or lost on that bed of over
[1:56:59] under. That is sufficient across every municipality I've worked for. And it's usually
[1:57:05] schedules.
[1:57:08] And when things are picked up like the yard waste, when that's open, what
[1:57:14] can you recycle, what can you recycle? And we could drill down if you wanted to to find
[1:57:19] out exactly where they're going, but that is just common across the board. What I will
[1:57:23] say is what there's some things missing, glaring, glaringly missing, things like age jobs.
[1:57:31] Jobs is huge. Jobs is a huge hit. It is not going to show up on our analytics because we use.
[1:57:39] We push that out to government jobs. Now I can get the analytic data from government jobs.
[1:57:45] But I bet it would be up there. It would be in the top 10. The jobs were housed on our website.
[1:57:51] But when you type BNWW. VOP.org.
[1:57:59] Hr. It goes straight. It redirects you to our God's page.
[1:58:04] So that's not going to show up.
[1:58:06] But this doesn't show library or archives.
[1:58:09] It does not. You're correct.
[1:58:11] It was probably in the top 15.
[1:58:18] This is just the same information presented in a different way for those that
[1:58:21] like the bar graphs, you can see that everything's pretty even
[1:58:25] except for our home page.
[1:58:27] And a who's responsible for the website?
[1:58:30] We'll get to that in a couple of slides.
[1:58:32] That's all right.
[1:58:33] No, I mean, individually keeping the data up to date
[1:58:36] is really a significant task obviously.
[1:58:38] It is.
[1:58:39] It is.
[1:58:40] For each department.
[1:58:41] Right.
[1:58:41] I have a slide about that.
[1:58:43] So I know you asked me for the bottom 10.
[1:58:46] And like I mentioned, we have 6,500 pages.
[1:58:53] Thousands of those pages have one visit her year.
[1:58:58] So it was going to be, so what I did,
[1:59:00] I used a hundred as my threshold.
[1:59:03] And then I did the top six, just to give you an idea.
[1:59:05] But remember when we talked about the different pathways
[1:59:09] in which you can reach a site,
[1:59:11] so I want to buy surplus property is in that list,
[1:59:15] But that's just because they don't go through that I want to.
[1:59:19] I want to view codes.
[1:59:22] Everyone views codes and regulations.
[1:59:24] That's very popular, but they're not going through that
[1:59:27] web's that pathway.
[1:59:29] They're going through planning and inspections.
[1:59:32] Facility directory,
[1:59:35] I imagine would be where it is,
[1:59:37] same thing with the awards and rate of recognitions.
[1:59:41] And 125th anniversary just continues to pop up.
[1:59:44] people are interested. I wouldn't be offended if you removed that.
[1:59:47] Remove what? Now that's you!
[1:59:51] Oh, for historical purposes.
[1:59:53] All right, performance and dashboard.
[1:59:56] So the mayor asks specifically about our dashboards because they're very robust.
[2:00:02] This is typical across the state of North Carolina. I've talked with all my colleagues. We spend a lot of time, internally.
[2:00:11] We use these dashboards internally. We make data driven decisions. Our council uses them daily. The public does not.
[2:00:20] I did add one more piece of data in the views versus users, because I felt that this was important.
[2:00:30] So the performance reports and dashboards, the views were 125, however, those were only 81 unique users.
[2:00:38] How do you define users?
[2:00:42] An IP address.
[2:00:43] And IP address, so like, if I went to the site four times in one week, I'm not going to count, I'm going to not, I'm only going to count as one user, but I'm going to count as four views, because I visited it four times.
[2:00:59] You might have multiple.
[2:01:02] If I go on via my phone, mobile and go from the laptop, because I'm sitting at home, I will be two.
[2:01:09] It's devices.
[2:01:10] It's devices and IP addresses that are hitting that.
[2:01:14] Dashboards are a little better at 360-8 with 258 individual users and then our strategic operating
[2:01:25] plan, which is actually the hardest document to read is not hard, but just robust and dense.
[2:01:37] We had about 1,200, but only 400 and 8 individual users.
[2:01:44] I will also note that we link out to the strategic operating plan a lot more than we do
[2:01:52] the others.
[2:01:53] And that's a goal of mine this year is to really try to push the dashboard information out
[2:01:58] a little bit more and see if we can get some more traction.
[2:02:00] Thank you.
[2:02:01] Good idea.
[2:02:01] But we did, this is what our current key performance measure dashboard looks like before
[2:02:07] you dig in to each goal.
[2:02:10] I want to bring up that we switch to a different platform, clear point.
[2:02:18] The Durham currently uses clear point, so I just wanted to give you an example, I don't
[2:02:24] know if this is what it's going to look like, because the team is going to build it together,
[2:02:28] But this is an example of what Durham's key performance dashboard looks like compared to what we currently have.
[2:02:38] So we're excited to see where we can go with that.
[2:02:43] So external platforms, it used to be 15, 20 years ago.
[2:02:47] You were having to update your website every two to two years or you were obsolete.
[2:02:52] You're talking 30, 40,000 dollars a pop at the minimum.
[2:02:57] These platforms, these companies are offering us solutions, so we don't have to do that.
[2:03:03] We don't have to recreate our website every year.
[2:03:05] We can use these solutions from a seller, for instance, that's our planning and
[2:03:15] my VOP has
[2:03:16] Jason back there.
[2:03:17] Can he, I think they also offer it as well?
[2:03:21] Yes, that is.
[2:03:21] Thank you.
[2:03:22] I thought it was.
[2:03:23] want to make sure. The one with the red green and blue, that's the southern software that
[2:03:30] does our statistics for our website, state archives of North Carolina host hour minutes.
[2:03:38] And agendas, civic wreck is the platform where all of our registrations and our catalog for
[2:03:44] our Parks and Recreation Department go, civic clerk of course is agendas software, GIS everyone knows
[2:03:52] government jobs is the orange and American legal is the municipal code.
[2:03:58] So keep in mind that we've got probably triple the amount of platforms.
[2:04:03] This was just one that I thought that we could just briefly talk about tonight.
[2:04:12] So who maintains the website, Mr. Farrell's question.
[2:04:16] So IT is responsible for the support and maintenance and security of hardware and the infrastructure
[2:04:21] of our website. However, every department has content responsibilities. I think this is a good opportunity to bring up that not only last Thursday night it was our fire department out all night long our IT staff was out all night long.
[2:04:37] We had a global outage and we woke up to my listserv was all the communities from all over North Carolina that were closed for business that day.
[2:04:48] Permitting system wasn't used.
[2:04:50] That was part of the broader outage.
[2:04:52] The global outage from last week is the same night as the fire.
[2:04:57] People were close for business and all of our staff walked in, sat down, opened up our computers and everything worked.
[2:05:07] So that's just a credit to the IT teams dedication.
[2:05:12] I just wanted to make sure that I shouted that out for them.
[2:05:16] Administrative staff.
[2:05:16] So this is all of the, I'm not admin department,
[2:05:20] but staff throughout the village update
[2:05:23] departmental pages as needed as folks change positions.
[2:05:30] If they are in charge of any committees or boards,
[2:05:32] they're responsible for uploading their information.
[2:05:36] Clark does council materials, of course,
[2:05:38] agenda minutes, et cetera.
[2:05:41] I do news, banner images, graphics, and any other website updates
[2:05:45] as needed. As long as I'm not coding, I leave that to IT. Librarian parks, they assist with updating
[2:05:54] events calendars, which you know is popular. So that's very important that our events calendar
[2:06:00] is kept up to date. Future and expected trends, the BOP staff is evaluating in 2015, the needs
[2:06:10] transfer website refresh, the trends right now are maximalism, more is more, larger images,
[2:06:18] user-centric design. So what that goes, it ties into what you were saying. Mr. Taylor
[2:06:25] about the, how do our users use our website? Our internet, our internal website, looks a lot
[2:06:33] different than the external website. And there's a reason for that. And it's, and it's built
[2:06:38] for how we need to use it.
[2:06:40] We also want to keep in mind a mobile first design,
[2:06:42] make sure that, because 60% of our users are mobile users,
[2:06:47] that it also is mobile friendly,
[2:06:49] and we want to make sure that we are accessible in our design.
[2:06:56] An example of this is all caps.
[2:07:01] You're also screaming at someone when you write in all caps,
[2:07:04] But it's also for some people that have the accessibility devices hooked up to their computer.
[2:07:10] It does not recognize all caps and cannot read out what it is saying.
[2:07:16] So it's very important that we keep up with these types of things,
[2:07:20] so that we have an accessible website and security interest always remains on trend.
[2:07:26] So I wanted to-
[2:07:31] We host everything on our in-house servers.
[2:07:35] Oh, sir, we host this in the cloud with granicus.
[2:07:41] Thank you.
[2:07:42] Single cloud provider, do we have multiple?
[2:07:46] Excuse me.
[2:07:47] Do we have just one cloud provider, or do we do more than one platform?
[2:07:51] For the website, we have one cloud provider, but they have redundant systems in the cloud.
[2:07:57] Okay, so one goes down, the other takes over, that works.
[2:08:03] So real quick, I know a lot of people sometimes get a little nervous about AI technology,
[2:08:10] but people are using it on websites.
[2:08:14] Rowan County is using it.
[2:08:16] And if I'm a, I wanted to just, so this is their homepage.
[2:08:22] And AI is front and center, and so I'm very interested after the year to talk with their
[2:08:26] Communication's director and find out how useful this has been and it will so let's say
[2:08:34] You can ask a question
[2:08:37] What was the good one we had just a manager Shannon when is the council me when is or
[2:08:52] And so this AI only searches within itself. It does not search the wide web
[2:08:58] So it will give me
[2:09:01] calendar. It will give me historic landmarks. And you can continue asking it questions.
[2:09:09] Where's the agenda?
[2:09:22] So there it is. And this takes zero manpower. This takes zero person's
[2:09:28] answering a phone call.
[2:09:32] And this helps, this can guide residents and to fence, you know,
[2:09:35] how do I do a fence permit? Or do I need a permit for fence, etc. Any questions about
[2:09:41] AI technology.
[2:09:47] Thank you if you missed a letter it would know what you intended but that's different questions.
[2:09:52] It probably would.
[2:09:55] I have an internal issue with Miss Spelling Award.
[2:10:01] When are we going to be adopting it?
[2:10:03] Sorry.
[2:10:04] When are we going to be adopting AI to our website?
[2:10:07] Good question.
[2:10:09] That's a process that we're going to, the team and Jason's team will get together and discuss what
[2:10:15] needs, what our trends are showing, and if that fits in with what we, the tools that we
[2:10:23] want to use, there's no decision. That's just what's coming.
[2:10:29] I would like to integrate
[2:10:30] some AI eventually. So how do we keep up with an ever-changing technological climate? This is
[2:10:39] just personally for my position. So I'm a member of NC3C, which is North Carolina City
[2:10:44] county communicators. So you'll see we have a packed schedule tomorrow between that and the government social media.
[2:10:52] We have two webinars tomorrow. The cost for NC3C is $50 a year and I get every single penny out of that.
[2:11:01] Tomorrow we're going to be discussing community engagement.
[2:11:04] 3CMA is the national organization and they're constantly updating us on trends
[2:11:10] that they're saying, case law, that they're saying come out for websites in social media.
[2:11:17] We're, I'm also a member of the government social media and you can see that tomorrow's
[2:11:21] discussion is going to be top AI tools for social governments.
[2:11:25] And then, Nurtilert, I listen to Govcom's podcast once a week, sometimes it applies to me,
[2:11:32] sometimes it does not, but it's still interesting to see what other government agencies are doing
[2:11:38] in terms of communication.
[2:11:41] And I know that Jason is a member of his professional
[2:11:45] organizations and gets information constantly from them.
[2:11:52] And so we like to build meaningful connections
[2:11:54] with every digital interaction we have, whether it's
[2:11:57] our app, the key ask, email, computer,
[2:12:02] and with that,
[2:12:03] I will answer any questions you may have about our website.
[2:12:08] Questions?
[2:12:10] Dr. Morgan.
[2:12:12] I was just going to mention what's not really a question.
[2:12:14] It was to reiterate something that got done and the Jeff commented on.
[2:12:22] When the traffic circle issue first came up and DOTs had saved these initial crashes
[2:12:26] or initial.
[2:12:27] We asked you have any data post the ballers or for 2024 and they didn't.
[2:12:32] We had to thinking about it because the source of their data is really our police reports.
[2:12:36] It starts there if there's a crash and then it gets aggregated up to them. And I thought we must because of that and because of what we see in the daily
[2:12:46] Police report that we must be able to report on it somehow and I'd spoken separately with Jason and with chief web and and then kind of made a formal request that they take a look at this and
[2:12:58] If I don't think it took seven days. I think it was less than a week. They came up with for a first cut a really excellent
[2:13:06] ability for us to look at our own data and I had some other thoughts on that which I
[2:13:10] said I'd hold off on. I didn't want to give just a knee jerk reaction. I believe
[2:13:15] you've all been copied on the website. You can click on it. They've already made a
[2:13:18] couple of enhancements and I don't think we want to make this a life's work but to
[2:13:22] the extent that you have any thoughts. I think now is time to maybe feed them in because
[2:13:26] this is important information both specific reference to the DOT as we work through
[2:13:31] going forward and just generally. So again, Kudos to the IT department for coming up very, very quickly
[2:13:38] with the solution that we still don't have anything from DOT, but we have our own numbers and they'll
[2:13:44] never match exactly what DOT has, but I'll be happy to go with our numbers. I think they'll be more
[2:13:49] granular and I'll be more accurate and we can actually pretty much look at them in real time now.
[2:13:54] Okay, thank you.
[2:13:57] Barb, that's all that questions.
[2:14:00] Pack?
[2:14:02] Thank you.
[2:14:02] I just had one of the things that triggered the website
[2:14:07] thought in my mind was that in our community survey findings in 2023,
[2:14:14] they gave us a 10-year look at certain issues.
[2:14:20] One question caught my mind is,
[2:14:22] which of the following do you use to get information about the village of Pinehurst?
[2:14:27] Well, in 2013, 82% of the respondents said the pilot newspaper in 2023, that had dropped
[2:14:38] down to 68%, sorry amount, he's just reporting the facts man, and in, but on the
[2:14:52] The Village website, we went from 47% in 2013, up to 50% in...
[2:15:00] So, the trends were way different, which don't mean that on the screen for you now, too.
[2:15:06] Okay, you know, which tells you the reliance that our residents have on the website, which what makes it very important.
[2:15:15] And in the other one, it's not website, but it was the village newsletter, which also in 2013 was relied by 82%, but it dropped to 56% in 2023.
[2:15:27] But we haven't spent, I don't think is much time on the village newsletter as we do on our website, which is obviously the become more and more useful.
[2:15:38] So this is very helpful. I'll have probably some thoughts and I've got with you again on this, and I do want to see a way we can encourage our residents to even use it more, the dashboards.
[2:15:52] The information in there is very helpful.
[2:15:56] Not everyone cares about a lot of that information, but for those who might.
[2:15:59] Those dashboards are very insightful.
[2:16:03] So thank you, Kristen, for this.
[2:16:05] And thank you for the work you do on the NAC.
[2:16:07] Because this is also helpful for them.
[2:16:10] Thank you.
[2:16:11] Thank you.
[2:16:14] Item D. We'll go to the next item up.
[2:16:17] Here comes Mike.
[2:16:17] This is a discuss the Chinkakuin and Magnolia Intersections and Stonewater Improvenance Project.
[2:16:35] Krash did a broke it.
[2:16:38] He goes the website.
[2:16:40] I'll talk to the way with the keyboard.
[2:16:50] All right.
[2:16:51] Well, good evening.
[2:16:52] Here to discuss a project you've probably heard a little bit about.
[2:16:56] We've called it the Chinkakuin and Magnolia Intersection and Stonewater Improvenance Project.
[2:17:01] This was a Jeff Baton Project.
[2:17:05] He was the one kind of handle.
[2:17:06] Boy, he's got on a month, and he does them under the bus.
[2:17:10] So, I'm not on a month of bus.
[2:17:12] I'm saying that Jeff Baton had kind of overseen this project through the design.
[2:17:16] And now, I guess it's been passed along to Carlton and myself to get through the construction
[2:17:20] phase, the fun part.
[2:17:23] The village retained McGill Associates to develop design plans for this project in Shannon.
[2:17:28] Can you pull up those two sheets through there?
[2:17:32] I want to make sure everybody's clear on exactly what that is.
[2:17:35] So that first one there's fine.
[2:17:38] This is just a little sketch I put together
[2:17:42] of the engineering plans for this.
[2:17:45] So this is at the intersection of Magnolia and Chinkwepin.
[2:17:49] And I might need a kind of a pointer to show that up there.
[2:18:00] A point for, I just want to be able to,
[2:18:05] or at least the mouse, yeah, kind of just use the mouse.
[2:18:16] So, just to give you an idea to make sure we're in the right place here, this is coming up
[2:18:21] Magnolia, if you're coming this way, into downtown.
[2:18:24] You come to this intersection right here, and that is the intersection of Magnolia and
[2:18:29] Chinkle Pan.
[2:18:30] So, the Magnolia in is on this corner.
[2:18:34] The wine shop and eclectic in the villages on this corner, the veteran's golf association
[2:18:41] is on this corner and I believe there's a residence on this corner. This project really has
[2:18:47] three components to it. First one is to turn it into a four-way intersection, a four-way
[2:18:54] stop intersection. As of right now you have to stop when you come up Magnolia from this direction.
[2:19:00] You have to stop when you come from this direction but it is free flowing on Chinkle Pin. And I'm
[2:19:06] sure you've been up there as you come up here on Magnolia. It's a little difficult to see when
[2:19:11] you're looking to the right and when you're looking to the left to see that oncoming traffic
[2:19:15] here.
[2:19:17] So the first part of this project was to make it a four-way stop in order to do that, the design
[2:19:24] includes these little brick islands, a column and a bowl of bots here, but they're just
[2:19:28] brick islands because we really don't have a good place to put stop signs as it is right
[2:19:33] now.
[2:19:33] So there's a brick island here, kind of out in front of the Magnolia Inn.
[2:19:37] There's another brick island that would come out here and it would be landscape and a place
[2:19:40] to put the stop signs.
[2:19:44] The other two corners pretty much remain as is.
[2:19:47] There's a little bit of rerouting, a sidewalk that
[2:19:49] goes on in front of the magnolia.
[2:19:52] But that's generally what we need to be done to make that
[2:19:55] a four-way stop.
[2:19:57] The second component of it is this stormwater.
[2:20:00] And that's the red lines on here.
[2:20:02] There is a stormbox right in front of the wine shop
[2:20:06] in the little parking area right there.
[2:20:08] It doesn't drain to anywhere, I mean it drains and infiltrates into the ground.
[2:20:13] There is not a pipe that goes anywhere to that other than just the little landscape bed that is right there adjacent to it.
[2:20:21] It works pretty good in some rainfall events, but when we get some of these, like we've had recently, where we get downpours pretty significant events in a short amount of time,
[2:20:32] There are times when it does overload that box there and it goes over the sidewalk.
[2:20:40] So part of this design actually connects to that box. I really wish we had another stormwater
[2:20:46] height box system close by to connect to. We do not end downtown. There's hardly any stormwater
[2:20:52] infrastructure in downtown. So this design actually takes it from there. It goes across the intersection
[2:20:59] and goes down Magnolia Road and actually ties in to a storm box, kind of down at the intersection
[2:21:07] with Dogwood there, with the Pine Crest in, in front of the Pine Crest in.
[2:21:11] Do they know whether inlets along Magnolia?
[2:21:13] There are no other inlets along Magnolia.
[2:21:16] This was something that was also looked at in pretty significant detail during our storm
[2:21:22] water management and master plan.
[2:21:24] It was actually looked at coming up Chinkwapin with it, but the closest place to do that
[2:21:30] There was an option of going up and actually going down the alley that goes beside Drum and
[2:21:35] Quill.
[2:21:36] But that's all private property.
[2:21:37] We would have to get easements and then it would turn and go kind of along the roadstuff
[2:21:41] this property and eventually end up down by the village green parking lot.
[2:21:45] And that was going to be a lot more expensive than this.
[2:21:48] So the option that we elected to go with for the drainage improvements was to come down
[2:21:53] magnetally erode with this.
[2:21:55] As we did.
[2:21:56] Would this add additional and let's along the road?
[2:21:58] It does, yes. Quite a few. As we do that, you can see kind of right here on Magnolia.
[2:22:06] There's on Street Parking that occurs down in that area. It's not very organized.
[2:22:12] Right now, there's no designated spots.
[2:22:15] And sometimes we get complaints about people parking and blocking driveways and things like that.
[2:22:19] So in addition to the four-way stop and the stormwater infrastructure,
[2:22:24] infrastructure, we're going to kind of make that parking a little bit more organized with
[2:22:30] As he made it striking, in order to make sure people are parking in the correct locations.
[2:22:35] That's below the area that's currently the loading zone.
[2:22:38] Correct. That's exactly right. Yeah, good point.
[2:22:41] John, the loading zone is right in this area here, and that remains untouched. And I think
[2:22:46] there's even one over here, maybe on the other side of the market square.
[2:22:52] I'll go back to Jeff. Jeff was
[2:22:53] really hoping to get this thing in before the U.S. opened, and before he left. We sent the project
[2:22:59] out for bids in January and ask contractors please could you could you get this in for us
[2:23:06] before the US opened we didn't get any bids we got no takers on that so we kind of just
[2:23:12] backed up said let's wait till after the open send it out again send it out a few weeks ago
[2:23:19] I sent it to five contractors local contractors who we have worked with well who we know
[2:23:25] good contractors have worked in this area before, I got one bid back and there's two problems
[2:23:33] with the bid that I got. Number one is the amount of it. So we have, we've got some roll forward
[2:23:41] money to pay for this project. It was in the FY24 budget. There's $200,000 in the FY25 budget
[2:23:49] that's allocated to streetscapes and I think could be used for this if we wanted to. So
[2:23:54] total available funding with the roll forward if we didn't take money from anywhere else
[2:24:00] is about $564,000. The one bit I got was $1.14 million.
[2:24:10] That was my reaction to that.
[2:24:14] So only one bit but significantly over the funding that we currently have available. And the
[2:24:21] Another issue with it is North Carolina Bidlaws say if it's more than $500,000, we're supposed
[2:24:26] to do a formal advertisement process where we actually do an ad and it goes out and anybody
[2:24:30] can bid on it.
[2:24:32] We did not do that.
[2:24:33] I guess I was being optimistic we could come in under $500,000 but that was not the case.
[2:24:40] So we need to reject the one bid that we received and we need to proceed with if we want
[2:24:46] to proceed with this project we need to re-advertise it or advertise it out during the
[2:24:51] doing the formal bid process.
[2:24:55] I would suggest that we do that, but when we do that,
[2:25:01] we actually break the project up into two components.
[2:25:06] The intersection improvements and the storm drainage improvements.
[2:25:10] The drainage improvements are what's driving the cost up.
[2:25:12] I mean, it's a lot of pipe.
[2:25:14] It's a tight area.
[2:25:16] There's inlets in that area as well.
[2:25:18] So what I would suggest is we put it out there, let's get a price if we only did, and I'm not suggesting we do this, but at least we had that option if we want to
[2:25:27] If we only did the intersection improvements the brick cutouts and created that four-way stop, what's that going to cost?
[2:25:34] And okay, if we want to do the rest of it with the drainage improvements to what's that going to cost?
[2:25:40] Well, will we end up having a dig the street up twice?
[2:25:42] If we did it twice, sure, but I think we'll know the numbers for that.
[2:25:48] I'm just saying, let's have it both ways if we want to.
[2:25:52] I am hopeful.
[2:25:53] I'm optimistic that if we put this out there and give everybody time to push the construction out, that
[2:26:02] will that $1.14 million bid will come down.
[2:26:05] I had two contractors tell me they were just too busy.
[2:26:08] I don't know the one who didn't respond, and I don't know the one who had some bonding requirements that they should have
[2:26:15] fixed before we go back out for bids on it. So that's what I would suggest. We go back out. We have we get both of those numbers and
[2:26:23] the other thing
[2:26:25] You know looking at the schedule for this. We were hoping to get it done before the open and then we were maybe hoping to get it done
[2:26:31] before the fall hit, but just looking at the calendar. I would suggest
[2:26:35] We put this out and start construction right after the first of the year.
[2:26:41] I believe that was actually a suggestion and Doug correct me if I'm wrong that some of the downtown businesses had during the listening sessions.
[2:26:48] We could do it in the winter months.
[2:26:51] We've got Holly Arts and Crafts, October 19th.
[2:26:56] We've got October fast, October 26th downtown.
[2:26:59] Christmas tree lighting is December 6th.
[2:27:01] I mean the fall and we certainly don't want to be doing this.
[2:27:04] My opinion around Thanksgiving between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
[2:27:09] So my thought would be we give everybody enough time to put their bid together.
[2:27:13] We tell them we're going to start at first of the year and you know, the risk we run with that is
[2:27:18] paving the roads back in the cold weather months, you know, we may not be able to pay in January.
[2:27:23] February, I believe the St. Patrick's day parade, if I was just looked at the calendar right,
[2:27:28] would be around March 15th.
[2:27:30] So I would be hopeful that we could be done before.
[2:27:33] I'd also ask that we talk with the business owners down there that are affected by this.
[2:27:39] Before we decide the time frame.
[2:27:44] I think.
[2:27:45] Yeah, Mike correct Doug.
[2:27:46] That was their suggestion when you did met with them before.
[2:27:53] I'm very much a proponent of this.
[2:27:55] I think it's a safety issue downtown there.
[2:27:58] And when you talk to business owners, those cars that sometimes come down there.
[2:28:03] you know, Chica Quinn up towards Ritter there, they come down much faster, it's a very
[2:28:10] apparent.
[2:28:10] That's hard to see.
[2:28:11] No reason for people to tap their brakes other than they should as they come down there.
[2:28:19] So I generally like your suggestion and I certainly do think we ought to try to schedule
[2:28:25] it.
[2:28:26] We were to provide the least amount of complications for the downtown business centers.
[2:28:31] Just where in the roadway would the storm water digging take place as distinct from building the concrete pillows in order to put the four-way intersection in?
[2:28:46] So the way we've got that red line here is where the pipe would go John.
[2:28:51] So this is over in front of the wine shop.
[2:28:53] We would actually have to come out kind of and go right up the middle of the intersection there.
[2:28:56] is what we do now. As we go further down, Magnolia kind of shifts to the right hand side.
[2:29:02] Part of the cost here is there's existing utilities, there's a water line in that road,
[2:29:08] there's a sewer line in that road and it's those are the things we know about. So it's
[2:29:12] it's tight. We shouldn't, it doesn't look like we'd have to dig up. If we put the concrete
[2:29:17] pillows in, we wouldn't have to dig those up to put the water line in. So in that sense,
[2:29:21] the two projects can be separate.
[2:29:25] That they could, other than we've got a little box right here because water comes down,
[2:29:31] this curb right now and so, and maybe we could do something there, put a flume or something
[2:29:36] underneath there to get that water out.
[2:29:38] So, to your point, yes, I think you could go over on the Magnolia inside and do that and
[2:29:43] put a stop sign there and I don't think it impacts the drainage project.
[2:29:47] This one over here, I think maybe we could get creative with it and not have to dig it up again, but that would be the one spot
[2:29:55] There may need to be some musicians.
[2:29:57] Since you're separating and do you need to go out for the...
[2:30:00] Open bid or can you just go back out of the way you went before?
[2:30:03] Since you now think the price would come down under five?
[2:30:05] I would, well,
[2:30:09] if we separate them, I would still do the full advertisement.
[2:30:14] Because it gives it, then we're covered either way.
[2:30:16] If it comes in over under five hundred thousand dollars.
[2:30:20] Sir, remind me, again, the last time I researched these roads.
[2:30:24] We resurface Chinkopin in October, but we stopped right here in anticipation of this project.
[2:30:32] Okay, so we did have the fourth thought of this.
[2:30:33] Oh, yeah.
[2:30:34] We resurfaced Chinkopin right before the US opened to put these parallel parking spaces in here and we stopped right here.
[2:30:42] So you can actually go out there and look at it and it stopped here and it stopped here.
[2:30:47] So we are not going to have to dig up any roads that we have just recently resurfaced.
[2:30:52] That is correct.
[2:30:54] Well done.
[2:30:55] Now, Magnolia, I think Magnolia was resurfaced.
[2:30:59] It was before I got here.
[2:31:01] So I've been here five and a half years.
[2:31:02] So it was before that.
[2:31:03] It's not in terrible conditions.
[2:31:04] Well, Mike, do you understand?
[2:31:06] Well done.
[2:31:07] Because this is something that some people would have missed.
[2:31:10] And I'm glad that you caught this and have saved the village a lot of money.
[2:31:15] So thank you.
[2:31:16] You're welcome.
[2:31:18] Are the questions for Mike?
[2:31:20] We need a formal direction.
[2:31:22] or I think if you're good with our recommendation to put it back out but separate it to where
[2:31:28] we've got a price for the the islands and then an additional price to do the whole project
[2:31:33] that's that's what I need we will put that out and we'll come back to you at some point
[2:31:39] in the future with the options and how we're going to pay for it.
[2:31:43] Consider you have a green light from the council. That's what I need to thank you very much.
[2:31:48] All right, I am going to suggest we take a seven minute break on the calendar on the agenda.
[2:31:57] You have other business than.
[2:31:58] Oh, okay.
[2:31:59] Move it to adjourn.
[2:32:00] I have no other business.
[2:32:02] I didn't think so.
[2:32:03] I moved to adjourn.
[2:32:06] I didn't think any of us had any other business at this point.
[2:32:09] So we will take a motion.
[2:32:14] I moved to adjourn the regular meeting.
[2:32:16] Second.
[2:32:17] So adopted the back in seven minutes, thank you.