Full meeting transcript - May 9, 2023

» never mind there we go ready good evening kershaw county everyone here online and in the audience this is our regularly scheduled county council meeting for tuesday may 9th 2023 i call this meeting to order mr bobby gary will you take the podium please and open us in prayer thank you sir please stand for the pledge of allegiance right adoption of tonight's agenda is there a motion to adopt this agenda make a motion madam chair to adopt the agenda okay mr tucker has the motion is there a second second mr tomlinson with the second any discussion on tonight's agenda um i did have a madam chair i did have a matter that i wanted to bring up an executive session but i mean obviously i'll make that motion but i noticed it wasn't on the agenda so i don't know if we needed to amend the agenda to not

» e that and maybe we can ask for a legal no we don't we can have an executive session at any time so um when it's appropriate just make the motion thank you all right all those in favor of accepting tonight's agenda as is indicate by raising your hand and the vote is unanimous this agenda is approved moving on to proclamations we have one proclamation tonight honoring saint matthew baptist church and mr bobby gary is here from that church and mr gary i'm so sorry that i missed y'all's event on saturday the proclamation reads whereas saint matthew baptist church exists to glorify god and proclaim the gospel of jesus christ our savior to preach the good news of the same saving death and victorious resurrection of jesus christ so that all who believe will be saved and to baptize them in the nam

» e of the father of the son and of the holy ghost and whereas saint matthew baptist church vision is to be a transformed community of disciples committed to sharing god's love and seeing transformation by the grace of god they aim to be part of a growing church family that is focused on each member's spiritual emotional and physical growth and whereas at saint matthew's baptist church their mission is to save souls by glorifying god to spread his holy word to support fellow believers and to be a guiding light for the community and whereas saint matthew's baptist church was founded by former slaves in 1873 in lugoff south carolina a building was not available so worship services were held outdoors with the slaves from bell plantation under brush arbor later later in that same year mr gordon b

» ell and mr grady bell granted the worshipers two acres of land for a building and burial ground a church was built with services being held each sunday and prayer services being held during the week the old church is located approximately one mile from the present location of the church and whereas saint matthew's baptist church is celebrating the sesquicentennial anniversary of the church in may 2023 now therefore be it proclaimed that kershaw county council acknowledges and recognizes saint matthew's baptist church on its sesquicentennial 150th anniversary for its many contributions and accomplishments in kershaw county and in the state of south carolina and extends its congratulations on this historic occasion signed by kershaw county council this ninth day of may 2023 all those in favor

» of accepting the proclamation indicate by oh is there a motion to make a motion that we approve the proclamation please thank you mr tucker and mr shoemakes second is there any discussion very proud bobby to be a part of this resolution or proclamation and i want to just say you're looking good these days councilman again mr gary thank you and thank you for bringing this to our attention and including us on this special occasion anything else madam chair yes sir oh thank you um i just want to say to uh former councilman bobby gary uh congratulations too i was just making sure she was reading this she didn't say saint matthew united methodist which is my church so make sure they get it right but we've already celebrated 150 years we're clocking a little older than you guys but congratulation

» s to you and your church family and continue to do what you do in the community i know y'all have a lot of programs over that church where you feed and do different things in the community and very proud of you guys thank you all right with that we'll go to the vote all those in favor of approving this proclamation honoring saint matthew's baptist church indicate by raising your hand and the vote is unanimous thank you mr gary do we have uh councilman brazel on the phone okay councilman brazel can you hear us yes we can okay thank you madam chair yes sir unfortunately we're experiencing more technical difficulty with the live stream so they're going to continue to work on it but regardless we'll have it recorded and okay okay thank you uh mr galey do you want to take a photo okay well we we

» normally do that so i wanted to to ask you all right we're up to number six on our agenda public comments thank you mr dubose we have two speakers tonight the first speaker is mr tom webb the third hey tom yes so we're gonna um try something new tonight with the timer okay we'll have the timer on the screen and ryan does it make a noise at the end of five minutes okay no it doesn't sound like it is it turned on testing yeah all right seems like um council is still considering spending an awful lot of money on a sports complex and i want to speak to that a little bit um my my title to this rant is bread and circuses when rome was getting shaky they tried bread and circuses to manage the people to distract the people free food and games games lions and tigers and bears and gladiators and a fe

» w christians thrown in shall we spend millions of dollars on game complexes and pretend that heroes play there that what we want for heroes our children growing up to think that somebody who bounces a ball or hits one with a bat is a hero well that's great for kids to get some exercise but how much is enough for that question i keep asking uh you can go too far with moch anything there's not much left of rome these days but majestic ruins the coliseum for instance a monument to big mistakes and do you know what else rome did they hired foreigners who had no respect for roman values the foreigners sacked rome they turned against rome and we here in kershaw county have hired what looked to me like foreigners for the comprehensive plan the team they call it there's one pretty little girl the r

» est of them look like i don't know where they come from but they don't come from kershaw county so uh they're supposed to help with our comprehensive plan and i wonder how much they like our bill of rights free speech free thought private property gun rights free market individualism and american history my guess is anybody from way up there in the frozen north that look like they do probably don't give a darn about us thank you mr webb right the next speaker is jeff maddox hey jeff let's see if i can get this mic right um i got some notes today um years ago 2007 2008 when the great financial crisis started and all that's when i began my journey into the realm of politics and over those years i was instrumental in building one of the largest tea parties in in south carolina we on a regular

» basis we have between two and three hundred people at our tea party meetings every week we're getting involved pretty good um you may remember when when uh the obama administration went after tea parties you know the irs went after them and all you know if you signed up as a non-profit and all one of the things i advocated was that we didn't sign up that we didn't become any kind of uh known to government uh permissioned by government entity um we kept all our money any donations in a damn shoe box that's how we did it and we'd have a we'd have an open ledger of what we were spending and not we didn't report anything this is america during that same time i got a call from the fusion center a colonel and she asked me about the tea party you know at that time they were calling us domestic ter

» rorists and that kind of thing and uh i told her look here if you think we're domestic terrorists and the average age of my tea party is 65 we got a problem over those years i've been in i was targeted by the sheriff i was called uh tied to sovereign citizens and i was attacked by both republican and democrat parties back then it was chad conley and uh dick harpoon that came after me for speaking truth to power i've been called all kinds of names i was attacked on the mainstream media oh wis did stories of me and played the little sovereign citizen thing of shooting cops and all kinds of craziness so i've been through it i've been involved in in senate campaigns u.s senate campaigns against uh flimsy graham and i saw the inner workings of uh the political game and it's a dirty dirty filthy

» game this game of politics money dentists old families and political puppets plans are made behind closed doors and card games and back rooms and back door parties these plans they creep up in the political realm and they're they're played in in little committees and all and no one the public is unaware of these things until poof the idea is floated out there in trial balloon and then you start getting people coming up to the and advocating for these things when the plan has been laid long ago and such as such as this recreation plan we smelled of it a number of years ago and now we're seeing the fruition of it and now we're looking at up in the state house there's a 1.5 million dollar proposal for a ymca in kershaw county it's just interesting to me how these coincidences keep coming toget

» her at the same time the people don't have a voice for this no that plans been laid long ago that's all talk that's all propaganda we know that now i've been in the game too long i've become cynical at it but as jefferson said we should have a revolution every generation and that's what i advocate for because the system is so corrupted the system is so bureaucratic the system is so twisted that we've got to cut it off all the heads of medusa snakes i advocate for a complete and total tax revolt let's start over thank you thank you mr maddox all right that concludes public comments for tonight now we will move into a public hearing the public hearing will be on an ordinance authorizing the execution and delivery of an amendment to a fee agreement by and between kershaw county south carolina

» and cam for southern pine incorporated as sponsor and new south lumber company incorporated and new south camden properties llc as sponsor affiliates to provide an extension of the investment period and other matters related there too we'll open the public hearing now i didn't even think about this public hearing but it kind of goes in line with what i was just saying government is picking winners and losers all the time now government interferes in what is not the free market you look at the medical industry and the rules and regulations there you look at the comprehensive planning and have to go on you look at all fees and lose and all kinds of deals and public private partnerships and all the incestuous intertwining that the government does and i hear a lot of people say you know that's

» just the way it is it's always been this way yeah i guess i suppose it's true because even after the constitution these games were played about picking winners and losers back then it was massive chunks of property and uh the debasing of the currency and the the veterans of the revolutionary war had to sell their script for near nothing when speculators came in then they lobbied congress and congress gave them on par so they would make thousands of percent by speculating and then lobbying the government to get things done and that's what happens here because you see these companies come in and they're looking for the best deals look at uh who was it f and n uh recently you know the the fee and lieu agreement didn't pass and all and so they were already in negotiations with pickens county to

» get their little slice and so we're left with these little municipalities and all trying to outbid who's going to uh pick a winner and loser and who's going to give the most and all when it's not government's job the free market would decide for itself had it not been for government sticking their nose in the business that we don't have any use in it's kind of like this comprehensive planning thing where it comes down from mount high that we have to do these things and they give you a criteria where you got to cover environment blah blah why can't we just uh right on there um we're going to try to be the freest county and in south carolina and maybe in the nation we're going to rely on the free market we're going to do something a little bit different than what's done before because like i'

» ve said to you guys before i can't find anything that it's well-intentioned yes but i can't find anything that's turned out well when we look at the nation the nation's 33 trillion dollars in debt and yet we keep playing these games and playing these games and pushing wars and and comprehensive planning and all to what end to what end so i know this disagreement's just an extension and everything and i know you guys are going to do it and all i can't say as i blame you but uh it's something that we need to think about what is the fundamental function of government and what does it mean to freedom we're not free we tout it we pledge allegiance we sing the songs we do all that but hell no we're not free and i want freedom for my kids i want them for her grandkids and his grandkids and jimmy's

» and yours i want them for everybody but the only way we're going to do it is government has got to get smaller it's got to and it's going to one way shape form or another and until people step up and say we're going to do the hard thing we're going to start cutting this cutting this thing back before it destroys every bit of freedom that we were promised in 1776 with the declaration of independence what else to say anymore i mean the people the people might be waking up a little bit but they're scared to speak they have no voice they're they're they're intimidated by their own government you know i go harking back to what jesus did when the bankers got into the temple and he whipped them that's where we're at that's where we're at i'm done thank you guys thank you mr maddox any other speake

» rs for the public hearing mr robert bird do you go by bob bob hi bob thank you for being here tonight tell us where you're from um i'm uh have a residence here in camden on ladford lane and uh i'm the plant manager of the canvore southern pine mill here okay just a few things i wanted to share with you all uh we talk about trees and forestry and all these things uh we uh practice sustainable forestry we've done that for years our products are stamped with an sfi stamp which ensures uh that we're managing our forest correctly and we plant more trees every year than we cut so make sure that supply is sustainable and we use 100 of the trees that are brought into the mill uh we sell all kinds of byproducts bark sawdust shavings from planter and uh some of that we use for fuel to uh heat our dry

» kills we use the green sawdust for a couple kills and we use bark and sawdust for the other ones that runs our boiler um we we process probably 18 to 20 000 tons of logs a week which translates to about six to seven hundred truckloads of logs we also employ 200 people at our mill and we have some projects that we're working on now smaller projects but we have another big project coming up the first part of next year we've already made a purchase order for that for a new green sorter to go on our sawmill which will pretty much complete all the work we wanted to do on the sawmill and that's a probably about a 10 10 million dollar investment when we get through with that and then after that we have a couple more dry kills we need to build and some other smaller type projects uh that we'll be w

» orking on so the original agreement that we had was for 35 million we probably spent approximately 70 million dollars so far uh which has really uh made a big difference in uh our production rates and our reliability in camden uh we're trying to get my goal is to get camden in a place to where it's uh will be in good shape for the next 10 to 15 to 20 years and be a sustainable workplace for our employees and uh they'll have uh steady reliable jobs and we've done a lot of work around pay and benefits we have excellent benefits and uh we're constantly looking at that trying to improve that so i brought a short video that'll kind of show the process of what we do and how we do it and some of the improvements we put in it's about five or six minutes and then after that if you have any questions

» i'll be glad to try to answer them okay thank you mr bird brian do you have the video thank you mr bird for that video that's cool if i may yes mr jones i just want to say thank you for one what a what a great way to tour your facility without having to leave our seats i'm very impressed you've been good partners with kershaw county from the very beginning and we thank you for all your investments and what you and what you mean to us here thank you so much any other speakers for the public hearing right with that i will close the public hearing item number eight approval of minutes this is for the tuesday april 25th regularly scheduled meeting is there a motion to approve the minutes i'm chair make a motion we approve the april 25th minutes okay mr tucker makes the motion is there a second

» second second by mr tomlinson any discussion i'd just like to thank ms hannah for for the minutes thank you yes absolutely miss hannah you are very thorough thank you any other discussion all right with that i'll call the vote all those in favor of approving the minutes from tuesday april 25th indicate by raising your hand and is mr brazel still on the line mr brazel okay so it's um all those in favor are mr cato mr tomlinson mr jones myself mr shoemake and mr tucker and absent is mr brazel right those meeting minutes are approved and um miss hannah will put them on the website for everyone number nine discussion item tonight i'm going to hand it over to the county administrator to introduce but this is the kershaw county impact fee study that's been discussed um for years now and mr noon k

» ester is here he is the study consultant so i will hand it over to you danny madam chair members of council what uh this has been an ongoing process with looking at what a an impact fee would do for kershaw county um there's there's a lot of rules and regulations to it it only allows us to spend money from this effort on expansion not current services or anything like that but matt will certainly shed some light on that um but it it would um involve a fee on all new construction unfortunately we're not able to parse out uh major developments from minor development from an individual building a house so any house being built this fee would have would apply to but um with that i will turn it over to matt i think he has some slides as well and um let him just give you all a 10 000 foot view no

» w this process is still ongoing it's going to go before the planning commission to let them look at it and so it's still have has several several steps to go through but uh again matt is here just to give you all kind of a high level view of what this would be okay thank you while he comes up can we get a copy of the report in these slides emailed to us yes yes absolutely thank you and mr templar what goes before the planning commission this presentation that we're getting it would be the study the study that he has uh we've received the study back and and his in his report his official report so um and he can walk you all through the specific stuff okay hi matt thank you for being here tonight thank you for having me okay well as mentioned my name is matt noonkester i own a firm called cit

» y explain incorporated mr noonkester you'll have to speak into the mic you can take it off if you'd like sorry i was born that's okay soft talker okay good evening good evening uh my name is matt noonkester i own a firm called city explain incorporated we are hired to be an extension of staff to do what i'll call at this point a proof of concept for development impact fee study that would comply with state law and so for this evening kind of as working off of the opening that was given i consider this more of a briefing and more of a conversation if and when you decide to move forward we'll do a formal presentation where we have to check certain boxes under state law to say that we've looked at certain things you'll make a certain type of motion all that kind of stuff but for today i really

» just want to set the table for these documents that we've submitted so that when you read them you kind of have some things to look for because frankly they're a little bit thick and they need to be to comply with state law and give the information needed if we ever had to go to court but at the same time i want to give you the highlights so when you read them you'll know what to look for so i did put a couple of slides together so if you could go ahead and do the next advance for me i've got five quick things here it'll be an introduction that we'll start with and i'm just going to kind of run through the who what where when and why of impact fees for you so again by way of introduction next slide please south carolina has both the blessing and the curse of having state legislation that gu

» ides how an impact fee study needs to be done it's a blessing in that there are states around the country that would love to have the opportunity to think about an impact fee even if they decide not to do it it's a curse in that there are a lot of requirements that need to be met in order to implement and maintain an impact fee so when we're talking about these again as i was mentioning in the opening these are fees that are put forth to new development only so new development that comes in that pulls a building building permit and wants to construct and invest within the county from whatever date you adopt your ordinance would then have to pay an impact fee any existing development that's on the books right now or anything that already has a building permit in place but it's not yet finish

» ed would not be subject to the impact fee matt what what is considered a development so there's actually a definition within the state law on on that and it would be any type of investment that would be made there are some exclusions like if you replace something that's burnt down or if you expand an existing use but it's not detrimental to the supporting infrastructure residential development if you add a a basketball court or a tiny house or you know accessory dwelling in or whatever they're calling it these days those kind of things there are some exemptions for there's also specific exemptions for schools and volunteer fire departments and affordable housing if you decide to go that route as well but it's a single family home is considered a development correct just one house okay yes u

» h and not only that it would be a single family detached home a mobile home an apartment a town everything um and again we had to prepare the study and would have to go through the process following the south carolina development impact fee act so i'll refer to the word act quite a bit that just means state law for this evening excellent so what are impact fees and why would you want to use them uh they work or are most uh well received in communities that have a lot of growth pressure coming on but they want to pass the cost of new development on to those who are coming to the county in this case versus the existing residents that are here right now and so it's a way to make sure that you collect at least a portion of the impacts that new development has as they move into kershaw county i

» just want to be very specific if we get into conversation later the act says that a city or a county has the authority to collect an impact fee we'll get into what that means if you're an enterprise fund or a special district fire a special tax district fire prevent provider something of that nature there's additional provisions that need to be put in if you're if you want to go down that road but specifically in the law it says if you're a city or a county you have the authority to collect these fees and you have to pass what's called a rational nexus test which basically means that the person or the thing that is creating the burden is the one who should pay a proportionate share of solving that burden and again there are growing interests all across south carolina if you go to the next s

» lide i'll continue here but i actually have a map where you can see who's been doing it lately these do work when you have land available for development again because new growth has to come in and pay for this and in places where you have resistance to increase taxes or you're having funding shortfalls with your budgets and things a lot of people talk about development impact fees in that context so this is a map of other jurisdictions within south carolina that are collecting impact fees at this time the green dots are ones where they've already done it i just put the two white dots in there to remind myself to mention as you go through this process the city of camden is also considering impact fees and i'm actually doing that study and i'll be meeting with them next week but just so if y

» ou hear conversations in both directions i want you to know that camden is also looking at an impact fee at this time is it is it like i know certain kinds of taxes if camden does an impact fee would that be exclusive to camden and to the exclusion of us or if you build a new house in camden we passed it camden passes it you pay two impact fees or just the one you just pay the one if we voted on our impact fee first would we cover the county or could camden come in after that and do theirs there's a provision in the law that we would have to work out how like it i'm presuming you're thinking of like an annexation agreement or something i'm just thinking like if we're first to the table if we pass a kind of wide impact fee does that negate camden's ability to do it or can they do it and sort

» of take that impact fee from us they they can't take it from you what the you have to apply it only where your jurisdiction applies and so i have a slide coming up where it'll say basically unincorporated kershaw county is where we're doing our study okay so it's it's similar to like an h tax i got you okay good concept that's a good analogy um great great um and i i come here not as a proponent just i have an education on impact fees i always like to tell you the good and the bad so those two circles you see with berkeley county and dorchester county i actually did their impact fee studies years ago and they elected to unwind it and they went the sales tax route so you know it's not that impact fees are for everyone and you have to have eyes wide open as you go through and as we continue d

» own this path together we can talk about the pros and cons and what the different experiences were of these jurisdictions and so again just sometimes because a picture's worth a thousand words for me you see here just a development uh from anywhere in the country and if you click the next one you'll see that everywhere that there's a rooftop right now i've put a red dot on top of it if you were to enact a impact fee today all of those homes in red would have already been built and would not be subject to the impact fee next slide but even if you've already approved a development a major development but they haven't pulled their building permits yet those homes or those businesses would be required to come in under the development impact fee so the reason i bring that up is a lot of people t

» hink very strategically about when you pass your ordinance what is your effective date because if you make it tomorrow a lot of people weren't counting on that and their performance and the like or if you put it too far out you're going to get a rush of permits that come in who are trying to beat the fee so it's very strategic on what date you pick in terms of your effective date so again you can have the same neighborhood where some of the homes paid an impact fee and some of the homes did not pay an impact fee and it all comes down to when you enable this and implement it all right so just a few requirements of the act if you can go to the next slide as you go through here there are very specific provisions within state law for what impact fees can be used for and not used for so they can

» be used for anything that increases capacity to serve new development so i get these questions all over the state and they say can you use impact fees for this i say well are we increasing capacity let's go through that exercise and see if the answer is yes if it is it might be eligible for impact fees once it does increase capacity you can use it for all phases of bringing that project online the design and engineering if you have to do land acquisition the construction utility relocation you can even use it for the financing of that specific project but the law is also very clear on what you can't use it for so once that improvement's brought online or any existing infrastructure you have right now you cannot use this money to maintain it you can't pay any administrative costs to have thi

» s program and any of the operating costs that come with it so i i tell the joke all the time that i can probably find a grant to get you a bus but the real commitment is if you're going to operate the bus from here till forever that money would not be covered by an impact fee you'd have to find a way to operate and maintain that bus as you went forward once you collect this money it has to go into an interest bearing account so you just have this money sitting waiting for the project that's needed it must be spent within three years of the scheduled improvement date within the project list this is what got berkeley county in trouble a little bit was they were saving for an interchange but they didn't get development fast enough to buy an interchange within three years so if you do go forwar

» d with this you're going to want to have a list of projects that are small medium and large so that if you need to spend the money you can spend it on something you would have to do an annual monitoring report and report on what you've spent the money on each year and you would have to update this plan and usually the stat the fallback is to do it every five years when you review your comprehensive plan and then if you wanted to charge any higher fees fees or different fees or that nature you would have to update the study to support that increase next please yeah and then there are four specific documents or things if you use the official term that need to be created so the first is the justification report you can have a copy of that now we've turned that in it's about 85 pages but about

» 60 of its appendices again we just need to be prepared to go to court if we have to so we want to show that we've done a very thorough study but this is what i kind of call the adult book report so this is where we have documented everything you have now what shape it's in what it's worth so we can understand what the maximum allowable impact fee might be based on your existing assets number two is something that's in process we need to still work with staff to finalize a list of capital projects that we would want to consider and eligible for funding so that's something that would need to be done before this briefing became a formal presentation number three is a study of how these impact fees affect housing affordability within the county that study has been completed and is available for

» your review and then the actual ordinance itself we have turned in a draft ordinance as well it's about 30 pages or so but it's very specific about how an impact fee would be administered calculated and monitored so as was mentioned in the opening this discussion's been going on for quite some time our work has been going on for several months i just wanted to kind of show you a punch list of what we've done and what would be left to do if you decide to move forward so in terms of the feasibility studies we have done the homework that we had to do you all have passed a resolution telling the planning commission they needed to do this study so we've checked that box under state law and then we've created the three documents again the capital improvements plan project list is still outstandin

» g that would be something we would do as we move forward and then we would go into what i call the public comment period this would be one box to check under the public comment period but formally you have to go to planning commission and have them make a formal recommendation to you all as council and then you all would have to hear and consider the impact fees and just like you would any other ordinance you would have to go through that process to review and adopt the ordinance and make it long okay so as i mentioned some of the documents next slide the documents have been created so i just want to give you some highlights as you read them in the coming days and weeks so the first one is the impact fee report itself the justification report and what we did here was look at all the existin

» g conditions that you have right now we anticipated what future needs you might have and we put a cost to all of that and we did it for four different impact fees at this time parks and recreation fire protection emergency medical services and then a catch-all category i call municipal facilities and equipment and if you look on there it includes public works the sheriff library solid waste and government services that are affected by growth so things like the planning department the engineering department e911 those kind of things that would be affected by growth are included in here and so this gets back to the question earlier about where the impact fees would apply and this is in the report but everywhere that you see in blue we went ahead and did the study for the entire county so all

» of all of unincorporated kershaw county is eligible for an impact fee we wanted to do the report with the broadest scope so that if you ever wanted to extend or expand something you didn't have to go redo a study the areas that you see in red you would not be able to collect impact fees in whether it's bethune elgin or camden because they are incorporated cities and or towns and they would have to implement their own impact fees you can't you can't go in and collect a county impact fee in a town limits regardless wherever they want to or not so let's say bethune has no desire elgin has no desire of ever implementing that we still couldn't collect it from the county side i have not seen that done before with all those those dots that were on the state yes usually it's the boundaries the boun

» dary okay and that's how they've done it all right thank you yep thank you for the for this report um i know that there's been a lot of concern about growth with this county council and i know that the impact fee was mentioned to try to try to help and offset some of that but to my understanding that that that would the impact fee would not help us control the growth because basically all it would be is another way for us to generate some revenue correct yeah impact fees are not prohibiting growth they're just trying to create accountability because basically what happens is that the builder comes in pays the impact fee and he's going to pass it right down to the consumer so it's just a general it's just a revenue generating mechanism that primarily you are correct it's not a way to dissuad

» e growth thank you but it also to to to that point though hasn't it in some of these counties where you've seen it can help direct growth so if you have an area that's densely populated as an impact fee and an area next door that's more rural that doesn't have an impact fee the growth in that area may increase um you know i know that's happened in the low country where they've had impact fees in the more populated area to sort of engineer growth so if you have a county like ours with a densely populated say elgin if if the elgin unincorporated area had an impact fee it could in theory push some of that growth up to different areas and spread that growth out more evenly if you've seen that in barriers yeah and in fact that's one of the reasons i wanted to mention in my opening that both you

» and the city of camden are considering an impact fee at the same time there there is some potential that depending on what decisions are made on both sides of that line could impact where growth would want to go and i'll show as an extreme i'll tell you uh you know like in fort mill up on the on the state line their school district actually i think has a 20 or 21 000 impact fee for schools and that's what led to the court challenge and everything else it was upheld but as much as you would think that would move the growth around the market's so hot there and to your point of just giving it to the buyer they're still building there so i think it could be used in tandem with some other things like where you provide infrastructure and that kind of thing but there is there is some evidence that

» the impact fees when they get to a certain point will get people to make a decision on where they want to invest yep so um lancaster county uh are you familiar with them that okay so indian land is eating their lunch with growth and it is my understanding from talking with fellow council members and residents up there that there's an impact fee in the indian land area but it's not down in kershaw the town of kershaw those are some options that we have where we can strategically implement this impact fee if it's something council decides to do that's actually a perfect question for my slide because that's where i'm at right there so thank you for that uh can i say can i mention something to you on that on behalf of just following up with council tucker i think the geography of our county wil

» l depend on where the growth is coming not impact fees i could probably make a i can make several cases um i won't agree with you yeah well and that's fine um you know as a planner i will tell you that usually uh water and especially sewer and transportation are really how you can direct a lot of growth in the future um impact fees to the point i was making earlier can get people who are on the fence of deciding to go one way or another but we're not talking about sewer water we're talking about impact fees right now you are yes yeah yeah um but with some of the other projects that are going on right now studies you could be talking about those topics as well to direct growth i think thank you matt when is the impact fee paid uh it's it's calculated at the time of building permit okay uh th

» e way i've written the ordinance right now you would collect it before they could get a certificate of occupancy okay and the the theory there is that they're not actually creating the demand until they're occupying the building that's why we let them wait for that long okay and how is the fee um determined by size of the house no so um all the impact fee categories like the i'll call it the unit of analysis that we used is either population meaning residents or employees and so we have a per capita or per employee number throughout the document by each of the categories and the way we determine what type of home pays what amount is how many people tend to live in there okay thank you yes um so again just coming back mr tucker to your question what you see here on the map right now are what

» we call service zones and you can create service zones that would collect impact fees and have to spend them in certain areas and again i go back to the berkeley county example we had five service zones but we only collected them in one service zone basically from monks quarter down to the 26 corridor everywhere else we said there wasn't enough growth coming in future years we wouldn't be able to spend the money within the three years so we just didn't turn them on so you could do something like that as well okay at this point in time parks and recreation and that municipal facilities and services category we assumed could be county-wide fire protection and emergency medical services we assumed either the fire districts or the emergency response areas that you could turn on or off if you ch

» ose to do it now here's the catch to think about as you're as you're thinking about service zones or not where you collect the fee is where you have to spend the fee and so if you have a larger service zone it gives you more flexibility for where you can spend that money and it in theory is accumulating more money to spend within that area the tighter service zones allow you to turn things on and off but you really need to make sure the places you turn on are going to see growth come in the future if not they're not generating any revenue for you so again it's just something to think about so when you decided well you didn't decide what council decided in berkeley county to only collect for monks cornerback the goose creek you spent no money in bono no money in cross um trying to think what

» else is up 52 but um none of that nor way up there whatever it is none of that northern part money was spent on no we couldn't justify enough growth to need a project up there because it was a transportation impact fee and basically the roads were able to absorb what little growth they had going on north amongst corner uh next slide please hey matt how are these zones um determined so for fire protection we use the fire districts okay uh and for ems we use the response areas that they're using to provide the service again going back to that rational nexus term if i had to go to court and i could say well you know this ems station provides service in the area you're in that's why we collected that fee to go to that station so that that's the argument we try to make on this the other thing i

» just want to make sure you understand as you're reading the document is we use what's called a consumption driven approach which in its simplest form if you think about it now the the six of you could stand in line and then when the seventh person comes in they need to pay the same proportion you all paid and as new growth comes in they get in the back of the line they just keep saying paying the same proportion in order to try to increase services so that's sort of what we did for all the different impact fee categories next slide and the way we did this was we started we interviewed all of your different department heads that were in those categories that we talked about we pulled your property schedules for your insurance policies we pulled your vehicle inventories that you had we went o

» n to gis and the assessors database and got the land values but this was really kind of a technique like a snowball technique where we just started doing research until we could get enough information to write the report so that's kind of how we did this and it's the same way we've done it throughout the state so then the other thing just to have in your mind as you're reading these reports you're going to see presented what's called the maximum allowable impact fee that's the most money i can collect for you based on the data that you had available most communities though also adopt what's called a discount rate the discount rate is some percentage off of that maximum allowable sometimes it's because they want to be competitive in the region sometimes people pick it because they want to se

» nd a message coming back to what we were talking about earlier other places will do it so that just in case there's any data discrepancy or something we did get challenged we would have a little bit of wiggle room as we were being reviewed but the discount rate is a policy decision only it has nothing to do with the math or the inventory that we did but it is there and it would be solely a policy decision of your this council as you move forward so so if i may if you do this versus the other slide um in your collections your maximum allowable impact fee um anything else that you want to increase you would have to have another study done that's correct okay yep next slide so these are actually the numbers calculated um so you know if you don't want to read the whole report this is the slide

» for you that you can just keep coming back to but this is for um all four categories that we have for you so parks and recreation fire protection ems admissible facilities and equipment what would be the maximum you could charge and then i just put theoretical discount rates you can choose any number between zero and a hundred but i just chose these four so you could see so even if you wanted to i can't justify through the data collecting any more than two thousand six hundred ninety one dollars on a new home that comes in one of the things that i i bring to your attention because it was a really big issue in in york county with school district one um i was just part of that process is they were very sensitive to the mobile home issue and so i want you to be aware that in order to pass that

» rational nexus test anybody who creates demand on the system has to pay their proportionate share as soon as you start exempting those folks from doing it the other folks get upset and they sue so if you're going to do this you have to do it for everybody and so you'll see in their single family homes mobile homes uh multi-family the apartment townhome or condo and there's actually uh like four pages of land uses for each category that are in there as you see those numbers yes why are mobile homes so high is it because they're less value so you try to i'm not understanding how you derive to it's because they put a demand on the system right it's because the u.s census bureau reports there are more people living in a mobile home per home than living in a single family home per home you're ki

» dding i'm telling times are tough out there guys that's what struck me when i saw the numbers is like you know you gotta you know people building three uh four hundred thousand dollar homes it's gonna pay less than the guy that's in a single wire trying and trying to make it and again i i just tell you how it is that's probably one of the primary reasons that they don't have the school district one york county impact fee is because they were very sensitive to that you've done a you've done a great job here tonight but i'm not for it okay you i i wasn't here to i wasn't here to guard your support i understand but i'm just making a comment thank you you you said earlier that some of it had to do with the number of people in the home so if you had a couple that was wanting to build a house tha

» t had four children or five children and a couple that wanted to build a house that had no children the couple without children would have less of an impact fee than is is that my understanding or did i understand that wrong the way that uh kind of the the precedent that's been set is people use the average person per household published by the u.s census bureau and so in that case they're not judging number of bedrooms or coming to an average now one of the things we did do in the draft ordinance that we wrote for you is we created a provision called an independent impact fee calculation so if anybody wanted to challenge and say i'm building a 55 plus community we don't have children or we don't they could come in and if they could with they would on a letter provide proof that that's what

» they're selling then that you could grant if you wanted to a different impact fee because again we do it per person so if right now somebody wants to come in and then hold to it almost like a restriction that they would have less people in their homes then you could probably grant them that question so the people that um implemented impact fees um before the state got involved with all these laws of having these studies done because this wasn't always how it was done since i've been on council you could go in and do your ordinance as a municipality or as a county and set your fees wherever you want to set it and if you don't believe it go to mount pleasant it's a nice one down there i did it i did it okay um are they rain back in now or they grandfathered in before those laws took took effe

» ct so mount pleasant was allowed to do it before the law but then they wanted to update their numbers and when they wanted to update their numbers they had to come in under the new act okay so that's what got them was they they let the old one go as long as they could before they really wanted higher numbers but once you update to the higher numbers they had to go under state law so mount pleasant is now consistent with the development impact fee act goose creek was the same way okay so yeah slowly as the number isn't high enough anymore that they picked long ago they are coming in the conformance with the new law okay thank you yeah excellent so the next part would be the capital improvements project list this has not been created to date but when you if and when we create that it'll be a

» list of projects in each of the four categories for which impact fees would be eligible to be spent on again i would advocate for a small medium large type portfolio as you're going through this to make sure you can meet the three-year spend requirement as part of it you have to have a start and completion date that you're targeting try to summarize where the revenues and expenditures will be coming and going to and how the project will be funded and specifically the ones that will be funded with impact fees so we can look at that in terms of things that are eligible again it's things that create new capacity on the system it wouldn't be to affect any existing deficiencies or anything of that nature it had to be tied to new growth in order to happen right the third item is that what's calle

» d the affordable housing study uh that needs to be done um that has been done and turned in the law requires a study to be done it is silent on how you do the study we've done enough of these now and the other consulting firms who are doing them we all kind of do them the same way because there's comfort in doing the same analysis so that's what we've done here you go to the next slide please ryan so what we end up using is the us hud requirement or threshold of 30 percent of your income being spent on housing and as you look at this now the table one that you see at the top is before the impact fees and table three that you see at the bottom is after the impact fees are applied so what you see here is to own a home in unincorporated kershaw county is expensive and it's growing and part of

» the reason it's growing frankly is because people are moving in from outside who are selling a home in the northeast and paying cash for whatever number the developer tells them it is because it's a good deal in their mind so it's right it's bringing the cost up but you can see for owner occupied housing in both conditions you would be over the 30 percent threshold now again i just call it like it is the law doesn't ask you to do anything with this it's just information that you know that you're above the 30 percent threshold for rental you're okay and then the final component that we have that you can review moving forward is the actual development impact fee ordinance it is lengthy it's lengthy on purpose so we can be ready for anything that comes in it has an impact fee schedule so a tab

» le that you can quickly see for your convenience what the impact fees might be if charged but if you read the letter of the law we spell out everything is a math problem so that if something happens that that schedule isn't ready for or something we didn't anticipate the math problem rules the day and we can apply that in any way needed and then this is actually a spreadsheet that was turned in with the development impact fee ordinance and it's set up as a spreadsheet for a reason because where those colors are on the top you can apply different discount rates and see the numbers change if you're trying to hit a target so just some things to consider and kind of in closing if it comes to impact fees whether you decide to do them or not it's fine with me i'm just doing the study and the proo

» f of concept for you but timing is everything so obviously the economic conditions whether you're growing or not growing is really important the political support and the understanding of what impact fees are who else is doing them as was mentioned some of these questions in the low country it's just sort of the way they do business down there now because everybody's sort of done them you start to see that happening around the charlotte area as well not so much in this region and so think about where you are in the region and what you want to do it's important consideration before you move forward and then the budget planning process as i said this time of year is when people usually ask me to come present because they're worried about how they're going to fund some of their gaps within the

» ir budget and so they want to hear about development impact fees madam chair yes mr nuncaster um so say i know you said new growth um say you know i have a single odd and i was renting it on some land i was able to buy some land but i owned the house or was able to buy the house and i moved it from one location to another would that impact fee then apply to the new location so the person who owned that home and then moved to another location with that mobile home would an impact fee apply at that point if you're creating a demand in a new location it would apply now there'd be a credit at the old one but there would be a new impact fee at the new one and the same applies to a house so if i bought a house and i moved it from one location to another location that would be new development yeah

» then that impact fee would apply yeah the simple test is are you creating new demand in a new location that needs capacity that's the test that you would have i just show you this slide in terms of partnering strategy just let you know that there are some considerations to be had i'm not saying you know one should lead the other but just so you know what's going on with the city of camden's discussions on this um they're forthcoming uh next week they have a meeting on this topic but i just want to bring up that there is some interesting things to think about on either side of the boundary if one both or none of you adopt an impact fee and so all i tell you is to have eyes wide open and ears listening for what's going on in your region and then in terms of the partnering strategy you know ho

» pefully i've conveyed this to you today i'm not an impact fee sales person i don't really care if you do it or not i just want to make sure you had all the information you needed to so you can make an educated decision and you have the information prepared if you want to move forward so again just having an open and honest approach and and looking at the pros and cons of this are very important some councils have uh acted favorably and passed some had said nope this isn't for me and i'm just putting it out there that there's gone both ways you've done a good job thank you thank you thank you maybe in closing i should just end there yes mr tucker um was there any consideration anything written in this study uh to address uh campers you know like some people live on their parcel land but they

» live in their campers not at this time okay thank you matt can you walk me through um and like a dumbed down version of how the justification came to be for the amounts because you're not allowed to discriminate through this process but i feel like the selection of the amounts is inherently discriminatory by making the mobile homes pay more than everybody else so it just seems like square footage or the amount of your building would be non-discriminatory yes so i'm just trying to think how i want to answer this so i'm just going to take any impact fee category call it category a it doesn't matter which of the four it is what i end up doing is i come in almost like an actuary or an auditor and i basically come in and see everything that you have right now uh for that impact fee category so d

» o you own land for that category yes well how much is it worth do you own buildings for that category uh do you have vehicles and equipment that qualify for impact fees so i basically just add up all the wealth of your existing service provision whether it's parks fire emso and based on that value i put that in the numerator then we divide that by the number of residents in the denominator again that consumption driven approach is if you just get in line and the next person gets in line behind you then if you divide the total cost by the number of residents you get a per resident cost now the problem comes in whether you believe the census or not is when you go and click a single family home a mobile home or an apartment the u.s census bureau again whether you believe it or not is reporting

» that there are more people living in a mobile home per home on average than are living in a single family home in kershaw county in kershaw county yes and that that's how why would they be penalized though why would they have to pay more just because that's what they're choosing to live in it's not what they're choosing to live in it's because the demand and the system is created by people people create the demand and so if you have more people in a structure that's creating more demand that's the theory behind it okay so me and my husband and our two kids we purchase a mobile home we pay higher we purchase a single family home we pay less we're still four people with the same demand that's that's correct in that single case but when you go to the the data that has looked at your entire cou

» nty they're just saying for whatever reason whether it's whether you believe in the census what do you think it's accurate i mean there's all kinds of things we could challenge on the census but it's an agreed upon data source is that whenever they knocked on doors or whenever they did whatever they did they found more individuals in a mobile home than they found more individuals in a single family home that's all it is it's we're not trying to discriminate one way or the other we're just trying to use a data source that's available are there any other data sources you can use or any other um math that you can use to come up with it what i would probably do is again in the in the ordinance when you read it look just because it'll be a pdf you can do a word find just look for the word indepe

» ndent it'll come up a lot because we do prepare for that so in theory let's say you have a single family home or let's say you have a mobile home and you're coming in and you want to show that um only my wife and i are going to live there two people there's a letter you can fill out that you would say we commit to only having two people live here if that's the case then you would take that cost per person for two people instead of 2.68 or whatever it is and you would multiply that out but then the problem comes in in the enforcement is let's say you you have a child are you going to come tell the county oh we added a third a person so now we're three and so i mean that that's it's the enforcement issue that just gets a little so is um cost per resident the only way to do this there's no cos

» t per square footage or cost per amount of building you could probably do that but if two people live in a 5 000 square foot home or two people live in a 500 square foot home it's the people that put the demand on the system not the square footage so it's just kind of been common practice that you use per resident and per employee and i'm speaking of all the firms who do that work okay thank you these are these are to be just so i understand the methodology that you're talking about this is the methodology that survived appellate court scrutiny district court scrutiny so these are the these are the methodologies that that have existed after all the litigation if we were to develop a new process we'd have to pilot that through the entire litigation process to get to the end to see like you m

» entioned with the school when they anything you do novel outside of the lane of generally accepted practices you open yourself up to litigation and carrying that through the supreme court level until you know if it's an accepted practice is that fair yeah development impact fees are like any other ordinance it's nice to have partners and you know when you go to court and you can show the judge that look 90 of the state is doing it this way that's a powerful statement to me any questions for matt any other discussion okay danny so what's the timeline before i know this is going to planning what sort of the timeline until that will be back to us or could be back to us matt what was what did we have down when we uh trying to remember exactly but i know the resolution basically had it was eithe

» r 90 or 120 days or said or reasonably expected so we put we put that in there i just want to make sure i mean regardless i mean obviously whether or not it carries the day here is a different question but i just want to make sure that it doesn't stay in planning i want to make sure it comes back so that we can make our decision and that it doesn't sort of languish in planning so you know my response will be it certainly won't be next council meeting but it won't be next year either so it's it's you know there's some progressions that has to go through but i expect it to come back here i mean y'all we've um we've done the work we spent the money so you know you yes you bring the question before y'all to see what direction you want to go with it um so all right that's fine i i can be i can h

» ave some flexibility but i think that you know if we're a month and a half down the road and planning is still waiting to to take a look at it i think we'll need to maybe light a fire so we're up or down it needs to come back to us it's been a long time i think i guess i'm just okay i don't think you can it can't make this budget year though can it danny no oh yeah i agree councilman jones i wouldn't even try to do i just i just think you know we've heard issues go down there to die and i just want to make sure that we have the final say sooner rather than later understood anything else i'm good to finish reading this document then i'll have more questions but uh if you direct any questions of staff i'd be happy to help them answer them okay thank you and thank you for your hard work and tr

» ying to get this where we can understand it and make sure that if it's something that council chooses to do we're not not creating a liability where we can continue to get sued yeah so appreciate that it's in my best interest too yes sir matt is this your last slide uh i'm going to call it either way okay i know we're kind of acting like it's done but just wanted to check with you all right anything else from council matt thank you very much for being here thank you for your hard work and thank you for being available for our questions of course all right that concludes our discussion on the kershaw county impact fee study um mr templar just make sure we get a copy of the study and also these slides and to any of the um members or citizens in kershaw county if you if you'd like to see the s

» tudy or have any questions on it please give us a call i think the citizens would just appreciate us getting the live streaming back up yes they would um any update on that ryan mr templar no have to push it out like the last time so work to resolve it so some people rely on that live stream so um did we fix it from the last time well the last time it was a third party issue okay all of our equipment this time it's an equipment issue okay with the camera itself okay um can we get voice live yeah we've got well not live but we'll have the audio copy available asap okay thank you good madam chair may i could you please look into the fact what it would cost us to own our own system to do it so we would not have to rely on a third party if that's possible yes i think it might be possible but if

» you would look into it okay back on our agenda we're up to ordinances so we have a couple tonight the first one is going to be the third reading of an ordinance authorizing the execution and delivery of an amendment to the fee agreement by and between kershaw county south carolina and can for southern pine incorporated um this is the third and final hearing we have the public hearing on it thank you mr bird and mr maddox for speaking is there a motion pertaining to this ordinance i so move okay mr jones makes the motion and sir second i second mr shu makes seconds and into discussion again thank you great partners with kershaw county appreciate it i don't make a lot of motions up here unless it's for myself but uh i appreciate you guys mr bird i don't have any additional questions or anythi

» ng thank you for being here and thank you for your investment in kershaw county this is an extension of the currently existing fee in lieu execution and delivery yes mr tucker thank you um i would just like to say a hearty thank you as well i didn't realize you had 200 employees out there so that was a good number to hear and uh and i said this last council meeting i really appreciate y'all getting your seeds correct choosing camden versus conway we're greatly grateful for that but thank you and continue to grow all right anything else okay all right all those in favor of the ordinance authorizing the execution and delivery of an amendment to a fee agreement by and between kershaw county south carolina and cam four southern pine incorporated indicate by raising your hand and it's unanimous

» all right we'll move on to the next ordinance this will be a second reading of an ordinance amending and restating the kershaw fairfield multi-county industrial park mcip agreement is there is there a motion pertaining to this ordinance so moved mr tomlinson makes a motion is there a second second mr tucker seconds and any discussion about some conversation would you danny explain what we're doing here ready to get one of your or mr debose yeah well mr burgess he's back there too yeah mr burgess is here yep yeah this um current kershaw fairfield multi-county um industrial park expires um in june so it needs to be reauthorized there are multiple properties in it um for kershaw county and uh essentially it needs to be reauthorized that those properties continue to receive the benefits taxatio

» n benefits being in a mcip um i will note um just for y'all's reference that the exhibit a to the actual agreement has now been populated with all the kershaw county properties exhibit b is still blank um fairfield's working on their counterpart to it but um the kershaw properties are listed that's the only change from last reading and those will be available uh third reading from fairfield that's my understanding correct before we bring it back yeah okay that's that's my understanding thank you mr debose thank you for including those okay so in the most basic terms mr debose if the investment is located in kershaw county where we'll give one percent to fairfield yeah correct um this operates like your standard multi-county industrial park agreement wherein the county that has the investmen

» t property receives 99 of the revenues generated from it the other one percent goes to the partner county um the host county for the industry that's doing the investing then does a pro rata split among the taxing entities in that county um after taking um the cost of attracting that investment or industry off the top so the county can reimburse itself for improvements um to an industrial park you know better roads extending sewer etc etc um so basically you're not um your revenue neutral on your your investments into a park they get paid back and why does the county do this with other counties like what what would be the benefit of entering so mcip so you can receive um basically avalorum taxation benefits from having standalone fees or and often properties are also put into parks but a par

» k is a mechanism to essentially grant avalorum tax relief to properties and again it's a creature of state statute thank you all right any other questions all right all those in favor of an ordinance amending and restating the kershaw fairfield multi-county industrial park mcip agreement indicate by raising your hand and the vote is unanimous that ordinance passes second reading all right next ordinance first reading this is an ordinance of the county council of kershaw county south carolina to amend the county's official zoning map designation for approximately 89 acres of land with tax parcel number 294 000 00045 for allen and donna barton from r15 to r2 and providing an effective date is there a motion pertaining to this ordinance madam chair i make a motion that we approve first reading

» on rezoning uh the 89 plus or minus acres and elgin okay mr tucker makes a motion to approve is there a second okay i'll second right and into discussion mr templar do we have a member from planning and zoning here um i have the staff report if that helps i can handle that okay so this plus or minus 89 acres um it is is landlocked it has a private access or an easement going to it um the the planning commission did hear this um there were some concerns from neighbors around and they were more concerned about the future use of this parcel um but our zldr restricts a setup like this regardless of the size of the parcel when it has a restricted access to it through a private easement there can only be there can be no more than three homes on this parcel so there's currently one single family d

» welling on the property now and it also this rezoning makes it um more restrictive for if there were ever to be anything on this parcel this is a more restrictive rezoning dropping the capacity to put um residences per acre um the the planning commission did vote unanimously to adopt this okay thank you danny i had sent you a letter that a constituent sent me that wanted to was this that parcel the letter that i forwarded to you about uh there was some zoning uh issue it wasn't and i he sent it to me and i sent it to you to make sure the zoning uh board got to look at it was that this parcel i think so but i can't say for sure i think it is too right this is this is based on the area so so there were were some some again some residents that came out from the surrounding area that spoke and

» voiced their concerns forgive me for looking at my phone i'm just going to try to pull that letter up so i can take a quick look at it you guys don't mind no i don't mind at all are alan and donna barton here by chance would you all come up how are y'all and if you can just tell us the purpose for the rezoning in your own words under the current zoning we cannot put a manufactured home uh we're both retired i'm a retired vet um u.s army retired 2001.

» thank you for your service um i don't make that a lot you know affordability to build a stick build home versus a manufactured home under the current zoning we can't put a manufactured home we have one there for my brother that's older and that just replaced one that was already there so that one was grandfathered in under the current zoning our original thought was let's just go for a variance to put a manufactured home but that was against the law according to joey adams i can't i can't pronounce his last name we can't either well he's here yeah he's awesome um so this was the next step for rezoning for the manufactured home well i'm going to support you and we only want one more home in there and it was also pointed out that 80 of this property is in a flood zone yeah 25 mile creek yeah

» and i was just so i was reading the letter i don't want to identify but a letter from a citizen um the concern that this citizen had was with changing the zoning basically their concern was sort of a mobile home park being put in there right but if i hear what you're saying you're talking about putting a single structure we're not talking about building a mobile home park out there no and we couldn't because of the private because well in the flood zone i see too the right i mean not the easement the uh right away and what is it called easement right away it's 60 foot right away in order to develop it i would have to pave it and i would have to own it to pave it bring in sewer bring in water we're on a private well we're on a private sewer well you know something that's really important it'

» s your property yeah we spent our savings to get it and now we've been saving for the last two years to afford a manufactured home versus a stick-built home so if we wanted 2200 square feet of a manufactured home we'd spend roughly 150 000 versus three or four hundred thousand but looks like we're going to pay more in that fee because it's going to be a manufactured home versus a stick-built home so what well the impact fee that was just a discussion a study that so that's not implemented um so and i'm sorry well i was just going to say i don't have an issue i like i said i just wanted to make sure because i remembered a citizen reaching out to me directly and i just wanted to make sure i understood those concerns but i think that letter was brought up during the the first meeting with plan

» ning and zoning or the zoning commission yeah no way we could he he was concerned there was going to be 50 to 100 manufactured homes in there and he wasn't there to listen that we could only have three well i think it goes back to and i agree i agree with councilman jones i mean i think we we should do everything we can to make sure people can do what they want with their property with exceptions when it puts a burden on the community and obviously if you were building a mobile home park that would certainly be a different conversation but i'm convinced that it sounds like planning and zoning and i'd like to sorry i didn't mean to hold up the discussion ladies and gentlemen i just want to make sure i'd also like to point out that we are one half mile off the main road so in order to see us

» back in there you would have to have a drone or what did he call it the russian below or the chinese balloon mr kato uh danny you you did state that even with this rezoning they could only be three dwellings on that property correct right because of the right away i mean that would take away any development yes to put that citizen's mind at ease if they move away and someone else buys it they can still understand but they could have that on the record and i appreciate you guys putting up well we're not moving this is we've got roots and they're going to go deep you guys have had a fair i mean i know it's been a long experience but fairly smooth experience and i know there's been a lot of hurdles to jump through but how's no i inherited a lot of problems with this property we're getting ther

» e i mean specifically with the county it just i mean having you here it's always good to hear like how is your process dealing with the county side of this to get where you are today i know it's been long but has it been smooth or what what any issues that you saw that we could look at um i'm not going to say it's been smooth it's just i didn't understand what we got into when we bought the property but we were going to buy this property yeah a lot of steps right there are a lot of steps and i'm willing to follow all the all those steps and we wish you the best i mean they were dealing with somebody who cut all the corners and maybe they thought i was going to cut the corners too no well thank you i appreciate you you going through this process and enduring it and thank you for being so rec

» eptive to our questions i have to go through three of these two more after this one yes after this one two more um i'm going to go to mr debose okay i think he had something i just i just wanted to note for the record um that uh the citizen concerns about a mobile home park again they are limited to three units based on their access but the rd2 zoning district that they are seeking a rezoning to prohibits mobile home parks so but again just for the record since that was an express concern and i know mr shoemake wanted to make sure the record reflected that those concerns have been addressed thank you mr dubose mr tucker thank you madam chair um i'm going to give you a couple pieces of advice one is um come back for the next two readings uh here yeah here for council and make sure that we do

» n't slow the process down so you can get what you need on your rezoning get your mobile home built in and then the impact fees won't affect you at all if they ever come along so so they don't go retroactive so you can you can have your stuff done well before we even make a decision but um i know the processes can be drooling um in trying to get this and that's what most of our citizens do do is struggle with the process because it's so much but don't let it overwhelm you and um stick with mr joey back there and let him guide you through it that's that's his job it was better for him to speak than for me to speak because i still have the military mind and the military language right well we appreciate your discipline tonight you know you know what sir she has the same thing the military mind

» i've got my reins right here right yeah yeah madam chair yes mr tomlinson i'll thank you for your service um appreciate um everything that i can do to be a part of um allowing citizens to do what they'd like on their own property um i grew up in a mobile home in antioch um it's something that is near and dear to me and i think every citizen it you know it's a choice um i think this is the right thing to do and i'm happy to support it thank you all right any other question yes sir how come we missed the fourth tuesday for the first reading because the fourth tuesday in the last month right because this was um we were we went to the the other board on the 10th on april 10th that's a good question mr templar do you know why we didn't get it on the agenda sooner no i'd have to check with staff

» okay it's probably was didn't get in in time and so therefore you know it didn't meet our deadlines for the uh package why don't we yes but why is what why don't we just let mr template get back with them yeah i'm not mad i just wondered no that's a valid question yeah you guys have been working on this um so i will call you and i will let you know okay you thank you that explanation is that it yes sir all right all those in favor of an ordinance kershaw county south carolina to amend the county's official zoning map designation for the tax parcel 294 000 045 for alan and donna barton from r15 to r2 indicate by raising your hand all right and the vote is unanimous passes first reading and that um let me look at the date 23rd 23rd mr mrs barton the 23rd of may will be the second reading and

» then the final reading will be on june 13th all right resolutions we have one resolution tonight right so this is a resolution honoring colonel lauren webb to recognize and honor colonel lauren webb united states army retired for his meritorious and lifelong service to kershaw county the state of south carolina and the united states of america and to name the woodward field control room in his honor in recognition of his public service whereas kershaw county wishes to celebrate the patriotic life and service of colonel lauren webb and whereas born in ridgeland on july 6 1930 he learned the value of hard work growing up on a farm and working at his parents general stores he also worked making septic tanks and pouring concrete at webb concrete company incorporated still operating in barnwell

» and whereas in exchange for flying lessons young lauren webb washed airplanes at the local airport important to his military service and whereas he earned a bachelor's degree from clemson college in 1953 in animal i don't know what that is husbandry and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the united states army he successfully completed army flight training at fort rucker alabama where 150 flight candidates enrolled but only 50 graduated and whereas colonel webb completed various flight schools during his career in army aviation and was qualified to fly many aircraft including single and multi-engine airplanes and helicopters and he was licensed as an army flight instructor for many of them and whereas after flying along the dmz to the yellow sea in korea and back to base from 1959 to 1

» 960 colonel webb was assigned to the 82nd airborne division to support paratroopers at simmons army airfield at fort bragg north carolina and then volunteered for training on the mohawk which he later flew in vietnam and whereas he was stationed in verona italy where he flew bell huey helicopters beavers and otters otters otters were used to transport italian paratroopers and he flew mohawks to italian air shows and sikorsky helicopters to supply troops on italian mountaintops and whereas in italy colonel webb was honored to fly senator strom thurman around who was a general in the army reserve at the time and whereas when land behind italy's vagrant dam gave way killing over thousands of people in flooding waters he participated in rescue and support activities in the sikorsky helicopter f

» or which he was awarded the flying s from sikorsky helicopters and whereas after flying after serving in italy colonel webb served a tour in vietnam where he commanded a mohawk unit and nk flying infrared missions low level reconnaissance and over 80 combat missions and whereas after completing command in general staff college he was assigned as the deputy chief of staff for the intelligence division at fort monroe virginia he was later sent to langley air force base to correct procedural deficiencies as at its flight facility for which service he was awarded the legion of merit in the meritorious service medal and whereas in 1973 colonel webb was assigned to ishan iran to teach iranian pilots to fly the bell huey helicopter and then was assigned to fort lee virginia retiring in 1975 after

» 25 years of military service with almost 10 000 flying hours and whereas he moved to camden and used his talents by teaching jrotc at lower richland high school and then served in kershaw county juvenile court for 15 years he served on the camden airport commission for 12 years as its chairman for four years and whereas colonel webb has been a fixture at woodward field serving as a mentor and great source of advice for pilots both young and old and whereas together with barbara webb his beloved wife of more than 62 years he reared two fine children colonel tim webb and melinda rabin both of whom reside in kershaw county and whereas the kershaw county council is grateful for citizens like lauren webb whose lives are marked with patriotism and excellence and the council members take great pri

» de in saluting his exemplary life and service whereas kershaw county council has adopted rules and order of business that allow it to name county buildings and approve the display of honorariums on or in county buildings or property be express action and approval and whereas colonel lauren webb's contributions to kershaw county are such that kershaw county council finds that he should be recognized and honored for his lifelong service to kershaw county the state of south carolina and the united states of america through naming the woodward field control room in his honor and by the display of an honorarium at woodward field now therefore be it resolved by kershaw county council in meeting duly assembled that one the members of kershaw county council by this resolution recognize and honor co

» lonel lauren webb united states army retired and commend his meritorious and lifelong service to kershaw county the state of south carolina and the united states of america and two that the control room at woodward field shall be named in honor of colonel lauren webb and an honorarium be placed at woodward field celebrating his public service resolved by kershaw county council this ninth day of may 2023 is there a motion to approve so move mr jones makes a motion is there a second second and second by mr cato any discussion yes if i may yes i've known lauren webb all my life when i first got in county government back in 73 74 he actually went over to millenstead new college with me to speak on my behalf we had to do that to get some credit because i majored in electives um but i tell you wh

» at i i am i know we have a rule that's currently there that we don't name buildings or offices after people but i am absolutely in support of this council doing this and i think it was the right thing and the right time for us to do it and i know mr borowski and i have talked about this he he has really pushed this and thank you mr mike so much this family is well deserved thank you madam chair yes absolutely mike can you come up to the podium now this is tom borowski's brother folks all those who know tom broski when is uh colonel webb's birthday um july 6th okay so what is y'all's plan out at the airport well we want to try to keep it much of a secret as we can oh okay but we are a live stream is down hopefully hopefully the audio is gone now but we're planning something july in july prob

» ably july 8th around that time okay um and we're going to have a nice little event for him but um you know what we'd like to see is you know you all are invited to come out to the airport at any time and i would strongly encourage that you come out on a saturday morning um colonel webb's there every day at nine o'clock 9 30 um every saturday and he's probably there three or four days during the week and uh believe it or not you you'll it's just amazing on how much people he draws there just to hear his stories and get his experience and you know they'll be talking about planes and flight missions and i'm sitting there like like like a kid like what they talking about but they just it's just amazing um and colonel webb i believe is going to be 93 um this coming july so you know i would encou

» rage if anybody wants to come out to the airport please come out especially on a saturday um i'm there every saturday i usually get there about seven in the morning but usually everybody starts getting there about nine nine thirty and um if you're what they call a lucky dog you might get a ride in the plane um my first flight when i went out there the first day i was out there was in a t6 um so they're very inviting to pilots um and like i said there's sometimes we have 15 20 people in a control room you know just sit and have a coffee and just discussing stuff like that that's awesome well thank you for um advocating for this and it's such an honor um i just want to tell my colleagues 10 000 hours in a helicopter um is very hard on your body so um that's just amazing 25 years of service in

» aviation what we'd like to do too is you know believe it or not colonel webb actually still flies he doesn't fly the plane but he'll go for a ride i'll ride with him i'll let you take my seat that would be great they actually made a they have a ladder that they actually use to get him up on the plane um it's it's it's a sight to see but again like i said i just encourage everybody to come out and on a saturday and it's just a visit come to our meetings you know we're we're wide open we're want more people to get involved um so again you know the invitation's out there i do got something that i was asked to give you okay um mike when are your meetings our next meeting is uh okay on mondays this is how much he's respected out there that an actual one of the pilots actually wrote a book about

» him on the fly i mean it's unbelievable well thank you for sharing all this with us especially saturday mornings yeah like i said come out get some coffee and uh you know i know not only would the pilots appreciate it but the staff out there and you know and i gotta say is you know i got on the commission and i've only been on it maybe six or eight seven eight months and you know you got probably the two hardest working people out there that i've ever seen in gary and dale i mean those guys are unbelievable um when the pilots come in you know i ask them i mean we get pilots that actually drive here two hours and have an airport 20 minutes from their house and just out of curiosity i said why do you come here and they say because the hospitality and the service we get it's well worth the dri

» ve you know the guy that actually wrote that book he drives an hour and a half hour and 40 minutes every weekend to come fly his plane out of our airport because of the service he gets that's awesome it's a special place and um the national guard trains there a lot too just because the air traffic is low and the runway is so nice yeah it's uh i mean they just did the runway um so i mean they got a lot going on out there but um but the uh it's unbelievable what you see coming in and out of there i mean it's a busy airport very very busy i mean you got a lot of people flying in you know economic development you got people flying in you got the businesses flying in you got the private commercial or private people coming flying so it's a very active airport and you come out there and you get ei

» ther dale or you get gary to take a tour it's unbelievable the tour they can give so that's awesome and we want to get more involved in the community so so we're looking at some plans for next year okay mike let's do an air show there we go be on the line thank you all right any other questions comments all right um all those in support of the resolution to recognize and honor colonel lauren webb indicate by raising your hand and the vote is unanimous and i can't wait to um do more with this and i'm i'm sorry mike i didn't know that there was some surprise planning going on all right new business so our new rules that we amended and restated this year um that thank you that form the finance committee thank you mr templar has given us the budget in the capital projects list states that the f

» inance committee will give a report the meeting before second reading of the budget um so that's this meeting we'll have second reading on may 23rd the rules do indicate that that report will be an item under new business so that's why it's under new business and not discussion however these reports and recommendations are for information only and there will be no vote taken tonight with that i'm going to turn it over to the finance chair mr sammy tucker thank you madam chair um i would just like to um first of all start off by thanking the finance committee mr derrick shoemate and councilman brant thomason for all their efforts and hard work and um you should have in front of you uh your capital items and your budget but i want to go to the sheet that was in your agenda which is the financ

» e committee uh opera and accommodation funds recommendation um we had some monies that were left over from opera and then we had some a tax money after digging it out into the numbers and so the finance uh committee made it very conscious and a very um deliberate decision to make these recommendations and i'm happy to allow my colleagues to uh speak uh once i go over these numbers with you so what we're doing is making a recommendation that we take six million dollars of the opera money and uh have it directed towards recreation no particular project it's just six million hell into our account now where it's bearing interest for recreation we also recommend that uh 165 000 comes out of that for ems chassis um another 63 000 for kirkland community center to fund them for two years a hundred

» thousand out of a tax for the waterby river boat ramp another 100 000 out for the kershaw county uh art center from the opera money and then what i would like to do is challenge all of us who may have um some non-profit agencies that didn't receive or get as much as they requested to be thinking how you want to divvy up forty eight thousand three hundred and eighty five dollars and um if you need any additional information i'm more than sure that uh miss rita would text you those non-profits um and their request or email them to you i'm going to stop right there madam chair and give my colleagues who serve on that committee with me an opportunity to speak if they like mr thomason councilman thank you mr chairman um i just wanted to say thank thank you to my colleagues is it was a lot of tim

» e a very good learning experience being on the finance committee i really appreciate staff's hard work yes i know they spent many many hours preparing a budget that i'm i'm happy to support and have been a part of um one that has no fees no no tax increases one that takes care of our first responders um fixes some infrastructure needs um that and those infrastructure needs you know there's some that's a band-aid but we're still waiting for the jail to come back um the study on that to see a cost and we have some courthouse stuff but at least we've gotten up to par and allocated some money we're able to take um care of our employees as well um and also you know some citizens quality of life so i think it's a very very good budget i'm happy to support it councilman she may uh just echo what u

» h councilman thomason said i mean i know we've spent 50 plus hours meeting over this and i think this is the result of a very deliberative effort it certainly isn't perfect you know particularly one of the challenging things for this budget as the finance committee knows very well is that you know funding sources for one time expenditures are one thing but the funding sources available for recurring uh was a very different story and so there some very difficult decisions had to be made because as everyone knows if you use a non-reoccurring dollar to make a to buy something that's a recurring cost then you're gonna have to find that dollar every year from here on out so um i appreciate councilman tucker's leadership on the finance committee uh it was very very helpful that's all i have madam

» chair at this time we would um take any comments or questions okay um can you provide me with the balance of the arpa fund and the a tax that's available to make these recommendations okay the opera funds was a total of let me get my numbers uh 6 million three six six three nine five and then we had a hundred and ten thousand dollars in a tax i'm sorry i'm struggling with those numbers but they are correct i just didn't have them right in front of me thank you you're welcome on the 48 385 from contributing agencies um i would like council members to reach out to their districts and get to know some of the agencies out there um i personally would like to support anything that supports our youth in kershaw county um that is very important to me and they're the future of this county anything t

» hat can help them and develop them summer camps summer projects schools any extracurricular activities that would keep kids off the streets or anything keeping them from being bored um that would be helpful and thank you for the recommendations the 6.3 million that's after the radios right yeah correct 3.4 it's also after the radios and then a certain amount of arpa was used as carryover to help balance this budget uh so that we could do like for example uh give employees cost of living increases okay some things like that so so there's a number around 400 000 ish dollars that went to that is that fair yes sir and are we just talking about arpa and a tax right now correct mr chair okay okay mr nope i'm good thank you well i really don't know where to start i'm you know we talk about we have

» six million dollars left over you know the sheriff didn't even get a fourth of what he asked for in capital this year ems still needs an ambulance a station we have a jail that has to be the number one priority has to be is falling in and and our administrator has done the best he can do trying to stay out of the politics of this county council to give 500 000 for just some simple repairs 600 600 for some simple repairs i'll tell you folks on three to four million dollars would go a long ways on a on fixing that jail up and it's in it's in i i would dare say the sheriff would have to agree with that the jail is a top priority but it bothers me and we talk about there's no fees no tax increase we could do some fees i mean we can get creative do fees because fees are nothing but a tax in disg

» uise and a fee is nothing but something that goes around a tax but when you talk about millage i don't think mr debose maybe you're the person to ask for this i don't think we have the capability to raise any millage much of anything this year do we based on what council did last year i can let mr templar speak to that but my understanding is it is very close or capped because we do have some capacity just because of um with inflation and different things happening with the economy and and the value of our mill so there there certainly is millage capacity but um how much i'm not mistaken we could one no more than that probably 10.

» right it's huge well i sure hope y'all don't go down that road no listen um exactly but but let me just say this i do appreciate the finance community's hard work i know they're dedicated what they're doing i just absolutely disagree with this wholeheartedly when i'm looking at that man back there the number one law enforcement agency in the county couldn't even get he got a fourth sheriff but you're going to see it soon okay and of course uh the mr templar you've done a great job on balancing the budget we've got a balanced budget uh i just think we're missing a great opportunity to get ahead of some of our capital but we're going to put it all into the ball fields i don't mind putting some of it in there guys but my gosh six million dollars when we got all these other needs in the county

» this economy is hurting people are hurting um mr templar coming i will give the floor to you go ahead thank you i just wanted to ask mr templar a quick question i know that we still haven't received the jail study um or you know even done one really on the courthouse yet what do you anticipate the total cost and just a roundabout figure of redo renovating the current jail and the expansion of the jail uh expansion i you know i i don't know how you get away from you know a 20 million 20 million dollar price tag with current and that's just a just throwing something out yeah just just around about just because of you know the complexity of that facility the the things going in there um and just having uh received some numbers back i mean an ems station is two million dollars at this point and

» this is so much more complex um and then the the fixtures that have to go in there so i i just throw out 20 million and then there's some other concerns we're putting 600 000 towards the current facility so we're not talking about you said 20 million for a new facility new we're not talking about a new facility right i'm not right and so to if we're going to expand i say new facility renovating and expansion i'm sorry i'm um i see what you're saying mr jones um an expansion so we would want not want to expand on a building that is is falling apart so 600 000 is going to take us it will take give us some room there but um you know there's plumbing issues i have some concerns having toured it with the uh you know the moisture that's coming through with the inability for the paint to stay on t

» he walls because of moisture is wicking through the bricks and stuff so there's a couple issues over there um so i i think to truly address the jail is is is going to take a significant amount of money and i let me let me pick my time back up here mr chair like tell you right now five million dollars go a long ways in that jail to bring it up to par i know that the current the current current facility if i mean would do a lot it sure would it's no question about it uh we we can skirt around that all we want but it's just a fact um but anyway that's where i'm at thank you any other comments yes mr tucker well i just want to make sure everyone understands um the process that we're that we're doing these are recommendations so there's anything that you disagree that the finance company has rec

» ommend formulate your motion remember what we have to do we have to make a motion identify the funding and then we identify the expenditure you can propose anything back to this council as long as you get it into the agenda package on the 23rd so all of your great ideas and things you want to fix you can put those into motion on the 23rd oh i plan to okay i just want to make that clear so i don't want thank nobody to think that the finance committee has anybody hampered from making their motions and their um decisions on the six million four hundred seventy six three hundred eighty five thousand ninety five thousand dollars madam chair and let me say this mr tucker y'all have worked very hard and i appreciate that you have different priorities than i do it's all about priorities that's all

» it is i have i have no problem and i know the process and i promise you i will make well i'm stating it for everyone i'm not stating that you i'm stating so everyone can have knowledge what the process is number one this is not directed towards you and number two we all got different priorities i didn't agree a hundred percent with the two colleagues that sat with me on everything but guess what we had we had a conversation and this was the best conclusion the three of us came to to present back to council so you know we're not up here like we the three-headed monsters all agreeing and kumbaya this was best product we thought that we were charged with to do thank you mr tucker and thank you to the finance committee um i have been to your meetings you have worked diligently um i had to look

» at some figures so i have a couple more questions mr templar or mr tucker when does the a tax need to be allocated or spent this 110 000 is there a date or do we have a state law that mandates we do something with it right now my knowledge no it's a carryover right okay but i will certainly get back with you on that but uh madam chair if i may yes mr tucker the other a tax money because there's there is more a tax money will come from and i'm just saying it just for public knowledge that will come from the a tax committee recommendation so i don't want them to put those two together which there is a timeline on and it must go into this budget cycle for 23 24.

» okay okay um so mr templar i just need a breakdown of last year's a tax um because the a tax committee last year made a recommendation to council and i want to know if that was fulfilled if those entities got that money um and how there's 110 left carried over what was it not spent on or was there always 110 allocated separately um next question okay we have the fy 24 approved capital projects mr templar can you provide everyone on council with a list of the unapproved capital projects that were requested but not funded okay um all right the watery boat river boat ramp um hundred thousand dollars mr tucker can you explain to me where this number come from because my understanding is we don't have the study back and this council already approved twenty thousand dollars or ten percent of the

» project to pay for so why do we need an extra a hundred thousand dollars on top of what county council already approved to spend on that well first and foremost it was in a written request from one of our colleague council members um that we look for this 110 that he actually emailed us contacted us okay who was the council member mr councilman russell brazel okay um it came back with a second request on funding for the 500 000 that we were not able to do and move the boat ramp to our property if that was doable as the administrator looked at that but we just did not have the funds to do that where it lies now um that that hundred thousand dollars was supposed to be our part of um good seed money to encourage the state general assembly to fund the boat ramp to the max of their capabilities

» now none of that has passed for a final vote but there are some good things in the works from my understanding i don't want to state them because i did not talk to our delegation so i don't want to repeat hearsay but i'm very hopeful and optimistic um that this hundred thousand we have set to the side now will not be needed and we can redirect it before we take third reading and that the state will completely fund it okay okay um did the written request come with any documentation any bids any no ma'am okay um here's my concern this council took up this issue um we have a study going on we committed to paying a certain amount towards it and this council i guess this council's authority and decision-making process was completely circumvented for the state house um and there's there's a thous

» and a hundred thousand dollars just an arbitrary number that someone threw out there's no project to see how much it's going to be um so i guess i just don't appreciate this council taking up an issue voting to spend money on it and voting to contribute 10 of the final project whatever that might be or twenty thousand dollars and then a council member just sending another request to the finance committee um because someone at the state house said to do so so i just have to put that out there um i can't support another hundred thousand for the watery river boat ramp um simply because this council already stated what they're going to put towards it and we don't have anything in front of us so what if the project is a hundred thousand so kershaw county is going to pay for it all well it's a hy

» pothetical question i just i just want to know where the number came from if it is if it is just a hundred thousand then i think we should jump on that because that would be a darn good deal madam chair yes you know we did 60 60 000 on a study with boat ramp that's still out there we did vote on twenty thousand dollars am i correct madam chair we did and we spent several thousand dollars removing the old dock it's not a ramp it's a dock yeah i i cannot accept the hundred thousand i mean we're throwing money around and there's just really no documentation to show where when why how you know i guess there's some good plans in our heads um i just want to know the expert that said it's going to cost six hundred thousand dollars um madam chairman yes um so looking at the state house is currently

» going on and there were conversations i think that other other council members um including mr brazil had had with our representative regarding a line item in the budget um which should be approved prior to our third reading of our budget and that line item um is a is a match for funds based upon us putting this number in there if we get the budget back from the state level that that line item was not able to be approved or in there um the line item can be reutilized this is based upon conversations with a person that kershaw county elected to represent them at the state and i i felt comfortable um making that leap to have that matching hundred thousand and if it doesn't work out we can take that hundred thousand put it back in and utilize it for something else okay thank you if this counci

» l wanted to allocate a hundred thousand why didn't it get approved for a hundred thousand when we took this issue up for me uh i was not involved in the request when it came up on the agenda uh you actually came to me and spoke to me why it should be that and at that time that's the information i had not having the other side on um what exactly was the intent on how we're going to fund this boat ramp and so and plus that was supposed to be generating a letter of commitment so they could start the process over there i don't even know did the letter ever go out to the delegation saying you know no because it was no it didn't okay and it wasn't needed because it's in the budget without the letter okay well you know circumvent is a strong word because i don't circumvent people no this isn't oka

» y it's nothing to the finance committee um i want to make that clear nothing to the finance committee kershaw county decided that we were going to spend twenty thousand dollars or ten percent of the project we're waiting on the project cost and members of this council in the state house had conversations without me and determined that that wasn't enough money and i want to know how they determined it wasn't enough money that's all i just want to know the documentation used to know that it's going to be a six hundred thousand dollar project because that's very expensive and i don't know if it's going to be four hundred or six hundred you know i've heard between four hundred and and five so you know i don't know what the true or real figure is at this current time okay but we're committing a

» hundred thousand dollars i mean at least that's the recommendation well i know it's more than that i do know that four or five um second question mr templar if you can give us all the dates again on the arpa month arpa funds when does it need to be allocated and when does it need to be spent committed by 24 spent by 25 okay so we don't need to take up arpa or a tax voting at this time so we have time on all this um i think correct me if i'm wrong mr tucker the finance committee was doing it in conjunction with the budget because it was just yeah well just convenient time well we um we wanted to redirect the funds uh from opera because right now they're committed to sewer was was left and so um to figure out what all our capital and what all our opportunities to fund the best budget we also

» took into the opera and a tax um funds that was available if i may um and also you did have a vote and a motion a vote made in these chambers that sent that request back to the finance committee didn't they which we're talking about the uh the arpa funds you're talking about for the radios no for the six million dollar match yes we had a request we had a um request written request from council members and a vote and uh asking about the opera funds for the six million for the recreation yeah i've got all that i'm gonna explain to y'all what you did when i gave my council brief well not you you actually voted against it but i'm going to talk about that vote just a little bit well not right now in your in your but it's germane to this because it's it's all intermingled well we're talking about

» finances now so let's let's stay on course mr tucker again i appreciate this work thank you um from my perspective there is for the chassis there's a bid there's a there's documentation there's we know how much that's going to be the community center we have a very detailed budget of how much that center needs to conduct its services the kershaw county arts center we know how much the ada compliance is going to cost and we know the repairs that need to happen and the contributing agencies um if someone wants to contact us that they need a specific amount they'll need justification and something to show what they're going to use it um so i guess i take issue with the boat ramp and the recreation because we don't have any we don't know how much those things are going to cost okay and let me s

» peak a little bit and i don't want to get it's not an issue with anyone personally it's just in in general we have no idea how much those projects will cost yes but i don't want to get into the weeds just on recreation tonight um there's going to be no money spent until we get answers to those questions that's what i want to state there's not a dime today or may 23rd that's going to be spent on anything the funds are being reallocated and then we're going to get bids back because there's certain things that certain people believe in recreation is going to happen and the um bids is going to show you you can't do it you physically can't do it with the monies we have so we're working on what other options that can best suit the citizens of kershaw county and we can still do some recreation and

» that doesn't that doesn't alleviate that maybe we can't do the 12 or 10 million project we don't know that at this time that's what we're asking to allow us to get that information and then we can make a more informed decision on what that looks like yes sir thank you you're welcome and it can also be reallocated so right now it's in sewer this is the recommendation of how it should be allocated um but nothing prevents this council from reallocating it again all the way until january 1st 2024 yes ma'am or you spend it yes all right any other topics of discussion okay finance committee report recommendation on annual budget yes ma'am woo woo so i think it's been stated already and i'll get mr templar's assistance as we go down i just want to reiterate that no fee increase no tax increase no

» millage increase um not that we did not have the capability to do that we did and that number is fairly large mr jones compared to what we've had in the past just because cip you know um we uh we grew better than i thought but it was this committee's and staff's decision that you know times are not good for everyone and that we're still in in tough times so we did the best we could with the little growth we had from the millage increase in value and we pulled from different categories or different areas where we had a little something stashed back to make this budget work and i commend mr templar and his staff um miss lauren and mr jerald back there for um and the finance team um for putting the head down and just doing the hard grunt work making tough decisions because these decisions aren

» 't easy and you're gonna make some people happy and you're gonna make some people mad because it's just not enough funds to get everything what everybody wants but let me say this right here no one should be angry at staff or council because last year was a christmas year a blindsiding year and i would um i have the floor mr jones i apologize i so i'm gonna hang my hat back on that that it was a very good year for departments all of the departments and employees so you can't do that every year that is not the norm um we're doing the best we can and um i'm gonna say like councilman thompson said i am very proud of this budget and i'm very proud of it because it has no increases in fees taxes or anything else i'm gonna ask mr templar if he wants to go over the numbers or if we want to go up b

» y department but this is what you actually read last month um in title only yes thank you and i'm um thank you for getting it done mr templar so that it's available to the public do we have a page that shows total you mean like general fund total first page the 30 million i'm also interested in the capital and in the in your budget mr templar sure y'all have a uh copy of the capital that we have um that long sheet with um all the capital projects i don't i had to give my copy of tiny tiny print yes hard to read hard to read mr i can share you can have one too on your back mr tucker no no we're good let the attorney read i'll just start with capital um to go over these items there were a lot of asks but only uh just a a handful were funded and that's that's nothing different this year than i

» t's ever been in any other year we typically will always have three or four more million dollars in requests than available funding so a process of understanding what has historically been asked for um needs change from year to year also balancing these requests with what was uh council's will if you will at the uh the the council retreat so balancing goals and objectives with with funding um requests here was was something we were pretty keen on doing so um a few of these were just operational just going down the list time clock plus is going to allow us to kind of come into the 21st century with time management time clock clock clocking employees in currently we're doing this all on paper which is requiring two full-time employees to just engage in a never-ending process as soon as checks

» are cut but they are right back at that following monday tallying um employee hours for over 430 employees so that it's just very inefficient use of time um this project will allow us to use one employee to do this this this this process um door controller system uh government center was just just increasing security here uh where we're going to go to badge scans as opposed to the the the punch buttons we can deactivate and uh employee badges if if they are terminated or no longer work here so from a security standpoint is much more safe server upgrades it continues to be a need it always will be just in in the type of uh reality we're in with with technology becoming more and more prominent in in our day-to-day operations 65 000 that that's that was trimmed down from the original 200 000 a

» sk and these are for server replacements which is just a crucial part of what we do um there's a vehicle for um just again keeping up with fleet needs older vehicles um poor fuel mileage and uh maintenance costs continue to rise on older vehicles so we we do a pretty good job with our fleet um hva system at the detention center looking at that this is also um this is for maintenance this is uh from building maintenance so this is separate from the 600 000 that we have allotted for the jail over there but we're always going to be um replacing air conditioners we just have so many i i have yet to see a year where we're not replacing a roof unit exterior handicap lift over at the uh courthouse um because of the the the layout of that core courthouse everything is upstairs so we have the uh han

» dicap elevator over there that has been very problematic over the years so we look to replace that um another uh air conditioner replacement here in this building courthouse renovations there's not really much we can do there beyond an expansion but um trying to get people in more comfortable work areas some of them are working in just cramped spaces and doing some rearranging over there to get some more life out of that building um it has been important so some painting and and things like that i think you all had toured the courthouse at one point so we're trying to address a lot of the asks uh from there and this has been something that's been on our the budget request for probably three years now it should have been funded when we bought the uh voter registration building but that build

» ing took up all of the uh i think it was eight hundred thousand dollars set aside but that that building took up a vast majority of that funding so the courthouse got left out voter registration renovations um continuing to make that building more useful on the on the front side um there's because of these the mandates with the security of the voting machines um we're always going to be pressed into new unfunded mandates on the security of our voting system in kershaw county um a new truck again keeping up with the fleets uh new building upfit for a the uh public works building we're getting close to should have that building complete in the fall so that will be upfitted for the uh the new works bases for public works solid waste um our engineer and some other support staff um courthouse se

» curity was another item that was uh high on the uh goals and objectives uh for council so short of of putting more people over there uh the weapons detector seemed like a logical ask so to i know the system over there the uh metal detector over there has got some time on it and this just kind of brings us up current some more vehicles uh for the the um corner 126 there's one vehicle there we have four tahos for the sheriff's office again keeping up with the um the our fleet needs um he had asked for 15 but just this year we um there's four were available for us in in what our um capacity to purchase it allowed us to do that's all the money we had yes sir and we we so we have x amount of dollars assigned to uh enterprise which is not it's enterprise leasing um so our lease capacity is is pre

» tty close this year other vehicles needed to be replaced throughout so four vehicles there we thought would be sufficient based on our available funding just kind of spreading the money around to all departments um detention center up fits six hundred thousand dollars and i think we've spoke um a good bit about that there's plumbing electrical painting hvac there's there's um some technology upgrades there um some locks uh i think we may be able to address the washer and dryer issue over there as well did you say some locks locks just upgrading locks so we we have sufficient locks but there's more updated locks that that are wired in so i'm drawing a blank on the name of them but um we've been trying to implement those every budget year just keep up to date uh animal care facility as you kn

» ow we're in con uh conversation with the uh kershaw county humane society um they offer us the ability to house dogs and cats but as you know this is a heavy equine uh county um there's there's livestock needs we have so we've been looking at this for some years now as an area to uh to house um emaciated horses or large animals we get cows we get goats pigs all kinds of things that are just beyond the capability of what the animal shelter can handle for us so um as our farms are turning over hands uh the relation in kershaw county they're they're being sold to new owners um our relationships and our abilities to store animals throughout the uh the county are kind of going away so we're just gonna have to take this back in in-house and look at that uh high throughput scanner over a voter reg

» istration um again it's just keeping up with the unfunded mandates uh for our election equipment and process um there's another vehicle for parks and rec to finish mowers and you know we go through mowers a lot because we're cutting grass all summer it seems like every probably six days a week we're cutting grass so um airport um this is a grant refund is something we don't normally do but the faa deemed us to be ineligible for this funding from a previous grant from the airport drainage project from some years ago so they after many conversations and um please to the uh faa they still want uh this 236 744 returned to them um before they will consider us for any other grants we have a grant that we applied for for runway lighting um just friday we made the deadline but they said they would

» not even consider that without having this funding returned so this is just a sad reality out of a six million dollar project with our grant match that was 250 000 i think back in 2018 um we're having to return this amount of money so the appeals process didn't work out in our favor more vehicles you see a white goods replacement vehicle here this is allowing us to get washers and refrigerators and things like that of our convenience centers um we're about at the end of the a safe life span of the current vehicle so this is a dire need um some crew cabs out there for uh public works um a ditching tool some mulching equipment and the bridge study that we um we heard one gentleman come up and talk about so this was a direct result of um some public comments and some concerns about our bridges

» the last time we did any bridge study was in 2013 so we had some bridges that were rated very low um we want and some that that bridge that gentleman had talked about was a three at the time and is now a zero and had to be closed so this is a very important piece we've got a lot of bridges you wouldn't even know they're there there seem to be made out of old railroad ties or something so it's just not a very robust material um capital plan for 514 000 this is going to this kind of seems um like an arbitrary number but it's it's going to allow us it's a remainder to oftentimes throughout the budget process we have quotes but but prices increase and this will allow us flexibility to not have to skip on model year vehicles um and any kind of other adjustments that come midstream where manufact

» urers or or retailers have given us a price it's a quote it was good for 30 days or whatever and then that quote goes uh that price is no longer any good and over the years we have missed out on equipment at lower prices because we had to go and and instead of two roll off vehicles out at uh solid waste we had to just opt for one because we just didn't have the money and we're talking like maybe eight thousand dollars so the 500 500 000 where where you can keep that that that will that will stay right here in the capital plan and anything that comes out will be a a a a transfer it can only go to capital so it can't go anywhere else and any other number that exceeds my ability would certainly become or come before council well the ditch digger those things that's that's good stuff that's goo

» d stuff danny i'm just sorry you don't have enough money to get more of it because you are running short on some things when it comes to maintaining the amount of roads that we have to cover in this county we can't keep up with it yes sir we haven't had the money to get the equipment so with our capital reserves we were uh 3 million 99 999 4 cents and this basically takes up every dime of that um so again with council's goals and objectives and priorities in mind the the history that i've had here at the county with asks and and just um operational needs um our our capacity for leasing and all these other factors these are the items i have chose to fund for the the capital request for fiscal year 23 24 i'll be glad to answer any questions on the capital side thank you mr templar and i know

» you'll get us a list so that we can compare to the unfunded um just a quick comment i would like my colleagues to not forget about the detention center employees so um the courthouse renovations and those employees being overlooked for a while that is absolutely true they have a place to go the detention center employees don't have a place that we can move them but we need to be thinking about them and keeping them in mind again there's three employees over there working in a closet and then the entire admin section of the detention center works in a very small place too so um their uplift does not include any kind of uplift for their offices just keep that in mind for what repeat that for the employee offices but thank you and thank you for using our retreat and our goals to prioritize you

» r list um and just a quick word on general fund it's it's you have it in front of you it's it's a just a slew of numbers um everything is uh i'm i'm proud of the the work that staff did on this budget it was tough we did not certainly want to come to council and ask for um any kind of increase knowing what last year was i felt it was um my job to stay well within the revenue streams we have um the first order of business was to go through this budget as it was being the current budget and look at the areas that were in the red for any reason so fuel and things of that nature i have a question when you were going through your capital projects you were dealing with the strictly monies you had correct did you ever consider trying to talk to the finance committee about some of the arpa funds th

» at would qualify for a lot of that capital no sir i why beyond the fact that um because at the time arpa money wasn't in play because it was it and it currently is um the majority of it is committed to sewer but may i say something yes then it is then it hasn't been in play at all because it's always been that way uh ever since we did the uh the you know the the grants that we did i think a couple million dollars on a couple of grants then basically i hear what you're saying it's not in play i don't buy it because the money was there and i was just wondering and everybody else was saying what they want to spend it for so now with one correction the the the interest from arpa was um drawn but the the the the arpa itself that that number sitting there was was not in in in my mind in play it w

» asn't in play with what you had to work with right i was just using because you knew it was going to go for ball fields i didn't know where it was going to go so with the but the super unknown it wouldn't have been prudent to use any other funding streams than reoccurring funding streams from tax fees and other other things well i want to apologize to you danny go ahead um mr templar i understand why you didn't consider it but i would like your recommendation if the arpa funds were available to you for capital projects what you would spend them on as the administrator of this county i would like to know that for my own knowledge and moving forward into this budget if you did have that available how would you recommend we spend it and i want a copy of that sure within three days sure thank y

» ou so uh just going back to the general fund and um you know it it points where i was concerned whether there would be a hiring freeze um you know no cost of living adjustments and things of that nature but just as we as the budget process went through its iterations we were able to get more numbers and and a little more room um to to fund things so we have a three percent cost of living adjustment for all employees across the board um and we are able to fund everything we have our all of our current obligations we're also able to fund um the increases the the unforeseen increases just due to inflation due to services the increase in services um for all departments some departments grew but it was not due to anything other than is uh things out of their control with a a particular vendor ma

» y have increased their prices by eight percent or something like that so so when you spread that across all of our departments that that number tends to add up so it was important to address the reoccurring increases um and and take care of our employees and um just keep everything running so keep the lights on and the doors open so special uh special uh special revenue ems fire um those those those department heads do a great job with taking care of their budget um they have some of them have healthy reserves public works is a new enterprise fund this year so they have no reserves they just became an enterprise fund this year so they're in their infancy stage but we look to grow their reserves um and have them less dependent on the general fund budget and more independent as it relates to

» capital purchasing power and things of that nature so all of all of the capital requests out of fire and and some of the uh sewer those were able to be funded by those by their individual budgets uh through um but partially not totally so a few of them have so fire was now if you consider arpa that would be partially um with the radios and things like that but they had been budgeting for radios over the years so they had been on a robust replacement schedule would they have met the mark who knows um ems same um they've got some money sitting there for ambulances and or an ambulance and um how much do they have sitting there 700 a little over 700 000.

» and that's right now that's at this moment right general but once you buy the ambulance and the chassis that's going to go down because that money's going to come out of the and not the chassis money not the chassis but the ambulance yeah the ambulance okay um i think 340 000 will come out for the ambulance you didn't have enough for two ambulances did you no thank you so again living within the realm of reality of what you can fund um they they made their decisions much like i did with the general fund budget um i defer to them i trust in what the equipment they need we we discuss it throughout the budget process and um so they they do a good job so they did i agree with their work staff did a good job on their capitals so any more questions i was reading thank you that's okay that's okay

» i'm i'm i'm here no i don't i would just encourage the public to read this get this off the website and contact us um if you have any concerns questions or ideas right anything else from finance no i think that concludes our recommendations okay thank you mr templar thank you mr tucker you're welcome all right we will move on to council briefings it's not on the agenda but mr tucker we are starting with you okay this is going to be real long no report well okay all right mr shoemake um just a couple little things um i went uh last week to the elgin town council meeting i've started to go to those every month um to give them sort of an update on what council is doing to kind of keep uh at least i mean the municipality in my district up to date on days where i'm not going to be able to make t

» hat meeting i'm going to send a written little write-up so again we did that for the first time it was really helpful in fact they were able to bring some constituent issues they had gotten that were county related that i was able to get to mr templar and kind of get fixed right away so that was a pretty helpful use of my time um i went to the teacher of the year award ceremony two weeks ago i think so it was great to see all the educators and principals being recognized particularly those from uh stover and blaney and dobies um and two things i wasn't sure i was going to bring up but uh yeah um just because i don't know how anyway uh i recently learned this morning or this afternoon as the meeting started that miss deborah karencheck passed away um she uh is pretty sudden uh for those of y

» ou don't know miss karencheck her uh her and her husband joe live in elgin uh their son jason is a public defender here um pillars of the community uh again it's on facebook now so i felt like i could share it but it was very sudden um joe is a retired colonel and a retired de agent i had the pleasure of knowing joe as a high school student when i was a federal prosecutor had the privilege of working with people who worked with joe and as a father of a baseball kid i had the privilege of watching joe cheer on his grandson and deborah as well in fact one of my last visits when i was campaigning for this seed was to the karencheck household just to see them so my heart is with their family um and uh so that's pretty sad and um the last thing is uh for those of you who probably uh don't know u

» h we had a young man from camden pass away in a boating accident um excuse me sorry um chase was 16. um it's my son's age i saw him play a few times i didn't get a chance to really get to know him but um it's just tragic security anyway that's all i have uh thank you mr shumake of mr jones thank you madam chair members of county council and and mr shumake thank you for that um we all have felt that pain for the loss terrible terrible tragedy okay i've got a couple things i want to bring up if you get it up ryan okay at the last county council meeting i was i had some dialogue with a couple of my council members and i i felt like i was questioned about whether or not i was telling the truth when i said a few things of course i told my colleague i said not only am i telling the truth i'll bri

» ng the documentation back and show you when i say you did what you did you did what you did because it's in writing and the documentation was requested by me um at the may 9th 2023 council meeting um let's see if you'll go to uh the first slide right here i want you folks to look at the yellow okay well first off this is members of county council placing matters on the agenda it says county council members can place proposed matters on the agenda by providing the agenda item to the county administrator and clerk of court by 1 p.m on thursday preceding the next schedule regular scheduled council meeting at which count county council at that time county council will vote on or take action now listen on any matter coming before county council to get together with supporting documentation that'

» s our room we voted on it then next next slide ryan yes this is what we had on the agenda under new business proposal for recreation revitalization four words that's it nothing else all right next slide please a motion was made on those four words madam chair i move that kershaw county agreed to accept the donations from musc and the health resource district totaling six million dollars and that kershaw county council submit a proposal to the finance committee to budget and allocate a six million dollar fund match using arpa funds in the re uh kelly i'm see reallocation reallocation reallocation i'm sorry reallocation process so that a total of 12 million will be available for a kershaw county recreation revitalization project okay now the next slide okay this says proposal for the recreati

» on revitalization councilman russell browser made a motion that kershaw county accept the donations from musc and the health resource district for six million dollars and that the kershaw county council submit a proposal to the finance committee to budget budget to budget and allocate a six million dollar fund match using arpa funds in the reallocation finance committee budget and reallocate the six million dollars for offer to be used um and of course that'd be a total of 12 million dollars which would be available to the kershaw county recreation revitalization project project now go to the next slide please okay this is a proposal for the to the kershaw county finance committee from councilman russell browser and councilman danny kato read at the top this was not included in the agenda p

» acket it was not presented to the public or press this document was given to council members after the motion was made during the meeting now did anybody do anything illegal absolutely not but what we did was we absolutely circumvented our own rules disobeyed our own rules and made a motion and made a six million dollar match 12 million dollar turnaround decision with totally no information in the agenda whatsoever uh and i've done something that no one else has ever done here before and i had actually uh asked madam chair to let me go first because i want to make sure my council members had every opportunity to say why i'm wrong but i'm not wrong i've got it documented what did i say let me finish all right but anyway when i say i've done something no one else has ever done i've included i

» n my council briefing documentation in the agenda packet so everyone would know exactly what i plan to talk about in my council brief march 14th meeting members of council pushed for a vote to accept the six million dollars from musc and health resource district and match it when the chair put woodward park project on the agenda for april 11th with commitment letters due april 6th and finance committee recommendation by april 6th yet members of this council motion to vote with that they made their motion to vote with no finance committee recommendation no referral to the finance committee or 14 days of waiting no commitment letters from mbsc or health service district then the chair puts radios on the agenda for march 14th with supporting documentation and this i just couldn't believe counc

» il members asked her to take it off to give the finance committee time to make a recommendation in good faith she did she removed it from the agenda and referred it back to the finance committee april the 18th i don't know i'm skipping around here rescheduled for uh april the 11th the chair puts radios back on the agenda with documentation on the agenda at one o'clock and her motion publicized she actually even put her motion in there that she was going to make to county council now council members claimed that she was not transparent they were blindsided they need to read their agenda packet when they get it um council members asked why can't you wait until may the 9th for the finance committee recommendation okay so you guys didn't wait for the finance committee recommendation on woodward

» park and y'all couldn't wait until the chair reschedule the uh the vote yet you're saying she needs to wait for the recommendation of the radios she needs to wait until the scheduled time to take the vote council members completely ignored the chair's schedule in their regard to woodward park she had town hall meetings set up she had uh publicity uh things set up but you know what guys it doesn't work like that the people voted her to be the chair the people trust her with these meetings and schedules and when the chair schedule didn't fit some of the council members agenda they ignored the rules now with the radios you're going to call her out and make sure she follows the rules the rules seem to differ from other councilmen the rules seem to be different from other for other council membe

» rs and it's like the chair is under scrutiny for following the proper protocol and procedure when council members have ignored and they have ignored it the same procedures and protocol one month earlier it folks it just doesn't make sense and as the vice chairman i am going to support this chair but now let me make myself perfectly clear about this chair i will also hold her accountable the same way i hold everyone else accountable and myself and i was speaking to somebody today the former clerk county council said she had never pretty much in a statement i'm going to probably make it sound better than what it is because it's talking about me but she said jimmy jones never put anything on the agenda unless he had supporting documentation there there's been no communication with the sheriff

» on the cut of his uh capital of course i know with the uh ambulance service they you know with gerald being overstaffed and everything they've had that they they all probably know what's going on but folks it just it just bothers me but i will hold her accountable just as much as i hold anybody else accountable as i hold myself accountable now i'm i'm going to end with this because i want to end on a good note it's all about transparency we need to stop governing by ambush and and i'll debate that with anybody who wants to tell me we haven't done that the chair is transparent in all aspects but a majority of council still wants to spend tax dollars and taxpayer money to ambush with no transparency and that's exactly what happened it's exactly what happened in our last budget process as well

» and a majority of council's top priorities is travel baseball to benefit a few we have so many needs in this county and i'm not angry guys i mean i'm just i'm actually excited about i get to share this with you now this is my opinion my thoughts the top priority should be public safety and providing essential funding for law enforcement ambulance service and securing prisoners at the detention center a majority of council hands out millions of dollars of taxpayers money for travel baseball at the expense of public safety and that is my opinion and i'll stand by it and stick with it i have one more thought when the state rightfully provides hundreds of millions of dollars for big economic development projects why is kershow county always second you know everybody who loses is second you stil

» l lost whether you second third but every time i talk to somebody in another agency another community another county they came in second too well anyway i can tell you i have the answers i know exactly why we're not moving forward with that project scout going to blackwood two billion dollars four thousand jobs the battery plant going to florence 810 million dollars 1200 jobs we lost out on on on a few more as well but that was within the last six months so having said that guys listen we got to be transparent we got to be forthcoming i think there's a lot of excitement because there's a lot of support for baseball fields up here and i'm gonna tell you what sheriff you may not get your cars you may not get your stuff and we're gonna get some baseball fields and uh to my folks in the ambulan

» ce service you may not get all the ambulances you want you may not get your two million dollar new building that we could get we could do with this but we're gonna get some baseball fields and i'll tell you something else the jail has got to be fixed we got six million dollars sitting there i am not going to vote for any bond to build a new jail but anyway having said that i really want to say uh to my colleagues on council i enjoy serving with you i just don't agree with you and i hope you all have a very nice evening and uh madam chair members of council that concludes my report thank you mr jones mr tomlinson thank you madam chair um i'm gonna get in a little bit lighter mood mr jones thank you for for all your thoroughness i appreciate your report i know that you love kershaw county and

» and the county loves you and you spent a lot of a lot of years serving um and i do think every person up here on council loves kershaw county and it's doing it for the right reason but thank you so much for how hard you always fight and one thing i i love about you is um no matter how if we disagree or not you're always there and you were willing to talk to me and be my friend and always yes sir this has nothing to do with it and i thank you for saying that yes sir um i'm gonna be brief i you know like like we said before i really enjoyed serving on the finance committee um it was something it was an eye-opening experience and i'll tell you what i think we have the hardest working employees in kershaw county and i'm glad that we um we put together a good budget um i really you know i'm glad

» to support every every part of it that we have um and i appreciate for you know my fellow council members to look into it and make recommendations because it was just three of us with staff and we still have four other members that um need to make recommendations and and i hope you spend the time and effort to do that so thank you for everybody who came out today and appreciate staff thank you mr thompson mr cato i'll keep some of my comments to myself tonight because i think it'd probably be best for all involved but i'm gonna stay on a lighter note myself and uh we're gonna move forward in this county we're not gonna worry about the past how about that because if we look at the past that's part of the problem with this county um first and foremost tonight i want to recognize a county base

» ball team i want to recognize north central knights their baseball team won the district championship yesterday four to two over woodland and they'll be headed to the regional playoffs um to lower state playoffs so uh congratulations to uh to the north central knights baseball team i had a couple of things uh here from the town of bethune um from mayor holly she wanted me to bring up here tonight and um thursday night uh at 6 p.m may the 11th they will be honoring law enforcement since it is police respect honor and remembrance week and i think the sheriff's going to be there and um so that's going to start at 6 p.m and the public is invited at the bethune recreational center so if anyone would like to attend that um that is that is happening this thursday and then the town of bethune has a

» kids in the park community spring fest coming up and that is saturday may the 20th from 10 a.m to 2 p.m and that's in the bethune memorial park there'll be food games music treats arts and crafts um and if you want to put something up there that you it says here you can reserve your spot and i'll give you a number it's 843-334-6238 if anybody's interested in that um so uh make plans to attend those activities in bethune um i too um would like to express my condolences to chase's family um i have had an opportunity to hunt with that young man and and and his dad and and i i i know his dad and his mom um the branham family and um such a such a tragic tragic loss and uh out of all i've seen in my career young people's always the hardest to deal with and i think the sheriff would would agree wi

» th me on that if you've if you've ever had to deal with that and i i i have i could never imagine losing one of my children or grandchildren so my condolences and my deepest sympathy and prayers go out to this family but that concludes my report thank you thank you mr cato all right um also in the agenda packet there is a letter from musc to the health service district of kershaw county so this is one of the commitment letters um that i requested from chairman ogburn back in march um and it was sent to council we got some requests to get some copies of it so i decided to include it in the agenda packet just to let everybody know that that came in and we received it last weekend our family went down to patriot's landing where the boat ramp there were 52 trucks and trailers so i assume there

» were 52 boats in the water at least just at that landing and i talked to people about what would be most beneficial down there and um not having the dock the floating dock has not stopped the people that want to be on the river they're still going out on the river they said it was helpful but what they are really interested in is a second slip to accommodate the boats coming in and out so that's something we'll look at we're still waiting on the study to come back and that will be part of our thought process when it comes back all right so i'm wearing a t-shirt tonight i know that's kind of strange i do have my dress on underneath but i wanted to tell you about unity in the community this is a group that hank kerfoot headed up and also a kind of movement started by brian mays starting the c

» onversation those two have joined together and they meet the second tuesday of every month um the it's for lunch the location changes and the purpose of the meeting is to have a conversation with someone that you have never met or that you would not normally sit with or that you would not normally have a conversation with um i went this afternoon and it was awesome and i got to meet some really great people and i have to admit when i've got there i migrated to the people i knew and sat down with them um and then we had to move around and eat with someone else and it's i think it's really great for our community so there's a lot of stuff that even on this council um that unify us um children being one of those um so you get to talk to people and conversate with people that you normally would

» n't and i think there's healing in that um we have such a polarizing political world right now um nationally but we don't have to have that in kershaw county so if you'd like to get involved with starting conversation or unity and community and some of the events they do please reach out to me hank kerfoot or brian mays i think it's really awesome for this community this week i want to acknowledge um that it is national correctional officers week this council is going to recognize may 7th through the 13th 2023 as correctional officers week in kershaw county so our correctional officers are responsible for supervising offenders um they promote the safety of all of kershaw county um they assess behavior conduct um they're helping some of the offenders get their geds their help they keep them

» healthy um one thing that director jones has implemented is um that they get to go outside anyone at the kershaw county detention center gets to go outside now that hasn't been done in years correctional officers are a crucial part of a county-wide re-entry initiative and read they play a critical role in preparing offenders for success um and assimilation back into communities after release so we don't have a it's a temporary facility here in kershaw county okay so we're not a prison um offenders going there do come back into the community community and i want to recognize everything that they're doing um for the offenders over there and for the jail the morale at the detention center i know this sounds strange but it's really high um amongst the people that work there um they're correctio

» nal officers they love their jobs and that's awesome um so just if you see anyone working at the detention center please thank them and please recognize them director jones deputy director workman and shanae graham coffin um just thank you for what you do and this week is dedicated to you and your hard work and sometimes not so great conditions the kirkland community center is having may fest on may 20th this is the community center located um um up 97 at the old baron dekalb elementary school it's may 20th from 10 to 5 p.m all right next meeting we will be um may 23rd we have we will be reading all the applicants that apply to be on the health service district of kershaw county board there are three seats that um term ends this june so if you're interested in that go to our website and fil

» l out the application for boards and commissions we'll read all the applicants names on may 23rd and then on june 13th we'll take nominations for votes miss hannah is in the current process of doing the research to see which seat nominated which seat on their board which seat from us um so we can see which seats need to be field filled there are three at large seats and then there's um six that would be nominated from their respective district and thank you um mr shoemake and mr cato and for bringing up the newman family so um please um we have to always pray for our parents and youth but melissa branham jean branham shane newman and amanda shelton please keep them in your prayers for their loss and that's all i have mr templar no report okay mr dubose no report all right we're up to execut

» ive session um we do need an executive session tonight madam chair i would move that we enter executive session to receive attorney-client privilege briefing on a pending or threatened legal claim okay motion to enter executive session on a pending or threatened legal claim is there a second second all right mr tomlinson second and any discussion question um we need mr templar mr blanchard mr dubose okay um no vote coming out of this executive session we just need to receive legal information all those in favor of entering executive session indicate by raising your hand the vote is unanimous we're in the executive session mr dubose can you give us a recap of executive session real quick yes ma'am an executive session motion a attorney-client privilege briefing was received on pending threat

» ened or potential legal claim thank you no decision no votes were taken thank you sir motion to come out motion to come out executive session okay mr chuck makes motion mr she makes seconds any discussion all those in favor of coming out of executive session indicate by raising your hand vote is unanimous we are out of executive session and miss hannah if you can um note for the record councilman jones left at 916.

» all right we are up to adjournment mr tuckard yes ma'am my mother would be very disappointed in me um so i don't want to do that because she's the love of my life to you and miss hannah and all who is watching and miss reader happy mother's day that is coming up this weekend that's from both of us yes that's from both of us three of us and i want to say one more thing before we go because she is just too humble to do it so i'm gonna do it for her so they had a special meeting at the state house um today at the senate and our madam chair was recognized and honored for the women and leadership in kershaw county by the senate today so i got the plaque since she wouldn't hold it up so thank you thank you and mayor drakeford mayor emmons and mayor holly and myself and we're all mothers so yes al

» l right thank you you're welcome at this time is there a motion to adjourn what's your amount of chair okay mr tucker makes the motion mr cato seconds any discussion all right thank you gentlemen oh all those in favor of adjournment vote is unanimous thank you have a good evening