By By BETTY MITCHELL GRAY
Staff writer
North Carolina’s 20 coastal counties must join together and hire a professional lobbyist to fend off unfair regulations, the Beaufort County Board of Commissioners were told Monday night.
“If the coastal counties don’t organize, we’re going to have more problems,” Tom Thompson, director of the Beaufort County Economic Development Commission, said to the commissioners.
Last year, the counties covered under the Coastal Area Management Act loosely organized under the moniker NC 20 and successfully fought off onerous stormwater regulations and unfair increases in coastal homeowners’ insurance rates, Thompson told the board.
The organization will continue to monitor discussions in the N.C. General Assembly about coastal homeowners’ insurance rates and continue to fight for more transportation funds for the region during the coming year.
But unless the counties organize with a professional director and lobbyist — similar to the 13 counties that are part of the Highway 17 Association — eastern North Carolina will continue to suffer unfair regulation at the hands of the state’s politicians, he said.
In an interview after his presentation, Thompson said he will seek $200,000 from counties throughout the coastal region to hire that professional director and lobbyist. He wants them to budget and allocate that money for using during the upcoming 2010-2011 fiscal year.
“There’s interest out there,” he said. “But I can’t predict how successful it will be.”
The report on NC 20 was one of four annual reports on activities in 2009 made to the county board.
Others presenting information included Marc Finlayson, director of the Highway 17 Association; Tim Ware, executive director of the Mid-East Commission, and Roy Wilson, executive director of East Carolina Behavioral Heath.
Ware told the board that the Mid-East Commission received $12,050 in dues from Beaufort County. It provided 2,709 county residents with various services during the year including 2,482 who received services from the Area Agency on Aging and 227 who received help from the commission’s JobLink center.
Among other activities, ECBH established a mobile crisis unit in 2009 that responded to 187 calls in a nine-county area from July 1 to Sept. 30 including 57 calls in Beaufort County, according to Wilson. The agency provided crisis and detoxification services to 182 people from a nine-county area including 73 at Beaufort County Hospital’s Ray Silverthorne Crisis Center.
Finlayson gave the board an update of highway-construction projects along U.S. Highway 17 including construction of the Wilmington, Jacksonville and New Bern bypasses and the project to four-lane U.S. Highway 17 north of Washington to N.C. Highway 171.
In other business, the board:
• Unanimously approved a capital-project budget ordinance and awarded a $1,256,125 contract to Caldwell Tanks Inc. for a tank-mixing system to be installed on the 12 existing elevated storage tanks of the Beaufort Regional Water System. The contract will be awarded pending receipt of an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant that will cover at least 50 percent of the cost of the project and a no-interest ARRA loan for the remainder of the cost.
• Unanimously approved a request from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office to use drug forfeiture funds to buy lap-top computers to allow deputies on patrol to access the North Carolina Automated Warrant Repository.
• Unanimously approved a request from Beaufort County Tax Administrator Bobby Parker to advertise in a newspaper the list of delinquent property tax payers for the 2009 tax levy and the 2010 Beaufort County Tax Listing Guide.
• Approved with a 4-3 vote a motion by Commissioner Hood Richardson to send a letter by certified mail to Gov. Beverly Perdue asking for a specific response to the county’s request to remove Spanish from state government Web sites. Siding with Richardson were Commissioners Stan Deatherage, Jay McRoy and Al Klemm. Commissioners Ed Booth, Robert Cayton and Jerry Langley cast dissenting votes.
• Approved with a 6-1 vote travel expenses for county employees in the amount of $5,296.75 with Richardson casting the sole dissenting vote.
• Delayed until March appointments to the Beaufort County Industrial Facilities and Pollution Control Financing Authority.
All commissioners attended the meeting.