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6 • Morrisville and Preston Progress. Thursday. June 25. 1998 Hodgkins returns as town manager 7 will continue to watch over this town and watch over Mr. Hodgkins’ job performance. I am not going to allow him to make mistakes as he has before as a manager.’ —^Mark Silver-Smith, town commissioner Continued from page 1 sioner. “I will have to be more assertive with individuals,” he said. “I want to be able to prioritize my work the way I see fit, rather than someone without knowledge of day to day operations.” Hodgkins said he plans to invite a member of the Institute of Government to educate the board on how managers conduct their jobs and how elected officials conduct their jobs within the parameters of the council manag er form of govern ment. “1 think that some of our membership does not really understand the role of the commission er, the statutory requirements, what is the manager responsible for, what are they responsible for,” he said. He spent the week in discussions with board members, ensuring that their support was behind him. He said he is satisfied with the support except in one case. "What they’ve effectively done is disrupted my work, disrupted my career temporarily, also exposed the town to ridicule, really,” Hodgkins said. “This is not some thing to take lightly. If s important for them to recommit themselves to moving the town forward. They need to restore staff’s faith. For a short time, we were in total chaos. That can’t happen again,” Hodgkins said. He also looked for support for another position to assist the town manager with projects and paper work. “I can only delegate so much to department heads because they’re already overloaded,” he said. A memorandum of six items was adopted at the June 22 meeting. In It, the board agreed to act as a poli- :ymaker, not a supervisor of day- to-day operations; to hold regular work sessions; and to establish a group process for discussion, avoiding the need for multiple, duplicative meetings; to limit undue contact with staff; to allow Hodgkins to cultivate subordinate staff to help him carry out his job, and to set up a meeting with the Institute of Government outlining duties of staff and board under the Council-Manager form of govern ment. The motion passed unanimously. However, Silver-Smith had excused himself from the meeting before the vote. At the special meeting June 15, Mrs. Faulkner also made a motion that would establish a policy to help the staff to know who to answer to and at what time. “Action items directed to the staff should be in writing with the signa tures of all of the board,” the motion said. The motion passed 4- 1, with Mayor Pro Tern Silver- Smith dissenting. A formal policy drafted by Town Attorney Frank Gray was adopted June 22. The key phrase in the policy was “the Mayor and Town Commissioners shall refrain from issuing individu al directives to town staff and per sonnel.” The policy also asked that board members m^e appointments with the manager and department heads if information is needed. ‘T just felt like there needed to be some kind of policy to protect the staff and the manager’s relationship without interference from any of the commissioners,” Faulkner said after the meeting. “The board needs to work together as a team, not individually or in twos or threes or whatever. This is the beginning of working through that process so that we can work together as team.” She said it was not directed at any one commissioner. Hodgkins returned to Morrisville about two-and-a-half years ago as town manager, but he had served as Morrisville’s Community Development Director and Assistant Town Manager for about five years in the mid-late 1980s. He left that job to serve as County Manager of Franklin County, and then was a budget and management analyst in the city manager’s office in Raleigh before returning to Morrisville. In the early 1980s, Hodgkins served as Planning Director for Clayton and had worked in the planning department in Kinston after receiving his master’s in pub lic administration from Virginia Tech. “I have always supported David,” Barbee said after the June 15 meet ing. “I'm very pleased with what happened tonight. When we get him back. I’m sure he will come in running again. He’s ran since he’s been here,” he said. “I hope they know what they are doing,” Silver-Smith said after the meeting. “If these people think he will come back and do a better job, they’re wrong. People on the board are afraid to look toward the future.” Later he said, “Mr. Hodgkins does not and never did have the ability to be a manager. To point the finger at me for making it difficult for him! .. If me as an elected official caus es him a little upset-ment to make sure he did his job, I am, as an elected official, responsible for this man’s running the town. I’m not one to sit on that board and ignore his inability to do his job. There are plenty of examples I could cite. “There have been complaints about him by employees of this town on a number of occasions,” he said. “I can’t say who they are. “Hodgkins is a type of person I have concluded that because of the lack of ability to be a manager will put the blame on other people. That’s his way of doing things. Hodgkins procrastinates, he doesn’t know how to get most things done.” Silver-Smith continued, “In con clusion, I’m a very active mayor pro tem/commissioner in this town and I always have been. I take my job very seriously and I have proved ±at. I will continue to be responsible, I will continue to watch over this town and watch over Mr. Hodgkins’ job perfor mance. I am not going to allow him to make mistakes as he has before as a manager. There is not any com missioner on this board that is going to tell me not to talk to the manager or anyone else in this town, when they all knew how incompetent he is.” “I am way up for this challenge, I have been for anything else that was thrown to me from any other board and this board,” Silver-Smith said. K V Center® « a give your child a big head start on this fall’s classes, in our fun, positive environment, students actual ly get excited about learning. Through our testing and individualized instruction, stu dents learn faster than you ever thought possible. To learn more about Sylvan's programs, call today. In just a few hours per week this summer. Sylvan Sylvan Learning Center® Helping kidu do their best. Individualized Programs For All Ages PROGRAMS: GRADES: •Reading/comprehension M2 •Math •Pre-Algebra •Algebra I or II •Geometry •Writing •Study Skills •SAT/PSAT/ACT Preston student scores perfection on SATs By Mary Beth Phillips Staff Writer Preston resident Shannon Hughes has been making straight A’s since kindergarten. This spring, her hard work paid off, when she was one of only a few hundred students across the country to score a perfect 1600 on her SAT college admission test. Miss Hughes, a rising senior at Durham Academy, is modest about her achievements. “I do my best in school,” she said. “It just happens to come out pretty well.” The daughter of Brian and Linda Hughes moved to her home at 100 Wybel Lane in Preston from Baltimore about a year ago, when her father took a job as a professor of electrical engineering at NC State University. Because she had attended a private school in Baltimore, her parents enrolled her in Durham Academy, although her two sisters, Rachel and Kelly, attend West Cary and Weatherstone public schools. TWO LOCATIONS: CARY 467-8097 GARNER 779-2229 Coming into a new school her junior year created some logistical problems. For example, juniors at Durham Academy are taking chem istry, which she finished her sopho more year. But she had never taken biology. So she was placed in a biol ogy class with seniors. She had to be placed into a col lege-level calculus course because she had already taken the junior- level coursework in calculus at her old school. Her easiest course this past year was Robotics, she said. “You just build with Legos and then you pro gram them with power devices. It’s really simple programming. “I definitely fit on the math-sci ence end of the spectrum,” Miss Hughes said. “I like math and sci ence better,” though obviously she is proficient in the language-side of things. The SAT is divided into ver bal and mathematics sections, and she scored a perfect 800-points in each area. She hopes to become an architect, an engineer or a scientist, and she Shannon Hughes She gig gles as she relaxes in a chair in her living room, wearing rolled-up denim shorts and a T-shirt. She says she is leaning toward a top-notch private school such as Duke or Princeton, but she has a lot of deci sion-making to do before the appli cation period begins in the late fall. As far as she knows, she is the only Cary resident who attends Durham Academy, although there are stu dents from Raleigh, and a contin gency from Henderson there. “I say I’m from Cary and the kids act like it’s Siberia or something,” she said. But she has fit in well. She runs cross-country and track for her school, and she is front-page editor for the school newspaper. She set up and ran the lights for the spring musical, and joined the debate club in the spring, “The best thing about Shannon,” said her mother, “is even though she is a great achiever and a hard work er, she’s always fun. She’s cheerful and she keeps her sense of humor.” At home for the summer, she runs every day. and she practices the piano, which she has been playing since age 6. She can rest on her laurels now that she has a perfect SAT score. In a way, her friends are more impressed about it than she is. In fact, all the attention is a little hard for her to understand. “I just went and I took the test,” she said. “I just happened to get more right than most people.” Local girl second in pony essay contest By Mary Beth Phillips Staff Writer Morrisville Elementary School second grader and Preston resident Amelia Pale was a runner-up in the Dream Pony Essay Contest, spon sored by Scholastic Book Club, win ning a set of Pony Pal books for her literary efforts. “We went to Chincoteague one day,” Amelia explained, “and we got to watch the ponies swim. This was a true story,” she added. “I really liked this one pony. Then we went to the auction where people buy them,” she said. Some of the wild ponies are sold and taken away, and others buy the ponies and allow them to continue to live at Chincoteague. “My mom let me handle the cam era,” Amelia said, “and I got to pet one [pony], and I took a picture of him. But I never could find the pic ture I took of the little baby pony I liked.” Mrs. Pate said, “She cried the whole way home because she want ed us to buy that pony. It must have made us look bad,” she said with a laugh. “I told her she won because it was such a tear-jerker.” The letter from Scholastic said there were over 3,000 entries nation wide in the contest. The first place winner got $5,000 or a pony, and the runners up got a complete set of Pony Pals-books. Mrs. Pate said entrants could not be over age 10. Amelia was just as happy with the books, because she already has a pony, Bucky, who boards at Chapel Ridge on Olive Chapel Road in Apex. Her parents bought her the pony soon after the trip to Chincoteague. Bucky IS a Buckskin pony, just like the wild baby pony she had admired. Miss Pate said it was her idea to write the essay “because I really like ponies. I came up with the idea by myself about what to write about,” she added. 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Morrisville and Preston Progress (Morrisville, N.C.)
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June 25, 1998, edition 1
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