The State Port Pilot Our Town Long Beach After a performance review by town council last Tuesday, town manager Jerry Walters was given a $4,000 salary increase. The raise will be paid him in a lump sum this year, as he has not had a salary review in the previous two years. Council said the manager’s car allowance will remain $3,600 annually. Walters recently was appointed to the environmental stan dards committee of the N. C. City/County Managers Association. With the prospect of consolidating Yaupon Beach and Long Beach town governments to form the new Town of Oak Island looming, Long Beach will begin to cut Yaupon Beach residents in on certain important decisions well before the July 1,1999, target date for completion of the municipal merger. Yaupon Beach residents will be added to the committee discussing implementation of a Fragile Area Management Plan at “The Point” and to the town’s wastewater management committee. Mayor Joan Altman said it is important to involve Yaupon Beach residents in these two committees now because both are considering large expenditures of public funds. Yaupon Beach Time to compile municipal recommendations for N. C. DOT’S annual Transportation Improvement Plan will be soon at hand. Town officials have asked citizens to forward transportation suggestions to the board of commissioners through Town Hall. The second bridge to Oak Island at Middleton Street in Long Beach has been the town’s top transportation improvement request for several years. Town property tax bills have been sent. Payment of municipal property taxes must be made by the first week in January to avoid penalty. A two-percent penalty is added to the tax bill after that time and additional interest will be added monthly. Water bills were mailed to customers two days late this month So the late payment date has been delayed two days. Late pay ment date now is November 18. The November meeting of the board of commissioners of the Town of Yaupon Beach will be held Tuesday, November 10. This is a change in the regular meeting schedule. Normally the board would meet on the second Monday of the month. A pub lic hearing on the town’s land use plan update for 1998 will be held at that meeting. Bald Head Island Village council will meet in special session Friday to review proposals from engineering firms willing to perform a compre hensive study of the ocean sand beach systems on and around Bald Head Island. The town already has employed Gulf Stream Environmental, a consulting firm now undertaking an analysis of beachfront conditions of a more limited scope. That firm is expected to report within six months on the volume of sand in the system and present an analysis of sand flow through the system. Council may move as early as Friday to hire a beach manage ment consultant who will take the study of the beachfront a step further, examining the placement and effect of groins the vil lage has located on the strand. Several groins have been dam aged and the village has taken bids for repair. Before repair is begun, village officials want to verify that they are placed cor rectly and have had the desired effect on beach conditions. Council was given information from engineering firms respond ing to requests for proposals earlier in the month, but asked more time to study the responses. The village finance committee will meet at 3 p.m. Friday at Village Hall. Boiling Spring Lakes Staff was busy this week preparing city property tax bills for mailing. Bills are to be mailed to all property, owners shortly and payment may be made without penalty any time before the first week in January. After that, a two-pefcent penalty is added. A three-quarter-percent monthly penalty may be added to the tax bill for every month payment is not made. The board of commissioners of the City of Boiling Spring Lakes will meet in regular monthly session at a slightly differ ent time this month. The board will meet at 7:30 p.m. — not 7 p.m. as usual — Tuesday at City Hall. Mayor Tom Tully opted not to call the meeting until the polls had closed that Election Day. Southport City manager Rob Gandy and public services director Ed Honeycutt will attend a conference on year 2000 problems fac ing cities operating electric systems Thursday. The Year 2000 — Y2K — bug is the name given the likelihood that some comput ers and microprocessors may not recognize the year change between December 31,1999, and January 1,2000. Gandy said this week the city has had a Y2K committee examining issues in the city for several months. Honeycutt leads the city’s Y2K team. “We’ve been going over it for several months now,” Gandy said. “All of our electric and other service facilities in the field have microprocessors and we are trying to determine if they are Y2K compatible. It’s not just our electric system that may be affected, but also our billing system and many other things we do.” The city’s board of aldermen will meet in special session at 6 p.m. Thursday. The board will review paving bids and will interview candidates for appointment to the city planning board. Caswell Beach Town Hall will be closed for municipal business Tuesday as the county board of elections converts it to a polling place. The Saturday beach party thrown by the board of commis sioners’ community outreach committee attracted a good num ber of residents to the pubjic beach access area. The group was well fed on beef, chicken/sourdough rolls, pasta salad and homemade brownies. • Ed Zalewski has been appointed to the town’s beach preserva tion committee, a subcommittee of the beach erosion control committee. The preservation committee will advise commis sioners on use of the town’s newly created Caswell Beach Preservation Trust. The trust was created earlier this year to accept contributions from private sources for beach nourish ment and stabilization projects and to serve as local match to federal grants for beach nourishment projects. DOWN TO THE .a^irias., Photo by Jim Harper Beach season isn’t over ‘til the weatherman says it’s over, and this week’s mild temperatures and sunny skies were perfect for shelling, bird-watching -- even toiling at sea -- at Lockwood Folly Inlet Looking to the future Old Dosher building a victim of progress? m iticnara nuoei Municipal Editor It appears increasingly likely the original Dosher Memorial Hospital building, built in the 1930s, will at some time be tom down to make way for additional hospital expansion. That eventuality will be one of the topics of discussion when hospital trustees meet with their architectural plan ning consultants in the next few months to review options presented in a long-range facility master plan. Failure to remove the old hospital building would ham string the hospital’s development on the small section of Howe Street property it has to utilize. “Which is something we cannot do,” trustee Eugene B. Tomlinson said. Hospital administrator Edgar Haywood said the architects had already made a presentation to the hospital’s planning committee. ‘The proposed plan outlines the need to significantly expand our emergency, surgical and imaging departments, as well as relocate our existing ancillary departments to improve the ever-increasing flow of out-patient services,” ‘Any small hospital like we are that ends up the year in the black is doing a darned good job.’ Gib Barbee Dosher trustee Haywood wrote in his monthly report. While the architectural planners have recommended mov ing Dosher’s physical therapy department across Howe Street to a new facility on land the hospital owns next to the Rx Shoppe, planners have set out two options for dealing with the older section of Dosher that served the community See Dosher, page 6 Adviser: Yaupon proposal ‘concern’ By Richard Nubel Municipal Editor Consolidation of Long Beach and Yaupon Beach can only work if Yaupon Beach rescinds its annexa tion ordinance, a Long Beach resi dent told town council last week. Long Beach resident Rosetta Short, long active in municipal affairs, said she supports consolida tion of the two municipalities to form the new Town of Oak Island, but feels that Yaupon Beach should be asked, as a condition of the con solidation, to forsake its plan to annex 554 acres along Long Beach Road, Airport Road and Fish Factory Road on the mainland. On October 1, Long Beach Town Council and Yaupon Beach Board of Commissioners announced plans to explore consolidation of the two municipal corporations to form the new Town of Oak Island. Target date for completion of the consoli dation is July 1, 1999, if three task committees exploring the consolida tion process report favorably on merging finances, government structures and services. Southeast Brunswick Sanitary District has filed suit, seeking to overturn a Yaupon Beach ordinance of annexation of the land, now in its jurisdiction. If that suit is unsuccess ful the annexation will be complete, and Yaupon Beach corporate limits will reach from the Oak Island bridge to the Long Beach Road and Fish Factory Road intersection on September 1, 1999. Ms. Short said the concerns of the mainland area and the concerns of the island proper are fundamentally different. “Consolidation will only be viable now if the Yaupon line stays where it is,” Ms. Short warned. She also complained the consoli dation proposition was presented to citizens as a "fait accomplit" at a September 30 joint meeting of the two towns’ governing boards. She said no mention of the Yaupon Beach annexation was made at that time. “Annexation should have been discussed by one or both mayors,” Ms. Short said. She said state coastal grants may be jeopardized if a mainland com- ' ponent is added to the town and the new Town of Oak Island may be bit ing off more than it can chew by adding an area with a very different development history that has only been guided by zoning ordinances for a few years. Do we need the bitterness Long Beach Road residents have for Yaupon Beach spilling all over them?” Ms. Short asked. “I-really think the mess on Long Beach Road is too far gone to beautify it. So we don’t need it.” Two other residents asserted Long Beach and Yaupon Beach commis sioners had already committed to consolidation of the two towns and said the public would be left out of the decisions. “From what I understand, this is a done deal,” resident Bud Deitz said. .“From what I was told, the citizens will have no further say. We voted for you guys and you’re going to do it. Is there going to be a referen See Yaupon, page 6 City officials say some Southport residents still haven’t.fully adjusted to solid waste collection pro cedures changed in July. ; - Specifically, some city residents have continued to place yard debris at curbside for collection. The city stopped collecting yard debris from the ground at curbside in July when Southport contracted with Waste Industries Inc. to remove yard debris. Yard debris must now be placed in the older of the two collection bins most city residents now have. “All grass clippings and leaves must be either irt (90-gallon) containers or in plastic bags placed beside the container,” a memorandum from the city says. “Loose piles of leaves or grass clippings will not be picked up.” • Brush and limes must be tied in bundles no more than five feet in length or 70 pounds in weight and placed at roadside for collection. Yard debris 'is collected once weekly on Wednesdays in South-port.’ Each household in Southport is billed $7.04 monthly to support the once-a-week debris Collection and the city’s curb side recycling program Anyone placing debris along any city street or state highway, not in compliance with the present city ordinance, is subject to being fined,” a public notice from City Hall this week says

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