Newspapers / The Perquimans Weekly (Hertford, … / May 21, 2020, edition 1 / Page 2
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A2 THE PERQUIMANS WEEKLY, THURSDAY, MAY 21,2020 Obituary Clyde Carlton Lane HERTFORD - Clyde Carlton Lane, 86, of Hert ford, passed away Thursday, May 14, 2020 in Eden ton House. Mr. Lane was born in Perquimans County on January 18, 1934, and was the son of the late John Martin and Martha Ann Alexander “Annie” Lane. A machinist, he retired from NASA, LANGLEY, VA. He was a member of Hertford Baptist Church, and also enjoyed membership in the Perquimans Ma sonic Lodge #106 and the William P. Stallings Post 126 of the American Legion. A veteran, he had served in the US Army. ; In addition to his parents, he was preceded in ; death by his wife, Lois Jean Butt Lane; sisters, : Alma Hurdle (Robert), Julia Weston (Blake), Thel- ma Smith (Harry), and infant Ida Mae Lane; broth- ; ers, Winford “Buck” Lane (Madeline), Calvin Lane, ; and infant William Lane; and by a brother-in-law, - Frank Gibson. Surviving are his sister, Selma Gibson of Daytona Beach, FL; a brother, Preston Lane and wife, Kay, of Hampton, VA; a sister-in-law, Clara Lane of Ame lia Island, FL; and many nieces and nephews. Also surviving are Lois Jean’s children, Rhonda Lane Gregory and husband, Danny, of Hertford, Tammy Lane Lassiter and husband, Sammy, of Aulander, and Joseph Richard Lane and wife, Gail, of Manns Harbor, and their families. A private service was held Tuesday in the Mill er & Van Essendelft Funeral Chapel, 1125 Harvey Point Road, Hertford, and was conducted by the Rev. Don Carter. A private burial followed in the Lane Family Cemetery. Online condolences may be made to the family by visiting www.millerfhc.com. Obituary Policy For information on sub mitting obituaries or death notices Monday through Friday, 8:30 am. to 5 p.m., call 252-329-9505 or email obits@apgenc.com and specify that you are inter ested in obituary informa tion for The Perquimans Weekly. On weekends and holidays, email obits@ apgenc.com. We do not ac cept notices by fax. Law Enforcement Log ■ iiCiC Perquimans Sheriff's Office is seeking information about the driver who fled the scene of a hit-and-run accident. On Saturday, May 9 at around 12:19 p.m. Communications received a 911 call about a vehicle accident on Snug Harbor Road, ac cording to the sheriff’s department. The caller said that the other vehicle had fled the scene and was driving a white Ford truck that was heading towards Hwy. 17. Trooper W. Copeland, North Carolina Highway Patrol, was in the area and responded to the call while deputies were enroute. Copeland met the suspect vehicle with the vic tim just behind, and turned around to stop the vehicle. Copeland caught up with the vehi cle and discovered that the suspect had been consuming alcohol. Depu ties then discovered two firearms in the truck and one of the firearms was stolen out of Pasquotank County. The victim told communications that they would wait for law enforce ment at the Bethel Fire Department in a black Honda Accord. When Dep uties arrived there the victim was no longer at the Fire Department, and the phone number for the victim was Obituaries must be received, processed and approved by noon on Tues day to appear in print in the Thursday edition.. Death notices are $25 and can include the name and age of the decedent; funeral and visitation or viewing information; and the name of the funeral home. no longer in service. If anyone has information or knows the victim of the hit-and-run, please contact the Perquimans County Sheriff’s Office at (252) 426-5615. Perquimans Sheriff's arrests between May 1 and May 6: ■ Joshua Copeland of Holiday Island Road, Hertford, was arrested May 1 and charged with second-de gree trespassing. Bond was set at $200 unsecured. ■ Cedric Cunningham of Belvidere Road, Hertford, was arrested May 1 and charged with possession of a stolen firearm. Bond was set at $2,500 secured. ■ Khalil Mabine of West Grubb Street, Hertford, was arrested May 1 and charged with possession of a stolen firearm. Bond was set at $2,500 secured. ■ Sean Revels of Discovery Street, Hertford, was arrested May 2 and charged with simple assault and second-degree trespassing. Bond was set at $200 unsecured. ■ Kevin Corbin of Hampton, Virgin ia, was arrested May 5 and charged with obtaining property by false pretenses. Bond was set at $1,000 unsecured BUDGET Continued from Al reassuring answers that should give our readers in sight into how Town Coun cil is preparing a budget. For example, Hodges said, “My personal philoso phy with regard to taxes is we need to try to stay even or below the surrounding towns in the region to con tinue to attract new resi dents and businesses.” Perquimans Weekly: Has council gotten clos er to closing the $2.6 million gap? Yes. The Gov erning Body portion of the budget alone has been re duced by nearly $300,000, although our budget is like ly to go back up somewhat to cover a few priority capi tal outlay items. Town Manager Pam Hur dle recommended shelving most of the capital outlay and capital improvement requests across all the rest of the departments, and with those changes we’re getting closer. Council is meeting this week to make the final revenue and ex penditure adjustments. Does a property tax/ utility rate increase look likely? If so, how much? Balancing a budget is both art and science. The sci ence part is easy - you just add up the numbers and if they don’t work you make adjustments until they do. The art part is figuring out how to increase revenues without unduly burdening one group of citizens over another, and how to cut costs without preventing a department from doing its Job. What I can tell you as a matter of fact is our current funding model, wherein we supplement our general fund by charging high elec tric rates while making no reinvestment in our water and sewer infrastructure, is completely unsustainable. We must change course or risk becoming insolvent as a government or suffer ing a critical infrastructure failure with no ability to fix it. In deliberating this change we are considering every available option, not ROUND-UP Continued from Al in town. Perquimans County boasts a population of around 13,000 souls with around 2,000 people living in Hertford, so it makes good sense to reach out to peopled places like Albe marle Plantation, Bethel, New Hope, Winfall and Woodville. Though like the news paper, Hertford Rotary touches all corners of the county, Kretzer and Boyer too have expressed plans to better connect the club’s membership. just in the way of increas ing taxes and utility rates, but also in renegotiating agreements with Perquim ans County and the Town of Winfall and reexamining whether we can continue to provide all of our current services moving forward. My personal philosophy with regard to taxes is we need to try to stay even or below the surrounding towns in the region to con tinue to attract new resi dents and businesses. Our problems are not just a function of past poor decisions or an increasing poverty rate, but also a de clining population of resi dents and businesses who form the tax base we need to keep rates affordable. The challenge here is fig uring out how to continue to invest in quality of life improvements like parks and other activities for our young people, as well as in development activities that will bring jobs to the Town and more money to our res idents’ wallets. If we’re to achieve this goal more grant funding and potentially more low interest, low payment loans will have to be part of the equation. Utilities Rates: All that said, utility rate increases are what keep me up at night. We are already near the ceiling of what many of our most at-risk residents can afford to pay, and yet we’re struggling to even cover the costs of do ing business in our water and sewer departments. Although our residents often refer to their high “light bills”, the reality is a huge part of their monthly bill (particularly for our se nior citizens) goes to loan payments in the water and sewer departments. I’ve spent literally hun dreds of hours studying the problem, including building computer models to assess the impact of various rate increases on our residents’ budgets, and there is no realistic scenario in which we don’t have to raise rates in the water and sewer de partments. Last Tuesday night Council received a pre sentation from the North Through our conversa tion, we noted that there are a lot of impressive people living in Perquim ans County ranging from a longtime retired con gressman to a top tele vision producer known worldwide for Forensic Files. Hertford’s Mayor Earnell Brown has an impressive resume as does Joseph Hoffler, a county commissioner. Hertford residents - mark your calendars for June 20 when there will be a scheduled power outage starting at 11 p.m. Sunday night. Accord ing to the town’s Public Works Department, pow ¬ Carolina Rural Water As sociation which came to the same conclusion: if we don’t significantly increase revenue in the water and sewer departments we will likely be unable to operate our system at all within just a few years. So the question is not if we have to raise rates, but how we do so in such a way as to reduce the impact on our most vulnerable citi zens to the maximum ex tent possible. To do this we need to make some combi nation of the following ad justments: ■ Reduce our refiance on utilities to offset budget deficits in the general fund. (The general fund is what pays for Council, Town Administration, Streets, Police, and Fire, amongst others.) The only way to achieve this is through a combination of tax increas es and spending cuts. ■ Implement a grad uated rate schedule by class of user for electric, water, and sewer ser vices. In the electric de partment we’re actually losing money on what’s called peak demand charges, which is an el evated rate businesses pay for heavy electricity usage during peak load times. In the water and sewer departments we’re charging our residents the same base fee and rate as our institution al users consuming lOx the amount of water per month, which means our residents are paying 2.5x the price per gallon as our heavy users. Com plicating matters is the fact that the Town is our own customer in some of these cases (like when the water and sewer de partments buy the elec tricity needed to operate the plants) so increasing rates in one department can actually reduce rev enue in another. All this is in addition to the af fordability problem for many of our residents; every increase will inev itably reduce the number of customers who can afford to pay their bill, which in turn blunts the impact of a rate increase. er will be down between four and six hours so that Dominion Power can perform preventive main tenance to its substation that provides power to the town. In other matters, my daughter and I toured Hertford’s waterfront via kayak on a sunny day. Showed her a lot of amazing homes on Front Street’s back porch. If plans to develop the waterfront ever come to fruition, town will be transformed in such a way that will pave the way toward economic devel opment. Cow got loose in the All of this complexity is why I’m spending so many hours construct ing and tuning comput er models - we can’t cut these departments be cause they desperately need to increase expen ditures to stay functional for years to come, so all we can do is figure out ways to reduce the im pact to our residents as much as possible. ■ We absolutely must chase more grant funding for everything from parks to commercial develop ment to infrastructure up- grades to police and fire department equipment up- grades. Until we grow our population and businesses there is simply no other way to continue to improve our Town. There was talk of ad justing council salaries - does council/mayor pay stay the same? Yes. Will Historic Hertford Inc., receive any money? That’s a hot button issue for the Board to decide at a future date. I think what’s important to all of us is that HHI acknowledge its crit ical role in the aforemen tioned grant funding solic itation process. HHI is the designated 501©(3) (i.e., nonprofit) for the Town’s Main Street program, which should be a mqjor funding conduit for economic improvement ac tivities in the Town. Again, I reference the previous comments on needing jobs and businesses to help our residents and Government pay the bills. However we’ve seen a diminishing benefit from this arrangement over time which we can ill afford if we’re to turn the Town around. Any funding we pro vide HHI needs to be with an expected return on investment (ROI) in terms of real dollars, not just in special events like the Grand Illumination or plays at the Carolina Moon theater. These latter items are certainly important and valued by our residents, but the bottom fine is we need more from the Main Street part of HHI. New Hope neck of the woods for a short time last week. Rather it be a cow than a beagle who is enduring quarantine. Obtained a bunch of tax documents, infor mation that is public re cord, which shows how much some folks owe in back property taxes, fines and fees. How does one go 10 years without paying property taxes? Interesting reading, particularly as these property records provide some context about those folks who are raising the banner against gentrifica tion in Hertford. ^Modern Dentistry^ in a relaxed environment The dental hygiene teamat Albemarle Dental Associates. DR. CHRIS KOPPELMAN, DDS DR. ETHAN NELSON, bDS COMFORT • QUALITY • EXPERIENCE ALBEMARLE DENTAL ASSOCIATES ^eneia/ and Cosmetic ^entishy LET’S FACE IT! You need to get ORGANIZED! BUT WE CAN HELP- CALL TODAY! all seasons self □□storage ^ Ike 1 seated of uoa/o life/ CALL US TODAY! “We always welcome new patients. ” 482-5131 103 Mark Dr. Edenton, NC (behind Chowan Hospital) Information For subscription questions, delivery issues, classified ads, legal notices, and obituaries, please call Customer Care at 252-329-9505 POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Perquimans Weekly, Hertford, NC 27944 QUIMANS EE KLY (USPS428-080) Published Each Thursday A publication of Adams Publishing Group Established 1934 111 W. Market St., Hertford, NC 27944 Robin L. Quillon Publisher Sean O’Brien General Manager Miles Layton Editor Bev Alexander. Advertising Representative Phone 252-426-5728 ■ Fax 252426-4625 Email: mlayton@ncweeklies.com Subscription Rate Home delivery. $35 + tax per year
The Perquimans Weekly (Hertford, N.C.)
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May 21, 2020, edition 1
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