From Robbins to Pinebluff, Moore County's towns and villages have remarkably similar concerns when it comes to their relationship with county government: coordinated planning for land use, and for water and sewer expansion; more responsive budgeting when it comes to funding fire protection and emergency medical services; and improved communication between the county and towns.
    Those were the common threads that emerged again and again as leaders from ten of the county's eleven towns shared their goals with the Board of Commissioners during a Thursday, March 4 meeting — the latest in a series of regular conferences bringing together the Commissioners with elected officials from the municipalities. Only the Town of Cameron failed to provide a list of goals.
    The February meeting of the county and towns concluded with a suggestion from Commissioner Cindy Morgan that each government submit a list of its top goals to be distributed and discussed during the March meeting. All but Cameron provided lists, which were circulated in advance of the conference.
    The meeting is structured so that the Commissioners and town council representatives sit facing each other around a large central set of tables. County and town staff, as well as members of the public and press, sit at tables behind. The Greater Seven Lakes Community Council recently asked for a seat at the table of elected officials, but has not yet received a response from the county. No one from the Council was present at Thursday's meeting.
    
Water & Sewer Issues
    Commissioner Cindy Morgan called the issues surrounding the management of the county's water and sewers systems "the hardest problem we have," and that assessment was amply illustrated by the number of towns that included water and-or sewer issues among their goals.
    The County owns and runs the utility system in some towns — Pinehurst, for example; it provides wastewater treatment service to others, like Aberdeen; the County is expanding service to others, like Vass; and it buys water from others — Aberdeen and Southern Pines. In some cases, more than one of these relationships obtains with a single municipality — so nearly everyone at the meeting had something to say about water and sewer issues.

    Aberdeen Mayor Pro Tem Robbie Farrell told the group that his town has already committed to provide sewer service to a thousand new homes — but can do so only if that wastewater can be treated at the county's Addor pollution control plant. And the ability of the Addor plant to meet Aberdeens' future needs is dependent on a planned expansion of the plant. Yet, Farrell said, Aberdeen has had difficulty obtaining information about the progress the county has made toward that expansion. The information Farrell was seeking was provided by county officials to the Aberdeen town manager earlier the same day.
    Aberdeen was the first of many to mention specific water issues, which included:
    •    Carthage's desire for an emergency interconnection between its water system and the county's that could be used in times of shortage.
    •    Foxfire's interest in connecting with the county system in order to supply water to the recently annexed Stonehill Pines development.
    •    Pinebluff's interest in extending its sewer system.
    •    Pinehurst's concern about modernizing both the water and and sewer distribution systems in Old Town, as well as working with the county to drill new wells in the Pinehurst ETJ.
    •    Robbins' desire to work with the county to reactivate its water plant and fully-utilize its wastewater treatment plant to provide both water and sewer service to others in the county.
    •    Taylortown's interest in upgrades to its water and sewer system.
    •    Vass' often-expressed need to connect its sewer system to the county's Addor treatment plant — an on-going project on which the county recently made substantial progress in securing grant-based funding.
    
Calls for County to rejoin the Summit
    Many municipal leaders also made a point of asking that the county participate in the water committee of the Moore County Summit — a regular get-together that includes both elected officials and others organized by the Southern Pines Pilot newspaper and the Moore County Chamber of Commerce. As they had in the February meeting, Commissioners made clear that they preferred to work in the context of their own gathering of only elected officials and would not, for the present, be rejoining the Summit.
    Southern Pines Councilman Chris Smithson said the county simply disappeared from those meetings, without any explanation or any suggestion for changing them in a way that would meet the county's needs. Smithson said the county's new regular meetings with the municipalities, at least where water issues are concerned, amounts to reinventing a new process to replace a process that was already working well.
    After several other town leaders echoed Smithson's point, Commissioner Nick Picerno, who chaired the Board of Commissioners when the county withdrew from the Summit, said he had attended one meeting of the Summit water committee, and "What I got out of that was a lot of tension, finger-pointing, and a lot of talking, but I didn't see a lot of things that were going to get accomplished."
    "I didn't run to be a county commissioner to talk about problems," Picerno said. "I want to find solutions and get them done."
    "Not that it wasn't a great idea. I think it was a  wonderful idea. But, it has to have a purpose of producing results — not just getting in a room and talking about it . . . Until you can get into a smaller group and get some action plans done and some goals set, and accomplish some tasks, then you are wasting everybody's time. "
    Picerno said he had recommended that the Board pull back from the broad discussions of the Summit and "figure out what we need to do." The result was a focus on working to fulfill the existing contract and commitments the county has with the municipalities — as well as pointing out the progress that Moore County Public Utilities was in fact making on increasing the available supply of water.
    While Picerno's explanation clearly did not satisfy Smithson, it was also clear that the Commissioners are determined to give the new cooperative process they have launched a thorough try-out before going back to meetings of the Summit.
    "The Board has taken a position on this," Chairman Tim Lea said. "We are not willing to come back to that table, because it was not moving forward in a positive direction, from the county's perspective." He noted that the county-sponsored gathering of towns had in fact opened new lines of communication.
    "When something's not working, you have to try a different direction," Lea said, asking the municipal officials to continue to give the county-led process a chance to succeed.
    
Many water supply options available
    Commissioner Larry Caddell, who has been informally appointed the Commissioners' point man on water issues, said he decided to run for re-election this year specifically to continue to focus on water issues.
    "There's not just one option that is going to fix this," Caddell said. "We are not going to put all our eggs in one basket." He said the county has a number of options, including sources in Robbins, Montgomery County, and Scotland County, among others.
    "But you have to be able to sell the water that you've got," Caddell added. He noted that improvements to the county's water system — once new wells in Pinehurst are brought online — have it capable of delivering 6.2 million gallons per day — well above the county's all-time record for water consumption of 4.5 million gallons per day.
    "I don't want us to think about how we put a bandaid on this," Caddell said. "I want us to think about how we fix it long-term. But us taking potshots at each other . . . That's not going to work."
    Caddell said the county and its towns need to approach water supply issues with a twenty-year planning horizon.
    The next step on water and sewer issues, outlined by Morgan and Caddell, would involve an inaugural three-hour meeting, open to both municipalities and others, which would focus for 90 minutes on water issues and 90 minutes on sewer issues. The hope is that this would become a regular meeting in which the county, the municipalities, and others with an interest in water or sewer issues, could begin to exchange information, plan, and cooperate. The date for that meeting will be announced later.
    
Fire & EMS Funding
    Carthage Mayor Milton Dowdy told the Commissioners that funding adequate fire protection is a growing challenge for municipalities, in part because "the volunteer fireman is becoming a thing of the past." Dowdy noted that the proliferation of two-wage-earner families mean that young adults have less time to volunteer. The result is that towns must hire full-time, professional firefighters.
    Yet the towns, Dowdy said, do not have adequate input into county decisions regarding fire district tax rates, which are set as a part of the overall county budget process.
    Moore County is divided into a number of fire districts, and fire departments are funded by a special property tax assessed on real and personal property within those districts. Each district has a board of directors that approves an annual budget for its department and sends the budget request to the Board of Commissioners. But, the Commissioners have the final say on the fire district tax rate and, therefore, the revenue available to the fire departments. Last spring, as the county's budgeting process wound down, the tax rates of a number of districts were cut.
    Dowdy said that, last year, the Carthage Fire District Board had "approved the aspirations of Carthage" for fire protection, only to see the budget "knocked down by two or three appointed people who kicked it to the curb," an apparent reference to the County's Emergency Services Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations on Fire and EMS issues to the Commissioners.
    Carthage's concerns were echoed by Southern Pines; Smithson explained that citizens of a densely-populated town have different expectations about levels of service than residents of rural areas — for fire protection and in other areas.
    Commissioner Morgan said the Commissioners had already discussed having fire and EMS service and funding be the focus of the April county-municipality meeting, scheduled for Thursday, April 15. She told Dowdy that the Emergency Services Advisory Committee would be meeting on March 20 to hear the budget requests of individual fire departments and invited him to attend that meeting to ensure that Carthage's needs are represented.
    
Other priorities
    Coordinated Planning. Several municipalities asked for more involvement in a coordinated approach to countywide land use planning, with Foxfire, Pinebluff, Pinehurst, and Southern Pines specifically mentioning county cooperation as they attempt to expand their Extraterritorial Jurisdictions or municipal boundaries. Whispering Pines asked that the county develop a plan for preserving open space, and both Robbins and Vass wanted county help in marketing their towns, either as a tourist destination, in the case of Robbins, or as a bedroom community of both Fort Bragg and the Raleigh Area, in the case of Vass.
    Housing rehabilitation. Both Robbins and Vass mentioned a need for county help in rehabilitating substandard housing in their communities.
    Schools. Southern Pines asked for more input into decision about school funding, noting that Southern Pines schools seem to get the short end of the stick in decision made by the Moore County Board of Education. That led Chairman Lea to suggest inviting the School Board to participate in the county-municipal meeting, a suggestion that met with general approval.
    
County Goals
    The county provided municipal officials with a two-page statement of its goals, which were summarized in three primary objectives:
    •    Move forward with the planned capital projects, including new public buildings in Carthage and improvements to the county's water and sewer system.
    •    Strengthen financial policies and encourage economic development by keeping the tax burden low.
    •    Continue to improve communication both among county departments and between the county and other levels of government.
    Chairman Lea ended the meeting on a cautionary note, recounting hearing from other counties in recent meetings that some are looking at their Fiscal Year 2010-2011 budgets and planning cuts of up to twenty-five percent.
    Lea said next year is likely to be even tougher on the budgets of local and state governments than the current year has been, because federal economic stimulus dollars will no longer be available to supplement traditional revenue streams.
    The Chairman said Moore County had worked hard to be both conservative and proactive in preparing for tough economic times and has therefore weathered the storm better than ninety percent of North Carolina counties. He said the Commissioners have set a goal of cutting county expenses by three to five percent and cutting taxes by as much as two cents in the upcoming fiscal year.
    "More and more, the folks paying the taxes don't have work," Lea said. "If they don't have work, they can't pay the taxes. And, if they can't pay the taxes, how are we going to pay back all the debt that we are accumulating?"
    Lea said local governments have little control over decisions made in Washington, DC, or in the State House in Raleigh. "So we, more than ever, are going to have to depend on each other in how we move things forward, budget-wise.