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Randy
Crow for New Hanover County Commissioners |
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Budget |
Centerpiece of my campaign
- No overcapacity streets - is the key to economic growth. A piece of property which would
be a great park is the 2000 acres or so at Carolina Beach off Dow Road
owned by the Gov. and used as a buffer for Sunny Point. This and Carolina
Beach State Park should be developed into a regional park. Duck Haven
would be a nice golf course for the County to buy. Land off Blue Clay
and Murrayville might be available to build regional parks with golf courses
soccer fields. Clean Greenfield Lake. A little this, a little bike road
there, and wham, bang, our community should become a magnet for companies
who pay well to relocate. |
Self-financing bonds pay for
themselves. Bonds pay for public improvements such as streets, water and
sewer service and sidewalks in special development districts. Those facilities
and the private development they support cause property values in a district
to improve. That generates additional tax revenues to pay off the bonds.
Please join us on November 2 ( in Charlotte) in voting FOR Amendment One
to authorize the use of self-financing bonds in this state. |
With anticipation
I am in favor of incentives but would want to look at the cost one incentive
at a time. Our area is blessed to have the movie industry here. Every
community wants the movie industry because it is such a cash cow for local
businesses. Movie people are off the wall cool guys and are usually in
the arts which a community is only as good as its art, in my opinion.
Incentives for the movie industry should be approached as short term fix
to eliminate competition and after the price war is over things get back
to normal with our movie industry having a larger market share and movie
incentives are history. |
It would take a lot
of words for me to try and explain my position on affordable housing.
In my opinion group homes is a form of affordable housing and I strongly
believe in group homes. If the reappraisal is put off for two years government
will be forced to take a close look at what is gobbling up their money.
What government will find is that apartments and low priced homes with
many people living in them is sucking money out of the General Fund like
a giant vacuum cleaner. |
When I first came
to Wilmington and went to the beach I was around one year old. A few years
later until I was about 58 when I was getting ready for my vacation at
the beach I could not go to sleep at night wondering how the sand bars
were going to look this year or whether or not the jetties had made it
through last summer's hurricane season. Another name for the tourist business
could be the beach re nourishment or sand business. No sand no tourists.
Beach re nourishment is the key incentive for the tourist business and
I am totally in favor of beach re nourishment. Jetties I think would make
this area have more sand and more beautiful and I would like to see giant
rock jetties protecting the inlets at Figure Eight and Carolina Beach
although I think they may be laws against this. |
With small reservation I support and am in agreement with the CAMA, Coastal Area Management Act, plans and there updates annually and I feel our CAMA plan reflects a good understanding of our area's growth, although our CAMA plan has inconsistencies. Twenty North Carolina coastal counties have CAMA plans and I think the counties which comprise an area about the size of Harris County where Houston is located should mesh their CAMA plans and consider one high quality of life area as one objective. Probably Brunswick, Pender, and New Hanover counties should meet every three months or so to mesh their CAMA plans and every six months or so Columbus, Bladen, Sampson, Duplin and Onslow counties should join Pender, Brunswick and New Hanover counties to mesh their CAMA plans with the CAMA plans of Brunswick, Pender and New Hanover. The New Hanover County CAMA plan states that 57% of our jobs are relatively low paying consisting of retail trade, service, and construction and our highest paying jobs are manufacturing and they have been steadily declining and now constitute only 11% of the work force. In my opinion apartments fuel this job scenario. Logic tells me if we did not have the overabundance of apartments, our roads would have less traffic, Boeing type companies paying high wages would want to come to our area because of no overcapacity streets, and our growth would be fueled by high paying jobs. A public opinion survey conducted
in 1997 by CAMA revealed 72 % of the surveyed registered voters said our
area was growing too fast. Residents feel our clean water is declining
and their concerns have led to strong community desire for protection
and enhancement of our surface and groundwater quality and a desire to
improve the quality of our coastal waters. People offering input to the
CAMA plan and updates feel traffic volume exceeds the capacity of the
street networks and that planners should minimize dependence on the automobile
by changing land use patterns and government provide facilities for alternate
forms of transportation. Density is blamed for too many vehicles on the
streets and respondents feel higher density should be allowed only where
adequate infrastructure exists and where natural conditions will not be
adversely effected. The Columbus County Green Swamp dump will cause regional pollution and Wilmington will be for sure a one deer dog polluted junk yard if it is allowed to be built. Smithfield Foods is polluting our river especially during hurricane season when it opens the flood gates and emits the horrible waste it stores on site and we need to tear Smithfield a new ass hole if they don't stop polluting the river yesterday. There are intelligent answers to the Columbus dump and Smithfield Foods' pollution of the river but their sticking their head in the sand and keeping on keeping on with the same mind set is not one of them. Hello Columbus, try locating your dump on dry land. The world may be able to see it but your dump will not pollute the region, my Wilmington. Planners should envision this
area as home to a million people or more now. Planners need to guess where
the plants will be located, where their employees will want to live, where
their schools will be, where they will launch their boats, where their
kids will play soccer, which beach they will frequent, every, everything.
Then planners need to suggest incentives to make the pieces of the puzzle
come together to form one giant no overcapacity roads, high quality of
life, art filled, actor filled, creative cool community. Should we put
this nice elementary school out there ahead of the curve on Blue Clay
Road? Should we build a regional park with fantastic soccer fields on
Baravian Lane? Should Topsail build a nice boat launch? These are the
questions our planners need to be asking. |
Merging City and County is nothing new in the USA. New Orleans and the Parish tied the knot in 1813. Boston and Suffolk 1821; Philadelphia and the County 1854. No county and City have merged in North Carolina. Actually there have been only 33 City County mergers in the United States. Wilmington and New Hanover County have put consolidation before the voters in 1933, 1973, 1987, and 1995, many more times than the three other NC City County consolidation plans voted down in their counties. No County-City consolidation advocates have produced the necessary charter that is the subject of the referendum. Normally in consolidations which have taken place in other parts of the country, the city government is abolished, and the county government is legally transformed into one that has all the powers and functions previously held by both governments. The people who have supported consolidation have done so on the grounds of efficiency and see better coordination of all government services and improved management of growth. Opponents argue the merged government would be a larger, less responsive, a less efficient one. Some citizens fear a loss of political influence and/or jobs. Members of rural fire departments and sheriffs' offices usually oppose consolidation. People in the City usually want consolidation because it should mean their taxes would go down. People in the County don't want consolidation because it means their taxes will go up. The people in the county are gamboling - Do I take the safe bet and go for consolidation or hope and wish annexation does not nail me? Logic dictates we consolidate or Wilmington will gobble up the county by unapproved annexation - Taxation without representation, which is the reason I oppose annexation. If I am elected a County Commissioner I will I will always try to get reappraisals put off. A community without re evaluations should shock the many who watch the municipal government scene and no re evaluations should be a great inducement for people to move to our area. I will always do the Will of the majority but to my mind consolidation is better than annexation. Possibly a game plan would be to merge Departments engaged in similar functions and work on a Charter but hold off full consolidation until the City threatens to gobble up more of the County through annexation and then consolidate. The Sheriff's Office and the Police departments should remain separate, although maybe some detective departments should be merged. If the City does not annex more of the County, the County should grow much faster than the City because of the tax advantage, which to my mind is a good incentive, provided the growth is single family detached, condos or and townhouses. The old style developments where there was a developer of the lots who sold them to individual homebuilders appeals to me. Now one giant developer develops the lots, builds the houses, and markets them and makes all the money. The small homebuilder now can't find lots to build, which is a change for the worse, since I have always been a small businessman and I see competition and the right to be in business for yourself as good and the American way. An idea crossed my mind on how to move forward with Consolidation after reading part of a Feasibility Study of City-County Consolidation. Basically an idea would be for the County to take over the City's Water/Sewer, Parks, and Planning Departments. This would require the County to increase property taxes to around 19 cents per hundred of assessed value, if my math and guess is correct. So instead of paying the County 68 cents per hundred we would be nailed for like 87 cents per hundred. The City would be loosing about a third of its budget and the City would reduce its tax rate by 19 cents per hundred or more. Just an idea. If this gobble
up the City turned out to be a good idea then maybe at a later date the
County would go after more of the City. Maybe there would always be some
of the City, police department, ect. |
Re evaluation is taxation without representation in my opinion, deceptive, and we should not have our property re evaluated. Whatever amount the property is put on the tax rolls is what it stays until it is sold a second time. Big government special interests and those who benefit from inflation have had re evaluation laws passed. A centerpiece issue of my campaign is to put off re evaluation until 2009 from where it is planned now for 2007. There are many retired people who have sold their homes in other parts of the country and relocating or considering relocating here. They understand the inflationary aspects of re evaluation. Some of these retirees are becoming dependent on a fixed income for the first time in their lives. Moving to a community that does not re evaluate assessed property would be a big incentive for them to move here. I will fight to put
off re evaluation until 2009 if elected to the County Commissioners and
if I loose this fight and if re evaluation increases assessed values 50
percent then I will fight for a fifty percent reduction in the property
tax rate the year the budget is based on the re valued assessed property
values. That's right. If the assessment increases assessed properties
values by 50% and the tax rate was 68 cents per hundred before the reassessment
then the tax rate moves down to 34 cents per hundred after the reassessment.
But my druthers are to put off reevaluation until 2009. |
Mixed use development
in the County is more to my liking than mixed use in the City and amounts
to an ordnance which allows residential to be placed in property zoned
business, B-1, B-2. The residential put in B-1, B-2 is usually going to
be apartments and I would prefer the residential placed in the B-1, B-2
to be town houses or condos which it can be. |
Drainage is a big problem but not that big of a problem in the County. The drainage problem is in the eyes of the beholder to some degree. If one considers four inches of water on the roads after a one inch rain then in their eyes we have a drainage problem from time to time. After a big rain most roads are passable even though a few may have ten or so inches of water which is rapidly draining off. No houses are still in the County which flood due to the fact FEMA bought the houses which flooded after Bertha or Fran, I think. New construction must follow strict drainage guidelines so as the town is built out old drainage problems should get fixed with the new. Tidal creeks have gotten silted
up through the years especially since the Core of Engineers has made it
almost impossible to dredge, remove, silt from tidelands. When people
say Wilmington and the County have an expensive drainage problem I think
they are referring to cleaning out tidal creeks. We should clean out the
tidal creeks. It would make the marsh land look one heck of a lot better.
Cleaning out the creeks is not that serious of a drainage problem because
when the tide falls the water the tidal creeks drain drains. So tidal
creek drainage is a drainage problem that can be put off. If we ever want
to be a world class community that takes care of nature cleaning out tidal
creeks should be done. |
