CARTHAGE – The Moore County Board of Commissioners will potentially consider providing a bit of kickback to county teachers following the latest local sales tax report provided to the board.
At the board’s Aug. 20 regular business meeting, Board Chairman Nick Picerno urged the board to consider providing supplemental funding to school teachers in order to cover supply costs.
“Every year, we hear the story of local teachers having to go into their own pocket to produce supplies and needs – especially in K through three,” Picerno said.
Picerno’s initial idea is to send the Moore County Schools Board of Education $40,000 to be used to reimburse public and charter, kindergarten through third grade teachers in the county for supply costs that were out of pocket.
“Through May 24, we’ve already exceeded what we had budgeted for our current fiscal year,” Picerno said about the current sales tax projection, stating that those funds could be used to provide the money.
While no action was presented for a vote, the issue will more than likely be brought back up at the board’s next regular business meeting.
The board also held two public hearings, with the first being for a rezoning request for 16.83 acres of property located at 3883 Busbee Rd. from Neighborhood Business (B-1) and Rural Agricultural (RA) to Rural Agricultural Conditional Zoning (RA-CZ) in order to renovate the existing property into an assembly hall.
“The UDO defines an assembly hall as a fully or partially enclosed facility or open area used or intended to be used primarily for spectator sports, entertainment sports, exhibitions, public or private gatherings, conferences and conventions with accessory uses such as snack bars, restaurants, retail sales of related items and other supported facilities,” said Planning Director Debra Ensminger. “Assembly halls include the terms amphitheater, arena, banquet hall, coliseum, convention center, exhibition hall, reception hall, retreat center, sports arena and stadium.”
According to the applicant’s application, the assembly hall would be both an indoor and outdoor space with requested usage for weddings, receptions, auctions, vendor pop-ups, local pottery shows, bridal shows, art shows, senior games, yoga and meditation studio, dance studio, art competitions and pottery classes.
The application also states that the developer will provide enough parking to accommodate 200-250 guests.
Following the hearing, the board approved the request – Commissioner Frank Quis was the lone dissent – with a condition to forbid excessive noise following 10 p.m. on any day of the week.
The second hearing was for a text amendment to the UDO in order to add mobile food campuses as a specific planned development use.
Following the hearing, the board approved the request.
The board also approved a contract with BI-TEK for the purchase of new tax support software.
The contract will total $630,000 in the first year for the purchase and approximately $84,000 in each subsequent year for ongoing licensing, support and maintenance.
“Prior to the pandemic, we began to look at the various alternative software for packages that were better streamlined and would help us overcome some of the challenges that we have,” said Tax Administrator Gary Briggs. “Currently our system is broken down into three software components that run our system so we began a process to go out and look at the brightest and the best new software systems that were in place to find a new software package that would place all of our operations on a single, unified platform.”
In addition, the board approved the acceptance of nearly $490,000 in state and federal funding for utilization by the Moore County Health Department.
The Moore County Board of Commissioners will next meet Sept. 3.
