Davidson’s Town Board meets Tuesday night, with an agenda that includes a public hearing and vote on a proposed change in use from commercial to residential at Davidson Commons East, off Griffith Street. The board also will hear updates on the MI-Connection cable system and PIES business incubator. And it will conduct public hearing and votes on an affordable housing ordinance amendment, and on the rules of procedure for the Design Review Board/ Historic Preservation Commission.
The board also plans a closed session to discuss “personnel matters.” The meeting begins Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Town Hall, 216 S. Main St. Here’s an annotated agenda with links to documents:
TOWN OF DAVIDSON BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
Town Hall Board Room – 216 S. Main St., Nov. 9, 2010, 6:00 P. M.
Click hyperlinks to download documents (PDFs)
I. CALL TO ORDER
II. ANNOUNCEMENTS
III. CITIZEN COMMENT
IV. CHANGES TO AGENDA
V. PUBLIC HEARINGS
(a) Amendment to Sec 6.3 (Affordable Housing) of Davidson Planning Ordinance. [The amendment would reserve all affordable housing units required in a development for those of very low, low or moderate income and remove remove the option for developers to provide units for people of “middle income,” defined as 120 to 150 percent of the area median income. The town spokeswoman said the reason for the change is that since the economic downturn and decline in housing prices, people who fit the middle income category “can generally afford to buy a house on their own now and don’t need this assistance.”]
(b) Design Review Board/Historic Preservation Commission Rules of Procedure amendment to Sections 20.3 and 22.4 of Davidson Planning Ordinance
(c) Davidson Planning Ordinance map amendment for Davidson Commons East Conditional Planning Area
VI. PRESENTATION
(a) PiES update (PiES is a business incubator partnership between the town and South Main Square business center. Read coverage of PiES on DavidsonNews.net under the PiES tag.
(b) MI-Connection update (by Alan Hall, General Manager of MI-Connection) (MI-Connection is the local communications network that Davidson owns with the town of Mooresville. See previous coverage under the MI-Connection tag.)
VII. CONSENT
(a) Approve meeting minutes from October 12th, October 22nd, and October 26th
(b) Appoint alternates to the Lake Norman Transportation Commission. Mayor John Woods would become the alternate to board member Brian Jenest. Asst. Town Manager Dawn Blobaum would become the alternate to Town Manager Leamon Brice. Exhibit VII (b)
(c) Approve addition of Library Endowment Committee to Mayoral Appointments in Rules of Procedure Exhibit VII (c)
(d) Approve tax refund of $37.23 for a Southwest Drive homeowner. Exhibit VII (d)
VIII. OLD BUSINESS
(a) Consider approval of Davidson Planning Ordinance map amendment for Davidson Commons East Conditional Planning Area (Download the staff analysis, Exhibit VIII (a))
IX. NEW BUSINESS
(a) Consider approval of Affordable Housing amendments to Sec 6.3 of Planning Ordinance Exhibit IX (a)
(b) Consider adopting DRB and HPC Rules of Procedure and amending Planning Ordinance to reflect the
changes to Sections 20.3 and 22.4
Exhibit IX (b1) – Historic Preservation Commission rules
Exhibit IX (b2) – Design Review Board rules
Exhibit IX (b3) – Membership rules for the two boards
X. CLOSED SESSION
(a) To discuss personnel matters
XI. ADJOURN
As I am not a resident of Davidson. I hope someone reading this comment who is a resident of the Town of Davidson might have the opportunity to attend tomorrow’s meeting and ask the following questions about MI-Connection:
1. Since revenues for the first quarter indicate you may be up to $2 million short of your target by year end, yet expenses are on budget to meet or exceed budgeted year end expenses, how can you assure the Town that you won’t need to request additional cash infusions between now and June 30, 2011? (Above and beyond the $6,400,000 or so already allocated between the Towns to provide)
2. Are you confident that you can continue to provide service to the communities without exceeding your current Capital Expenditures budget of approximately $2,600,000? How much of the Capital Expenditures Budget has already been spent through September 30, 2010?
3. What new products and services will MI-Connection offer to keep pace with the competition? Both DirecTV and Time Warner Cable offer multi-room DVR services and the ability to schedule DVR recordings from smartphones and computers. When will MI-Connection be offering such services? If not, why not?
One might also get the Town representatives on the record as to whether or not they would entertain further cash requests from MI-Connection for failure to meet the targets they assured the public they would meet when this “bare-bones” budget was approved last summer.
After all, it’s YOUR tax dollars and you ought to have confidence in how your money is spent!
Reader Andy Stevens lives in Troutman.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Town officials said last week that based on the first quarter financial report, they’re confident the system won’t cost them any more than what they’ve already budgeted. General Manager Alan Hall also told DavidsonNews.net MI-Connection is on track to meet its budget.
Mr. Hall says he believes MI-Connection “can grow within the projected funding request that we’ve made to the towns. We may grow more than we budgeted, but we’d have revenue to offset the cost. I fully believe we will be able to operate this year without coming back to the towns for more funds.” (This was not in my article last week, but addresses Mr. Stevens’ question.)
(See our Nov. 2, 2010, report on the first quarter results, “Losses narrow, but growth still slow at MI-Connection.”)
Of all of Andy’s excellent questions, #3 is the most important. As taxpayer/investors, we are confronted with a choice: sign up for MI-Connection, or face a combination of higher taxes and drastically cut municipal services.
The downside of the second option is obvious. The first option may not appear to have a downside, but if MI-Connection is not able to keep up with the competition, the citizen investors of Davidson and Mooresville may quickly find themselves stuck with outdated technologies.
Time-Warner Cable has rolled out download and upload speeds to the Charlotte area that far exceed those offered by MI-Connection, not to mention the premium services that Andy mentions. I’m not terribly concerned about being able to have multiple DVRs in the house or to be able to program them from a smartPhone (except to the extent that those features will provide a competitive edge to MI-Connection’s competition), but I am concerned that a significant disparity in connectivity speeds will make Davidson less attractive to new companies who are deciding where to locate facilities and jobs.
Technology in five years is difficult to predict. It is a fair question to ask how a company with $17 million in annual revenues hopes to keep up with one with $17 billion (not to mention AT&T with over $120 billion in annual revenue). The notion that technology will stand still is a foolish one, and potentially quite costly for our town.