The Wrightsville Beach Board of Aldermen will hold a joint meeting with the Wrightsville Beach Planning Board Tuesday, Oct. 28 to discuss a variety of issues.
Town manager Tim Owens said the meeting agenda would include further discussion of appealing preliminary flood zone maps. During the Oct. 9 board of aldermen meeting, Wrightsville Beach Mayor Bill Blair asked Owens to research consulting firms capable of determining whether the town had any grounds for appeal based on inaccuracies in FEMA’s storm surge or wave height analysis.
Owens said he was in the process of creating a request for proposal (RFP), which he would present to board members during the meeting. After hearing the board’s feedback, he said he would send the RFP to two consulting firms with whom he had been in contact.
“Basically what I’d be looking for, as far as that goes, is to get some responses back and enter into some negotiations trying to finalize the price and scope of work,” Owens said during an Oct. 21 phone interview. “Hopefully that will be a little more of a refined approach.”
The 90-day window for appealing the flood zone maps has not yet begun, Owens said, and he expects town officials will be notified by email when that period starts.
Owens said board members would also talk about the commercial portion of downtown Wrightsville Beach. Owens said among other issues, it was important to have a plan in place for how to rebuild the downtown district in the event of a devastating storm.
The aldermen will also hear concerns expressed by planning board members about fishing off the public docks at Wynn Plaza.
“You get a lot competing interests there,” Owens said. “You’ve got boaters trying to get in and fishermen trying to fish at the same time.”
In response to recent graffiti tagging on structures around town, the board will discuss town ordinances pertaining to graffiti.
“We have several buildings that continue to have graffiti on them even though we’ve made contact with the property owners, but we really don’t have a lot of enforcement capability,” Owens said.
Among the most noticeable structures bearing graffiti tags is the unoccupied Food Mart on Salisbury Street.
“We’ve been talking to them for months,” Owens said. “But I realize they’re in a transition phase; they either want to tear the building down or paint it, but a little bit of paint would clean things up pretty quickly.”
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