HAMLET — After one week on the job, Matthew Christian was sworn in as city manager at the beginning of Tuesday night’s City Council meeting.
The council voted in May to hire Christian, who, at the time, was town manager for Mount Gilead in Montgomery County.
Christian, who grew up in Davidson County, attended Appalachian State University where he met future, and now former, city manager Marcus Abernethy.
After a six-month internship with the town of Davidson in 2012, he decided he wanted to go into municipal management.
“I knew this is what I wanted to do after that experience,” he previously told the RO, adding that the internship provided good insight into the challenges and opportunities of being a town or city manager.
Christian went on to be a town management intern in Weaverville, and a planner in Knightdale before landing the town manager job up the road in Mount Gilead in September of 2016.
“I want to thank you for the opportunity, I’m really excited to serve the city of Hamlet and everyone’s been really welcoming, so far,” Christian told council members during his brief report Tuesday.
Christian said he spent his first week getting to know staff and city facilities.
“There’s a lot going on here, so there’s still a lot of work to be done, but everyone’s been really great,” he said. “I’ve been getting up to speed on a variety of issues and I’m really grateful for all the time that folks on the staff and in the community have given to me.”
On Monday, Christian said he started venturing around town to meet some of the business owners — which is challenging due to complications caused by COVID-19 restrictions.
“But through time, I’ll get to know everyone and make sure they know me,” he said.
Christian replaces Jonathan Blanton, who took the job as the first town manager for Ranlo in Gaston County.
SOLAR FARM DENIED AMENDMENTS
Julianne Wooten, a representative of ESA Solar, approached the council to ask for amendments in regards to a solar farm project on Old Laurinburg Road.
The first was a minor encroachment into the 120-foot fenceline setback required.
Wooten said that ordinance was not adhered to because the parcel has a bend, so one section was only offset by about 116 feet.
The second request, regarding fencing, was a little more controversial.
She said the company installed an 8-foot fence, which is built to allow small animals to get in and out, instead of the 6-foot fence with a foot of barbed wire on top as required by the city’s ordinance.
“The fencing swap was driven initially by an initiative that Pine Gate (a solar company with multiple solar farms in South Carolina) started … to make the farms a little more thoughtful and more cohesive with the surrounding area,” Wooten said.
She added that the fencing has larger holes in the bottom that allows wildlife to pass through, which she said would be “a pretty good fit” for the Hamlet project.
According to Wooten, the fencing the company used complies with the National Electric Safety Code, which allows that option and one similar to Hamlet’s ordinance.
“However, it would have been wise to run it by you guys first,” Wooten said.
Council members agreed.
“Why would you not want to comply and fix it like it ought to be, rather than ask for a waiver?” asked Councilman Oscar Sellers.
Wooten said she thought the fence would be fitting to local wildlife with the surrounding woods and that ripping up the fence and replacing it “is a whole lotta work.”
“We certainly want to comply,” she added, “... but it’s kinda just where we’ve ended up .. replacing the whole fence is a big endeavor, but certainly, it’s doable.”
Councilman Eddie Martin asked Wooten when the company realized they weren’t in compliance and why wasn’t construction stopped
She responded by saying it wasn’t found out until the company spoke with City Clerk and Zoning Coordinator Gail Strickland about the encroachment issue.
City Attorney T.C. Morphis said that another solar company helped draft the ordinance, which specifically requires barbed wire at the top of the fence, and that it was on a model that was floating round at the time.
Not wanting to set a precedent of granting waivers of city ordinances, Councilman Jesse McQueen made a motion to deny the request.
“I hate it happened,” he said. “I know it’s a cost, but at the end of the day, I feel like it’s something that shouldn’t have happened.”
Wooten asked if it would be possible to just go back and add the barbed wire atop the existing fence, since it was already taller than the ordinance required.
Mayor Bill Bayless, going by parliamentary procedure, said that it wasn’t part of the motion on the floor and the company would have to put something in place and come back to the board.
Just before Bayless called for a vote, Martin spoke up.
“It would seem to me that a project this size, this big, this important, that the fencing should have been in compliance with our ordinance as they agreed to,” he said, “not come back with a fence that haven’t even discussed, didn’t talk about, didn’t know nothing about it, and now they want us to approve something that’s not in the ordinance. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to agree with Mr. McQueen.
Sellers added he thought it was poor planning.
With that, the cancel rejected the request for both waivers.
“Sorry about that,” Bayless told Wooten.
“That’s OK, we’ll get another fence in there,” she said before leaving.
OTHER BUSINESS
The council also:
During their comments, council members welcomed Christian to the city and remarked on a video recently released by the Hamlet Police Department.
Sellers, Stuart and McQueen also remembered Jason Norton, a former Richmond Senior High School teacher and coach who recently passed away.
McQueen also took advantage of the time to make another dig at the Richmond County Board of Commissioners for the decision earlier this year to change the method of sales tax distribution, which has been opposed by every municipality in the county.
After commenting about the improvements at City Lake and wanting them to continue, he said it would be difficult with the financial blow the city was dealt by the county.
“Hopefully we’re going to find a way past that and move forward,” he said, going on the record to add, “The election’s coming up in November … and I personally will not vote for anyone that is not willing to publicly go on the record to say that the new sales tax formula needs to be reversed.
“I hope everybody in the towns, especially the ones that lost everything, I hope they search their hearts and do their diligence to look and see if maybe someone can’t be in that position that will not see the error in what happened.
