One morevote coming

ROSEBORO — Although a revised vacant building ordinance won approval by a 3-1 vote of town board members present at a meeting earlier this week, the action was later rescinded because of a technicality.

The purpose of the ordinance was aimed at preserving the aesthetic integrity of downtown Roseboro. A big push for the proposal last month was to protect the town’s commercial business district to ensure proper maintenance was being done on building facades and building interiors of vacant spaces downtown.

The board tabled the the ordinance last month among concerns with policy verbiage. A major focus of those concerns involved the actual definition on how to correctly identify a property as vacant.

Lead Fellow Tyler Wise addressed that issue during last Tuesday’s September meeting.

“This statement was added to the definition of a vacant building,” she said, reading from the amended ordinance. “A property shall be presumed not to be vacant if the utilities are all on and one of the following is true — one, the property is actively being renovated or, two, the property is advertised to be lease but is between tenants and is in a suitable condition to be lease.”

Some of the highlights from the ordinance were property owners being required to register a vacant building or buildings with town staff, to remain in compliance with maintenance and security, as well as submit a plan of action for complying with those requirements.

The security requirements involved preventing unauthorized personnel, people and or animals to access a property. Another portion of the ordinance dealt with penalties for failure to comply with those requirements. Failing to initially register a vacant property was $50, and $50 for not doing it annually. Another $50 applied if there’s a failure to submit a plan of action, and failure to implement plans is $250. The final piece was a $500 penalty for failure to meet the maintenance or security requirements.

Following Wise’s presentation, board members voted 3-1 to adopt the new ordinance, with town commissioner Ray Clark Fisher casting the dissenting vote.

Later in the meeting, however, town attorney Sandy Sanderson brought to everyone’s attention that the vote couldn’t pass after all.

“I’m going back to the vote on the vacant building ordinance,” Sanderson said. “Since it is an ordinance, in order for it to pass on the first date that it is introduced, and introduced is considered when it’s voted on, it has to be by two-thirds of the entire board. Since Mr. (Anthony) Bennett is not here, we’ve got three out of the five. That’s just a little bit less than two-thirds of the entire board, so it will have to be scheduled for a vote again at the next meeting.

“If at the next meeting, it’s three out of five, it still passes, but there’s a funny rule about voting on ordinances on the first date that it’s entered. So we’ve got that vote, but it’ll be calendared for the next meeting.”

The vote was rescinded and will be brought up again at the October meeting.

Fisher, who cast the lone dissenting vote, talked once again about the impact he felt the ordinance would have on other businesses.

“When you think about it, we’re punishing the people that have a building downtown. What about other businesses?” Fisher asked. “I know we‘ve got to do something to the downtown area, and I know the other areas are not as bad, but you have a vacant building now and then in other places, too.”

Fisher also touched on the identification of vacant buildings again even with the updated wording Wise mentioned in her presentation.

“I just feel like I need little bit more time to actually let all this sink,” he said. “I know we’ve had it come before use one time already and we’ve changed the wording a little bit, which makes it better. But, I mean, it’s still going to be hard to determine what’s vacant. On top of that, some people have a building and they can’t rent it, what do you do then?”

Sanderson offered his opinion.

“Well, that was what we were trying to address on the definition,” Sanderson replied. “If the utilities are on and you’re attempting to rent it, it’s not considered vacant.”

“So if you turn the power on and you’ve got the water hooked up that’s not considered vacant?” Fisher asked.

“If they’re also attempting to rent it, then yes, it is presumed to be not vacant,” Sanderson replied.

Another non-board question related to how the buildings will be monitored under the ordinance was posed by Mikkel McKinnin who owns a pair of the buildings downtown.

“Who’s going to monitor, check these buildings?” McKinnin asked. “Will there be a checklist, do you show the electric bill or water bill, how does that work exactly?

Sanderson once again spoke up.

“If it appears to be vacant, and they (the town) contacted you to say we think that you need to do this or that because your building is up for being considered vacant,” Sanderson said, “you just show them the bill and then that puts the issue to rest.”

Mayor Alice Butler asked for the motion to approve the ordinance soon after, but Fisher still had one last concern.

“I’ve still got some issues with this but, as it’s been said once, if we do this it’s going to be hard to undo it,” Fisher stressed. “I mean once we bring this ordinance to fruition are we stuck with it because I just feel like there’s going to be some touchy grey areas with this?”

“It’s like we’ve done with other things, once we’ve adopted something,” Sanderson said. “Once we put it into practice and we see it needs to be tweaked, you can always make a motion to tweak it. There’s always a big difference between theory and practice. We just need to keep in mind that this is not set in stone and we can always vote to change it if we need too.”

Fisher did say, however, with the vote being pushed back to next meeting that it would give him time to look over the proposed ordinance more which could change his previously opposed vote.

Butler also highlighted that all the downtown property owners that the ordinance would affect had been mailed and notified.

“I think it’s a good start; it doesn’t account for everything that we could come across but at least it would give us a foundation to work with because we need to start doing something,” commissioner Richard Barefoot said.