City Manager Comments May 7

16 May City Manager Comments May 7

The following is a summary of City Manager Bill Prokop’s Report to City Council on 5/7/2017:

 

Good evening: First congratulations to our Fire Chief and his entire staff for achieving the ISO rating 1 for our City and the Town of Port Royal. (I ask all the members to please stand up) as we all express our thanks.

Second, I thank the Mayor and Libby for organizing a very nice “Thank You” event for all our volunteers and committee members, that was held on April 27th at the Depot. It was well attended and again we thank all the people who help us every day.

Third, we want to remind everyone that Hurricane season is upon us and it is never too early to start you own “Preparedness Planning” we will be doing some education sessions but it is time for all of us to start thinking about it.

Fourth, our marina plans are on schedule and moving forward. As you know the H-Dock is now complete and all the repairs to our Dingy Dock have been made as well. Some good news is the permits have been approved for us to go forward with the new Day Dock. We are now in the process of finalizing the specifications for preparing the RFP which we hope to have ready by early fall and construction to start in the January/February time frame with completion by this time next year. Also, we are moving along with the plans to repair the pilings under our park that we had discussed last year. In short, the sub-structure of our park and the upgrades to our marina, including A-Dock will be taking shape over the next 12-18 months.

Fifth, we will be starting the engineering work for the construction of Pic Pocket Road, which was scheduled to begin as soon as the Boundary Street project was at a point to determine that the funding would be available. We will be getting the engineering work completed and then we will be back to you with details of the plan.

Sixth, we now have confirmation of our Southside Park trail grant and the engineering and plans for that will be starting soon and will be part of our 2017/2018 operating plan.

Seventh, FEMA information we are still waiting for approval of our cost and for approval to move forward on the mitigation plans that we have put forward. As we have learned, this process is slow and methodical and we just must be patient. When we have news, you will all be the first to know.

Eighth, our Police Department had a “mock” assessment of State Certification by a team of law enforcement professionals and we did very well and we will be ready for the official assessment by this fall.

Ninth, we have started to prepare our projections of what would happen if a local option sales tax was approved for Beaufort County. To us, Bluffton, and Port Royal this would be very beneficial and it was agreed that our Mayor and Mayor Sulka of Bluffton would do a presentation to the Hilton Head Council to make them aware of the benefits to them and to the rest of Beaufort County. For Beaufort, our projections show that over $775,000 would be returned to the taxpayers and over $900,000 would benefit the City and help us tackle some major infrastructure projects that we have in front of us.

Tenth, as you saw in the paper today we have a new grocery store looking to build in the City on 170 and Parris Island Parkway and we were notified that there is going to be a delay in the HarrisTetter store on Lady’s Island do to a Kroger Corporate decision, that will affect all HarrisTetter expansion plans for the next few months.

Overall, we have a lot going on and we are in the process of finalizing our budget for next year with close attention to our Strategic Plan and the Goals that were set.