RAEFORD – Hoke County is hoping to better protect its water and its citizens’ access to water with a new proposed ordinance.
At its Oct. 7 meeting, the Hoke County Board of Commissioners was presented with a Water and Sewer Allocation Ordinance which gives greater control and guidelines to the county.
“When you guys hired me, you brought me in so we could actually get utilities back to where it needed to be,” said Utilities Director James McQueen. “Since that time, we’ve done a lot of studies and we’ve looked at a lot of data and what we’ve done since I’ve been here, we’ve basically balanced the checkbook. We were writing and giving out allocations to basically any location without doing a check balancing process. So what my staff has done is we’ve gone through the process of going through and looking at all of the allocation that has already been promised and we’ve looked at all of the actual meters that we have in our system.”
The ordinance would cap the water allocation for development at 50 lots per application and reserves the county’s right to maintain a minimum of 30% capacity of its available water and sewer as a safeguard.
“What we’re trying to do in this ordinance is that we cannot risk our citizens that have water right now, not having water a year from now because we wanted to meet the demand of developers coming over and wanting to develop land and sell all that they can sell,” said Commissioner Tony Hunt. “I’m not going to sit up here on this commission and allow that to happen. I’m going to protect the citizens that are here now. … We don’t want to stop growth because if something doesn’t grow it dies, but we have to have smart growth.”
However, the commissioners voted to hold a public hearing on Oct. 21 to hear public opinion on the ordinance.
“We’ve made sure that the county will be viable moving forward,” McQueen said. “I know the ordinance may not be perfect yet, but we will work to make sure it becomes perfect and we will develop and we will close every loophole that the ordinance may have.”
The board also held two public hearings with the first being for a special use permit request for 2.0 acres of property located at 3991 Fayetteville Rd. for the purpose of a tattoo business and the second being for a rezoning request for 4.5 acres of property located at 2197 Highway 401 Business from Residential Manufactured Home (RMH) to Highway Commercial (HC).
Finally, the board approved the advertisement of an offer to purchase surplus property located at 186 Raindrop Loop at approximately $4,800 and the declaration of nearly $10,000 in over a decade old owed taxes as insolvent.
The board was also presented with the support efforts that the county engaged in in response to Hurricane Helene.
“I sent our emergency management department to western North Carolina,” said County Manager Letitia Edens. “They’ll periodically go and we’ll keep sending our team there. We also sent some donations of stuff we had there on behalf of Hoke County.”
“This office has never deployed outside of a couple of counties,” said Emergency Management Coordinator Andrew Jacobs. “We worked the US Open in Moore County and been to different events three or four counties away, but the idea of us going down range for a week hadn’t happened before. This storm is more than what has been categorized in the news as North Carolina’s Katrina. It is far more than that.”
The Hoke County Board of Commissioners will next meet Oct. 21.