Council meets Tuesday
By Matt Caulder
Published in News on January 18, 2014 10:38 PM
The Goldsboro City Council will meet at 5 p.m. Tuesday for its work session due to city offices being closed Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The Council will begin with a closed session meeting for personnel discussions, specifically relating to Goldsboro City Manager Scott Stevens.
The City Council ran out of time to discuss Stevens' annual review during its last meeting and will pick up where they left off Tuesday, Stevens said.
The closed session coming at the front of the meeting was at the request of Mayor Al King to allow plenty of time for the Council's discussions, Stevens said.
"He wanted to put it at the beginning so he wouldn't feel rushed or anything," Stevens said.
During the work session, the City Council is expected to discuss a change order and informal bid request for work to push utilities back away from Berkeley Boulevard to make room for the Berkeley widening project to come through.
Four water lines must be relocated for the paving work to continue, but additional work is needed to reduce the inconvenience to Goldsboro city water users.
An additional $28,000 is recommended to be added to the $104,000 project awarded to the R. D. Braswell Construction Company in November.
The project will add a right turn lane onto Royall Avenue from Berkeley Boulevard and construct another southbound lane from New Hope Road to connect with the section that is already a four-lane road north of U.S. 70.
The Goldsboro City Council is also expected to add an additional $900 as the city's 10 percent match for planning funds to allow for the renovation of Goldsboro Union Station not making the cut for U.S. Department of Transportation grant funding.
The city received a $10 million grant to finish out Streetscape on Center Street, construct a GATEWAY transfer center next to the train station and pull Walnut Street back into downtown with Streetscape from Union Station on Carolina Street back to Center Street.
The City Council also is expected Tuesday to accept the final recommendation of the Mercer Group for changes to the city's pay and classification of jobs.
If the recommendations of the study are accepted, 11 jobs will receive a bump in pay grade, one will have a title change and one other position will drop in pay grade.
In addition, the Council will hear the results of its annual audit for the past fiscal year during the work session Tuesday night.
The audit, which is required under state law, was prepared by Carr, Riggs and Ingram CPAs and Advisors, a regional tax firm that operates an office in Goldsboro.
Finally, two public hearings will take place Tuesday night at the City Council's formal meeting at 7 p.m.
The first is a recommendation from the Stevens to revert a portion of land in between Carolina and Virginia streets know as Hogan's Alley back to the property owners adjacent to the unused throughway.
The northern portion of the alley is no longer passable and has not been used as a throughway for years. While the land would go back to the control of the property owners the city would maintain right-of-way access to the alley.
The second public hearing refers to the proposed rezoning of a residential property at the corner of Patetown and Tommy's roads as an Office and Institutional Conditional Use District for the purpose of a charter school.