🏛️ Your county commissioner meetings might be moving to earlier in the day — and the idea is getting pushback from commissioners who say evening meetings are what let working people show up.
At the Oct. 5 meeting, County Manager Steve Stone proposed moving the board’s first monthly meeting from 3 PM to 2 PM, and the second from 6 PM to 3 PM, with a scheduled 5–5:30 PM break before reconvening at 5:30 PM to handle development items. A hard stop time — where unfinished items roll to the next meeting — was also discussed, and staff floated a third monthly meeting.
Why: House Bill 1222, ratified this July, shifted approval of most residential developments of 25+ homes from the appointed Planning Board to the elected commissioners. Stone said staff expects a ‘large quantity of H.B. 1222-related items’ at the November meetings — and it doesn’t let up after that. For context, the Sept. 21 meeting started at 6 PM and ran past midnight, and that agenda didn’t even include any of the new development hearings yet. (The Planning Board made a similar move last year, shifting its meeting from 6 PM to 4 PM.)
The board was split. Commissioners Pat Sykes and Randy Thompson oppose changing the times — Sykes said 6 PM ‘gives our citizens that work time to get here,’ and Thompson wants a stop time instead: ‘I think four hours in to any meeting, after that I don’t see where you’re going to be productive.’ Commissioner Frank Williams voiced support for the change, noting staff deserve a break if meetings keep running late (‘we don’t need to torture our employees’), and Commissioners Marty Cooke and Mike Forte favor hard stops and are open to the schedule change.
No action taken — the vote was tabled to a future meeting. The Beacon will keep reporting as this develops, and so will we.
Source: The Brunswick Beacon.
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