At recent meetings, Forsyth County commissioners took action on the following items. All were approved 5-0 unless otherwise noted.
Commissioners...
• Extended a moratorium on the acceptance of applications and permits for non-conforming sign upgrades for electronic message boards
• Postponed to the April 13 meeting an administrative hearing on violations to the massage and spa ordinance
• Removed, at the request of the applicant, by a 4-0 vote, with Chairman Todd Levent recused, two items relating to rezoning agriculture property to industrial and highway business on Regent Court
• Amended a settlement agreement with the county’s sheriff office, civil service board and Amanda Funkhouser, a former civilian employee of the sheriff’s office. Funkhouser will receive about $18,000 instead of around $13,000
• Sent a letter by a 4-0 vote, with Levent absent, to invite steering committee members to a meeting on the update to the county’s comprehensive plan on March 29
• Extended a contract worth $18,102 with Jacobs Engineering for work on the update to the comprehensive plan
• Moved ahead with applications to the Council of Accountability Court Judges seeking a drug court grant worth $422,290 with a required match of $46,921 and a CARE court grant for $298,812 with a required match of $32,979
• Approved the purchase of Panasonic CF-54 Toughbooks from Mobile Ingenuity, LLC worth $217,107 for the county fire department
• Appointed Pam Bowman, StreeRam Royyala, Angela Johnson, Keith A. Banke, Mandy Moyer, Melissa A. Loggins, Kathy Autry and Robert Hoyt to the Forsyth County Citizen Stakeholder group.
Forsyth County Commissioners will wait a year before discussing a potential future lake park in northeast Forsyth.
At a recent work session, commissioners voted 5-0 to postpone discussion of a doing a master plan for a potential park on Army Corps of Engineers-owned land on Brookshire Road until March 2018. The park had been discussed at a previous meeting.
“When this was presented to us it was not presented in my district; I didn’t know it was in my district … I thought it was in [District 5 Commissioner Laura] Semanson’s district,” District 4 Commissioner Cindy Jones Mills said. “In my opinion, we are throwing away $100,000. We shouldn’t be doing it; it’s in a very private location.”
The cost of the plan was one of several issues.
“It has some goods and some bads to it,” said Parks Director Jim Pryor. “First, it’s a beautiful piece of property on the lake and we do want to look for properties like that, but you’re going on a one-lane road through an existing neighborhood and you’re building a park about a quarter mile away from [corps-owned] Keith Bridge Park.”
Pryor said there could be uses from the park but they would need to be different enough from the corps park to get approved.
The use of the property came about during a discussion of the county abandoning portions of the road. Both issues will be discussed in a year.