STEP: Does it Have a Theme?

It may be unfair, but when I read the plan attributed to the Pamlico County STEP (Small Town Economic Prosperity) plan unveiled at a meeting at Pamlico Community College January 6, I was reminded of Winston Churchill's reaction to a particular dessert. "Madame," he said, "this pudding has no theme."

It is probably unfair to comment, since I didn't attend any of the meetings or do any of the work. A fair assessment of the proposals might be, "they can't hurt."

There may, in fact, be a unifying theme: tourism.

I don't object to tourism. It has the potential to entice visitors to come spend money in the county. That's good.

What the proposed activities don't seem to do is provide a sustained base of economic activity. A sustainable effort creates jobs. The measure of success should be jobs and payroll, preferably year-in and year-out, month-in and month-out.

I don't think a flea market, a revived Blue Crab festival, or a set of marketing materials are likely to accomplish that.

The county needs a more ambitious plan.

Town of Oriental Audit - Some Lessons Learned

I'm glad to note what seems a growing consensus among the Board of Commissioners that the audit of the Town's finances for fiscal year 2009 was competent and thorough.

I believe it likely that the town will continue to use the services of Pittard, Perry and Crone for the next audit. That's good news.

"Big Picture" Lessons from the 2009 audit report:

I think there are a number of lessons to be learned from the most recent audit, including:

1. When the auditor comes, it should be an "all hands on deck" event;

2. The auditor can be expected to investigate and report how things stand as of the day of the audit (June 30), and not what was corrected later;

3. The town gets a better and more thorough audit when the auditor comes to the town instead of doing the job remotely;

4. The purpose of listing deficiencies is to make the Board and the public aware of problems requiring attention - an audit does no good if it fails to spell out specific issues that fall short of good business and accounting practices;

5. The Board of Commissioners, and the Oriental taxpayers, need to be aware not only of the deficiencies reported in audit reports, but also of the auditors' recommended "fixes."

The Nitty-Gritty Details of the 2009 audit report:

I am working on a detailed analysis of the audit's reported Control and Material deficiencies, which I may share. Comments made at the January 5th Town Board meeting concerning the audit shed more heat than light on the subject.

Most of the listed deficiencies have already been corrected.

The major remaining deficiency is in the water system - the apparent discrepancy between the amount of water the town pumps from its wells and the amount billed to its customers.

Heidi Artley, who keeps careful track of water usage for individuals and alerts customers when she sees evidence of possible plumbing leaks, also checks each month to determine the difference between amount of water pumped from the wells and the amount billed. She informed me a few months ago that the percentage of wastage appeared to be increasing, beyond the expected loss from flushing the water system. She has some ideas as to what to look for. Fortunately, Commissioner Johnson has taken on the task of reactivating the town's Water Board, to make recommendations to the Town Board on water issues, including apparent wastage.

One Lesson from the 2008 audit - Look Beyond the Audit Report:

One additional lesson to be learned from the previous (FY 2008) audit is that the Board of Commissioners, and town citizens, need to be aware of and pay attention to communications from the auditor outside of the annual audit report.

For example, the 2008 auditor Seilor Singleton advised the town to make $500,000 in "adjusting journal entries" (AJEs) to the town books.

The auditor's recommended adjustments to the town's General Fund amounted to $250,000, or about one-third of the total amount of the General Fund budget. The adjustments to the Water Fund also amounted to $250,000, or about 125% of the amount of the Water Fund budget.

The auditor did not communicate these recommendations to the Board of Commissioners, and they were never brought to public attention. In the future, they should be.

While I am not an accountant, I do understand that "adjusting journal entries" do not necessarily indicate there have been any problems or accounting errors. AJEs are generally a part of normal accounting procedures. However, AJEs are sometimes used to correct accounting errors, and it appears that at least one of the 2008 AJE recommendations was made in order to reconcile a $3,500 shortfall in the town's cash-on-hand account.

Whether AJEs recommended by the town's outside auditor are made to correct accounting errors or as part of the normal allocation of income and expenditures, the auditor works for the Board of Commissioners and should report all findings and recommendations - including AJEs - directly to the Board.

The preliminary audit report for FY 2009 is not the last communication the town will receive - the town can expect at least one letter from the Local Government Commission approving the audit or directing actions to be taken. There may also be a communication from the auditor forwarding adjusting journal entries. The Board, and the public, should pay as much attention to any such communications as they have to the audit report itself.

Town Board Meeting: Audit

This week's Pamlico News printed an article about Oriental's Town Board meeting of January 5 concerning the town audit and other issues.

This completes the accounts available in Pamlico County news media to citizens who did not attend the meeting.

I did attend the meeting, and over the next few days I will offer some additional commentary.

Oriental's Future: a Vision

A little over a year ago, as the Long Range Planning Committee was nearing completion of its task, Dee Sage asked the members to each draft a vision of what the Town would be like in ten years. My response focused on how the town might grow, and what paths we might follow in economic development.

The final Long Range Plan didn't incorporate every element of my vision. I hope we can have a broader discussion about the future, including a discussion about the future of Pamlico County. To foster such a discussion, I thought it might be useful to share my vision. Over the next few weeks, I will flesh out the vision in more detail.

I would welcome comments.

Oriental in Ten Years

By David Cox

My vision of Oriental in ten years is as follows:

Population: increase to 1750, through a combination of migrants from elsewhere and annexation of neighboring developed land.

Principal economic activities: water dependent activities, including fishing, shrimping and crabbing, expansion of existing marinas to include more boat repair, maintenance and construction; marine trades in support of expanded use of ICW for commercial as well as recreational purposes; support for transiting recreational boats; provision of services in support of green power and improvement of water quality; tourism, with emphasis on outdoor activities associated with the water, including paddling, exploring of marshlands, birding and related activities; recreational fishing.

Public facilities: increased boating infrastructure facilities, including additional town dock at foot of South Avenue (after town wins its lawsuit), associated marine welcoming center, shower, laundry and head; municipal mooring fields in Smith Creek, Raccoon Creek, Neuse River, protected by additional breakwater, and with protected dinghy landing at one of our street ends – this has made Oriental a “must stop” for transiting boaters; additional wildlife boat ramp on Camp Creek in newly annexed part of town.

Businesses: increase in population and tourism and more frequent visits by transiting boaters provides expanded customer base for businesses, including a convenience store, pharmacy, car rental facility, boat rental, and one or more destination restaurants.

Housing: additional housing stock through infill (building on existing lots) in R-1 and R-2 areas and construction of multi family dwellings in R-3.

Demographics: Median age of population decreases due to influx of working age families.

Oriental will have developed greater cooperation with Pamlico County, especially in area of economic development.

Haiti's Agony

Forty years ago, my ship, USS W.S. Sims, pulled into Port au Prince, Haiti, for the weekend.

My wife and one of the other officer's wives surprised us by meeting us at the pier. They had flown down from Mayport, Florida to join us. There had been soldiers with machine guns on the roof of the air terminal. It was the last year of the notoriously corrupt and brutal regime of Papa Doc Duvalier.

The amount of poverty was startling. I had seen crushing poverty in rural Holmes County, Mississippi and in rural areas of the Philippines, but nothing to compare to Haiti. Still, we found the Haitians on the street to be friendly and welcoming.

We stayed in a lovely old hotel run by an expatriate German couple. The place was reminiscent of the setting of a Graham Green novel.

We rented a run-down VW and drove up into the mountains. There were still trees on the mountainsides then, and the view was spectacular. The roads were full of boulders with sharp edges. One of them punctured a bald tire. I checked under the hood and found the jack and spare tire, but there was no tool to get the hub cap off. Soon a Haitian farmer happened along. The only tool he had was a machete. He applied it to the hub cap and had it off in a jiffy. We thanked him and changed the tire. He smiled, waving and walked on up the mountain. We decided it was best to head on back to the hotel.

Back in Port au Prince, we explored the streets and were fascinated by the outpouring of art. Many of the paintings would have been classified as primitive art - flat perspective, simple primary colors. But there were other paintings of the highest quality painted with a complex palette, that would have been at home in major art galleries.

It was only a brief visit, but it left us with a strong impression of a wonderful people. We can only wish them well.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I never met Martin Luther King, Jr. But I knew about him as early as 1955.

1955 was a busy year. It was my second year at the University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss"). That August, Emmett Till, a fourteen year old from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi was brutally lynched. In December, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

We heard more and more about the young, charismatic minister who led the bus boycott in Montgomery, and organized the Southern Christian Leadership Council.

I only knew one person who had personal contact with the Reverend King: Will D. Campbell, a Baptist minister who was Director of Religious Life at Ole Miss from 1954 to 1956. Will was an avuncular, pipe-smoking man of Scotch-Irish background who had first been a preacher as a teen in Amite, Mississippi. He ran afoul of the University administration in a series of events, including the kerfluffle over the Reverend Al Kershaw and an incident when the Assistant Registrar, suspected of being an agent for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, discovered Will playing ping pong in the campus Y building with the minister of the Second Baptist Church in Oxford. "We were separated by a net and using separate but equal paddles," Will explained to the Chancellor.

Will left the University and went to work for the National Council of Churches Department of Racial and Cultural Relations and other organizations in Nashville. He was very impressed with Dr. King. "The man is a saint," he told me during a visit to Ole Miss in 1958.

I knew Will well enough to know he wasn't describing King as a "goody-goody," but as someone both committed and effective. He was especially impressed with King's dedication to Gandhi's concept of nonviolence. The most impressive fact about Gandhi's nonviolence is that this wizened little man in a loincloth carrying a walking stick and no weapons other than an iron will had brought down the world's greatest empire of the day.

A few years ago my wife and I visited the Martin Luther King Jr. museum in Atlanta. In the bookstore was a well-illustrated book on the civil rights movement. On the cover, a headline declared that Martin Luther King Jr. had worked to insure freedom for African Americans. I disagree. He worked to achieve freedom for Americans.

LOng RAnge Navigation (LORAN)

We just learned that the Coast Guard will cease transmitting LORAN-C signals at midnight zulu February 8, 2010. This will bring to an end almost seventy years of development and operation by the US of a very valuable hyperbolic radio navigation system.

I personally never owned a LORAN-C set. I used LORAN-C in the navy, but never liked it. Maybe I disliked it because the set I used was a klunky converter to a LORAN-A set.

I liked LORAN-A. I was introduced to LORAN-A operation on a WWII-vintage DAS-3 LORAN-A receiver, during midshipman training cruise on USS Macon the summer of 1957. It took a little while to get the hang of it, but it gave the operator a lot of control. I used a DAS-4, a slightly improved model, on USS Cabildo and USS Higbee.

The system was intended to provide a fix by plotting time differences from two pairs of stations arranged as a chain, with the master station between two slave stations. The geometry of the arrangement would cause lines of position to cross each other at an angle that resulted in an acceptable fix. A single LORAN line could also be crossed with a sun line. That often came in handy.

LOng RAnge was a bit of a misnomer. The system was designed to use a ground wave radio path, and the maximum distance the signal would reach was about 900 miles during the day and maybe 1600 miles at night. That wasn't enough to reach across the wide Pacific.

A skilled operator could use the system over greater distances by measuring the time difference of sky waves - as long as they were one-hop waves off the E-layer of the ionosphere. If you were really skilled, when operating in the Western Pacific, it was often possible to match the ground wave of a master station with the sky wave of a slave station, apply a time difference correction from a special table, and plot an accurate line of position.

A key skill requirement was the ability to distinguish a sky wave from a ground wave. That took a bit of time and patience. Sky waves were less stable than ground waves, but they could appear fairly stable for a short period. If the operator inadvertently matched a ground wave with a sky wave, the resulting time difference could plot very far away from the ship's actual location. I believe that is what happened when USS Frank Knox ran aground on Pratas Reef in the South China Sea in 1965.

I never trusted LORAN-C because there were too many automatic features. I wanted to see the actual wave form to see what I was dealing with. And I preferred to plot the line of position myself on a piece of paper.

Utility Billing Information as Public Record

North Carolina General Statutes section 132-1.1(c) explicitly provides that “billing information compiled and maintained by a city or county or other public entity providing utility services in connection with the ownership or operation of a public enterprise, excluding airports, is not a public record as defined in G.S. 132-1.”

Does this mean the city may not disclose billing information? Not exactly, according to a recent post by Kara Millonzi of the School of Government on the NC Local Government Law blog. She postulates a number of scenarios under which the disclosure of billing information may be legal under G.S. 132-1.1(c). She suggests, however, that the decision to make such a disclosure should be pursuant to a decision made by the governing board, and the municipality should apply any governing board directive consistently.

In any event, G.S. 132-1.10 prohibits a local government or public authority from intentionally communicating or otherwise making available to the general public certain identifying information, including Social Security or employer taxpayer identification numbers; driver’s license, state identification card, or passport numbers; checking or savings account numbers; credit or debit card numbers; digital signatures; personal identification code numbers; biometric data (such as eye scans, voice scans, and DNA); fingerprints; or passwords. Furthermore, G.S. 132-1.2(2) prohibits a local unit or authority from revealing an account number used for electronic payment (defined as payment by charge card, credit card, debit card, or by electronic funds transfer).

Bottom line: the town does not have to disclose any of this information to the public. It may under certain circumstances, but better be very careful.