Hendersonville Standard
HENDERSONVILLE WEATHER

Hendersonville citizens are fed up




Hendersonville citizens are fed up

Hendersonville citizens are fed up

In last week’s Hendersonville Standard, we reported that at the July 24 Hendersonville Board of Mayor and Aldermen meeting Ward 5 Alderman Darrell Woodcock spoke up about the situation regarding Mayor Jamie Clary’s decision to suspend Public Works Director Chip Moore.

 

Clary’s decision was overturned by the city’s Management Review Committee and Clary was asking the board to reverse that ruling. Woodcock called the entire situation “embarrassing” and went on to say, “I’m glad this was the last thing on the agenda and not the first thing so all those children would (not) see how our government is functioning.”

 

Alderman Peg Petrelli later gave her own take on the ongoing dispute, adding “we are at a crossroads of dysfunction.”

 

Ouch. 

 

That “dysfunction” seems to be on full display when it comes to oversight of the money earmarked for road repairs. 

 

When citizens made it clear they would be attending the June 12 BOMA meeting to express their frustration about a lack of progress on repairing Drake’s Creek Road, the board voted unanimously to pass a Resolution of Intent to partially fund the project, even before the first citizen approached the podium.

 

However, a vote to appropriate the funds was never needed because Moore says he had leftover funds that he could use from the previous fiscal year. Road repairs are now underway.

 

The confusion over the money being used for road repair projects and the outcries from citizens tired of driving on rough roads led reporter Tena Lee to inspect a series of public documents related to this issue.

What she found out was that when developers pulled building permits for new homes in the Drake’s Creek Road area, they were required to pay an assessment for road repairs that by city ordinance were supposed to be designated specifically for Drakes Creek Road.

 

The records show the developers have been paying the fees but it turns out that rather than keeping these funds separate, as was promised to city residents, they have been rolled into the general fund, where they can presumably be used for a variety of different things.

 

City officials have promised to go back and extract those monies out of the general fund to be allocated for Drakes Creek Road, but it boggles the mind that this wasn’t done correctly in the first place and that no one seemed to know just where this money was going.

 

So here we sit. The mayor is mad at the public works director, some of the aldermen are pointing fingers at the mayor, the public works director has hired a lawyer and no one seems sure where the money to fix the roads is sitting.

 

In the meantime, roads are not being repaired quickly enough and citizens are fed up. 

 

Who can blame them?

 

The editorial board of the Hendersonville Standard is made up of owner Dave Gould, Editor Sherry Mitchell and reporters Tena Lee and Josh Cross.

Leave a Reply