By Elizabeth G. Cook
Salisbury Post
Salisbury and Rowan County officials came away from a luncheon meeting Monday with promises to work together.
Members of the Salisbury City Council and the Rowan Board of Commissioners met at City Hall for a broad discussion of mutual interests. Commissioner Chad Mitchell was the only member of the two boards who did not attend.
The economy, public schools, the I-85 sewer line, the county airport, telecommunications, a sales tax increase and the Census were among their topics.
Annexation was front and center ó the issue that put the two boards at odds last year when the city attempted to annex 2,000 acres on N.C. 150. Commissioners took a stand against involuntary annexation and joined N.C. 150 residents in fighting the city.
City Council dropped the effort after so many residents signed up for city water and sewer that the plan became unworkable.
Monday’s consensus was that the boards should not let differences over annexation prevent them from working together on other issues.
Both boards will now leave that issue in the hands of the state, Mayor Susan Kluttz says. “That’s where that battle is.”
Locally, some of the players in city-county relations have changed. Arnold Chamberlain, then chairman of the county board, lived in the area targeted for annexation and spoke against it. Commissioner Jim Sides also took an active role. Chamberlain did not seek another term on the board last year, and Sides lost his bid for re-election.
Ford led the voting last fall and became chairman. Elected at the same time was Commissioner Raymond Coltrain.
Kluttz says she and Ford have been in communication with each other several times since Ford’s election.
The Monday meeting was the first between the council and the county board in four years. Kluttz said relations between the two had moved backward in recent years, and annexation was a big part of that.
But there are many more issues on which the two boards agree, she says.
“We’re going to have to be working together more closely than we have in recent years,” Kluttz says.
Ford came away with the same sentiment.
“To be honest, everybody seemed to be on the same page,” he says.
Salisbury is biggest of the county’s 10 municipalities, he says, so city and county should work together.
“I feel like it’s something you’ve got to do,” Ford says.
The two groups also discussed the proposed quarter-cent increase in the sales tax that commissioners are considering. Ford says the tax would not apply to groceries. Nor would any portion of the revenue raised go to the city or other municipalities.
The county is exploring the increase as a way to pay for updating communications for fire departments and building a new jail ó improvements that would serve the municipalities as well as the county, he says.
The communications upgrade is federally mandated, Ford says, and the jail annex is being forced by the state. “We do not have a choice on either one of those,” he says.
Commissioners have to decide by July whether they want to put the tax increase on the fall ballot for voters’ approval.
During his campaign for the county board last year, Ford says, he often heard concerns about the relationship between the county, the city and other towns.
He sees communication among them all improving this year. The Municipal Association has decided to meet every other month, instead of quarterly. It helps, he says, for elected officials to talk face to face instead of through the newspaper.