BURGAW — As Pender County Manager Randall Woodruff prepares for the same position in neighboring Brunswick County, his right-hand man is getting ready to take over a county that faces numerous challenges in a period of high growth.
Before his appointment to the county’s top administrative position, Chad McEwen served as the assistant county manager the past two years. Prior to his county work, he spent 13 years working for the town of Burgaw, rising from intern after graduate school in 2005 to planning director and ultimately town manager, a position he held for seven years.
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Port City Daily sat down with McEwen to discuss the main challenges facing the county, and how he plans to tackle them.
[Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.]
It seems Woodruff has given you a lot of responsibility as the assistant manager. Is this true?
Randall did give me a lot of responsibility, but he also gave me a lot of autonomy to make decisions and work directly with the department heads and staff, which has helped me get acclimated to the county and its operation. That certainly contributed to my ability to be qualified to take the position.
What are your goals coming into your new role as the county manager?
One of my top priorities will be infrastructure. The availability of infrastructure and capacity, primarily in dealing with our water system, is certainly a problem and a challenge. We have several short-term and long-term plans in place to address that need.
My number one priority is going to be working with our public utility staff and the board to come up with the most cost-effective, quickest means of addressing those water issues. This will include possibly partnering with other municipalities and other utilities that can help us. Anytime we can provide an interconnection — not only for supply purposes but also for emergency circumstances like we did last week with Dorian — will be helpful.
Had we not had the ability to call [the town of] Wallace and say, ‘Wallace, we need to utilize some water’ because of the breach we had on Highway 421, we would have been in a mess. We certainly would’ve experienced much more of the brunt and impact of Dorian than we did. The same goes with our priority to have an interconnection with CFPUA, to provide the option of having water in an emergency situation on the east side of the county.
Priority wise, Pender County is a growing county, and managing those growth challenges through infrastructure improvements while not affecting the quality of life for the existing residents is going to be a challenge that my office — and me personally — will have to be involved in. But the county’s blessed with highly competent department heads and staff in those areas, and we just want to continue the good work that they’ve started.
Speaking of the population boom, especially in the east along the Highway 17 corridor, there are also capacity constraints within schools in that region. How are you going to go about tackling those issues?
Fortunately, there is a very open, frank dialogue regarding the growth issue between the Board of Education and Board of Commissioners, and we have a great relationship with the superintendent and his staff.
Ultimately there will be the need for additional school space. We know that, and our challenge is going to be maximizing the impact of the dollar, so to speak. When we know we’ve got to build something, we need to make sure that we build it the most cost-effective way, capturing the most benefit for those students and planning long term for that growth.
We need to make sure that wherever future facilities are built, they’re built in geographical areas that are going to experience growth. You don’t want to build a school in the middle of nowhere and have to bring children in; that’s not necessarily the preferred path.
It is a very deliberate process already in place with the Board of Education to determine the best locations and the type of facilities, whether they be K-8 or K-5 or grade 6 through middle school or high schools, those discussions are already happening.
And part of that is connecting facility planning with land use planning, right?
Well, you don’t have to be an expert on land use or schools to know that the Scotts Hill area of the county as well as the Highway 17 corridor along Hampstead, from county line to county line, is the high-growth area of the county. In that regard, [county planning director Kyle Breuer] has done a great job in reaching out to the school system and keeping that open dialogue of, ‘This is where the development is being proposed.’ And to have three-party meetings between the school system, these private developers, and our planning staff to see what opportunities exist to facilitate the development.
My wife and I are looking to move to Pender County, obviously. And the first thing out of a young parent’s mouth, particularly my wife’s mouth, is ‘What school district is that house in?’ And the proximity of a school in a neighborhood, particularly a good school which Pender County certainly has, is one of the priorities for people who buy homes. So there’s a mutual benefit, not only to the developer but to the school system, for those discussions to happen prior to land being cleared and housing being built.
Hurricane Dorian came less than a year after Florence brought catastrophic damage across the county. Thankfully it spared the county for the most part. The county published a report earlier this year identifying various areas of improvement in terms of disaster preparedness. What’s going to be at the top of your agenda to prepare for when the next big storm comes?
The thing an event like Florence provides you with is the ability to know where you need to improve. And we certainly learned that shelters were a big area that needed improvement. And during Dorian, the experience our ‘shelterees’ had was better tenfold, from my understanding, than it was in Florence. And that is as crucial of a component of emergency management disaster preparedness as anything — having adequate shelter space and facilities to encourage people to get out of harm’s way.
We had a significant sheltered population during Dorian because I think it was so fresh on people’s mind — their experience during Florence. Which is good. One of our main concerns was that we still had a large population of people in FEMA trailers, in privately owned trailers, in these areas that had flooded. We’ve got to get them somewhere safe. We put information pleading with people, ‘Don’t stay in these campers and these trailers and in these flood-prone areas. They’re not designed to withstand 70 to 100 mile-an-hour winds.’
Thankfully we didn’t get that wind load. But we were prepared for them at the shelters. The improvements in our shelter experiences is a direct correlation between the great relationship we have with the school system and superintendent staff. Without that cooperation, we would be in a very serious predicament with where to safely house people during an event.
The report also mentions debris management — which was a hot button issue in the months after Florence — as a central area of improvement. How will you go about this in the future?
The debris operation with Florence — the county has never experienced a debris operation of that scale in terms of its scope or its cost. And shortly after the storm, we had some very direct conversations with DOT about responsibility, and the fact that the county financially could not sustain another debris operation of the scale of Florence. DOT has been very willing to hear what we’ve got to say, and we’ve got an agreement in place for future events. And you saw that basically, to some degree, in Dorian, where the county said, ‘We’re not going to do debris collection. We’ve coordinated with private vegetative sites to take that material for a fee.’
I don’t know that the financial ability or will is going to be there to take on another operation the scale and cost of Florence. We still have millions of dollars that have not been reimbursed due to that debris operation. And as you can imagine, the level of reimbursement that has not been provided and spans over two years presents some challenges. We’re in a sound financial position as a county, but there have certainly been strains put on us operationally because of the expenditure of Florence debris.
There is also what some call an East-West divide in Pender County, where resources and infrastructure differ in the sparsely populated rural areas and the high-growth coastal region. How will you address this issue?
We’ve had ongoing discussions about the lack of internet infrastructure — high-speed internet and internet in general — in the rural areas, particularly the western portions of the county. We’ve talked with several different vendors and utilities regarding pilot programs studies. And it comes down to money.
In sparsely populated areas, at the end of the day, they’re going to make it an economic decision of whether or not that cost benefit is worth that endeavor. And we’ve tried a lot of different mechanisms to get over that cost hurdle, and one opportunity we’ve looked as this pilot program. I can’t really go into much more than that, but it’s something the Board is exploring.
Ultimately what you have as a county is 850 square miles, which is a huge area to be covered and, honestly, a huge area to cover equally, particularly when there are population densities on one side that far exceed the other side of the county.
Mark Darrough can be reached at Mark@Localvoicemedia.com
