Land Use Plan Lessons Learned - Jan 2018
/LUP Lessons Learned
(sent to the County Commissioners on the eve of their 2018 annual offsite planning work session)
As you may know I spent more than twenty years of my business career advising governments and commercial businesses on investment strategies to enhance competitiveness and profitability while a partner of Booz-Allen-Hamilton. This was followed by six years as a Professor in UNC’s Business School, training MBA students in corporate strategy development and guiding the students to apply their new skills to help North Carolina small businesses through the UNC STAR Program I created.
For six of the past seven years I have served the County as a member of either the Economic Development Advisory Board and the Steering Group for the new Land Use Plan. This has given me an opportunity to analyze and begin to understand some of the economic and management issues facing the County. In early November I shared with each of you my analysis of the County’s wealth of information in your Tax department database and other public sources that I used to track growth, development investments and issues across all five Land Use areas.
I began looking at the County economy in 2013 when our EDAB was shocked by the 50% tax rate hike driven by a collapse in Outer Banks property values. I have continued my analyses while on the LUP. Although Occupancy Tax revenue shows growth this is due to inflation and the increase in the number of bedrooms. Rents per bedroom have been slightly declining while costs continue to grow. The issues I address are real and critical to the County’s future economic health. The purpose of this note is to urge you to ensure that our LUP addresses several topics that can improve County’s future economic health and help keep mainland taxes low.
Two topics address issues of immediate concern:
· Beach Nourishment
· Regulation of Housing Density on the Outer Banks.
Two others could have longer-term positive impact on the County:
· Improved Access to State and Federal Lands
· Improved Access to the Off-Road Area.