Mayor Brown talks priorities

What are your top-three priorities for the town in the next year?
First and foremost, I think for all of the commissioners, is working on the pension situation, and that is something we’ve started working on. Secondly, my goal would be to try to get a handle on this community center. Obviously, I’d like to see it built, but we need to see if the community is on board with doing it. Also, beach renourishment. I’m hoping that the information from consultants is showing us that we don’t have to do island-wide beach renourishment and can, instead, focus on hot spots.

How should the town move forward its pension plans?
The approach I would like to see is pensions being part of a balanced approach to employee compensation because it’s uncontrollable. I’m hoping it will be put into a situation where employees would be put into more control instead of the town being liable for it.

How will the town approach beach management in the next year?
We will develop a revised plan. Our current plan says we will renourish the beaches every eight years and spot-nourish as needed. That will all be worked out with our consultant.

What changes do you hope will be made to the town’s zoning code?
Basically, we’ll just be bringing the zoning code and Comprehensive Plan up to today’s standards. When I was on the Planning & Zoning Board, we were constantly running into situations where they weren’t up to today’s standards and having to make changes to individual codes, so it makes sense to go back and look at the entire thing.

If another budget shortfall occurs, how would you expect the town manager to address it?
We’ve been advised that there probably will be an 8% to 10% budget shortfall countywide. There’s always the possibility of a tax increase. We have lowered the mill or kept it the same the past five years. I’m hoping that we’ll find another way. Our town manager has found a lot of things to cut that we wouldn’t have dreamed of cutting in the past, especially by finding people in the county for things that we would have had to hire a consultant for in the past.

What was the toughest choice you had to make as mayor in the past year?
I think the hardest issue that we dealt with was the town manager issue. It thrust a lot of responsibility on me, which I was not trained to do. I think that I was extremely lucky the way things fell into place and by the fact that David Bullock came in front of our search party. I’ve talked to cities lately where they’ve done a national search, and it can be a very trying experience and frustrating because they hire consultants to help find people, and the people aren’t exactly who you’re looking for.

What has been your proudest accomplishment so far as mayor?
I don’t know that it was my accomplishment, but probably the same thing in that we got the town government going in the right direction. Also, we finally got the Vision Plan adopted that was presented to the commission in 2007 … but they didn’t know what to do with it at the time.

Is being mayor tougher or easier than you thought it would be?
It’s tougher. Even though I’ve been around the town for a long time, there are a lot of little things that the mayor does that I didn’t know about. There are a lot of additional meetings, and the mayor is the town’s representative. Plus (the commission) attends a lot of county meetings that we didn’t in the past.