EP 54: A Day at the Beach (The Wild Intersection of Gov't and Summer Vacation)
It's summer, and beach towns all along the coast are each receiving thousands and thousands of visitors from across the U.S. Take Atlantic Beach, N.C., for example. It has a year-round population of about 1,500, but in the summer months that number surges to roughly 50,000. How in the world does such a small community -- with limited staffing and resources -- prepare for that? How can it provide adequate services, like police or even enough public water, amid outsize demand? What's the procedure when someone calls the authorities to report mysterious matter washing ashore? And did you know it's somebody's job there to make sure the beach is still there for tourists? Yes, literally. It's amazing how it all comes together, though we suntanned beneficiaries seldom ever consider it. Let's think back to that classic summer vacation as we hear from a panel of experts in this special live episode of Municipal Equation, recorded with an audience in Atlantic Beach.
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation. I'd like everyone in here who's seen the movie Jolls to raise their hand. Okay. For the purpose of the bot podcast, all the hands are in the air. Remember that
The wild intersection of government and summer vacation. My name is Ben Brown, and this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns in the face of change From the North Carolina League of Municipalities. Episode 54. You've been on vacation before. At least, I hope you have. Do you ever recall going to, say, a beach town? Like, when you were a kid, you know, spending a day, maybe a few days with your family in a hotel overlooking the sand and the beautiful ocean? Or in a timeshare, or rent a cottage maybe. It was the middle of summer, and you were one of what seemed like thousands of vehicles bottlenecking onto this amazing little barrier island. The beach is covered with towels and umbrellas. The seafood restaurants are packed. Your parents are talking about pina coladas. Your dad bought you a kite that neither of you could really figure out. You make friends with the kid staying in the unit next door. He's on vacation with his family too, and they've all got bad sunburns, and your parents joke that they must be from the Midwest or something. Word starts to circulate that someone saw a shark, or got stung by a jellyfish, or passed out on the dunes, or saw a carcass wash ashore. Wait, what? Yeah. I mean, it was ultimately a really great time. Good memories, bad sunburn. A lot happened at that action packed beach town you visited when you were, I don't know, 10 years old. Did you ever get to wondering what that place, that beautiful tourism paradise, is like in the off season? You know, when all the tourists are gone, and the weather's cold. People actually live in that town year round, you realize. How many? You know, it's gotta be a small population. Population. And how in the world do they prepare for all at once, thousands and thousands and thousands of people cramming in for a few months out of the year? All those people, all that traffic, all those calls to police about the guy passed out on the dunes, or the shark, or the jellyfish. Does that local police force just kinda sit around bored in the wintertime, or do they just maybe take on new officers in the summer? Obviously, we could construct a million little questions about how a beach town, the government of that town, does it. It's a pretty unique environment, and the dynamics are really surprising. Even after pausing to think about it, like we're doing right now. So it's peak season right now for beach towns up and down the coast. And and I guess it has been for a couple months. And I drove out to one of those beach towns earlier this month for a special episode of Municipal Equation, recorded live at the NC Local Government Budget Association conference in a beachside hotel in Atlantic Beach. To flesh all this out, our panel included a beach town manager, Brian Kramer of the town of Pine Knoll Shores, a beach town police chief, Ryan Thompson of Pine Knoll Shores, and a guy whose job it is to keep the beach in place. And yes, that is a job. To keep the beach wide, and sandy, and ready for tourists, and anyone else who wants to visit. His name is Rudy Rudolph, of the Carteret County, North Carolina Shore Protection Office. And what these three had to say was, again, surprising, and a combination of funny and shocking when we get to talking with the police chief. And it got the audience asking questions as well. This episode is gonna hit the highlights, so as usual, I may jump in to, you know, paraphrase or summarize things to keep it going. But I really enjoyed the live energy of this one. So here it is. And if you hear a rumbling sound in the background from time to time, it's because Atlantic Beach was, at that time, getting pummeled by a severe coastal storm. Just another occasional layer of vacationing in a beach town. It's worth it. So we're here in Atlantic Beach in the middle of summer, and I'm gonna read from my little script here. And beach towns like this are I mean, what happens to a beach town in the summer? Just somebody shout it out.
Swimming. And
and and who's swimming? Who's here? I'm home. Who's right in that? Tourists. Tourists. Towns like this are these towns are vacation central. I mean, it's a beautiful place. You know, people drive hours to be in a place like this, which means, you know, the real estate is valuable. The local businesses get a get a boost. You have, I guess, hotel stays and occupancy tax money, and everything sounds like a pretty good deal. You know? But it's challenging as you guys know, our panelists know, to to kinda keep it up and running. And I gotta say too, it's a great deal for North Carolina as well because if we're talking about resort towns, not just beaches, you know, we got mountain towns too. We have resort towns from the mountains to the coast, and that's a really great deal for North Carolina and visitorship. We've got Brian Kramer today. I wanna introduce the panelists, town manager for Pine Knoll Shores just down the road. Right? Yes, sir. We have Ryan Thompson, chief of police for Pine Knoll Shores, and we have Greg Rudy Rudolph of the Carteret County Shore Protection Office. And I've seen Rudy speak many times in the past, actually. We were just kinda catching up, and he has a really interesting angle on the sort of burden on a a beach town to to be the kind of place that visitors would expect to to come to. And I wanna jump right into that with a question for Brian Kramer, town manager of Pine Knoll Shores. So real quick, what's what's the full time population of your town? So Pine Knoll Shores is sixteen fifty four, 1,654
in this
in year round. Year round. Calculation. Yeah. So peak summer months, time like this, who do you have here? So,
the planners tell us when every hotel bed is full and every rental's full and all the second time second homeowners are here, we we balloon up to 10,000. 10,000. So what was that first number again? Like, 1,600? 100.
I I'm I'm not good at math, but any budget people out there wanna see what the percentage increase is right there? Mhmm. Nearly 10 times. Nearly 10 times. Thank you. Some debate. But either way, I mean, that's that's massive. I mean, how do you so and I guess this is a question that the audience is gonna appreciate, I hope. When you're putting together your your annual budget Right. Do you have to plan for that year round population, that 1,600, or do you have to brace for the peak season and have things in place there? I mean, it's kind of a leading question. But Yeah. Let me let me first answer a question I'm always asked in groups like this, and that is,
what does a beach manager do? I'd like everyone in here who's seen the movie Jaws to raise their hand. Okay. For the purpose of the remember the, heroic police chief? We don't do that. Remember the sea captain who gets eaten at the end? We don't do that. Remember the geeky town official who runs around and says, is it safe to go in the water? That's what we do. That's what it means to have it done. So, so budgeting, you know, the standard response to that question, but but it's absolutely true, is we've got almost $900,000,000 of real value in in Pine Mill Shores. Emerald Isle, down the road, the big dog is almost 4,000,000,000. Wow. There's a lot of real value here. And of course, the big dogs in in this small town is public safety as it should be, fire and police, you have to protect that real value all year long. Okay? That goes with any town, but, you know, a lot of people think, for instance, hey, just hire a lot of renter cops between Memorial Day and Labor Day. It doesn't work that way. Or bring in a whole bunch of, extra, firemen. And anyone who hasn't worked in public safety and doesn't understand the the teamwork and the training aspect knows that that's not the way that works. So, to answer your question, there's not a massive budget increase, budget expenditure window between Memorial Day and Labor Day. We do have some some extra overtime and part time. Chief will tell you he brings in some extra folks from the pressure point weekends, the big weekends. But I can't say there's a there's an expenditure surge during during the summer, but the focus of a lot of the structure of the government is to handle that, if you understand Mhmm. The the nuance there. The focus of the way we're structured for public works, for public safety, and so on and so forth is in fact, hey, what are we gonna do when there's 10,000 folks here?
So we're just warming up here. Kramer said the town also has to prepare itself in terms of things like, you know, public water capacity. Those treatment plants have to take into account peak usage, so they have to build them well beyond the needs of the full time population. Again, expensive. And all of it has to be maintained year round too. Same goes for the beach, meaning the beach itself, the sand. The tourism industry, which is a multi billion dollar industry in the oceanfront counties here, depends on this. Depends on beach maintenance. And that, among other things, notably storm protection, gives demand to beach nourishment projects, where a big dredge boat and a whole cast of people come in and pump sand onto the shore, and build up new dunes and so on. Sort of a refreshed beach, which a lot of people don't know is a thing that happens. And because storms come in and wash away chunks of the beach, in addition to everyday erosion, It's a process that has to happen again and again. And that's expensive. Here's Rudy Rudolph of the Carteret County Shore Protection Office.
I'll I'll quote one of my county, commissioners. If you don't under under understand the problem, I still know what the answer is. Money. And, and, beach nourishment is a kind of I'm expensive. Just to get a dredge here is a is a 3 to $5,000,000. And that's so we get a bill for 3 to $5,000,000 and we have received grain number one. And then we get the sand by, the unit cost, so it'll be $10 a cubic yard. And we deal with with, you know, millions of of, you know, cubic yards. So right there, that's a $15,000,000 project. Wow. And, but, you know, sand is a problem because after the hurricanes of the nineties, we we didn't we didn't have any. We had birth of Fran, Bonnie, Dennis one and two, Dennis twice, and Floyd all within, like, a three year a time span. And before that, we had Hurricane Donna on the 1960. So it was like a thirty year gap of really hurricane activity. And lo and behold, half the town's population boomed between 1960 and the nineties. Parnell Seward was incorporated in nineteen seventy, thirty. So, you know, we've put on the on the beach since, in 1999, 14,000,000 cubic yards, which, a dump truck holds about 12 cubic yards. So I wrote down how many how many dump trucks that is. It's a lot. But, if you could take a basketball court and fill it with 14,000,000 cubic yards of sand, it would go 15 miles in the air. And if you don't know how how how how tall that is, just look I mean, if you see the see the commercial airplanes, that's about 15 miles. Wow. So, at 124,000,000 And again, the investments, we've gotten this for now over fifteen, twenty years and, you know, the investments have been, you know, rock solid. So 3 to $5,000,000
just to park the dredge and its cast of characters offshore before the first grain of sand is ever received. This process is highly technical and expert, scientific, extremely regulated. Every little thing has to be approved, from where you source the sand you're buying, to where you put it, how much of it there is, and on and on. You have to do these beach nourishment projects in the winter, which sounds like that's just for the sake of tourist season, but it's not. It's also in abeyance of protections for endangered and threatened species. Sea turtles, nesting shorebirds. But getting back to paying for it, localities like Carteret County, they've done bonds, special taxing districts, which do require local voter approval. So obviously, these projects have support if the locals are willing to pay more in taxes.
And that passed in three different towns, and there was a Hoshua Fund district and a non Hoshua Fund district in each town. And it passed in each district and in each town back in like 2001 and and, you know, '2. And that's something that you have to get state legislative permission to do, right? To to put a question like that on the ballot. Exactly. Exactly. And so what's been kind of neat though about that because we did that and it worked once we once the communities, did the bonds have retired the bonds, They kept a little bit of of property tax on the books. So instead of paying 16¢ per, you know, 100 on the oceanfront, it went to, like, 3. And, you know, the thought process there was like, folks, we're gonna have we're gonna have to do this again. Why don't we put a little bit of spy slowly and that and that way then, you know, the next time we have to pay, it'll be there. And then, of course, the oxygen tax, one half of the county's oxygen tax goes goes, goes, towards the the sole purpose of of, beachhead and nourishment. Our oxygen tax here in the county is 6%. Each percentage point yields about $1,200,000, so we get about 3 and a half ish million dollars a year. That's the light of the light of the crew in in the reserve.
So is this something that is totally handled locally or are there federal funds, state funds that can help you out?
State funding, not quite yet. The federal funding really comes from the, the port to the core of engineers. I I can't I dredge that up. They're about a million cubic yards per year. You already know a million is a lot. So if we can get some of that some of that sand on the beach through all different weirds, going to Congress and asking for it, going for everything with you. And so some of that sand, some of that 14,000,000 cubic yards of sand has come come from the harbor and some of that $124,000,000
has also come from from the feds as well. I I I gotta ask you this too. When it comes to selling the need for funding resources, when it comes to projects like this, I mean, there's a kind of a messaging thing too. Right? When it comes to this isn't just for beachfront property owners. There's a greater purpose. Right? Yeah. And and again, it
it it it gets easier in the summer because all you gotta do is just walk on the feeds and look, you know, both ways and there's a gazillion people. So that, you know, right there for really, really good, you know, selling points. And you know what's interesting too is, Beau Banks is about 25 miles long. 25 miles long is almost as big as Delaware's whole entire oceanfront. Almost as big as Maryland's, entire oceanfront. So we have a state
It happens all along the developed coast. Thanks to these projects, beach vacation towns can exist. And you can imagine what that means to the economy. We visualize that data every time thousands of people converge on the shoreline. But people are people, which is why we have folks like police chief Ryan Thompson of Pine Knoll Shores, who just before we began our panel showed me a picture on his phone of what looked like human intestines that had washed up from the ocean. Naturally, whoever found it called the police, who had to bring in resources to identify whether it was human. Thankfully, it wasn't. But he says he gets calls like that all the time. What is unique about policing in a resort town?
Everything. It's two different. It's refreshing, to be quite honest, because it's like working for two different municipalities. It's not a constant steady craziness. It's not a constant state of boredom. About the time you're ready for the tourists to go home, the season is over, and we go into our wintertime. About the time you get bored with that, all the tourists come back and all the craziness begins. In particular with a coastal tourist town, you add in on population multiplies exponentially and then you throw in hurricanes and coastal storms and, you know, everybody's primary focus should be on safety, but it's more on the fact that they're rooming in their vacation and they want to go in the water when it's black flagged, then Yeah. It's it's very unique. I work for other municipalities and it's it's the most interesting, I think, place to work.
Well, so you you mentioned earlier about the, recruitment part and hiring and bringing on officers. I mean, how do you first off, what's the procedure with that? You said it's it's not a rent cop situation. How early do you have to hire to get people trained into? So, you know So our staff stays static throughout the year.
We've got part time officers that are all full time officers someplace else. Of course they're primarily used in the summertime and not the wintertime, on holidays, on busy weekends for special events. Mhmm. Our hiring process takes anywhere between two to three months, so it would be incredibly inefficient if we went through a round of trying to hire officers every single year and then just let them know at the end of the year. So we just find it's much more efficient to maintain the same group of part time officers and just kind of let them lay dormant during the wintertime. And and if you need them, they're there. But, you know, we primarily use them in the in the summer. Gotcha.
Well, we were talking earlier about some of the interesting stuff that happens during a high season like this. I mean, could you kind of walk us through? I mean, what's memorable to you? Is there anything that stands out if I asked you, you know, what's what's what's a moment you'll never forget being a police officer during tour season? You know, there's so much craziness that happens.
If if you ask me what happened two summers ago, I could tell you because it's replaced by what happened yesterday. And like I was just telling you outside, two hours ago, my cops and I were on the beach because somebody reported human remains washed up on the beach, but they weren't. They were animal remains. We've had folks trying to jump off seven story detail balconies. I was on the Carter County SWAT team as a crisis negotiator for three years and saw everything that you could see from hostage situations to suicides and just just people in crisis. We have the same, even though it's a small area, we've got the same crime year that Raleigh has, it's just on a smaller scale, but our challenge is we've got one or two cops working at a time to respond to that major incident where other municipalities have 15 to 20 and that's the challenge that you, that you get. Well, so and for training too,
a beach down versus a non beach down, what are the special considerations?
We can't train in the summertime. And, you know, unfortunately that's when a lot of the training is offered and that's when a lot of the conferences are offered that we just don't we can't go to because if I send I've got seven full time cops and if I send one of my officers to training, you know, that's the equivalent percentage wise of sending an entire shift in another department. So we have to train in the wintertime. That's also we have a good chunk of our hurricane season in the, in, in the fall. That's when officers try to take vacation and leave because they can't take it in the summer. So, so we have to train in the winter.
What does that do with, recruitment in general when it comes to the desirability of working in a beach town? On the surface, it may be, you know, beach town, that sounds great. I'd love to work out there, but then you have the added challenges. How do you kinda how is that pitched to people you want to bring in? Is it a lot of people who are native to the coast, or do you have people that you recruit from inland or larger cities or So most of the officers we've recruited have been here. I can tell you I have a conversate the same conversation with every applicant that we have that we interview
is, I tell them, we're so small that there's gonna be a lot of times that you're work work by yourself. And you have the benefit in larger agencies of having a supervisor or multiple other officers right there with you to answer a question or to help you. Here, you're everything until somebody else for the higher rank gets there. And that could take time. There's been times where everybody in Atlanta Beach is at the jail, everybody in Indian Beach is at the jail, and our one officer on Pinellas Shores is the only officer available from falls in three municipalities. Wow. And that's the reality of working in a beach town in the summertime. And I've had applicants, when I tell them that, when I say I've gone to stabbings alone, I we routinely go to domestics by ourselves. I can't tell you how many times that we've been in altercations with folks and we're by ourselves Mhmm. Where they say that's not for me. And no thanks. And, you know, so it's, it's a challenge. The, the plus side is who doesn't want to come to work at the beach And, with with having such a high property value right here, you know, our town's got the luxury of being able to, you know, be at the upper echelon as far as, you know, paying benefits and that goes. So that that helps tremendously.
So is there one kind of call during the the peak season or the summer months that tends to come in more often than none?
Domestic, domestic situations. Unfortunately, when folks come on vacation, they think they're going on vacation to leave their problems at home. And, I can tell you they bring their problems with them, and it's usually accompanied by alcohol, and those combinations never mix well. So, probably domestic situations in our hotels.
Wildlife, Coastal wildlife? Are are these concerns as well that people have where they're they're coming from maybe a more urban area and they're not? I'm gonna tell you something that's gonna surprise you. Let's hear it. We have sharks in the ocean.
We get I had heard, but
We get 911 calls every summer to report sharks in the ocean. So, yeah, we do it with, you know, we've got a coyote issue going on right now. A coyote issue. Yeah. We've got snakes. We've got everything under the sun. We've had, about eight years ago, we had a black bear wandering around for a while before he disappeared. So, we've got a surprisingly large deer population here that causes issues in the wintertime. So, you name it, we've got
it. Alright. So we're gonna head to audience questions in a minute. But first, a few highlights from when I asked each panelist to tell us something that the general public probably doesn't know about the beach town dynamic, starting with town manager, Brian Kramer.
Everyone thinks everyone who lives at the beach is a gozillionaire. That's absolutely not the case, though, depending on what paper you read, you'd like to think that all these gozillionaires are getting the beach taken care of, formed by free, by the state, that's not the case. I'm particularly proud of Pinehill Sewers because of the volunteer spirit that we have. We have 1,600 people with an average, age of 63, we have active retiree, population, I have nothing to back this up, but we probably have the highest per capita volunteer base of, of, of municipalities in the state. But to answer your question, a lot of retirees from normal careers come You know, you know what you call people who retire in, North Carolina, and you've heard this term before, halfbacks. Right? Mhmm. You know, they went down to Florida. They hated the heat. They went halfway home back to Jersey, and they stayed here. That's Pinellas Shores. Shoreline protection leader, Rudy Rudolph.
And I can't I would just think that every single beach that you go on through the 25 miles of you have has been nursed. A lot of the dunes you see as you look, you know, from, you know, side to side are pretty much new, dunes that the towns have, helped, activate with a a dune of plantings and, and sand fencing. So, you know, one of the things that we've had, like, a challenge with, I guess, over over this year, and this is again what, like, the tool that you're coming a visitor wouldn't wouldn't understand is, you walk over 70 feet of dune that didn't exist seven years ago, And then you're on a 50 foot wide beach, which might be a little bit narrow, but you don't realize that you just walked over stuff that didn't even exist five or seven years ago. So try and explain that to somebody who says there's not enough tile space or hey, the beaches are really thin and what are you doing about it? And it's like, well, you know, we've done x y z and stuff and, you know, as a manager that's tough after the more than decade. To get back to the grape one and re explain that whole entire entire, you know, process again and and and again and again. I find that more challenging, as years that go by.
Police chief Ryan Thompson. I think we're we're just as busy in the wintertime as the peak season. You know, we save, like we talked about earlier, our training, our vacation leave, which means that with us and we have one or two officers working at a time. If an officer takes off, somebody's got it covered. We save all of our projects for the off season. Majority of our property crime happens in the off season, so we don't just get to relax, you know, after after the summer. It's it's a different kind of busy, but it's still busy.
Alright. So here we move into questions from the audience. And remember, this is at the Local Government Budget Association conference. So the questions coming up are more or less through that lens. For instance, some discussion about the occupancy tax, which is a source of revenue derived from things like hotel stays and short term rentals, which is obviously really important to a beach town. I'm just gonna let it play without interruption because if this is your bailiwick, then I wanna keep that value for you. If it's not your bailiwick, there's a lot you can learn. Do we have any questions from the audience? Anything I failed to ask that you think should be, should be put to our panelists?
Please excuse my ignorance. This is a bad question. But, if what what is the what's the importance of the dunes, I guess? Like, in my experience, you you walk through dunes to get to the beach, but the most, like, as you were saying, the most important part to most tourists
is the tile space and the beach itself. So Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Great question. It's a mini levy, if you will. So it's if so when we get that hurricane Kramer, I come along, it's just a category one, which is still, you know, panic mode everywhere, and it just barely touches that, you know, frontal dune. Great because that's why it's there. It's it's it's kind of our shock absorber. So we need that dune as kind of our of our levy. And also it's a good, habitat for flora and fauna. There's a there's a lot of critters that, you know, will live in there as well. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.
Just to underline that, Rudy has a set of photos from Irene, happened to take these in Pineapple Sewer, so I use them all the time when I'm answering that question with a a citizen, which, is taken the day prior to Irene, and then a couple days after the storm, and the dune network particularly, or in that spot was decimated, and it kind of looks like a World War One battlefield with, with the old two by four posts of the old, sand fence, but it worked. It worked. All, all that tax base and real property and such was protected because it was absorbed by that. So then we planted more sand fence and vegetation and it took away the beach. Now it's true. But it's important.
Thank you. My question is, what do you what do you think this area is gonna look like twenty or thirty years from now? I know it's experienced a lot of growth and continues to be a, you know, a thriving tourist destination, but do you think it's gonna, is it just gonna kind of continue that the same? Is it gonna continue to grow? Are you worried about climate change and the impact that might have? Right. I'll
answer very quickly just on the people side, Rudy more on the environmental side. I think the island is largely, not entirely, but largely build out. Okay? I also think there's a very strong, and vocal feeling that this island not become Myrtle Beach. That's a battle cry. There's a reason, there's no, there's a reason there's no centralized sewer on this island. There's either a septic or package plants, which are miniature sewage systems that work for a building complex or whatever. So it it will look different. Things are always going to change, but I don't think if you were looking at the island from five miles off Seward thirty years from now, you're going to see things we don't wanna see, which is high rises and stuff.
Yeah. I'm gonna echo that. The, the size of the, septic systems, most of the towns have a height, you know, ordinance as well. So it's gonna be really hard to squeeze the kind of bigger stuff here. Environmentally, climate change, you know, it's really tricky. I really like the sea level rise issue just just from my background. It's set on a gazillion panels about it. And it's it's really tough because the it's always you'd always talk about thirty thirty years in the future or Iraq to 2100. Well, elected officials have two year cycles, you know, the tourist has a one week cycle. So, you know, we gotta balance, you know, what can we do for maybe the next two or three years that's gonna help us to maybe combat, if you will, like climate change. And if it changes, you know, like dramatically, well, we're gonna have to make that kind of short short, you know, jump or not. So so so that's what I look at it. From a BGN nourishment standpoint, this is kind of inside baseball, but we have the elevation of of of where we, you know, put the sand. And we actually, in our long in our long term forecast, we even have, the sea level rises instead of putting it at seven feet above sea level, we're gonna put it at seven and a half within the next twenty five years. And that's x that's, you know, x amount of more sand and therefore our costs are gonna go up x from x, but, you know, we can plan for that. So that's that's, you know, generally how we do it.
Thank you. So my question, Chief, you kinda mentioned this when there's, you know, it keeps tourist season, people are on call or at the jail, you can work together with the other towns on the island. And I man I imagine a lot of the issues that Pine North Shore's or Lakeview face are pretty similar. So how much do you guys work together as kind of towns on, on the island, you know, for public safety or other services? Like how does that, that relationship work?
So that's a great question. So we've got a better so all of the municipalities, including the Sheriff's office, as far as law enforcement, I would put the communication and the working relationship that we've got in this county up against anywhere else in the state. We meet the chiefs and the sheriff meet monthly just to talk about issues that are going on in their town, major programs or policies that they're thinking about implementing. And we rely heavily on mutual aid agreements in the summertime and, it's not uncommon for on a Friday or Saturday night for our officers to spend more time in another town than they do in Pinellas Shores if there's a major incident. So, we rely heavily on those. If a crime happens here in Pinellas Shores, the same crime probably happened by the same people in Atlanta Beach and Emerald Isle, and so all, all of our investigators worked really close together. They've got great relationships. So, I'm very proud of that, because ten years ago that wasn't the way it was. Everybody kind of had a wall up with their jurisdiction that said what's mine is mine. They didn't want to share information. I think everybody realized that wasn't the way to to do things. Right.
If I could just add on to that, just to to put me behind that, all of the fire departments on the island now have an insurance rating of four. And if any of you are familiar with that. And a huge part of that is the required mutual aid. You know, recognition of apparatus and other department, stations and such. So it's, it's literal. It's literal. It's not just they play nice together. It's, I mean, it's literal that the sharing benefits everyone.
And I'll add one more quick thing. We've got a lot of big events that go on in this county, whether it's beach music festivals or fire invasions in both of them. And, and speaking of that, you know, just using the fire invasion that's coming up in August, you'll see an officer there from every jurisdiction working under Mitchell Lake. So we, we work, we share cops on a regular basis. We've got, free days at the aquarium and their normal attendance is somewhere around 1,000 or 1,500 people a day. These free days will bring 10 to 12,000 people And a seven person law enforcement agency is not equipped to deal with that influx of people, so we send cops to Atlanta Beach for the Beach Music Festival and they kind of send us IOUs in six months when we have free days to, to bring people down there. So I think we're all pretty good at planning for those contingencies.
I've, I have an economic development related question so, given that I imagine a lot of these businesses really need to plan to get a lot of their income during the, you know, the high peak of the year. In the off season it's probably a little bit slower. So does it ever get difficult to recruit businesses to an area like this given that, they need to kind of plant it that way? They can't necessarily just, you know, have the same stream coming in all year round?
Okay. Do I start? Yeah. Yeah. It is. I'm not an economic developer. Thank God. It's you know, because because you know, an economic developer, the conversation you had three, you know, years ago bears fruit. Now, you don't really remember what happened. The advertisement did here, didn't work, but it was there. So, with that, you know, besides the besides the tourism industry, you're right. It's very it's very difficult for them because, like I said, you know, meat and potatoes, it it it is all the summer. There have been a heavy focus with our, tourism development authority to really advertise that, you know, promote the shoulder seasons. The, you know, seafood festival and the fishing and things like that. And the challenge with that is this, you know, is schools. You know, just it's a it's a weekend driven thing. But again, you know, the whole school landscape is, you know, changing with, you know, charter schools and and everything, you know, year round schools. So that's kind of going on our favor. I know from the county perspective, there's, we have the division of coastal management has is stationed here. Division of of marine fisheries is in is in Carter County. The Duke Marine Land is in Carter County. UNC has the Institute of Marine Sciences in Carter County. NC State has, CMASS in I'm in Carter County. We have the aquarium here. We have, the Beaufort Maritime Museum. There's a huge maritime cluster here and our kind of economic development people are really working off trying to make this out of boating industries. So that whole marine blue economy, we're really trying to again, I'm not going to go over, but I know one. So we're really trying to kinda promote that kind of, you know, a cluster. And again, it's kinda difficult because everybody has their own stovepipes because you would see in Duke, you know, well, I don't I don't need to go there. It's not just on basketball courts everywhere. So, but yeah, but we're really trying to advertise that as this is a great place for that type of, you know, business and and co ops.
Thank you. Yeah. Good question.
Yeah. Just to piggyback off that, I was wondering about your revenue diversification and so do you I guess draw a larger percent of your total revenue from sales tax versus property tax? You talked a little bit about occupancy tax and how does economic development or a natural disaster like, right now it's raining and it you know, it rains on a really busy weekend. How does that affect the revenue that you generate?
You really need to hear from Rudy on the effects of the environment on the occupancy tax as far as the beach. As far as the municipal budget, gen our general our, ad valorem tax far surpasses, the sales and use tax. Probably about 1,800,000.0 in Advalor and about 600,000 in sales tax. But for a general fund budget of only 3,400,000.0, I'm wondering if there's any massive ones out here laughing at those numbers, but an old gray beard once told me, Kramer, the only difference between my budget and yours is comms and zeros. You still have a board to answer to, and I do. But, 600,000 out of 3,000,000 is a good chunk of change. So, yes, we pay attention when this when when he tells us that there's issues on the tourism side and occupancy tax, because we know, with the three months lag, with the sales and use tax comebacks, that it'll affect us that way, no question. One thing on economic development, Rudy hit all of those, there's been some chatter that I've noticed that's new about drawing retirees to Carteret County. A couple towns are talking about it now, the new county economic development. I, I see that as a result of baby boomers doing all of that. But that's another facet of economic development that I'm just hearing discussion of that's kinda new.
With with respect to the Oxy tax, just to give you an idea. So again, I mentioned our 6%. So that brings in about 7 and a half million dollars a year. July alone is is over 2,000,000. So, the one year hurricane Bertha hit July 4 weekend, and that's the only time in the history of the oxygen tax that July was not the highest month of the of the year. So, yeah, it does. Or hurricane Ophelia, one of these ones that kinda, you know, camp out offshore and stay there for for, you know, weeks, that does, what's gonna hurt us. I always had all my slides here, but the option tax is the most amazing barometer for, the economy. You could see over the past, you could see every storm that that mattered. You could see the economic boom. You could see the impacts of the of the of the school calendar. You you can see it all there. So
Are are you guys seeing, like Airbnb and things like that, impact occupancy tax? And and, I mean, do you guys collect from how does that work? Yeah. That's been,
something that that's evolved over the past decade. The old Oxy tax law said if you owned less than five units, you did not have to pay oxy tax, and they and they changed that. Now, you know, every everyone pays. And the kind of Amazon laws took into effect. So like if you booked a room on travel lawsuit or whatever, you you like to have to pay the oxy tax. But once the state says, hey, you have to pay the sales tax in North Carolina, got them. Now they have to pay the oxy tax as well. So that's all that, less than five was implemented maybe five or six years ago when the I call it and the the Amazon law issue was maybe three years ago. So, yeah. So it's it's definitely helped. Interesting.
And is there anything other factors that influence occupancy tax that maybe we're not thinking about or aren't apparent, but might like we talked about weather,
tourism, or like Well, you know, I mean, there's as our our favorite professor used to say, you could torture the statistics and I mean, until they confess. But, you know, so so let's let's see a lot. Yeah. There's been a lot of discussion like, well, if you increase the rates, you could have the same amount of people come but get more, you know, oxy tax. Or, you know, vice versa. You could decrease the rates like an economic recession to just attract people. You can have more people here, but you can you can almost have lower revenue. But, you know, with with all that said, we haven't seen that, that type of inverse, inverse things yet. So But I think, you know, one,
one, surprising thing about the occupancy tax issue when when I came aboard eleven years ago, that I wasn't aware of, I came here from the recourse, where I wasn't aware of anything in this business, but, what I heard discussed in the occupancy tax is, you know, how just what is the occupancy tax used for? Mhmm. And in this county, and this is not the same everywhere, in this county it's used to, maintain a healthy beach strand, and also for our travel tourism, authority, or TDA. When I first came aboard, it wasn't fiftyfifty, it was what was this? What? A two
a two fifths. A three fifths. So,
and and the beach was on the, was on the small side, and that was an effort that Rudy and his beach commission did a great job on it. We needed more, more funds for our beaches. But just to step back from your question about any nuances on it, the important thing is, for the communities, how's it used in the first place? And, I think it's used right here.
This question might be for Brian, but I'd be happy for anybody to weigh in. How do you, I don't know, co compare or gauge, citizen involvement in Pine Hill Shores in terms of participation in your budgeting process or the council meetings? Do you think it's increased because of the nature of your community? Do you think it's, how it might stack up? I don't want to ask anything that will get you into trouble. I'm just curious how the the level of involvement by the community in a in a in a town like this.
Yeah. So, you know, clearly retired people have more times on time on their hands, and clearly they're going to be more interested interested in in things. You know, I've watched how peer groups work with with with interaction and such. I can honestly step back and say, you know, with the retiree population is gonna be more involved. We have more committees, and Carter has pills, and they're and, you know, they're all full when people wanna join the committees and such. But if, if they're focused, they're productive. I mean, we don't have an issue budgeting wise, since this is what all this is about. We don't have an issue accomplishing the mission of taking care of the town and taking care of these guys, the employees, which is the most important part. We we don't have an issue with it. And I as I remind, the my coworkers all the time, we are in that all year. And so having all those commissions those citizens of Ryan's got a group called Volunteers in Police Service Defense. That's a post 911 DHS, initiation, initiated program. So he's got six or eight of his favorite favorite volunteer citizens who ride the beach or or do I'm gonna let him talk on this. Do do important things to help him out in the in the police station. But those people how to on committees, and that's that's an assist to me. I don't wanna work in a vac vacuum because then when when it's decision time, it's that much harder to get things done. Tell them a little bit about VIPs. That's interesting.
Yeah, so, so VIPPS, we're one of only two agencies in the county. We've got 11 municipalities with police departments. There's only two of us that have VIPPS for volunteers in police service. Predominantly, we try to target folks that are 55 or older that are looking to give back to their community. All of our volunteers, live in Pineless Shores. They go through a background check, because they're going to come across, you know, sensitive or private information just by the nature of walking through our halls, but they do everything from helping us out administratively, to entering citations in a computer, to taking our documents and our case files to the courthouse, helping us when hurricanes are coming up, answering telephones, which there there's not enough landlines or people to answer them when a hurricane's coming up, issuing reentry passes. I've called them at 02:00 in the morning saying we have a missing person on the beach, can you come up, can you come out and help us do search and rescue. So if it's not writing a ticket, or taking somebody's property, or taking their liberties away from them and, and arresting them, they can do everything that we can do. They direct traffic, they, they can do a lot of things that most folks don't think they can do, so. So when it comes to budgeting,
and this year we, we got board approval to hire an eighth officer. We're gonna go from seven to eight. My my point in having tie that into your question was, having those people involved with that makes justifying that kind of stuff in a small town, to me, that much easier. So
Well, let's have a hand for our panel.
Thank
you. Yeah. Thanks so much to our panelists. Again, Brian Kramer, town manager at Pine Knoll Shores. Rudy Rudolph of the Carteret County Shore Protection Office. Ryan Thompson, police chief of Pine Knoll Shores. Thanks for listening. This was a lot of fun to record. We'd never done a live episode before, and for that, we have to thank the NC Local Government Budget Association. Also need to thank my colleague here at the league, Chris Nida, our director of research and policy analysis. He took the lead on setting the topic of this episode, not the first time either. He actually brought me the topic that led to one of our more popular episodes, Games Over Gangs. That was episode 32 from August 2017. Thank you, Chris. The conference itself was really cool, and it hit a lot of modern and futuristic topics in the world of government budgeting and spending and prioritizing. A lot goes into it, way more than any of us think. Gotta give a shout out to Josh Edwards with the city of Durham, and to Ben Kittleson, also with the City of Durham, but, of course, recognized by many of you as the host and producer of the Gov Love podcast. Ben was in attendance and asked one of the questions you heard from the audience. Ben, Josh, it was great to see you both. And a special thank you to Margaret Murphy of Wake County Government, who introduced the session and set the tone perfectly and worked the room with the microphone during the audience Q and A. Thank you so much, Margaret. If you have any feedback to this episode, or anything to add, or even just to give us your favorite summertime vacation memory, I would actually love to hear that. You can send that to bbrown@nclm.org. Better yet, speak it into a voice memo on your smartphone, and email that to bbrownnclm dot org. That way I can simply play your voice, your story, your feedback, whatever it is, on this podcast. For anyone looking for some actual hard research on this topic, there is a report that you can read. One of our affiliate groups called NC Resort Towns and Convention Cities last year worked with Carolina Demography at the University of North Carolina to publish numbers and context and anecdotes and so on in a publication called Benefits and Challenges of Tourism for NC Communities. Obviously, that's in a North Carolina context, but for those of you listening in other states, you can probably apply some of the same principles and concepts from this report to the resort towns in your part of the country. If you want a copy of that report, send me an email, bbrownnclm dot org. Thanks so much for listening. NCLM stands for NC League of Municipalities online at nclm.org. Past episodes at nclm.org/municipalequation, iTunes, Google Play, all that stuff too. On Twitter, muniequation. We'll talk to you next time. This has Ben Brown.
