Florence City Council members continue retreat discussions

FLORENCE — Florence City Council had a four-hour special meeting Tuesday to discuss items that weren’t covered during a retreat Feb. 25-27 at Myrtle Beach.

“We had 22 items on the agenda during the retreat and only got to about a dozen of them,” Florence City Manager David Williams said. “This was an attempt to cover items we didn’t get to.”

Williams said the main purpose of Tuesday’s meeting at the Surface Water Treatment Facility along Florence Harllee Boulevard was a general discussion of the issues because there was very little in the way of making decisions.

“We use opportunities like this for council to give staff some direction about how they would like for us to proceed,” Williams said. “So, based on these discussions today, we know whether we need to go back and do further research or whether we need to move in with certain things.

“Even though no formal action was taken and we didn’t even get through with all the things we needed to talk about, it was good discussion. It’s the kind of discussion we can’t get in a monthly council meeting.”

Williams said such detailed discussion is beneficial to both his staff and city council “because we have an opportunity to put facts, figures and information in front of them that we don’t normally get to do in the course of a regular city council meeting.”

And he expects more special meetings like this.

“We have three new members of council that aren’t familiar with some of these issues,” Williams said. “It’s a chance for us to educate them at the same time. And when new issues come up for us at the staff level, sometimes we’re not sure which direction to take. Sometimes we don’t feel like we have the authority to make decisions. We depend on them (city council) to try to point us in the right direction.”

Williams said council can do that without taking any formal action or a vote.

“But they can sort of tell us what they think,” he said. “For example, the talk about downtown redevelopment today. I think some discussion was had, some recommendations made, but they didn’t say to go out and commission an update of the master plan for the downtown area.”

That was one of many items discussed Tuesday.

“I think it was a good discussion because it put on the table in front of everybody what the immediate need is,” Williams said. “And I think what we got out of that is we’ve got to move forward in determining where parking is going to be made available for the Performing Arts Center when it opens next year.

“And with that in mind, we can bring a recommendation or something to them they can actually take action on at a future meeting. So these meetings are very valuable to me because I feel like council now knows things they didn’t know about and we also know how they feel about it.”

But why meet way out at the Surface Water Treatment Facility?

“We come out here because we can get away from the constant interruptions at the (Florence) City-County Complex,” he said. “This is just a good place for us.

“When we built the surface water plant out here, we built this education center in here for exactly this type of event. We open it to other groups, too. We feel we can be more productive in such a setting.”