WS Chronicle

Photo by Todd Luck

BY TODD LUCK 

THE CHRONICLE

Land acquisition for a school bond project and the county’s first electric car charging stations are among the items county commissioners plan to take action on during their March 13 meeting.

County commissioners will be voting on several measures that will allow the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School Board to purchase land around Paisley IB Magnet School. The land will be part of a project from the 2016 school bonds for a replacement school for Paisley that’ll expand its capacity from 627 students to 1,027 students. A new Lowrance Middle School will be built on the same campus. Lowrance is a special needs school currently housed at Atkins Academic and Technology High School due to toxicity concerns at its old campus.

The school board has already approved the bid process for construction on the project.

“It’ll be advertised starting Sunday and the bids will be due back somewhere around March or the first of April,” Assistant Superintendent Darrell Walker told commissioners at a briefing last week.

Also included on the list for next week are the first charging stations for electric cars at a county facility, which will be at the new Clemmons and Kernersville libraries. Both libraries are projects from the 2010 library bond. County commissioners will vote Monday on accepting a $10,000 grant from Duke Energy Carolinas for two charging stations at each library. The county could charge for the electricity used by drivers at the stations.

In another library bond project, the commissioners will also vote to allow Coffee Park, which is owned by Tommy Priest, to operate a commissary in the newly renovated Central Library, which is scheduled to open in July. It will sell coffee and other beverages, wrapped snacks and bakery items. The county will lease 285 square feet for 5 percent of the commissary’s gross sales, but not to exceed $1,000 in any one month.

Commissioners will also need to approve payment for extra voting equipment that Forsyth County Board of Elections rented after early voting was extended last year due to the state voter ID law and its abbreviated early voting period being overturned by an appeals court. The BOE rented additional 110 voting machines and equipment from the Owen G. Dunn Company, which cost the county $55,748.63.

Monday will also be the current board’s first business meeting without Commissioner Walter Marshall, who died on Feb. 22. The Forsyth County Democratic Party will be voting to fill his seat on March 14.

Universal recycling and garbage service for the unincorporated areas of the county was not on Monday’s agenda as of last week, but commissioners may hear about it during today’s (March 9) briefing. The county is close to voting on the measure, which was one of the many issues Marshall had championed over the years.