Roads, police and a waterfront park: Retiring official outlines Brunswick town's challenges
After a 40-year career with 12 of them as the town administrator of Calabash, Charles "Chuck" Nance announced he plans to retire at the end of the calendar year.
Nance graduated from Appalachian State University in 1983 and began his career as a planner and building inspector in Edenton. He worked his way through several roles in the planning departments of several North Carolina towns before leaving local government to work as a contractor for a number of years. He returned to local government some 20 years ago.
"I've been around the block," Nance said.
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Ahead of his final months on the job, the StarNews chatted with Nance about his time with the town, the changes he's seen and what the future could hold for Calabash.
His responses below have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
What are the biggest changes you've seen in Calabash over the last decade?
Nance: I think the biggest changes to me are the population and the growth that's occurring, not just in Calabash but this whole area. You want your town to grow, but you want it to be in a sustainable way. You just wonder if this explosion will be sustainable and what it's going to do. It's going to create a lot of challenges down the road.
We're seeing, more recently, a lot of disdain for new development. We're getting a lot of feedback negatively about any kind of new development and especially high density development. It's caused us to kind of look at our land use plan and some of our zoning laws to see what we could do to maybe help slow some of this down a little bit.
What are the biggest challenges Calabash is currently facing, and what future potential challenges are you concerned about?
Nance: The infrastructure to me is going to be the biggest thing: water, sewer, electric, stormwater, the roads and streets system. I think as this growth is occurring, if people aren't on top of expansion and and the distribution systems and the collection systems, it's going to create some interesting situations down the road. You better get used to it taking a while to get from point A to point B in your car because not only are we a tourist destination, but now we're becoming more of a permanent, year-round as people are moving here to retire.
What unique challenges come with an aging population?
Nance: You're seeing the backside of the baby boomers hitting retirement age, and that was a large segment of our population. As people retire, it's going to tax systems like Medicare, Medicaid, retirement, social security, all of these things if they're not kept up with, those things are going to be become issues. And then you've got services to an ageing population, too. Are you going to have enough doctors and nurses and the type of care that is going to be required for an aging population?
What do you see in the town's future?
Nance: I think this whole area of Southeastern North Carolina and Northeastern South Carolina is just going to continue to grow and just become more urbanized. What happens with that growth, I don't know.
As the town grows, there's going to be a need for more employees and down the road probably a police department. We've purchased property so we've got land that we can develop for office space and future needs for the town government. That's all still in kind of the preliminary planning stages. The development has caused us to hire another building inspector, with the possibility of having to hire a third one. And we're also going to hire a full-time planner for code enforcement. In the past, when I first started here, I was able to handle that as well as the administrative duties. But as the growth has occurred, it's just becoming extremely hard to wear all these hats.
Are there any projects you hope to wrap up before retirement?
Nance: We are in the middle of this bridge replacement for the Calabash River Bridge, which is a NCDOT project but it also coincides with a waterfront park that we're going to build. We've put together roughly half of the funds necessary to do the complete project. We'll be working on the design and engineering aspects of it, but it'll be for somebody else to wrap up.
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Jamey Cross covers Brunswick County for the StarNews. Reach her at jbcross@gannett.com or message her on Twitter @jameybcross.
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Retiring Calabash official on overwhelming growth, challenges
