It's six o'clock.

Good evening.

Welcome to the regular council meeting for March 17, 2026.

As Mr.

Howard said, we start on time so we can finish on time.

And we always start with an invitation tonight by Dr.

Dukes, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Mr.

Servan.

If I can get already, please stand.

Heavenly Father, we come before you tonight to thank you for another beautiful day in this county and an opportunity to gather as community leaders, friends, and residents.

We ask that you may bless us with wisdom, patience, and your guidance as we all work together to make decisions for the betterment of our residents.

Father, we ask that you keep your hand of protection upon our first responders and those that serve each and every day.

These things we ask in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Attention to the flag.

I pledge to the flag of the United States of America.

One nation.

Thank you.

Please be seated.

All right.

We have this wonderful light system.

Green is go, go go.

Yellow is one minute left, and red.

Red is stop.

And this is a professional venue.

If you signed up and want to talk to us about something that we can do on county council that can help Ori County, we want to hear from you.

But this is not a place to come in and um be disrespectful or anything like that because it's a professional venue.

We can't help you and less we get a chance.

So we had one person signed up, and we will go ahead and get started.

Kelly La Piatra talking about tree clearing.

Thank you for allowing me to speak here.

My name is Kelly La Pietra.

I live in the Forest Brook, Sakasi area.

And if you see the pictures that um they're putting up on the screen right now, this is the area where my residential area is at the Arcadia section off of Forest Brook Road.

About a year and a half ago, um, we had someone come in here and remove all the trees off the entrance of the Arcadia section of uh of our development.

And it's been like this for a year and a half, and it looks like a war zone, so I like to call it it looks like Beirut.

Um there's no reason to have trees taken down, like at least 25 to 30 acres on off of that property.

It's on both sides of Arcadia Parkway.

Um it's lowering our uh property uh property values where we had several houses um, you know, trying to sell their homes and they had to take at least a 20 to 30,000 dollar hit on the sale of the house because people purchasing their houses uh are just complaining about um the entrance.

It's not inviting anymore.

It used to be a tree-lined area.

Um I also have here more pictures um inside the Arcadia section, where we had another um further back in the Arcadia section uh by the springs, they had um pictures uh they have trees that were removed at least a good 20 acres behind these homes where a developers just coming in here and just ripping down the trees, and none of us were notified.

And there really should be a process where if if anybody's being taking down trees off a property or a lot that's near homes, and residential people should be notified of this removal of all these trees.

And I'm I don't like hearing that they're only doing it for logging purposes.

I think that's a poor excuse.

If they're gonna be taking down trees, there we should be a permit process, and residential should be notified in advance that that these trees would be removed and give us a chance to uh to voice our opinions about the removal of the trees before they actually remove them off the property.

There's some there's solutions to this where you can actually people ain't buying people buying houses in the area, they can actually pay a two percent uh transfer tax on to the county, and the county can use you that money for a transfer tax to actually purchase vacant land that still has a whole bunch of trees on it, and it goes for land preservation.

That's something that we did in my former state where we had uh a transfer tax to anybody per purchasing a home.

Two percent of the sale of the house goes to the county for uh for land preservation, and it's been very successful.

Uh it's it alleviates any type of flooding because with no trees, where's the where's the water gonna go?

It's just gonna sit there.

And you need the trees on the properties to actually absorb all the water.

I also have here another section um over in uh on off of Sakasti Boulevard, right by the Brandy Mill Boulevard, where another more trees were actually removed at least a good uh 30 acres of trees off that property.

Um it's been been there for about a week, two weeks now where they they tore down all those trees, and again, it looks like Beirut, and it's like uh like a war zone, and there needs to be some type of legislation or something's going on within the county where we not rubber stamp every single developer that comes in here and says I want tearing down these trees, I'm gonna build be building houses.

It's we need something to protect the um, I guess the homeowners and protect you know our environment because without the trees, would be making you know the Myrtle Beach area, Conway area, and all uh all of Ori County into uh a lake, and we can't afford that because I can't afford to pay any more any more you know property taxes or uh insurance on my on my home where if I'm paying 14,000 1400 a year for uh insurance for my house, I I have to pay an additional nine hundred dollars a year for us for flood insurance, and that really shouldn't be happening because it's a flood zone, it's turned into a flood zone area with all these trees being taken down.

So there needs to be something on the county level where we can actually stop this overdevelopment.

We can need to uh stop all the destruction and removal of all these trees, because like I said, logging is not a good excuse.

There needs to be a permit process.

Um we implemented in the um my in my former state where we had you know the transfer tax was a big thing where any new houses that were went up or anybody's for a sale of a house, they paid two percent of the sale of the house to the the preservation fund.

So I hope we you can go along with that and you know again.