FRANKLIN
Franklin’s city council will hold a public hearing on Monday to accept nominations for new school board members during their regular scheduled meeting at 7 p.m. in city hall.

According to a notice by City Attorney H. Taylor Williams IV, nominations will only be considered if they are made during this hearing. A person may be nominated by anyone, including a person nominating himself or herself.

There are seven vacancies available, six of which are attached to a ward of the city and require that their school board representative be a resident of that ward, and a seventh “at large” position, which only requires that its representative be a resident of Franklin. The only other requirement to serve on the school board is that the nominee be a registered voter.

The seven available vacancies are the result of a city council resolution passed on Nov. 1 demanding the resignation of every member of the board by Nov. 7. The resolution was made in response to the board’s reporting they had overspent their operating budget for fiscal year 2015-2016 by over $480,000.

According to the notice by Williams, the former school board members who recently resigned can be re-nominated at the hearing.

People prohibited from being nominated to serve on the school board include city officers, deputy clerks of city officers, members of city council, employees of the school board, and the immediate relatives of any member of the county governing body.

Also on the agenda for Monday’s council meeting is a discussion of a request by Melissa Rollins, the city’s director of finance, to City Manager Randy Martin for the council to appropriate $494,643 in carryover funds from Franklin school division’s fiscal year 2014-2015, and transfer those funds to the division’s budget for fiscal year 2015-2016 to cover operational expenditures. If approved, the transfer would increase the division’s total operational budget for 2015-2016 from $4,987,395 to $5,482,038.

Another finance item on the council’s agenda is to officially accept a $5,000 grant to the Rawls Arts Museum from the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

To meet the terms of the grant, the city will need to match the amount donated, for a total of $10,000 going to the Rawls Museum for the city’s fiscal year 2016-2017 budget.

The final item on the agenda for council’s open session is the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Commission’s expansion of its metropolitan planning area boundary, which will include portions of Southampton County and the City of Franklin east of Route 258.

The council will conclude by going into closed session.