Board OKS site plans

Published 5:14 pm Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The Washington Planning Board on Tuesday unanimously approved site plans for a new eye-care center and Pronamics Industries in Washington.

Pronamics Industries is part of Project Blue Goose at the Beaufort County Industrial Park.

“This is an existing building they’re doing some modifications to,” Glenn Moore, a city planner, told the board.

Pronamics plans to build some additional buildings and increase the parking area, Moore said.

The board required some landscaping of the site’s parking area as a condition for approval of the site plan.

A technical review committee made up of representatives of various city departments had no problems with the site plan, except for noting the need for some landscaping, Moore told the board.

Project Blue Goose is composed of two entities: Pronamics Industries and Oak Ridge Metal Works. Pronamics Industries will be setting up operations in the Quick Start II building at the Beaufort County Industrial Park. That building is known as the Blue Goose because of its exterior paint scheme. Oak Ridge Metal Works is expanding into the former Brooks Boatworks building at the industrial park.

The eye-care center, which will have 14,500 square feet of space, would be built along the west side of Carolina Avenue and across the highway from Lowes’s Home Improvement. Washington-based WIMCO is the project applicant.

The board required landscaping as a condition of approval of the site plan.

Moore told the board that a corner of the land is in the 100-year flood zone, but the proposed building would not be in that flood zone.

“Having ridden by there after it poured down rain, I hope they have a really good (stormwater) runoff plan because they need a great deal of dirt or a really good runoff plan,” said board member Jane Alligood.

“They are currently working with Allen Lewis (the city’s public works director) on that and stormwater issues. I think the engineer, Mike Baldwin, told me they’ve just gotten their (stormwater plan) approval from the state,” Moore said.

The technical review committee had no issues with the site plan, other than pointing out the need for landscaping, Moore said.

About Mike Voss

Mike Voss is the contributing editor at the Washington Daily News. He has a daughter and four grandchildren. Except for nearly six years he worked at the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., in the early to mid-1990s, he has been at the Daily News since April 1986.
Journalism awards:
• Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service, 1990.
• Society of Professional Journalists: Sigma Delta Chi Award, Bronze Medallion.
• Associated Press Managing Editors’ Public Service Award.
• Investigative Reporters & Editors’ Award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Public Service Award, 1989.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Investigative Reporting, 1990.
All those were for the articles he and Betty Gray wrote about the city’s contaminated water system in 1989-1990.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Investigative Reporting, 1991.
• North Carolina Press Association, Third Place, General News Reporting, 2005.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Lighter Columns, 2006.
Recently learned he will receive another award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Lighter Columns, 2010.
4. Lectured at or served on seminar panels at journalism schools at UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Maryland, Columbia University, Mary Washington University and Francis Marion University.

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