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Orange County Page 2 of 6 between them, and $21,000 seemed to be the common figure. He said that he is not sure a position profile is needed. Commissioner Gordon disagreed and said that the position profile is needed. Commissioner Carey said that the Board should describe what it wants in this organization and use that as the basis for recruiting someone. Chair Jacobs said that the first bullet on page one of Mercer's proposal is Position Analysis. He thinks that one of the proposals indicated that it would work with the Board to develop the definition of the position. Commissioner Foushee said that when the Board was involved in the search for the County Manager, it was a part of determining the position profile and the consultant met with each member of the Board and drew ideas before there was a presentation. She found it interesting that this same process was not suggested here. This is what happened in the last process with Mercer. Chair Jacobs said that Springsted described exactly what Commissioner Foushee just said. He said that Mercer's proposal may be a boiled down version. Commissioner Foushee pointed out that on Mercer's page two, it describes that the profile is based on meetings with the Board of County Commissioners. This is what happened with the Manager search. Commissioner Foushee said that she would prefer the Slavin or Mercer proposals, because the County has worked with them before, and Mercer does have offices in N.C. and Slavin has clone a lot of work in N.C. She said that she does not recall any searches from Springsted for a county attorney and there have been none for county searches. Commissioner Gordon said that she thought all of the proposals were competitive. Chair Jacobs asked how everyone perceived the references. Commissioner Gordon said that she does not have strong feelings about any of them. She said that there is a process the County has to go through and there are costs involved, but she would like to pay someone to do the entire process. She does not see items to cut out. A motion was made by Commissioner Carey, seconded by Commissioner Foushee to choose The Mercer Group and authorize the Chair to work with The Mercer Group to review the process the Board has discussed and define it and see if there any savings to be achieved in the process. Geof Gledhill suggested adding to bring back a contract for approval on August 19th. The Board agreed to add this to the motion. VOTE: UNANIMOUS Commissioner Gordon said that when the profile is developed, she would like input from Geof Gledhill. All agreed. 3. Board Consideration of Hiring Attorney to File Necessary Documents with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to Request an Extension for Comment on a Proposed Expansion of the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant, leading to the possibility of a Subsequent Intervention by Orange County. Chair Jacobs said that this item was based on the fact that there was a deadline, should the County choose to ask for an extension from the NRC for the purpose of intervening of August 4th and there was no way that the Chair and the Vice-Chair were empowered to make any kind of decision like this. He said that the County Commissioners have received information from County Engineer Paul Thames. There were two people from Progress Energy in attendance that only wanted to listen. Rick Kimball was one of the representatives. Paul Thames said that the actual deadline to submit intentions is August 4th and that is also the final deadline to submit a motion to extend the deadline. NCWarn submitted a motion to the NRC a month ago to suspend the deadline indefinitely. NCWarn was looking at the fact that the NRC has not approved and is not going to approve the adequate design of the reactor for two or three more years. His conversations with Diane Curran indicated that she believed that NCWarn made a tactical mistake by asking for an indefinite suspension of the deadline as opposed to a date certain. Progress Energy is looking at permitting two more reactors at Shearon Harris based on a Westinghouse design, which is supposed to be based on a prototype design. He said that there are a number of issues about that design that Orange County has objected to before such as the spent fuel rods. It is not known what Progress Energy plans to do with the fuel once the five years of cooling off have passed. There are some other issues such as the Shearon Harris lake, which is used for cooling for the single reactor, that does not have sufficient water capacity to cool two more reactors, so Progress Energy has proposed to draw as much as 80 million gallons a day from the Cape Fear River downstream of Jordan Lake. Also, the fire issue that was discussed last year is still unresolved and the 10-mile as opposed to the 50- mile emergency planning issue is still limited to the 10-mile NRC minimum. Gordon Thompson, who did the technical work for the fire potential of the fuel storage has had his work accepted by the National Academy of Sciences and a number of other organizations. The first contention that the County had was right during the time of 9/11 and the County was not allowed to use mhtml:file://S:\Minutes\20080731.mht 9/11/2008