North Myrtle Beach City Council is set to vote on August 17 on whether to give City Manager Ryan Fabbri a 5 percent raise, lifting his salary from $225,000 to $236,250 a year, retroactive to June 6. This increase follows Fabbri’s first performance review, conducted in a July 20 executive session, roughly one year after he took the job.

Performance Review and Department Vacancies

However, the question remains whether Fabbri has earned this raise. Three department-head positions remain unfilled as of this writing: Public Works director, Human Resources director, and Streets and Drainage superintendent. These vacancies aren’t new and were already flagged as challenges Fabbri needed to solve during his first days in office.

A year is exactly the runway a performance review should measure against that goal, and the goal isn’t yet met. Finance has seen three different directors during Fabbri’s one-year tenure, and a Finance Director posting stayed open on the city’s job board for roughly six months before it was filled. The city has also acknowledged it had to overhaul its accounting system following findings from its outside auditors — a department central to how residents’ tax dollars are tracked was, for much of the year, in flux.

Leadership Team and Budget

Records obtained under FOIA-2025-536 show that when Fabbri filled the Assistant City Manager position, only one applicant was interviewed, and the city never publicly announced that the position had been filled. The clearest test of the year is the budget itself: a roughly $190 million spending plan that raised property taxes from 45 to 50 mills.

Text messages obtained show that the day before the June 1 vote, Mayor Jay Baldwin and Fabbri arranged individual meetings with council members, and Fabbri reported back that “we need to pass the budget tomorrow night,” naming which members were confirmed and which still needed convincing. After the vote passed, Fabbri and Baldwin congratulated each other on how well it “went down.”

South Carolina’s open-meetings law restricts public officials from using private, one-on-one contacts to build consensus outside a public meeting. These messages alone don’t prove that line was crossed, but they raise a legitimate question about whether the year’s signature achievement reflected open public deliberation or a vote secured beforehand.

Original reporting: MyrtleBeachSC News — read the source article.