Surely one of the most laughable assertions during this week’s budget confabs among commissioners and county staff was the repeated admonition to “trust the staff.”
Why, we wonder?
It’s our observation that the staff, particularly county manager Heidi York, has their own thinly-disguised agenda, which is generally to spend more and tax more. (And to be particularly generous with pay and benefits to the county’s own staff members.) Even when commissioners have asked for restraint, York and her cohorts have continued doing their worst on both counts.
Now the duplicity behind these shenanigans became obvious this week.
Until it slipped out during Tuesday’s meeting, the county staff kept concealed from commissioners – and the general public – that the county actually has had a major influx of revenue that has flowed into the county’s fund balance, or savings account, during the current fiscal year that ends June 30.
York divulged nary a bit about this infusion of extra cash just last month as she intoned during her budget presentation that she hadn’t planned to appropriate much from the county’s fund balance because it was already below the commissioners’ stated (though arbitrary) target of 20 percent.
But, lo and behold, this week the county’s finance director revealed that, in fact, millions of additional dollars have poured into the fund balance since the county’s last audit report for the year ended June 30, 2024.
None of that was mentioned by York when she presented her budget back in May, not last week at the public hearing, and not even this week during the budget workshops.
Instead, it came out through another member of the finance team. Concealing important financial information (like millions in new revenue) from her bosses, the commissioners, is not very professional, to say the least.
So many extra millions came in that the county’s readily usable savings went up by something in the range of $10 million – enough that the county could forego any tax rate increase, add a million or so to restore funding to several nonprofit organizations that the manager had axed, and still add millions more to the school system budget (although not all they asked for) – and still remain above the 20 percent target that commissioners have established.
Unfortunately, it appears that most commissioners – other than Ed Priola – are still interested in raising property taxes – even when it’s not actually necessary.
In fact, chairman John Paisley, Jr. wants to explore the option of a 2-cent hike, rather than “just” 1.59 cents which York has proposed.
But the real stunner came from commissioners Pam Thompson and Kelly Allen, who asked staff to crunch the numbers for a whopping 7-cent tax rate increase – which would represent an almost 15 percent spike in the tax rate.
Thompson recently jettisoned her Republican affiliation, and it appears that, with it, she has shed many of the principles associated with that political party.
However, Allen, who was appointed by the local GOP to her current seat on the board, will be able to seek her first term as an elected commissioner next year. But we seriously doubt she’ll last beyond the Republican primary if she were actually to propose or vote for a 7-cent tax rate increase.
It could be that this is just a typical political ruse, or decoy, so that taxpayers will breathe a sigh of relief when Allen supports a tax rate increase of “only” 1-, 1.59-, or 2 cents.
But, as we’ve noted before, we believe Alamance County taxpayers are on the verge of revolt over the ever-increasing property tax rates that York has recommended, and commissioners have readily approved, in the past two years.
Keep in mind, for instance, that the recent influx into the fund balance is the result of underestimated (or deliberately understated) predictions for the amount of revenues that the county would take in this year – from a combination of sales taxes, property taxes, and other fees and services.
As we have observed for years, a jurisdiction’s fund balance – both at the county level and for each of the local municipalities – is really little more than a repository for the millions of dollars in over-taxation that has been imposed on each jurisdiction’s taxpayers in the preceding years.
Whenever the county manager lowballs the estimated sales tax revenues – which she, and she alone, among local managers, thinks will decline during the next fiscal year – it puts pressure on commissioners to raise the property tax to compensate for lower sales tax receipts.
So what if sales taxes come in higher that York is predicting? She’ll just add that extra money to the fund balance – to become yet the latest example of another year of over-taxation of Alamance County’s taxpayers.
In any case, it is clear, as we noted last week, that there’s not a problem with revenues in the preparation of Alamance County’s budget. There’s a problem with spending – and taxing.
