Elon’s town council has adopted a new municipal budget that calls for nearly $12 million in outlays from the town’s general fund, a 7-percent increase in water and sewer fees, and no change in the town’s property tax rate.
The council voted 4-to-0 in favor of this new budget on Tuesday after more than two months of haggling over a proposed spending plan that town manager Richard Roedner had unveiled in April.
The budget that the council approved on Tuesday follows the broad strokes of Roedner’s original proposal, including the roughly 6-percent increase it recommended in the general fund’s expenditures. These additional outlays are earmarked for things like extra firefighters, $250,000 in streetscaping, an increase in employee health insurance, and a 2.5-percent “cost-of-living adjustment” for the town’s full-time staff.
The new budget also preserves a 7 percent hike in utility fees that Roedner had sought for the town’s free-standing water and sewer fund. But significantly, the town’s newly-approved spending plan contains no vestige of a 1.5 cent property tax increase that the town manager had originally proposed to balance the general fund’s outlays.
Roedner had sought to raise the town’s levy of property from 35 to 36.5 cents in order to avoid raiding the general fund’s savings to make ends meet. Pressure from members of the council to forgo this tax hike prompted him to suggest a laundry list of spending cuts, which he continued to tweak until shortly before the budget’s approval.
On the day of the council’s latest regularly-scheduled meeting, Roedner sent out a “reconciliation memo” that spelled out some of the most recent adjustments to the proposed spending plan. Among other things, the memo noted that the town manager had returned $25,000 to the town’s savings to account for proposed capital purchases that the town’s fire department has postponed. Roedner also enumerated $46,500 in additional cuts that he had made to items like computer purchases, nuisance abatement, and the council’s own travel allowance.
Roedner offered the council a pithy summary of these adjustments before Tuesday’s vote on the budget.
“That reconciliation memo brought us down to a zero property tax increase – at your request,” he declared.
The council’s members were equally succinct in their response to Roedner’s final proposal.
“You presented something to meet the request of council and that was a lot of work,” conceded mayor Emily Sharpe.
“Nobody wants their taxes to be raised but everybody wants their amenities to remain the same or more,” added Elon’s mayor pro tem Monti Allison. “I don’t know what will happen next year, but for this year, we’re good.”
“I think we’re going to be one of the last municipalities to pass a budget,” councilman Quinn Ray went on to observe, “although we were the first to present one.”
The subsequent 4-to-0 decision to pass the new budget excluded councilmember Stephanie Bourland, who had previously informed her colleagues that she would be absent from Tuesday’s meeting.
