Alamance County’s latest annual audit is apparently still not ready for prime time despite having been slated for public release earlier this week.
Yet, an advance summary of this financial review shows that the county witnessed a marked dip in its financial reserves – notwithstanding an increase in revenues that appears to have covered the county’s expenditures.
The details of this counterintuitive state of affairs were supposed to have been revealed to Alamance County’s commissioners on Monday. That morning, the commissioners were scheduled to receive a report from the Hickory-based firm of Martin Starnes & Associates, which has conducted the county’s audits for well over a decade.
The commissioners ultimately postponed the auditor’s report to March 16 for reasons that they didn’t explain at the time. Susan Evans, the county’s finance director, subsequently informed The Alamance News that this two-week delay is the result of an ongoing review by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, which is obligated to sign off on certain parts of the audit.
Evans was otherwise rather tight-lipped about the audit’s particulars.
“The audit has not yet been approved,” she told the newspaper on Monday, “so I won’t make any comments about it.”
A copy of the auditor’s presentation to the commissioners was nevertheless part of the publicly-available agenda packet for Monday’s meeting.
According to this brief PowerPoint, the county’s general fund took in about $223.9 million in revenue during the financial cycle that ended on June 30, 2025 – an increase of nearly 7 percent from previous year’s intake of about $209.3 million. During the same period, the general fund’s outlays rose from $206.5 million to $216.9 million – which, in theory, left the fund with a surplus of roughly $7 million by the end of the year.
The county has traditionally plowed its excess revenues into the general fund’s financial reserves. In this case, however, the overall value of these savings fell from $96.9 million to $96.4 million, while the portion of these funds that the county can hypothetically use dropped from $80.8 million to $78.1 million during the course of the year.
According to the auditor’s presentation, the decline was even more pronounced when the funds earmarked for use were factored out of the equation. The general fund was then left with less than $35.7 million in “unassigned savings” – as compared to the $40.0 million it boasted by the end of the previous year.
A long-standing county policy encourages the commissioners to maintain an unassigned reserve of at least 20 percent of the general fund’s annual outlays. To the chagrin of the county’s administrators, this percentage had dropped to 19.87 percent during the fiscal year that ended in the summer of 2025. By the time the most recent cycle ran its course, the general fund’s unassigned savings apparently amounted to 16.45 percent of annual budget.
A full accounting of these developments will presumably be shared with the commissioners when they receive the auditor’s report on the evening of March 16.
