Council defeats motion for 7¢ tax rate hike, rather than 5¢ recommended by town manager
A bare majority of Elon’s town council has tentatively agreed that an additional nickel on the town’s property tax rate should be enough to see it through the next fiscal year.
The council’s regular members voted 3-to-2 on Monday to press ahead with a recommendation from Elon’s town manager to raise the town’s tax rate from 35 to 40 cents for every $100 of value. In doing so, the council’s majority rejected a 7-cent spike that a minority of its members had favored due to the threat of state-level limits on future tax increases.
This preference for a 5-cent increase will remain a mere possibility until the town council signs off on a new municipal budget following a public hearing in May. In the meantime, the council’s members have endorsed a whole raft of other potential changes to the first draft of this financial roadmap, which town manager Richard Roedner presented in March.
In addition to endorsing Roedner’s suggested tax rate, most of the council gave him the go-ahead to tweak his proposed budget to include some prospective new fees on public parking and curbside waste disposal, along with surcharges on credit and debit card payments. The council also conferred its blessing on some staffing and payroll reductions that Roedner has recommended, and they’ve instructed him to switch out a proposed merit-based pay raise for a slightly less costly bump in the staff’s traditional “cost-of-living adjustment.”
In the end, all of the changes which the council endorsed had the same basic purpose – namely to limit the town’s reliance on savings to balance its budget. This overall intention had been a running theme in Roedner’s original budget, which still called for $1.1 in savings from the general fund’s financial reserves, or fund balance, to make ends meet. During Monday’s discussion, the town manager confessed that his own misgivings about this allocation have prompted him to make continuous nips and tucks to his original spending plan.
“I stress again: We will have a balanced budget,” Roedner went on to assure the council that evening.” “The issue is the amount of revenue coming out of our fund balance.”
[Story continues below special subscription offer.]
FOR THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE LOCAL NEWS, SUBSCRIBE TO THE ALAMANCE NEWS:
It wasn’t that long ago that the town’s municipal leaders were quite cavalier about the funds they had tucked away for a rainy day. As recently as the summer of 2025, Elon’s general fund, which pays for most of the town’s programs and operations, had nearly $11.6 million in savings that hadn’t been earmarked for any particular use – a sum equal to roughly 88 percent of the fund’s annual outlays at the time.
Over the past year, however, the town’s leaders have steadily chipped away at this financial bastion – most recently with the $2.8 million purchase of a LabCorp facility along Orange Drive that the town plans to covert into a new municipal building. All told, these recent expenditures have lightened the general fund’s savings by roughly $5.9 million. In the meantime, Roedner has warned that these outlays have been exacerbated by the town’s habitual use of its savings to balance the budget – a practice that he insisted must end to ensure that the general fund has an adequate financial cushion in the event of an emergency.
In light of his own anxieties, Roedner has proposed various adjustments in order to increase the revenues and reduce the expenditures that appeared in his original budget.
During the council’s meeting on Monday, Roedner recalled his earlier proposals to freeze one of two now-vacant positions in the town’s police department and to allow the town’s fire chief to realize additional savings by reorganizing his staff. Roedner suggested a further proposal to use part-time help to replace a now-vacant post in recreation and parks that, along with the changes in the police and fire payrolls, would reduce the town’s payroll expenditures by $208,000.
In addition to these staffing proposals, Roedner proposed a couple of modifications to the benefits that the town offers future employees. His recommendations included restructuring the town’s longevity bonuses so they’d be doled out at less frequent intervals and replacing the town’s automatic 5-percent contribution to staff 401(k)s with a match of the employee’s own investment.
Roedner resisted a suggestion from mayor pro tem Monti Allison to apply these same benefit changes to the town’s current staff members.
“If you tell employees we’re no longer giving you that 5 percent,” the town manager argued, “that ends up being a pay cut for our existing employees.”
The council, for its part, was willing to fiddle with the proposed pay raises for current staff members that Roedner had recommended in his original budget. To this end, its members agreed to strike a $100,000 allocation for performance-based raises while adding an extra percentage point to the 2.5 percent cost of living adjustment, or COLA, that the town manager had suggested for the town’s whole full-time staff.
Councilman Quinn Ray had argued for this additional emphasis on COLAs in order to keep the town’s salaries competitive with other jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, mayor Emily Sharpe declared that the temporary elimination of merit-based raises would give the town’s administrators a chance to rethink how they encourage better performance among staff members.
“My personal thought,” she said, “would be to go up on COLA, put a pause on merit, and restructure merit entirely.”
The council went on to accept Sharpe’s recommendation for a 3.5 percent COLA with no merit increase – a combination that’s expected to net about $28,000 in savings. The council also agreed that the town’s administrators should use their year without merit raises to reevaluate their approach to performance-based pay.
[Story continues below link to related editorial in this week’s edition.]
Elon’s hodgepodge of crazy ideas: https://alamancenews.com/elons-hodgepodge-of-crazy-ideas/
In addition to these payroll-related reductions, the council endorsed a number of new charges and fees that Roedner proposed on the other side of the ledger.
Its members agreed, for instance, to tack on a surcharge to offset the fees that the town must currently pay when residents use credit or debit cards to settle their bills. Roedner predicted that these surcharges would enable the town to recoup $58,500 in lost revenue.
Most of the council also accepted some proposed changes that Roedner had floated to the town’s curbside garbage and recycling services. These measures included the addition of $2 to the $20 a month that each household currently pays for the refuse and recycling containers that the town leases from its contracted waste hauler. Roedner insisted that this increase could would bring about $54,000 a year into the town’s coffers.
The town manager envisioned a more modest haul from another proposal to charge residents for the collection of bulk items and unwieldy yard waste like tree branches. The town currently offers residents one free pick up a month before it charges them for collecting these items. Roedner predicted that the town could raise up to $25,000 a year if it charges residents for the first pickup as well – although he conceded the change could come as a shock to some of the council’s constituents.
“This is some tough love,” he added. “We will deal with some irate customers who did not read the newsletter.”
Roedner went on to suggest the implementation of a paid-parking proposal that the town’s police chief had pitched to the council earlier this month. The town manager anticipated revenues of about $160,000 a year if metered parking were introduced in both the downtown area and in neighborhoods where non-residents periodically fill up the streets.
The council went on to embrace this idea, which would include free parking passes for residents of the aforementioned neighborhoods.
“It’s time,” insisted councilman Randy Orwig in response to the manager’s metered parking proposal.
“We can always remove it if it doesn’t work,” added councilman Ray.
Roedner estimated that all of the changes which the council had endorsed to his proposed budget would trim about $480,000 from his anticipated allocation of savings. He added, however, that the town would still need to pencil in $500,000 from the fund balance to make ends meet.
In order to generate some additional funds, Orwig proposed a 7-cent increase in the town’s property tax rate as an alternative to Roedner’s suggested 5-cent hike.
Orwig had previously pushed for a greater tax increase earlier this month when a legislative select committee was preparing to consider a statewide referendum on a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the General Assembly to impose new limits on local property tax increases. According to Roedner’s previous estimates, these additional 2 cents would bring in something on the order of $188,000 a year.
The committee’s subsequent endorsement of this referendum convinced councilman Michael Woods to get on board with a higher property tax in the town’s forthcoming budget. Elon’s mayor Emily Sharpe, who only votes in the event of a tie, also acknowledged her support for the more ambitious increase.
“I’m fine with 7,” she told the council’s five regular members, “but I don’t have a vote.”
Councilman Steve Exum ultimately joined Allison and Ray to form a 3-vote majority that voted down Orwig’s 7-cent increase in favor of the town manager’s original proposal for a 5 percent hike in the town’s property tax rate.
For 7¢:
For 5¢:
