County commissioners to hold emergency meeting Thursday to consult with their attorney on how to respond to school board challenge
[Update: The county commissioners and Alamance-Burlington school board have announced their first joint meeting of the dispute settlement process will be Monday morning at 9:30 at the Historic Court House.]
Alamance County’s leaders have been in a holding pattern since Tuesday afternoon when the Alamance-Burlington school board resolved to challenge the local school system’s allowance in the county’s newly-approved budget.
This move, which came less than 24 hours after the budget’s adoption, concerns the same statutory “mediation’ process that the school board invoked a year ago to compel the board of commissioners to add roughly $4 million to the county’s original outlay for the local school system’s day-to-day operations.
This year, Alamance County’s manager Heidi York seemed to anticipate the school board’s response when she recommended nearly $58.8 million for the school system’s “current expense.” This figure amounted to an increase of $1.5 million over the sum that the school board accepted after it had threatened to drag the county into mediation in 2025.
The commissioners ultimately signed off on the manager’s recommendation when they adopted a new annual budget on Monday. But the gesture was apparently not enough for the school board, which unanimously voted on Tuesday to invoke the same statutory mechanism that had served it so well a year earlier.
Since the school board announced its decision, the county’s top brass have generally been content to keep their own counsel about the school system’s finances.
“Our policy is not to comment on pending litigation,” elaborated Kelly Allen, the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, when she was contacted about the school board’s decision on Wednesday.
Allen’s decision to reserve comment has been echoed by fellow commissioner Pam Thompson as well Alamance County’s attorney Rik Stevens, who merely acknowledged that the county and school system have “tentatively agreed to begin the mediation process on Monday.”
Other county officials have been a bit more forthcoming about the school board’s latest gambit.
One person who has been particularly outspoken in his criticism of the schools is county commissioner Ed Priola. A first-term Republican who joined the county’s governing board in 2024, Priola had opposed the original budget in 2025 due to its inclusion of a property tax increase. He also cast the lone vote of dissent later that year when the rest of his colleagues signed off on the school system’s increased allocation.
Priola acknowledged that, in the build up to the adoption of the county’s new budget, he had some misgivings about the sum that York had proposed for the school system’s “current expense.”
“There’s some area for discussion, and I had the discussion with the county manager and Rebecca Crawford, [the county’s budget director]. But I double checked it and tripled checked it, and it is, according to the formula, what we owe them.
“I think they’ll leverage this on individual commissioners who can’t stand the pressure. I think we should call their bluff and go into open court for discovery because I want to know where all their money has gone.”
– County commissioner Ed Priola
“There’s some area for discussion,” he recalled, “and I had the discussion with the county manager and Rebecca Crawford, [the county’s budget director]. But I double checked it and tripled checked it, and it is, according to the formula, what we owe them.”
Priola was ultimately part of the four-member majority that voted to adopt the county’s new budget with its higher allotment for the school system’s current expense. He is now adamant that the commissioners should stick to this figure regardless of what the school board may do to tip the scales in its favor.
“I think they’ll leverage this on individual commissioners who can’t stand the pressure,” he added. “I think we should call their bluff and go into open court for discovery because I want to know where all their money has gone.”
The Alamance News was also able to glean some additional insights from Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, in the immediate wake of the school board’s decision to invoke mediation. Later that evening, Carter intimated his concern to the newspaper about the school board’s repeated use of the same statutory provision to winkle more funds out of the commissioners.
“If this continues, there’s no limit to how much they will ask for [in the future].”
– Alamance County commissioner vice chairman Steve Carter
“If this continues,” he added, “there’s no limit to how much they will ask for [in the future].”
Carter noted that, until Tuesday’s announcement, he had seen “no indication” that the school board would “come back on” the commissioners to get more funds for the schools. He nevertheless said he wasn’t exactly surprised to see the school board resort to a tactic it had employed a year earlier.
Carter went on to acknowledge that his own experience over the past couple of years suggest that there may be a need for some fundamental changes in way that the Alamance-Burlington school board is organized.
The board’s vice chairman said that one potential improvement may be to give school boards in North Carolina the power to raise their own taxes. Carter recalled that he saw the virtue of this approach during his eight-year residency in South Carolina, where he said the extension of taxing authority to school boards allowed voters to “hold them more accountable” for their financial stewardship.
Carter also saw a possible advantage in reconfiguring the Alamance-Burlington school board so that its members are chosen in partisan, rather a non-partisan, elections.
“I’ve never understood why certain races are on the ballot as nonpartisan,” he added. “People need to know what they’re voting for.”
The prospect of a partisan school board didn’t seem like it would make much of a difference to commissioner Sam Powell, who joined the county’s governing board earlier this year as the appointed successor to the late John Paisley, Jr.
Powell also had some mixed feelings about delegating taxing authority to school boards, which must currently look to county boards of commissioners for the local tax dollars they need to keep public schools running.
“It would be a headache off the commissioners not to deal with that. But I think that has been one of the jobs of the commissioners. If you have the school board setting the tax rate, that’s like the fox watching the chicken.”
– County commissioner Sam Powell
“It would be a headache off the commissioners not to deal with that,” he conceded. “But I think that has been one of the jobs of the commissioners. If you have the school board setting the tax rate, that’s like the fox watching the chicken.”
Powell went on to excoriate the school board for its habit of requesting ever-increasingly sums from commissioners, who he insisted are unlikely to appease the school system even if they accept the school board’s demands in mediation.
“I’m not sure that the school board would be satisfied with that amount or quite a bit more,” he added. “They have constantly come back to us every year…I understand that their bone of contention this year is that we’re only offering them $9.4 million for capital projects, and they wanted $18 million.”
On this count, Powell doesn’t get any argument from Priola, who has also been vocal in his objections to the alleged profligacy of ABSS.
“It’s always about more money with them,” Priola declared. “But the [poor student] performance and the bloated bureaucracy continue, and the kids are the ones who suffer…I don’t want to give them another penny until their performance improves.”
Alamance County’s leaders still hadn’t firmed up their plans to meet with the school board on Monday when The Alamance News went to press on Wednesday. Even so, the board of commissioners had scheduled an emergency meeting in order to consult with their attorneys behind closed doors.
According to the clerk to the board, the commissioners will convene today at 2:00 p.m. in their usual meeting chambers to hold this closed-door discussion.
[Update: the commissioners met behind closed doors for approximately and hour and half. They made no announcement when they emerged.]
