New property tax rate = 14.5 percent increase; over half attributed to paying for bonds voters OK’d in 2024
Burlington’s new city manager has presented a proposed budget for the city that calls for an extra $1 a month for sanitation, a 5-percent hike in water and sewer fees, and an increase of 7 cents (or 14.5 percent) in the city’s property tax rate.
This perfect storm of increases set the tone for the spending plan that city manager Bob Patterson unveiled before Burlington’s city council on Monday. Yet, each of these hikes was more or less in the cards even before Patterson took over the city’s top-ranking administrator in the fall of 2025.
In fact, the manager’s recommended bump in sanitation fees is actually the culmination of a two-year plan to divest Burlington’s general fund of curbside trash and recycling, while Patterson himself had primed the pump for a rise in water and sewer fees in his former capacity as the city’s water resources director.
Meanwhile, Burlington’s previous manager Craig Honeycutt had predicted in 2025 that his successor would need to call for a property tax hike in order to cover the debt payments on $68.5 million in bonds that the city’s voters approved in the fall of 2024.
A taxing dilemma
In his presentation on Monday, Patterson conceded that about 4 cents of his proposed 7 cent tax hike has been set aside to cover these voter-authorized bonds. With each penny on the tax rate worth about $917,000, he said that the revenue from these 4 extra cents would slightly exceed the $3.4 million that these bonds are expected to set back the city in the next fiscal year.
The city manager added that the remaining 3 cents of his hike would go toward inflationary increases – and more specifically, the portion of these increases that affect public safety expenditures.
“So, our theme this year is covering the bond debt service and inflationary increases.”
– Burlington city manager Bob Patterson
“So, our theme this year is covering the bond debt service and inflationary increases,” Patterson summed up when he rolled out the proposed spending plan during a monthly city council work session.
If approved as part of the city’s next budget, Patterson’s proposed tax hike would raise the city’s levy on property from its current rate of 48.36 on every $100 of property value to a new level of 55.36 cents.
Patterson estimated that, when coupled with a “natural” expansion of 3 percent in the city’s tax base, this 14.5 percent spike will reap about $50.8 million in the next fiscal year – or more than half of the general fund’s anticipated revenues of $95.1 million.
The city manager added that the increase would amount to an extra $175 a year for an average home in Burlington – whose assessed value of $247,000 he rounded up to $250,000 to simplify the arithmetic.
“While 7 cents sounds like a lot,” he added, “when it’s spread out, the annual cost for any one homeowner, isn’t that great.”
Payroll and capital
In return for this higher levy on property, Patterson said that the city will be able to fund modest increases in both its payroll and its capital expenditures.
Included in Patterson’s budget for the general fund is a bank loan that will enable the city to acquire a new fire truck for $1.5 million, replacement police cruisers for $795,000, and $575,000 for a new leaf truck and dump truck. The city manager has set aside another $1.1 million for street resurfacing and sidewalk improvements that are not covered by the aforementioned bonds, $868,000 for a new computer-aided dispatch system for emergency services, and $265,000 for window upgrades at May Memorial Library.
Meanwhile, the city manager’s budget calls for an additional $488,000 to cover inflationary increases in employee health and dental coverage and $489,000 to fill various now-vacant positions. He has allocated another $421,000 to add four new dispatchers to the city’s emergency call center, a new technical director for the city’s soon-to-be refurbished Paramount Theater, and an event center manager to be brought in halfway through the fiscal year once the theater has reopened.
Patterson’s budget also calls for extra $2 million to fund a “cost-of-living adjustment” of 3 percent for the city’s whole full-time staff. This figure doesn’t account for the additional raises slated to go to the city’s public safety employees. In the case of Burlington’s police officers, the cumulative increase would amount to 5.3 percent, according to Burlington’s finance director Peggy Reece.
Yet, even this seemingly generous treatment falls short of what the council had demanded two weeks ago when an annual update from the city’s police chief noted some backsliding in his department’s once-envied salaries.
During Monday’s work session, councilman Jeff Smythe, who himself once served as the city’s chief of police, recalled that the council had reached a consensus two weeks ago to “right size” the police department’s wages.
“I think that we’re prepared to make a conceptual statement,” he added, “about how we’re prepared to manage police pay in this scare environment.”
[Story continues below link to additional comments at the following night’s Burlington city council meeting, elaborating on his concerns about police and fire department pay.]
Read additional story on councilman Smythe’s concerns and proposed solution: https://alamancenews.com/police-chief-cum-councilman-persuades-colleagues-to-reprioritize-pay-for-police-officers-firefighters/
Taking the trash out [of the general fund]
The council didn’t have much to say about Patterson’s plans for the city’s sanitation services.
Under his proposed budget, these functions would be spun out into a separate fund that would subsist entirely on the monthly fees that residents pay for curbside trash and recycling pickup. This transition began under Patterson’s predecessor, who hiked these fees by $1 a month in anticipation of the change.
In Patterson’s budget, an additional $1 would be added to the current sanitation charge of $17.70 a month. The proceeds from this fee will be combined with the city’s recycling surcharge of $8.30 a month to sustain a free-standing sanitation fund whose inaugural balance would be $6.5 million a year.
Other funds
In addition to the new sanitation fund, Patterson presented separate budgets for the city’s water and sewer services, the Link Transit bus system, and Burlington’s stormwater fund.
In the latter case, the city manager had assumed that the city’s stormwater fund would continue to rely on a flat fee of $7 a month to pay for infrastructure improvements and other efforts that manage runoff and flooding.
Earlier that night, the council had agreed to lower this fee to $6 a month as part of a forthcoming move from the city’s current flat rate structure to one that charges higher rates to commercial and industrial property owners based on the contribution they make to the city’s problem with runoff.
Patterson has envisioned an annual haul of roughly $39.7 million for the city’s water and sewer fund when his proposed 5-percent fee hikes are factored in the mix. In the meantime, he has proposed a $4.5 million outlay for the Link Transit bus system, which gets more than half of its revenue from federal and state grants.
Word from the top
The council, for its part, generally seemed pleased with the recommendations that it received from the city manager on Monday.
Councilman Ian Baltutis insisted that the manager’s proposed tax hike is, in part, the result of decisions made a year ago in order to hold the line on the property tax rate through one more financial cycle.
“I know we wanted to catch up on a couple expenses from last year,” the councilman said. “So, the sacrifices made last year allowed us to put off the tax increase.”
The council, as a whole, didn’t seem phased by rumblings in the General Assembly about a constitutional amendment that could rein in the amount that cities and counties will be able to increase their property tax rates.
Meanwhile, Burlington’s mayor Beth Kennett saw Patterson’s budget as a simple attempt to keep the city’s head above water.
The thing that strikes me about this budget is that there is not glut in here,” she declared. “So, this is about not cutting services.”
