Alamance County’s board of commissioners has given its imprimatur to a budget amendment that formalizes an earlier pledge to increase the county’s financial contribution to the Alamance-Burlington school system.
This revision to the county’s two-week-old budget was enacted on Monday despite stiff opposition from one county commissioner who lamented the lack of transparency in the multimillion-dollar deal that this budget amendment ultimately implemented.
The rest of the county’s governing board voted 4-to-1 to proceed with Monday’s amendment, which adds $4 million to the roughly $53.3 million that the budget had originally set aside for the school system’s noncapital operations.
This budgetary adjustment reflects the terms of a settlement that the county had proffered to the Alamance-Burlington school board last month after the school board invoked a statutory provision that allows school systems to seek mediation to resolve funding disputes with their local government backers.
The school board had pulled this legal trigger on June 17 – just one day after a majority of the commissioners adopted a new county budget whose allocation for the school system fell some $5.7 million short of what the schools had sought for their operations. In order to skirt a state-mandated mediation process, the county attorney approached the school board with a deal that the commissioners had reportedly cleared in a closed-door huddle on June 19. The school board’s chairman formally accepted this settlement a day later at the end of a 25-minute confab with the commissioners.
In keeping with the terms of last month’s settlement, Monday’s budget amendment restores a $1.3 million line item that the school system has traditionally received to pay sheriff’s deputies who serve as school resource officers. The original incarnation of the county’s new budget had reallocated most of these funds to sheriff’s office after it emerged that the school system had been using a portion of the $1.3 million to cover unrelated expenses. Under the terms of last month’s settlement, the school system will be obligated to use the entirety of the restored funds to pay resource officers in the sheriff’s employ.
In order to obtain the remainder of the settlement’s proposed increase, Monday’s budget amendment diverted $2.7 million from a capital fund that’s reserved for the county’s own public facilities. This move avoided further plundering the county’s general savings – which already had $11 million of their available funds penciled in to balance the new budget.
The only vote in opposition to Monday’s budget amendment came from commissioner Ed Priola, who also voted against another budget revision that the county’s budget director had proposed to “clean up” the spending plan from the past fiscal year. In both cases, Priola attributed his stance to misgivings over the way in which the county’s had handled its financial settlement with the school board.
Prior to Monday’s vote, Priola recalled that he had initially voiced his objections to the proposed settlement during the board’s closed-door huddle with the county attorney. Priola went on to complain that there’s no record of his objections in the minutes from this closed session. Nor has there been any public reiteration of the decision that his fellow commissioners purportedly reached behind closed doors.
“We have a $4 million expenditure,” he added. “We were supposed to have made a decision – meaning a vote…Even just the spirit of the law requires that we have a vote…and my vote as being in opposition is not recorded.”
The minutes from the closed session, which were approved earlier on Monday, are completely mum on anything that transpired behind closed doors, including any decision that the board may have reached at the time.
John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, had previously told The Alamance News that “more than two” of the five county commissioners had indicated their support for the settlement during the board’s privileged conversation with the county attorney. On Monday, Paisley insisted that this closed-door discussion included no formal vote by the board.
“Therefore, when we adjourned after the closed session, there was nothing to announce,” he added, “and the final agreement was negotiated and handled at a later date.”
Alamance County’s attorney Rik Stevens went on to contend that the closed session minutes “should’ve” contained a breakdown of each commissioner’s preference on the proposed settlement.
“It indicates that approval was authorized by chair Paisley, vice chair [Steve] Carter, and commissioners [Kelly] Allen and [Pam] Thompson from the closed session we had,” Stevens added as he recalled some elusive version of the minutes that didn’t actually appear in the board’s agenda packet. “We did not take a vote. However, I spoke with each commissioner individually and sought that commissioner’s approval to move forward with the settlement agreement…and Mr. Priola is the only commissioner who indicated he did not want to proceed with the settlement agreement.”
Stevens insisted that this informal consensus met the legal criteria for the board’s authorization of the agreement. He added that, while there was no actual vote during the closed session, the opinions that he individually elicited were more or less the same thing – amounting to “a distinction without a difference.”
Stevens proceeded to assert that, under North Carolina Open Meetings Law, a vote in open session isn’t necessary to reiterate a legal settlement approved behind closed doors. He pointed out that the law does demand the disclosure of the settlement terms – the text which, indeed, appeared in Monday’s agenda packet.
“I believe we are on solid legal ground to do what we did,” the county attorney added in sum.
Stevens’ assertion were later echoed by Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, while commissioner Kelly Allen observed that copies of the settlement agreement were distributed after the joint meeting with the school board on June 20.
Priola, for his part, remained inconsolable about the way that this agreement seems to have bypassed the general public.
“Here we are authorizing $4 million without a vote,” he declared. “We should be voting on this, and the taxpayers should know of this [memorandum of understanding] in advance of its being accepted.”
