The anticlimactic outcome of Monday’s mediation has given way to a high-stakes game of wait and see for Alamance County’s board of commissioners.
Since the commissioners emerged from their talks with the Alamance-Burlington school board, there has been no sign that the two sides will resume their negotiations over the county’s financial contribution to the school system’s capital projects.
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See summary of Monday’s daylong joint meeting between county commissioners and school board: https://alamancenews.com/end-of-day-one-of-mediation-between-abss-commissioners-impasse-on-current-expenses-more-discussions-to-come-over-capital-spending-levels-for-abss/
These allocations had been the one point of contention that seemed to hold out any hope of a settlement to the professional mediator who had presided over Monday’s discussions. Yet, the consensus among Alamance County’s leaders is that it’s entirely up to the school board to decide if and when the two sides will meet again to thrash out these capital expenditures.
“The ball is in their court. It’s up to them to decide what they want to do,” commissioner Sam Powell acknowledged on Wednesday.
“They haven’t come up with any kind of ballpark figure, so we don’t know where to go from here,” noted commissioner Pam Thompson. “We’re just waiting to see when we’ll meet again.”
“We don’t even know if there is another round,” added Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners.
Kelly Allen, the chairman of the commissioners, conceded that there was initially some interest from the county’s representatives in plunging back into mediation while the memory of Monday’s inconclusive session was still fresh.
“We tried to meet with them the next day,” she recalled, “but they couldn’t get a quorum.”
Allen went on to admit that she doesn’t see any part of the county’s budget that could be squeezed to generate additional funds for the school system’s capital projects. Powell, meanwhile, was a little more hopeful about the prospects of scaring up some additional revenue.
“There’s a couple of sources that we can get money from – a combination of what we have and what they get from entitlements,” he said.
Powell nevertheless added that he thinks the local school board may have some unrealistic expectations about the county’s ability to provide funds for area schools. He pointed out that if debt payments for school-related projects are factored into the mix, the school board’s funding request to the county had hovered around $98 million – or nearly three quarters of the $137 million that the county expects property taxes to bring in during the next fiscal year.
“We want to support the schools, but we’re not going to satisfy everybody,” he said. “We’ve got a jail to run, a sheriff’s department, EMS – all of these public safety things. And they want 75 percent of what we get in tax revenue. They’ve made it difficult for us to fund that.”
Meanwhile, the prospect of further negotiations didn’t draw an especially voluminous response from commissioner Ed Priola.
In an interview with The Alamance News, Priola conceded that he had been keen to avoid any deal during the first round of mediation that would compel the county to raise more revenue from property taxes.
“You know I’m pleased with the result of not raising taxes,” he added, “and I don’t really have anything to say about [the continued dialogue over capital projects].”
Read the newspaper’s editorial page views on the mediation: https://alamancenews.com/school-systems-unreasonably-high-budget-demand-enables-commissioners-to-hold-the-line-against-abss-spending/
