An all-day budget retreat on Monday allowed the county’s administrators to lay out a game plan for the county’s next budget, which they predicted will test the mettle of even the most experienced members of Alamance County’s governing board.
The county’s top brass insisted that the upcoming spending plan will be a moment of reckoning for perennially deferred items like replacement vehicles. The county’s administrators also amped up their calls for a new EMS base in Mebane – a project whose estimated cost has recently ballooned to $5 million thanks to the proposed addition of a new garage for the county’s whole ambulance fleet. In the meantime, the staff stressed the county’s ongoing commitment to the local school system’s maintenance, and in particular the upgrade of roofs and HVAC systems, which are tentatively earmarked to receive $10 million in the county’s next annual budget.
The county’s administrators went on to warn the commissioners that their forthcoming budget will give them less room to finagle the numbers using their favorite go-to accounting tricks. They argued, for instance, that the county’s savings are no longer robust enough to serve as a convenient stopgap for revenue shortfalls while changes in the county’s budgeting procedures will make it more difficult to rely on “lapsed salaries” to cover unanticipated spikes in expenditures.
The commissioners, for their part, offered a number of suggestions of their own. These ranged from selective staffing cuts to a potential deal with Enterprise Rent-a-Car that would allow the county to lease new vehicles to upgrade its rolling stock. Some members of the county’s governing board were also eager to hold a new referendum on a 1/4-cent sales tax increase – an oft-floated trial balloon by officials who’ve sought an alternative to property tax hikes that has nevertheless been shot down four times by the local electorate.
The agenda for Monday’s retreat also included a discussion about a potential rewrite of the county’s strategic plan, a staff briefing on the procedures for closed sessions and public comment periods, and a proposed change in the way the county subsidizes nonprofit groups. Yet, in the end, these disparate topics were just variations on a single theme to commissioner Pam Thompson, who offered the county’s relationship with the local school system as an illustration of the inherent interconnectedness among everything under the county government’s purview.
“These things have so many zeroes attached to them,” she acknowledged. “But it’s all connected…It’s one county and one [school] system.”
[Budget story continues below links to other discussions during the daylong budget retreat.]
Other budget-retreat discussion:
• Commissioners hear of payroll error that gave some workers $470,000 more than they were entitled to over past seven months: https://alamancenews.com/commissioners-decide-to-leave-in-place-500k-payroll-overpayment-error-to-county-workers/
[And our editorial page views on that decision, Alamance County apparently needs its own DOGE: https://alamancenews.com/alamance-county-apparently-needs-its-own-doge/]
• Local option sales tax referendum discussion draws mixed reviews: https://alamancenews.com/resurrection-of-sales-tax-referendum-gets-mixed-response-from-commissioners/
• Among biggest-ticket items, maintenance expense projections for ABSS outlined: https://alamancenews.com/commissioners-mull-more-funds-for-maintenance-of-area-schools/
Cash course
The county’s next budget may have dominated the bill of fare at Monday’s retreat. Yet, as a prelude, the county’s administrators also offered the commissioners an update on the current state of Alamance County’s finances.
According to Susan Evans, the county’s finance director, the county started the current fiscal year with an overall budget of $225,229,852 for its general fund – a repository for various taxes and fees that pays for most of the county’s programs and services. Evans said that, due to various mid-year budget amendments, this figure has since jumped to $249,833,233. She nevertheless added that the county is unlikely to pay out all of these budgeted expenditures by the time it wraps up the current financial cycle in June.
“With all our forecasts, I am estimating that we are going to have revenues of $221 million,” she went on to assure the commissioners, “and I am estimating that, with expenditures, we are going to be at $231 million.”
Evans added that, in all likelihood, the county will have to draw nearly $10.5 million from the general fund’s savings in order to plug the eight-figure deficit that she anticipates by the year’s end.
In the meantime, Rebecca Crawford, the county’s budget director, informed the commissioners that there’s presently a slightly larger gap of $12.2 million between her rough revenue estimates and her preliminary expenditure projections for the fiscal year that begins on July 1.
Crawford emphasized that this raw estimate doesn’t include any spending requests from the county’s departments and agencies – although it does factor in $10 million for the school system’s roofing and HVAC repairs. She nevertheless said that this theoretical hole compares favorably to the shortfall of $17.2 million that she had been eyeing at about this same time in 2024.
“Bear in mind, this is only a projection,” she added, “and we will adjust this as we get departmental funding requests.
“This smaller gap of 12.2 million is about 4.75 cents on the property tax rate,” the county’s budget director went on to concede. “But that doesn’t mean we’re going to bring before you a request for a 4.75 cent property tax increase.”
Despite being very much a moving target, the upcoming budget still left much to discomfit Alamance County’s manager Heidi York.
“In the last two budgets that I’ve helped put together we’ve had no new vehicles [and] no new positions funded out of the general fund. Now, we are at a place where that is probably not sustainable.”
– County manager Heidi York
York told the commissioners that, during her two-and-a-half years in Alamance County, she has repeatedly been bidden to put off some much-needed allocations in order to reduce the county’s expenses.
“In the last two budgets that I’ve helped put together we’ve had no new vehicles [and] no new positions funded out of the general fund,” she went on to inform the county’s governing board. “Now, we are at a place where that is probably not sustainable.”
The county manager added that the county’s next budget will be the first in several years without the benefit of federal pandemic relief funds. She also raised some concerns about the recent erosion of the general savings as well as the deliberate drawdown of unspent payroll expenses that some county departments with numerous vacancies have been able to use as veritable slush funds.
“We had built in that vacancy rate for some of our larger departments,” the county manager added. “But we took that funding away as a cost saving measure…So we do have some challenges facing us.”
Saving grace
Foremost among the county’s financial stumbling blocks has been the state of the fund balance, or accumulated reserves, that are attached to the county’s general fund. For many years, the county had been able to build up this savings account as sales tax receipts consistently beat expectations and the county managed to avoid any budget-busting expenses. At one point, the county’s leaders were so sanguine about the health of these savings that they contemplated increasing their self-imposed quota for the funds not earmarked for any particular purpose from 20 to 25 percent of the general fund’s annual outlays.
Lately, however, the general fund’s savings have ticked downward due to a combination of large-scale capital projects, increasing payroll expenses, and lackluster returns from the county’s levy on sales. Evans said that, in the fiscal year which ended in June of 2024, the county drew $5.7 million from the unearmarked part of the fund balance. As a result, the county’s latest annual audit showed that, for the first time in years, this pool of readily spendable cash had slipped below the county’s 20-percent target.
Evans went on to acknowledge that the general fund still had about $80.8 million in “available” savings when the audit occurred – with roughly $41 million being “unassigned,” or unspoken for. This sum nevertheless amounted to 19.87 percent of the general fund’s outlays for that fiscal year. So, in order to bring these “unassigned” savings back in line with the county’s savings policy, Evans advised the commissioners to transfer $277,970 into the fund balance in order to nudge the metric back over the 20-percent mark.
Shake, rattle, and payroll
Another hot topic at Monday’s retreat was the staff compensation, which York acknowledged has been a priority for the county’s administrators ever since her tenure began.
“When I first got here, we heard a lot about Alamance County being a training ground for employees,” the county manager recalled. “So, two years ago, we embarked on a three-year compensation assessment that focused on market pay.”
York reminded the commissioners that the third part of this three-year study is scheduled to take place later this year. She added that the study’s previous installments have led to modest salary increases in areas like EMS, which she said now ranks in the middle of its jurisdictional peers for the starting salaries of paramedics.
York went on to address the county’s experimental use of signing bonuses to boost recruitment at the local sheriff’s office. She informed the commissioners that the sheriff has issued 27 of these $10,000 bonuses since the commissioners authorized his use of this recruitment tool in July. Under the board’s approved policy, new deputies and jailers can receive $5,000 up front and another $5,000 in installments if they sign contracts that obligate them to remain with the sheriff’s office for at least 22 months.
York noted that the county has already spent $135,000 on these bonuses, although it was able to recover $5,000 from one new recruit who chose not to remain for the mandated 22-month period. She stressed that it’s up to the commissioners to decide whether to continue this recruitment strategy.
The county manager noted that a previous trial with signing bonuses was ultimately discontinued after a brief run at the county’s department of social services. She stressed that DSS, which introduced its bonuses in 2021, currently employs just five of the people who received these financial sweeteners, which lacked the contractual obligations and clawbacks of the sheriff’s initiative.
“Their vacancy rate is still pretty high,” York went on to observe, “and it is in the same areas…they [also] felt that there were some morale issues that we created for some long-time employees.”
York also pointed out that alluring pay packages for newcomers can lead to “salary compression,” where the wages of junior employees are bumping up against, or exceeding, those of more senior staff members. She said that the county has tried to reduce this tendency through the issuance of regular “merit-based” pay raises.
The county’s reliance on merit raises triggered some questions for commissioner Ed Priola, who expressed skepticism that the county’s department heads are really reserving these performance-based hikes for their best employees. Brian Baker, one of the county’s assistant managers, conceded that there was a time when department heads were under some pressure to reward all of their subordinates for their presumed merit.
“There was a long period of years when we did not give cost-of-living adjustments,” he recalled. “We just did merit pay…But we really need be treating merit pay like merit pay.”
York agreed that it would behoove the county to use merit pay and cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs, as they’re supposed to be used.
“They’re serving two different purposes,” she added. “A COLA…tries to keep up with inflation. That is not the same as merit pay, which tries to identify, for your organization, those high performers and rewards them because they’re going above and beyond.”
The mention of pay raises also reminded commissioner Kelly Allen that she had heard Alamance County’s sheriff Terry Johnson hadn’t received a pay raise in five years. York was quick to assure the first term commissioner that this simply isn’t the case.
“He has gotten pay adjustments with the market study and the cost-of-living increases,” the county manager said. “He hasn’t gotten the merit-based raise because there’s nobody who rates his performance.”
York added that the commissioners could take it upon themselves to give the sheriff an additional raise, although she stressed that she isn’t in a position herself to reward Johnson on merit.
The right staff
In addition to employee compensation, the commissioners also addressed the staffing levels of various county departments at Monday’s retreat.
As an aid to the board’s deliberations, the county’s administrators had assembled a comparison of staffing in Alamance County with 10 other jurisdictions that they had selected based on their similar populations. These so-called “benchmark counties” weren’t a perfect match for Alamance – being, on average, about 10 percent more populous and roughly a third larger in the size of their general fund budgets. Yet, the contrast in staffing was conspicuously greater – with the benchmark counties fielding an average of 1,690 full-time employees versus Alamance County’s full-time workforce of 1,044.
The data that the county’s administrators assembled also showed Alamance County trailing its peers in side-by-side comparisons of individual departments and agencies. The only two categories where Alamance County could claim a numerical advantage were IT and the family justice center – the latter being a local innovation with few equivalents in other parts of the state. In other areas, the data suggested that Alamance County lags behind its peers. The staffing gap was particularly noticeable for EMS, which has 99 positions in contrast to the average of 120; DSS, with its 238 posts as opposed to the 331 for its peers; and facilities maintenance, whose 11 positions paled in comparison to the 40 in other jurisdictions.
These comparative figures nevertheless raised the eyebrows of commissioner Priola, who has criticized the apparent glut in some county departments since before his election in the fall of 2024.
During Monday’s discussion, Priola observed that the administration’s figures credited the county’s library system with just 40 positions, or 5 fewer than the peer average. Meanwhile, the commissioner recalled that his own inquiries of the system’s director revealed a staffing level in excess of 60 employees.
The county’s administrators attributed this difference to their focus on “full-time equivalents,” while the library system’s director presumably gave Priola a total that also included part-time and temporary positions. Even so, Priola remained convinced that there’s excess personnel in some corners of the county’s workforce.
“My focus is on right sizing the government in its entirety,” he told his fellow commissioners later that afternoon, “and there are at least two departments where I’m concerned about the level of personnel.”
Aside from the county’s library system, Priola suggested that there may be too many idle bodies in the county’s tax office. The commissioner went on to observe that the number of positions in this department has remained unchanged since the commissioners agreed to outsource the county’s next property revaluation.
Priola’s concerns on this score eventually received some support from John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners.
“I agree with Ed that there are some departments that are over-populated,” Paisley told the rest of the county’s governing board, “and there are some that are underpopulated.”
In the meantime, county manager Heidi York admonished the commissioners not to start slashing positions in certain departments until they’ve first ascertained that the remaining staff members can do what’s expected of them.
“When you scale back the staff,” the county manager said, “you’re asking other people to step up and carry an extra load…Sometimes it’s better to have a hard conversation about whether it’s a service you want to continue to provide than to require staff to limp along and provide the same level of service.”
Just to capital off
Another big drain on the county’s revenues has been the sundry capital projects that the commissioners have authorized to provide adequate accommodations for all of the county’s departments and agencies.
During Monday’s retreat, assistant county manager Brian Baker offered the commissioners some updates on three of these projects. He noted that work is expected to begin later this year on the renovation of a former industrial building in Burlington that the county has acquired as a new home for its 9-1-1 center. Although the city of Burlington, which had originally planned to house its emergency dispatchers in this facility, has pulled out of the project, Baker insisted that the county’s prepared to proceed on its own thanks to a $15 million allocation from the state legislature. He added that the completion date for this endeavor has been tentatively set for the end of 2026.
Baker added that the design work is already underway on the proposed renovation of the county’s former elderly services building along Burlington’s Martin Street. The commissioners had previously agreed to inject $5 million from a large bank loan into this vacant facility in order to repurpose it as a new home for planning, inspections, and other development-related services. Baker told the commissioners that this project is expected to wrap up in January of 2026.
Meanwhile, the assistant county manager said that design work is also proceeding apace on a $37 million venture to renovate and expand the Judge J.B. Allen, Jr. Court House in Graham. This project, whose cost will be covered by the same loan that’s bankrolling the revamp of elderly services, currently has a completion date in December of 2027.
In addition to these three ongoing endeavors, Baker urged the commissioners to brace themselves for a fourth project that aims to improve the coverage that Alamance County’s Emergency Medical Services has on the county’s east side.
The assistant county manager said that, as things current stand, it takes EMS an average of 14 minutes and 28 seconds to reach the site of a medical emergency in the eastern part of the county. By contrast, the agency’s countywide response time is 10 minutes and 36 seconds. In the meantime, Baker alluded to the precipitous rise in emergency calls that Mebane has seen due to its brisk rate of residential development.
In order to meet Mebane’s growing demand for ambulance service, the county has been marinating a plan to build a new EMS base in this community. In 2023, the commissioners struck a deal with the nonprofit Alamance County Rescue Unit to acquire a vacant lot along Mebane’s Third Street to serve as a potential site for this facility.
Last fall, the county’s plans were thrown for a loop when Mebane’s city council rezoned this 1.67-acre parcel along with about 80 neighboring acres for a mixed use development that the Greensboro-based Koury Corporation has in the works. The developer’s representatives had given Mebane’s leaders the impression their plans had the blessing of the county, which retains the title and deed to its 1.67-acre slice of the project’s proposed site. This claim proved to be premature – as inquiries by The Alamance News would later reveal. In fact, the newspaper learned that the county was counting on the developer to line up an alternate site before it would part with the property along Third Street.
Although the Koury Corporation has apparently identified another potential location for the EMS base, it had yet to close on the property when its rezoning request went before Mebane’s city council in December. On Monday, Baker conceded that he was still waiting on this proposed land swap to come to fruition.
“I think we’re going to do it,” he assured the county’s governing board. “We’re just not there yet.”
In the meantime, the assistant county manager encouraged the commissioners to set aside $5 million for the development of the new EMS facility in Mebane. He added that this price tag includes $3.2 million for the construction of a three-bay ambulance base, as well as an additional $1.8 million for a garage to maintain the county’s entire ambulance fleet. Baker predicted that the 16 paramedics needed to staff the new base would add an additional $1,193,840 to the county’s annual budget.
Priority express
Among the other items on Monday’s agenda was a proposal to shift most of the county’s nonprofit allocations from the general fund to a separate account that the county maintains for a special levy on hotels and motels. State law requires the proceeds from this so-called occupancy tax to go toward programs and activities that stimulate tourism. As a result, organizations that receive some of these funds would have explain their contributions to travel and tourism in order to qualify for the subsidy.
Also up for discussion on Monday was the county’s strategic plan, which was originally drawn up as an in-house initiative of the county’s planning department. The county’s administrators informed the commissioners that they’ve received an offer from the Alamance County Area Chamber of Commerce to flesh out one of the plan’s five “pillars,” which focuses on “smart” growth and development. The county’s administrators suggested that other external organizations may want to take a crack at some of the other pillars in order to give some added heft to the rest of the strategic plan.
Before they adjourned for the day, the commissioners also had an opportunity to share some of their own budgetary priorities with the rest of the county’s governing board. Commissioner Pam Thompson used this change to reiterate a proposed outlay she has repeatedly plugged for the sheriff’s office.
“My priority is body cameras for our law enforcement,” Thompson told her fellow commissioners. every police department in our county has body cameras…I had somebody contact us to say that it would be a little over $500,000 for what we need.”
County manager Heidi York said that Thompson’s proposal will most likely appear in her recommended budget this spring.
Meanwhile, Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, shared a suggestion to reduce the cost of upgrading the county’s motor fleet.
Carter said that he has heard Enterprise Rent-a-Car has a vehicle lease program that might offer the county a cheaper alternative to the purchase of new cars and trucks for its departments.
“And they indicated that we may be able to save $300,000 or $400,000 by going on the lease program,” he added.
On a somewhat related note, John Paisley, Jr. the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, suggested that the county could lower its vehicle maintenance costs by outsourcing this function to Alamance Community College. This proposal nevertheless drew an objection from Alamance County’s attorney Rik Stevens.
“Not to shoot holes in any ideas,” the county attorney said, “but allowing students to work on emergency vehicles probably creates a lot of liability for us.”
