Alamance County’s commissioners have adopted a new budget that adds 2.5 cents (or about 5.3 percent) to the county’s property tax rate and digs deep into the county government’s savings to fund the local school system and other priorities that critics had accused Alamance County’s manager of shortchanging in her own spending plan for the county.
The newly adopted budget, which squeaked through in 3-to-2 vote on Monday, calls for a total of $242.1 million in outlays from the county’s general fund – or about $12.4 million more than county manager Heidi York had recommended to the commissioners in May.
In particular, the new budget boosts York’s proposed allotment for the non-capital operations of the Alamance-Burlington school system by about $11.3 million. It also restores funds to the Alamance County Rescue Unit and other nonprofit groups that the county manager had nixed from her budget – along with about $2 million in the county’s capital outlays.
To cover the cost of these additional outlays, the new budget adds 2.5 cents to the county’s property tax rate, raising it from 46.9 to 49.4 cents for every $100 of property. This tax increase is steeper than the 1.59 cents that York had proposed to the commissioners. It is also augmented by an allocation of $11 million from the county’s savings – or $10 million more than the county manager had been willing to pull from these financial reserves.
[Story continues below.]
Read a package of the newspaper’s editorials on the commissioners’ decision: https://alamancenews.com/editorial-views-on-the-county-budget-and-property-tax-rate-increase/
Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, proposed this new budget on Monday in order to end some four weeks of handwringing and recriminations over York’s proposed spending plan. Carter insisted that this plan, while not perfect, is a workable compromise between the school system’s needs and the interests of the county’s property taxpayers.
“I don’t think there’s anything in this that everybody likes. I know there’s not enough money to do what ABSS wants to do. And I know there’s not enough money in here for the [school system’s] capital needs.”
– Alamance County commissioner vice chairman Steve Carter
“I don’t think there’s anything in this that everybody likes,” the board’s vice chairman conceded before that evening’s vote. “I know there’s not enough money to do what ABSS wants to do. And I know there’s not enough money in here for the [school system’s] capital needs.”
The board’s vice chairman was joined in his support for the new budget by fellow commissioners Pam Thompson and Kelly Allen. On the dissenting side of the vote were commissioner Ed Priola and John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, who objected to the new budget’s impact on the property tax rate.
“I want to truly apologize if this passes to every taxpayer,” Paisley declared moments before the 3-to-2 decision. “I also hope and pray that the commissioners are not voting for this gouging increase to be reelected. I think that you’re making a dramatic mistake if that’s what your motive is.”
A modest proposal?
The budget’s adoption came in the final minutes of a four-hour meeting that followed more than a month of accusations and angst touched off by the unveiling of York’s recommended spending plan on May 19.
In its broad outlines, York’s proposed budget wasn’t a radical departure from the one that the commissioners approved in the spring of 2024. In fact, the county manager’s recommendation for the general fund amounted to about a 2 percent increase over the current year’s adopted budget – with increased allocations for many county departments, a 2-percent “cost-of-living adjustment” for the county’s full-time workforce, and a merit-based raise that was to average out at 2.5 percent across the county’s payroll.
“I have to say that this budget is going to make no one happy [York said when she unveiled her budget recommendations on May 19]. No one wants to raise taxes; that’s clear. . . and it’s not easy to cut services. It’s not easy to cut positions. It’s not easy to cut employee pay. But this budget does all of those things.”
– Alamance County manager Heidi York (on may 19, 2025)
In order to make ends meet, York had proposed a 1.59-cent hike in the county’s property tax rate as well as a relatively modest allocation of $1 million from the general fund’s accumulated reserves, or fund balance. In the meantime, she proposed to free or eliminate some “non-mandatory” staff-level posts, pause longevity pay for veteran employees, and reduce funding for things like economic development, replacement vehicles, and non-county facilities such as the Burlington-Alamance Airport. The county manager also suggested deep sixing the county’s annual allotments to the nonprofit Alamance County Rescue Squad as well as Crossroads and Family Abuse Services – private nonprofits that provide services to victims of crime.
Yet, York’s most contentious move may have been to strike $10 million from the operations of the Alamance Burlington school system in order to beef up the school system’s capital funds. In addition to routine school maintenance and upkeep, which are the county’s responsibility under state law, much of this money was earmarked for roofing and HVAC projects that the county has undertaken to avoid the repetition of a massive mold outbreak that had gripped the school system in 2023.
By siphoning these funds off from the school system’s operations, the county manager wound up on a collision course with the Alamance Burlington school board, which had hoped for a $5.7 million increase in its operational allowance as opposed to a $10 million reduction.
Everyone’s a critic
It was somewhat inevitable that the school system’s boosters would show up in force when York’s spending plan came up for a public hearing on June 2. Public education enthusiasts ultimately deluged the county’s historic courthouse, which the commissioners had reserved in expectation of a capacity crowd at the hearing. They were joined by supporters of the rescue unit and other prospective casualties of the manager’s budget. Also on hand were fans of the county’s library system – which wasn’t slated for cuts in the manager’s budget but was put on notice all the same by a proposal from commissioner Ed Priola to phase out the county’s responsibility for funding the libraries in favor of the county’s municipalities.
In the end, York’s spending plan was savaged by most of 47 residents who addressed the commissioners during the hearing. In the meantime, it didn’t score any conciliatory points among budgetary hawks like Priola, who decried her proposed 1.59-cent tax increase as a betrayal of what he and his fellow commissioners had explicitly sought in the budget.
Priola eventually took the unprecedented step of presenting his own alternative budget to his fellow commissioners after the conclusion of this month’s public hearing. This rival plan hinged on the premise that increases in county spending had outpaced inflation as well as the incomes of area residents. It proposed to reverse this trend, and offset the manager’s suggested tax hike to boot, through reductions in capital outlays, the limitation of merit raises to the county’s top performing employees, and staffing cuts in the county’s tax department, the libraries, and even the county manager’s office.
But perhaps the most damning indictment of York’s budget came from the county manager herself, who acknowledged many of its potential sore points when she presented her plan to the commissioners last month.
“I have to say that this budget is going to make no one happy,” York declared as she summed up her proposed spending plan on the evening of May 19. “No one wants to raise taxes; that’s clear…and it’s not easy to cut services. It’s not easy to cut positions. It’s not easy to cut employee pay. But this budget does all of those things.”
[Story continues below photos from Monday night’s meeting.]
A financial carrot
Priola’s alternate budget was sapped of its momentum when the commissioners held a 10-hour “work session” on the proposed budget last Monday and Tuesday.
During the course of that two-day confab, the county’s administrators cast doubt on the assumptions behind many of the commissioner’s proposed cuts in staffing and spending. Although Priola clung to his plan for the moment, the rest of the board began casting about for other ways to fund the school system, the rescue unit, and other popular programs and services.
A breakthrough finally came toward the end of Tuesday’s marathon session when Susan Evans, the county’s finance director, acknowledged that the county’s general fund was on track to add millions of dollars to its financial reserves by the time the current fiscal year ends on June 30.
Prior to Evans’ admission, the county’s administrators had consistently used a figure from the county’s last audit to calculate the amount of spendable cash in the general fund. The administration’s accounts of this financial review had variously put the “unassigned” portion of these reserves at 19.7 or 19.8 percent of the general fund’s annual outlays – or just shy of the 20 percent that a previous board of commissioners had set as their goal for these savings.
This year-old audited figure had prompted York to pencil in a comparatively meager $1 million from the unassigned savings to balance the proposed budget she shared with the commissioners. Last Tuesday, however, Evans revealed that the county’s preliminary year-end figures show a much more robust fund balance – one that could give up another $10 million and still have 20.1 percent of the budget in unassigned funds.
A wealth of options
The finance director’s disclosure led to a flurry of spending proposals from various commissioners – four of which were ultimately assigned to the staff to flesh out in more detail.
One plan, preferred by Priola, proposed to draw $6.3 million from the general fund’s savings in order to offset the manager’s proposed tax increase as well as some of her more unpopular cuts to nonprofits and county expenditures.
A second proposal juxtaposed York’s recommended 1.59 cent tax increase with $11 million in unassigned savings to restore the school system’s operational allowance to the current year’s figure.
A third option proposed to raise the property tax hike to 2 cents while reducing the allocation of savings to $9 million, while a fourth, which commissioners Pam Thompson and Kelly Allen had floated, would rely on a 7 cent tax increase to add nearly $12 million to the school system’s operations while maintaining the manager’s proposed $1 million hit to the general fund’s savings.
These four plans were ultimately presented to the commissioners on Monday along with another last minute proposal from Thompson that relied on savings rather than additional property tax revenue to ramp up the school system’s operational funds. Thompson informed her colleagues that her two entries took two different routes in order to reach what amounted to the same destination.
“They would accomplish the same thing which is fully funding the school system,” she said, “and I think that it’s very important that we do this thing right.”
The school system’s statutory stick
The commissioners found their deliberations on Monday complicated by a menacing hint from the school system’s leaders that they may invoke a rarely-used statutory tool to goad the county’s governing board toward a decision more favorable to them.
Although the county technically isn’t obligated to fund the school system’s operations as it is maintenance and other capital needs, the General Assembly has given local school systems the right to demand mediation if they’re dissatisfied with the operational allowances they get from the local governments that subsidize them. According to Alamance County’s attorney Rik Stevens, the Alamance-Burlington school system could use this option to bring the county to the negotiating table. Then, should mediation prove fruitless, a formula spelled out in the state statute would automatically set the operational outlay closer to this year’s level than what the county manager had recommended.
“The past year’s funding is used as part of a multiplier to figure out what the next year’s funding will be,” Stevens explained to the commissioners on Monday. “I think this is the fallback position when the two parties can’t agree to a number, and there’s no right to appeal this number anywhere else.”
See separate story on school board decision to institute legal challenge to the ABSS allocation: https://alamancenews.com/school-board-initiates-dispute-process-to-challenge-county-budgets-abss-allotment-as-inadequate/
A new budget gels
The prospect that the county may want to play hardball was underscored by a special-called meeting that the school board had scheduled for the day after Monday’s anticipated vote. [See separate story in this edition.]
Carter, for one, suggested that the school board could use this special meeting to invoke its statutory right should the commissioners fail to live up to the school system’s expectations. The board’s vice chairman had initially proposed to defer this possibility by delaying the vote on the budget until Thursday. He nevertheless used a 10 minute recess to compare notes with Thompson, a one-time school board chairman, and ultimately came back to the dais with a proposal that would form the basis for the county’s new budget.
Carter went on to proffer a plan based on the third of the five options that commissioners had been considering. He initially substituted that plan’s 2-cent tax increase with a 4-cent hike, which he gradually whittled down to 2.5 cents – notwithstanding a suggestion from Thompson to “go 3 cents” up on the tax rate.
In the end, Carter, Thompson, and Allen landed on a spending plan that increases the county’s property tax rate from 46.9 to 49.4 cents for every $100 of property in order to add roughly another $6.6 million to the county’s kitty. It also allocates $11 million from the county’s “unassigned” savings, reducing these funds to an estimated 20.1 percent of the general fund’s annual outlays.
The new budget uses this additional revenue to restore many of York’s more contentious spending reductions, including a $125,000 allocation to the Alamance County Rescue Unit and $75,000 apiece to Crossroads and Family Abuse Services. It also adds $50,000 to the manager’s set-aside for corporate incentives, lifts her allotment for the Burlington-Alamance Airport by $125,000, and allocates $632,336 to shorten some proposed hiring freezes and restore some of her cuts to the county’s workforce.
The final iteration of Carter’s proposal goes on to return the $10 million that York had proposed to move from the school system’s operational funds to its capital outlays. It goes on to assign $8 million in savings to replenish most of those capital outlays, while reserving another $2 million for the county’s capital needs. In the meantime, it allocates another $1.3 million to the school system’s operations to cover a portion of the $5.7 million in new spending that the school board had sought to cover things such as increases in the local salary supplement and the introduction of a similar enticement for “classified” employees such as bus drivers and custodians.
The county’s new budget doesn’t, by any stretch, fund the entirety of the school system’s operational request – and for a moment it seemed like Carter’s proposal might not be enough to placate the school system’s backers.
During Monday’s deliberations, the school system’s superintendent Aaron Fleming repeatedly suggested that it would take $11.3 million, rather than $10 million, to restore the status quo from this fiscal year. It eventually appeared to dawn on him that he was erroneously including $1.3 million for school resource officers that the county manager had proposed to allocate directly to the sheriff’s office rather than cut out entirely.
In the meantime, Thompson seemed to dither in her support for Carter’s proposal after the county manager suggested that the vice chairman’s plans wouldn’t include enough funds to raise the local salary supplement for teachers. Fleming went on to point out that the school board could bankroll a supplement increase with the $1.3 million that Carter had set aside for operational expansions. He added, however, that those same funds could also be applied to other priorities in the school system’s so-called “expansion budget.”
“It can go to the teacher’s supplement or the classified supplement. But it’s only 1.3 [million dollars toward a 5.7-million request].”
‘Tax neutral’ option tanks; overtures to taxpayers continue
The new budget’s tax increase proved to be a harder sell for some members of the county’s governing board.
Prior to the vote on Carter’s proposal, Paisley and Priola made an unsuccessful bid to push through the first of the five budgetary proposals, which would’ve retained York’s cuts to the school system’s operations while keeping the property tax rate at its current level of 46.9 cents. Before this “tax neutral” budget came up for a decision, commissioner Kelly Allen conceded that she was initially inclined to support that proposal.
“Then, I learned that two of the commissioners, without telling the other commissioners, had $10 million taken out of the budget for the schools,” she added before the tax neutral option “So, I decided that withdrawing as much out of the fund balance as we thought was reasonable [while adding] a small tax increase is the smartest and fairest way.”
Priola, for his part, stuck to his guns on the county’s tax rate, which he has consistently said he would never deign to increase.
“I, for one, am going to keep my promise not to raise taxes. I’m going to keep the promise that all five of us have voiced out loud – not to raise taxes. . . When we’re in doubt, we raise taxes; when we’re caught over spending, we raise taxes; when we find $10 million, we raise taxes; when we’re asked to cut, we raise taxes. . . and we have a lot of people who are aching, living from paycheck to paycheck.”
– County commissioner Ed Priola
“I, for one, am going to keep my promise not to raise taxes,” he said. “I’m going to keep the promise that all five of us have voiced out loud – not to raise taxes…When we’re in doubt we raise taxes; when we’re caught over spending, we raise taxes; when we find $10 million, we raise taxes; when we’re asked to cut, we raise taxes…and we have a lot of people who are aching, living from paycheck to paycheck.”
Steve Carter responded to Priola’s concerns for struggling taxpayers with some sympathetic words of his own before he plugged a so-called homestead exemption that can halve the property tax bills of people whose incomes fall below a certain income level. He also mentioned a circuit breaker program that allows people in a higher income bracket to defer a portion of their property tax liability.
“We’re not taking a penny away from ABSS; we’re simply categorizing it as capital. General funds toward education are 35.7 percent of our total expense. . . and nobody else comes close.
“There is so much fluff in ABSS’s [budget]. I have page after page of notes, discrepancies, problems, with what ABSS is asking.”
– Alamance County commissioner Chairman John Paisley, Jr.
Paisley also echoed Priola’s concerns for the county’s hard-up property taxpayers, particularly retirees who survive on fixed incomes. In the meantime, he dismissed the very idea that the county’s school system is getting short shrift from the county.
“We’re not taking a penny away from ABSS; we’re simply categorizing it as capital,” he insisted. “General funds toward education are 35.7 percent of our total expense…and nobody else comes close.”
Chairman urges state to end local supplements
Before the county’s next budget came up on Monday’s agenda, Paisley tried to get his fellow commissioners to approve a resolution that would call on the General Assembly to shake up the rules for local allocations to public school systems.
The chairman’s proposal would’ve asked the state to assume the financial burden for local salary supplements while giving cities and counties more oversight of their allocations to schools and requiring that school systems return any unspent local funds to the local governments that parceled them out.
Carter acknowledged that members of the county’s legislative delegation have told him this resolution would be “D.O.A.” if it reached the General Assembly. Meanwhile, Fleming shared his doubts that the state would be eager to take on the $3.2 billion or so needed to cover local salary supplements across North Carolina.
“We have been talking about our property taxes going up,” he told the county’s governing board. “Imagine what that will do to our income tax.”
Despite a nod of support from Priola, Paisley’s proposed resolution failed in a 2-to-3 vote. The board’s chairman nevertheless continued to rail against the school system’s alleged financial mismanagement as he and his colleagues turned their attention to the county’s proposed budget later that evening.
During his diatribe, Paisley dredged up old grievances about bonuses bankrolled with federal pandemic relief funds and a news conference 18 months ago at which the school board’s chairman had blamed the county for the school system’s leaky roofs. He also dusted off a favorite soundbyte of the late county commissioner Bill H. Lashley, who was wont to assert that the school system wouldn’t be satisfied with “all the gold in Fort Knox.”
“There is so much fluff in ABSS’s [budget],” Paisley added. “I have page after page of notes, discrepancies, problems, with what ABSS is asking.”
Fire district taxes flare up
In addition to raising the county’s property tax rate from 46.9 to 49.4 cents for every $100 of value, the county’s new budget increases the property tax surcharges that property owners in half of the county’s 12 rural fire districts must pay to subsidize their local fire departments.
These rate changes include a hike from 10 to 12 cents in the Altamahaw-Ossipee district, a jump from 7.92 to 10.9 cents in the E.M. Holt district, a rise from 8.65 to 10 cents in the unincorporated district outside of Elon, a step up from 8 to 9 cents in the Faucette district, an ascent from 8.3 to 10 cents in the Northeast Alamance district, and an uptick from 8.73 to 10 cents in Snow Camp.
The county’s new tax rate as well as each of the six increased surcharges will take effect when the next fiscal year begins on July 1.
