Elon’s town council has approved a new annual budget that increases the town’s property tax rate by 5 cents to help bankroll $13.6 million in outlays from the town’s general fund.
The new budget, which received a unanimous nod from the council on Tuesday, hikes the town’s tax rate from 35 to 40 cents for every $100 of value (or the equivalent of 14 percent) in order to add nearly $470,000 to the general fund. In addition, the budget contains new and increased waste disposal fees, and it introduces metered parking to Elon’s downtown district and other areas where on-street spaces have been in high demand.
Taken together, these various revenue adjustments are intended to reduce Elon’s reliance on its financial reserves to cover the general fund’s annual expenses. The budget nevertheless calls for a one-time allocation from those reserves to begin the overhaul of a building that the council has acquired along Orange Drive to serve as a future home for its police station and administrative offices. Meanwhile, the budget sets aside another $622,747 in savings to balance the general fund’s budget – a decrease from what the council has previously penciled in from the reserves for this purpose.
The expenditures that appear in the new spending plan come to some $171,326 less than the latest version of the town’s current annual budget. These outlays include higher line items for insurance and legal services, as well as a 3.5-percent cost-of-living adjustment for Elon’s full-time staff.
The council had insisted on this 3.5-percent raise over the town manager’s 2.5 percent recommendation, although they dispensed with the staff’s traditional merit-based raise to make up the difference. In addition, the council has decided to phase out annual longevity payments for the town’s future hires in favor of bonuses that would be paid out once every five years.
The town’s new budget also adds 7 percent to the water and sewer fees that sustain the self-contained fund that pays for the town’s public utilities.
The council approved the new budget by a margin of 5-to-0 on Tuesday.
At the behest of councilman Michael Woods, the council has also made a formal commitment to use part of any budgetary surplus that appears in the town’s next audit to fund bonuses for staff.
CLARIFICATION ABOUT AN ELON TOWN COUNCIL STORY IN LAST WEEK’S EDITION
A story in last week’s edition of The Alamance News observed that Elon is the only local municipality that had assumed zero sales tax growth in his proposed budget.
Since the story’s appearance, Elon’s town manager Richard Roedner has contacted the newspaper to explain that his no-growth projection wasn’t based on a mere whim.
“One factor that has to be taken into account is that Alamance [County] distributes sales tax revenues to cities and towns based on population,” Roedner elaborated in an email on Friday. “Elon’s growth rate is very slow…When I got here in 2020, we were at something like 4.6 percent of the county population, and now we are at below 4 percent of the population. So, even as overall sales tax receipts grow, the distribution to Elon doesn’t necessarily follow the growth rate in overall receipts.”
Under state law, a county can choose one of two ways to parcel out sales tax receipts among its cities and towns. One option, favored by Guilford County, is ad valorum distribution – which uses a municipality’s property tax base to determine its share of the local levy on sales. The other, which Alamance County prefers, is per capita distribution.
Lately, Alamance County’s choice of distribution method hasn’t been very fortuitous for Elon. As noted in last week’s edition of The Alamance News, Elon is the only local municipality that saw its population constrict between 2023 and 2025. According to the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the town’s population declined by 1.3 percent during this two-year period, which saw the county as a whole add 3.9 percent to its number of residents.
