Taxpayers and public school teachers aren’t the only ones who have something to celebrate in North Carolina’s newly-approved budget.
This $34 billion spending plan, which received the signature of Governor Josh Stein on Tuesday, also contains plenty of goodies for local agencies and organizations – including a number located right here in Alamance County.
The details of this local largesse aren’t necessarily spelled out in the text of the budget itself. They are nevertheless itemized in a 716-page report that was issued on June 30 by the conference committee which hashed out the budget.
Among the items in this report are a galaxy of “special appropriations” that total about $304 million in the actual budget. These items include direct allocations to Alamance County and other units of government as well as grants earmarked for the use of various nonprofit organizations.
This list of special appropriations includes a “directed” grant of $500,000 to Alamance County. The county has also been instructed to pass along two other grants, worth $50,000 a piece, to upgrade the rolling stock at the Eli Whitney and Snow Camp volunteer fire departments. In the meantime, the county has been assigned to parcel out another $400,000 equally among all of its volunteer fire departments.
Another directed grant for $375,000 has been set aside for “water, wastewater, and stormwater improvements” within the city of Graham. The city of Mebane is set to receive an even larger sum of $725,000 for this same bucket for infrastructure improvements.
The town of Gibsonville has been assigned three special appropriations in the newly-approved budget. These outlays include $100,000 for “capital improvements and equipment related to water and sewer needs, a new police station, and a fire service apparatus.” The town is also set to receive additional $300,000 for its police department and $1.3 million to purchase a new water tank.
Other municipal outlays include two grants of $25,000 apiece to fund “water, wastewater, and stormwater improvements” in the towns of Green Level and Swepsonville. Meanwhile, the town of Haw River has been earmarked $125,000 for the same purpose.
On the nonprofit front, the Graham-based group Alcovets has been allotted $25,000 to use for veterans support services while two other grants of $25,000 have been earmarked for the CrossRoads Sexual Assault Response and Resources Center and the Burlington-based New Leaf Society, which is concerned with the beautification of communities across Alamance County.
Also worthy of note is a grant for $25,000 that the Saxapahaw-based Paperhand Puppet Project has been promised to repair the damages that Tropical Storm Chantal had wrought in the summer of 2025. Another special appropriation to the N.C. Department of Culture and Natural Resources contains $100,000 that’s specifically tagged for improvements to the Alamance Battleground.
The section on “special appropriations” isn’t the only part of the budget where the General Assembly has remembered to toss a morsel or two to the locals.
One outlay from the state’s opioid abatement fund sets aside $400,000 for the Alamance County nonprofit Living Free Ministries to provide addiction treatment services. In addition, the state’s community college system has earmarked $2,061,129 for Alamance Community College to split with two of its sister institutions in other counties.
In all of these allocations, one local jurisdiction that’s conspicuously absent is the city of Burlington. The county’s largest municipality has nevertheless received a dubious “gift” from another piece of legislation that has recently come out of Raleigh.
According to Burlington’s city manager Bob Patterson, the city had been bracing itself for a financial loss from Senate Bill 889, which effectively overturns the results of recent county-level property tax revaluations.
This bill, which was signed into law on June 19, requires Guilford and number of other counties that completed revals earlier this year to recalculate the results of these state-mandated mass reassessments. In the short term, the affected counties must rework their tax values based on the valuation guides they had used for their previous revals, which took place anywhere from four to eight years ago.
Although Guilford County contains a relatively small portion of Burlington’s city limits, Patterson acknowledged that the new law’s enactment has left Burlington with a shortfall in revenue of about $665,000. He nevertheless advised the city council to hold off on any budget amendment to cover this gap until after the city has settled the accounts for some of its ongoing projects.
