By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com
North Carolina law requires each unit of county and city government to adopt an annual budget for the new fiscal year by June 30, and Lee County’s commissioners voted Monday to approve theirs for 2024-25 with 13 days to spare. By a unanimous vote, the board approved a revenue and spending plan that tops $100 million for the second year in a row and holds the line on property taxes.
The budget of $112,927,338 is an increase of $8,089,265, or 7.72 percent, over the current fiscal year. The property tax rate will stay the same at 65 cents per $100 of property valuation.
The budget contains a number of high visibility items. For the third year in a row, county employees will receive what is called a “meaningful” pay increase, Lee County Schools will see an increase of $2 million over the amount they’ve been working with in the current year, and next year will see the county go on a buying spree for cars and trucks.
The General Services department, in charge of county facilities, will purchase three new pickup trucks and a Chevrolet Malibu. Emergency Management will receive $70,000 to buy a one-ton truck, Cooperative Extension will get funds for a Ford F-150 4×4 Super Crew, Social Services is funded $37,500 for a Toyota Sienna, Parks and Recreation also gets a Ford F-150 pickup at $44,000, and Senior Services was allocated $520,000 for a new 20-foot light transit vehicle with wheelchair lift.
The big winner in vehicles in the new year will be the Sheriff’s Office. The budget awards funding for two Chevy Silverado 1500 pickups, four Dodge Durango V6 Pursuit vehicles, five Dodge Durango V8 Pursuit vehicles, and another Chevy Silverado 1500 pickup to be used by Animal Control. Among the vehicle requests for the new year that were not funded was a request for $475,000 from Emergency Management for replacement of a mobile command post.
The budget also modifies the county’s Capital Improvement Plan to give better projections on the county’s inventory of facilities, projecting through 2029 what structures will be needed and when they will need to come online, as well as the best current estimates for their projected costs. It’s an organic document that will be modified every year, changing as the county’s needs also change, and it’s designed to give commissioners a better view of what they need to be planning ahead for in terms of having funds and potentially property available.
Sophie’s choice and school kids
Few would argue the task of dividing up a $113 million pie to adequately fund every department that provides county services is a hard job. County Manager Lisa Minter and her staff have been working on developing the county’s annual revenue and spending plan since they returned from the holiday break in early January. The many units of county government that serve its 66,000 people assembled their budgetary needs for the new year through the winter and early spring.
Those requests were compiled in March and April and then compared against the best estimates of how much revenue the county would have to work with in 2024-25. As always, the requests far exceeded the funds that would be available and lots of items had to be cut. In many cases, those cuts became a Sophie’s choice, where an extremely difficult decision has to be made in a case where no one outcome is preferable over the other.
In every budgeting process, there are winners and losers. But one segment which has felt itself on the short end of the stick for the past several years now – even though it’s received more each year than the previous one – is the county’s public schools. And though the commissioners have strongly reaffirmed their support to the school district that serves more than 9,000 students a year, that commitment seems lacking to many in the education community when budget allocations are made.
For four years in a row beginning in FY 2020-21, the school board requested funding to increase the local supplements paid to teachers, a tool the district uses to keep teacher pay competitive with surrounding school systems and to slow the exodus of teachers who might be willing to drive a few miles more to another county where they can get higher pay. And in each of those four years, the commissioners have declined to fund those requests. The school board was able to provide increases in supplements during those years by dipping into federal COVID relief dollars, but those funds will be exhausted at the end of September and there isn’t enough left to do it again.
When the Republican Party took control of the school board after the 2022 elections, they put together a plan that asked $2.5 million for broader salary increases for locally paid employees (teachers aides, cafeteria workers, administrative personnel), along with other items they felt essential to enacting their agenda. The commissioners gave them $500,000.
For this year, the school board chose a more inclusive strategy made up of meetings between several of its members and superintendent with members of the board of commissioners and the county manager. The idea was for both sides to keep the other informed of their needs and to create a free flow of information. The school board even submitted its formal request for funding to the commissioners this year a full two months earlier than any other department in hopes of impressing the urgency of the district’s needs.
The school board had asked for $5 million in additional funding for the 2024-25 fiscal year. Of that amount, almost $3.5 million would have gone to support a new pay plan for teachers and support staff. The $2 million increase that the county provided on Monday is just over half the amount needed to implement that plan.
Another $203,000 was requested to restore the payment of supplements to teachers possessing a master’s degree, with $981,000 asked for operational increases, and $512,500 requested for personnel requests that would include positions in Behavior Support, English as a Second Language, and the two existing positions in school health now paid from ESSER funds.
But when County Manager Lisa Minter unveiled her recommended budget to the commissioners on May 20, she recommended that the school board receive only $2 million of the additional funding it had asked. A Republican-led school board again came up short in funding from a Republican-led county commission.
The commissioners held a public hearing on June 3, allowing the public to comment on the budget Minter proposed. A number of speakers shared their thoughts, some of them making impassioned pleas for more funding for a particular agency.
Democratic school board member Jamey Laudate, who has built a close working relationship with fellow Republican board member Alan Rummel built on data analysis, made remarks that night. But Laudate said he spoke that night just as a Lee County taxpayer.
“Four years ago, the county allocated 23 percent of its budget to public and charter schools, so committing 19 percent now is a 21 percent decrease in the county’s funding effort to primary and secondary education,” he said. “In 2021-22, the county spent $19.3 million against an $84 million overall budget. The 2024-25 proposal from the county manager is $21.5 million against a $113 million-dollar overall budget. I’m trying to figure out how the budget increased 34.5 percent in four years, but public education spending is only increasing 11.3 percent over that same time period.”
Laudate said the lagging public education spending couldn’t be due to decreasing enrollments, inflation, requests that were not supported by data, or a lack of communication between the school board and the county.
“The numbers point to either one of two conclusions,” he said. “One, the priority that Lee County places on public education is falling, and quickly. Or, two, the county is attempting to place pressure on the state to fully fund public education. I completely agree that the state of North Carolina is underfunding public education, but drastically reducing our funding effort as a county is not going to change their funding effort.”
“As a taxpayer in Lee County, I’m asking you to be committed to public education,” he continued. “My tax burden went up 41 percent last year. The biggest public service that I use, and that 10,000 other students and their families use in Lee County, is public education. Don’t raise my taxes 41 percent and then raise public education funding 6 percent. That’s going to be a problem.”
Laudate’s words went to no effect. The commissioners stuck to the budget Minter proposed in May, and the school board now has to figure out what to do about its $5 million list of priorities and only $2 million to address them.
Communication is key
The discussion by the commissioners on the budget Monday night was over in less than five minutes. They’ve been working the numbers with Minter since early May, a public hearing was held two weeks ago, and all of their questions had been answered before Chairman Kirk Smith gaveled the meeting to order. But the process still has its rough spots, and communication seems to be at the top of that list. Some people have expressed their thanks to the commissioners for taking on the tough job of writing the county’s spending plan. Others are not happy at all.
Rummel, who is chair of the school board’s Finance Committee, went to the podium during the meeting’s public comments period and minced no words.
“I am speaking tonight as a private citizen, not as a member of the school board. I think this board (of commissioners) is broken with respect to its financial duties,” Rummel said
He added that for all of the promises made last year of opening up more lines of communication, all the school board received were two motions made by a commissioner to explore the possibility of adding more money to the proposed budget. Both motions were voted down.
Rummel questioned how the commissioners could set their budget priorities in December of 2023 before the first request for funding was received by the county manager three months later.
Republican Commissioner Bill Carver, who will leave office as his term expires in December, agreed that there is room for improvement.
“Communication with the school board has to improve, and this is the year to start making that happen,” he said. “We have to change some of the ways we spend our money.”
Developing a budget is the most important and consequential action the commissioners take every year. Now that it’s done for another fiscal year, the board moves to a summer schedule, with meetings held only on the third Monday for the months of July, August, and September.
When they return to their twice-a-month schedule in October, the election of 2024 will be just a month away. Two incumbent members of the commission are up for re-election this fall, both Democrats, and a third seat being vacated by the retiring Carver is also on the ballot.
