By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

It seems clear that Lee County Schools enjoy broad support among the county’s commissioners, and that when County Manager Lisa Minter presents the first draft of the county’s budget to the board in May, it’s likely that the school district will receive much – if not all – of the additional funding that they’re asking for when the new budget year begins on July 1.

The confidence that commissioners have in Minter to develop a budget that will address the nearly $6 million in new funding Lee County Schools are asking for in the new year was on full display at the commission’s meeting Monday night when they voted down a motion that would have required Minter to come up with a plan giving the schools those additional dollars without raising taxes on county taxpayers in the coming year.

Republican Commissioner Bill Carver offered the motion and found support from Democrat Cameron Sharpe. Carver argued that the commission had been unanimous at a planning meeting last December in agreeing to hold the line on property taxes in the coming year’s budget, and that with a fixed amount of money available to fund the school district’s request for an increase, bringing options to the commissioners on how to fund that growth made sense.

Carver even suggested several places in the county budget where Minter could potentially come up with savings, including reductions in the travel and conference budgets for commissioners and members of the county staff, delaying the purchase of new vehicles when possible, and even considering holding the line on potential increases in salary for county employees in the coming year. County employees got a 7 percent bump in their salaries last summer after years of annual adjustments that failed to keep up with the rising costs of living.

The remaining five commissioners expressed their broad support for the school district and promised to give serious consideration to what it was asking for, but drew the line at telling their county manager, who had previously served as the county’s finance officer for years, how to come up with options for the board to consider.

Republican Vice Chairman Dr. Andre Knecht’s words seemed to sum up the feeling of that majority.

“I’m confident that our manager will give us the options we need, and I don’t think we need a motion to push her in that direction. It’s a little early to do that, in my book.”

Democratic Commissioner Robert Reives was in agreement.

“We are all looking for ways to help the school system, but I don’t favor looking for ways to do that through trial and error,” he said.

Just before the vote was taken, Carver spoke up to say that all of the commissioners want the same thing – to find a way to help Lee County Schools with the additional priorities that it believes are critical to the success of its 17 schools in the coming year. What he hoped to accomplish with his motion, he said, was to demonstrate in a tangible way how solid that commitment is.

“How the budget turns out has a lot to do with the priorities you set, and we set the priority in December that we don’t want to raise taxes,” he said. “I think that showing that there is consensus among us and that we are all rolling up our sleeves to do all we can to help is important. It also may mean that we have to tighten our belts elsewhere and that others may not get what they ask for.”

Sharpe was the only commissioner to go along with Carver’s motion, although each of the others made a point to express their general support for the school district’s request. But it’s clear that each of the seven commissioners is anxious to see what Minter will recommend about the school board’s request, and what the tax rate for the coming year will be.

Budget coming in May

The school board has employed a different strategy in making their needs known to the commissioners after a disappointing result last year. Republicans took control of the school board in the 2022 election, but learned a hard lesson when it presented its request last spring – Republican control of the school board didn’t translate to support of its entire budget request. The county ended up giving the school district an increase of $523,500, about 20 percent of what they had requested.

At the time they made their request last year, former Superintendent Dr. Andy Bryan had resigned on May 9 and Assistant Superintendent Dr. Chris Dossenbach was elevated to take his place on an interim basis. Then-Chair Sherry Lynn Womack and Finance Committee Chairman Alan Rummel, both stunned by the rebuke from their own party, went back and began to revise their approach next time. Their first act was to bring in Democratic member Jamey Laudate, whose knowledge of finance and technology has been invaluable in the school board’s retooling of its approach.

They have spent the last year building stronger relationships with the commissioners and county staff, meeting with them regularly to discuss the district’s goals and “educating” them on the challenges it faces. Among those has been the fire last spring at the old Jonesboro School and the work being done to address learning loss that came through the COVID-19 pandemic isolation.

And since last year, the school board has new leadership. In December, Womack was replaced by fellow Republican Eric Davidson as chairman of the school board. Davidson has brought a different type of leadership to the board, one that is based more on thoughtful consideration instead of the shoot-from-the-hip mentality that eventually doomed Womack’s time in the chair.

And last November, the board selected Dossenbach as its permanent superintendent. He has demonstrated several times since that he is very willing to take firm and quick action when it’s needed – one of the qualities that school board members were looking for when it hired him.

Six of the seven members of the school board came to a meeting of the commissioners on March 18 where Davidson and Dossenbach gave a preview of the district’s budget request for the coming year, just over $25 million for the operation of the county’s public schools through June 30, 2025, representing an increase of $5 million over the budget awarded to LCS last year.

Of that amount, almost $3.5 million would go to support a new pay plan for teachers and support staff, $203,000 to restore the payment of supplements to teachers possessing a master’s degree, $981,000 for operational increases, and $512,500 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 federal ESSER, or COVID relief, funds.

The district’s financial position is more precarious this time because those same COVID relief dollars that have been flowing into the county since the spring of 2020 will end on September 30. Dossenbach told the commissioners in March that the district is almost totally weaned off of those funds, but it still means that the financial picture will look different for the coming year than it has for the past four.

When the commissioners met for their annual planning meetings just before the Christmas holidays, they came to a consensus that their overarching goal for Fiscal Year 2024-25 would be to hold the line on the property tax rate and not have a tax rate increase. The budget for the current fiscal year is $105 million, the first time in the county’s history that its receipts and spending plan topped the $100 million mark.

Without an increase in taxes, the commissioners will have to rely on increased valuations of parcels that have been improved through new construction to fund any increases in this year’s budget. With new construction taking place in almost every imaginable corner of Sanford and increasingly in areas outside the city limits, the amount of new revenue that will be brought in through property taxes is an unknown quantity now, and Minter will have to rely on Tax Administrator Michael Brown and others of the county staff to make their best estimates of what that new revenue might be.

The county also faces the coming sunset of federal COVID funds through the American Rescue Plan Act, but it’s really the corner they painted themselves into last year that hangs over what they will be able to do this year. The commissioners cut the rate last June on property taxes from 73 cents per $100 of property valuation to 65 cents, a cut of 8 cents. In most years, this would have amounted to a sizeable reduction and more dollars in the pockets of Lee County taxpayers. But it didn’t happen.

A reappraisal of real and personal property had taken place during the first six weeks of 2023, and the result was an average increase of 32 percent in property values across the county, with some landowners reporting increases of more than 50 percent on their tax bill. Expansions of that size simply swallowed up the 8 cents per $100 in valuation cut in the tax rate, and many people were left owing more in the current tax year than in previous years.

It left a bad taste in the mouths of many when they paid their property taxes last year, but it also created a situation in which the only ways for the county to realize growth in the amount of dollars available for its budget were through increased growth in land development or raising the same tax rate they had just cut.

That’s the challenge that faces Minter and her team as they work to collect all the pieces that will help put the county’s financial puzzle together. It’s Minter’s second budget as county manager, and she faces a state-imposed deadline of June 30 for the final budget to be adopted by the commissioners.

County departments have completed their budget requests, and the next step will be for the commissioners to consider what each department has asked for. The commissioners have chosen to follow a process they used last year, meeting in-person only with those department heads that Minter believes could justify their request for significant increases. Among these would be the Sheriff’s Office, General Services, Health, Social Services, Library, and Parks and Recreation.

The commissioners are set to hold those meetings on May 31, with the budget possibly ready for adoption on June 3 or 17. The county spending plan they ultimately adopt will determine where its priorities will be for the coming fiscal year and with a limited amount of revenue available to fund those priorities, there will be winners and losers. It’s that way every year as budget season comes to an end.