By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

Those waiting to find out what Lee County’s budget for fiscal year 2025-26 is going to look like will have to wait a little longer.

The county Board of Commissioners had signaled that a spending plan – and a property tax rate – for the next fiscal year would be unveiled at a public hearing on May 5 and voted on at a meeting of the board on May 19. Discussion at a board meeting in April centered around the proposed budget for capital projects and included staff members answering questions from the commissioners about the procedures used to arrive at the numbers, cost estimates, and the ranking order for new facilities that will be needed by 2030.

But May 5 came and went without a budget proposal, and the agenda for the May 19 meeting includes no mention of the spending plan.

Now, commissioners chairman Kirk Smith, a Republican, has asked that the budget be presented at a public hearing on June 2 and that commissioners vote on the proposal on June 16. State law requires counties and cities to adopt a budget by June 30.

Budgets are based on revenue projections – in other words, how much money will likely be available to fund the county’s priorities. As the budget-making process approached the time of adoption, those revenue forecasts became clearer, suggesting other options might need to be considered.

So, two weeks ago, Smith asked County Manager Lisa Minter to submit a budget that neither increased nor cut the property tax rate of 65 cents per $100 of property valuation. At the time, Minter had been nearly finished with her proposal for the next fiscal year. Still, Smith wanted to see what the county’s revenue and expenditures might look like if it held the line for the third year in a row. The last adjustment to the property tax rate was in 2023 – when a cut in the rate of 8 cents was offset by an increase in property values that left most taxpayers with an increased bill despite the lower rate.

Assembling a county budget is never easy, even for those who have done it many times. In recent weeks, employees in every county department have had opportunities to provide input. It’s a winnowing process, where the most essential items rise to the top as the county’s priorities are applied. At the end of the process, a draft version of the revenue and spending plan, a balanced budget, is assembled for consideration by the commissioners.

That draft is expected to include recommendations for specific capital projects to support the vision of the seven elected commissioners for the next five years. The actual list of projects that need to be completed will vary from year to year, and the priority of individual projects already on the list may cause them to move up or down or even fall off that list over the five-year plan.

The commissioners have been careful in their public and private conversations over the past six months not to speculate on whether the new budget might need to raise the property tax rate for the first time in several years. Much of the county’s fiscal growth during the 2020s has come in the form of growth in the tax base, seen both in the increase of the population and the buying of new homes, as well as new industry coming online. But that growth has leveled off in the past couple of years as the number of new companies making announcements of coming to Lee County has slowed.

Meanwhile, the county was using that growth money to pay for needs that had been little more than pipe dreams for years. It created a model that’s finally addressing the county’s mental health crisis, and improved the county parks system, making enhancements to make them more attractive, functional, and accessible to the entire population.

Lee County Athletic Park will open this July, four and a half years after being approved by the voters. It will provide modern playing fields and facilities for various sports and recreation. The park will also stimulate the economy through the hotels, restaurants, and convenience stores built to deliver the services demanded by those traveling to Sanford for games and tournaments.

That kind of growth will require a strong and steady cash flow over the next five years, and as the commissioners got their first look in April at how much that kind of growth will cost by 2030, it became clear that cutting the property tax rate again would be more difficult than before thanks in no small part to the reality of the Capital Improvement Plan numbers, – usually a comparatively small portion of the budget.

It’s not on the agenda for their meeting Monday, but those numbers will be public two weeks from now. That’s when the public will find out whether the revenue-neutral proposal Smith requested will keep the status quo on county services or result in drastic service curtailments.