By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

A group of Lee County Schools employees has reason to feel vindicated after a vote by the county Board of Commissioners on January 16 that will fund a salary increase.

LCS’ 600-plus classified employees – those such as classroom assistants, office staff, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, custodians and others who don’t require certification to hold their positions – had been arguing for a pay increase for years. The county Board of Education had consistently pointed them to the commissioners, who fund the school board’s operations. The commissioners, for their part, repeatedly said it was up to the schools to work within the confines of what funds they were given to fund operations, including employee salaries.

The commissioners’ unanimous vote at a retreat in January held for the purpose of giving a mid-year budget outlook allocated $847,000 that will be available for the current fiscal year. Raises should show up in paychecks soon. The board also allocated $108,000 to the county sheriff’s office to increase salaries of detention center employees.

The apparent windfall in funds will also give the county freedom to pay for other major expenditures in the current fiscal year. Many of these include higher costs for benefits that are being driven nationally by inflation, a 2.2 percent increase in cost-of-living adjustments for county employees and adjustments for some individuals on the county’s pay plan, and inflationary costs for the new EMS provider, MedEx of Ahoskie, who is expected to come on board this summer.

Where the money will come from

This sort of mid-year budget outlook and forecast is akin to halftime at a sporting event. While the players are taking a breather, the announcers and coaches look at every statistic imaginable and try to use them to predict how the game will end.

The same approach works well in the public arena. Commissioners can compare the amounts spent during the first half of a fiscal year, take a look at what revenues are likely to come in before the end of the budget year on June 30, see what remains to be paid in the year’s second half, and get a pretty accurate estimate. This estimate can become an important tool when work on the county budget gets down to business by the time spring arrives.

It’s not that often for local units of government like Lee County to have enough of a windfall in tax revenues and other savings to bring about any meaningful change in public policy that will last more than a year or so. In almost every case, it takes more than just a one-time infusion of cash to have any real impact at all. As a result, county commissioners are often forced to make some difficult choices on how unexpected revenues are spent as they ebb and flow, having little hard data on which to make a truly informed vote.

With the county’s economy on an upswing in recent months, the turn-around has opened a portal during which an opportunity exists to address some of the items on the county’s critical needs list before the trend swings in the other direction.

Funding for these two items, and a few more, will come from two main sources that will provide an unanticipated windfall for the county to do some big-ticket items that couldn’t be fit into its final budget for the current year when it was approved last June. These extra revenues come in the form of increased earnings in property tax receipts and sales tax revenues since July 1.

The projections show that quarterly sales tax distributions are up 12.3 percent over the amount that was projected in last year’s budget, a revenue increase that will net $2,839,405. That number will combine with another $2.1 million in new dollars from the property tax receipts that come largely from improvements to the personal or business assets, and the added value results in combined unanticipated receipts for the current budget year of at least $4.9 million.

It’s during these annual events that commissioners often must face the realities of a coming fiscal year where fewer dollars will be available for county spending than the last one, forcing some tough calls on whether the county’s annual plan for receiving and spending funds can survive for another year without an increase in the property tax rate.

It’s especially hard for commissioners who promised constituents a cut in property taxes – particularly in years like 2026, when the several members are on the ballot.

What it all means

This year’s discussion was part of a two-day review of county funding priorities for the coming fiscal year, several of them items that came before the commissioners in years past but went unfunded due to a lack of sufficient revenues.

The $108,000 for jail employees was requested by Sheriff Brian Estes last year to make the starting salaries of beginning officers in the jail to closer to that of a new sheriff’s deputy, and to make those salaries more competitive with those of surrounding counties, thus increasing the incentive for Lee County detention staff to remain in the county.

The vote is a huge win for this group that makes up half of the total number of those the school district employs. Its members attended meetings of the commissioners and of the school board for a year and a half, keeping their concerns in the minds of those who set policy and allocate resources, and their persistence and hard work are about to pay off.

They learned the value of making friends in high places. LCS Superintendent Dr. Chris Dossenbach promised the hundreds of classified employees on the district’s payroll in November 2024 that he and the central office staff would do everything possible to investigate the amount of the claims and bring back a plan to get it done.

He returned a month later with an outline of how it was to start, with the first quarter of the needed funding ($709,000) being provided in January 2025 by district funds and cost savings from a reorganization of the central office. The vote by the commissioners won’t provide for all of what the school staff members asked for, but it’s halfway there now.

They began as political neophytes, having little understanding of how to change a system that they believed had been rigged against them for more than 25 years, but they attended commissioner and school board meetings several times a month and learned how the levers of policy making are pulled. They became fluent in the language spoken by those who make and administer the county’s $100 million-plus annual budget.

Once those essential skills were mastered, real progress started to be made. Some of them continued to show up for work year after year without seeing an increase in their pay. In the summer of 2024, as many as 150 or more of them began to learn the skills of advocacy and how to use them to bring about change. That work finally finally paid off in January.

A lot went on behind the scenes. For more than five years, the commissioners and the school board could hardly be put into the same room before the meeting was adjourned and the head shaking resumed. But some of those leaders never gave up searching for common ground.

Not every problem is without a solution, it seems, although it sure looked that way a short 12 months ago.