Dare County’s proposed budget for the 2016 fiscal year, which begins July 1, was presented at the May 18 meeting of the Dare County Board of Commissioners and will be the topic of a public hearing by the board on Monday, June 1.
Also on the agenda at Monday’s meeting is a discussion of a bill in the N.C. Senate that would allow the commissioners to use up to $3 million a year of the occupancy taxes earmarked for beach nourishment to maintain the county’s waterways.
In addition, the board appointments on the commissioners’ agenda may be of interest to taxpayers in Hatteras village.
THE PROPOSED BUDGET
The 2016 proposed budget was presented to the commissioners by county manager Robert Outten.
The goals of the proposed budget, Outten said, match the board’s desires, put forth at a retreat in February and two budget workshops.
They are:
- Maintain but not expand current county service levels.
- Work within existing revenue sources.
- Maintain current department and function levels.
Thus, the 2016 budget proposes spending $101,870,999 in the General Fund, a modest increase of 1.16 percent over the current year.
When all expenditures, including special funds, are considered, the county budget rises to $154,704,808, which is 21.31 percent more than last year. However, Outten noted, without the special funds for inlet maintenance and beach nourishment, the total is only 1.58 percent more than last year.
Under the proposal, Dare County’s property tax rate of 43 cents per $100 dollars of valuation remains the same.
The proposals reflect only a small increase of .82 percent in the county tax base from $12.8 billion to $12.9 billion.
Some highlights of the proposed budget:
- No new programs.
- A net increase of .5 employee positions.
- No structural changes to employees’ health plan but a projected increase of 7.5 percent in expenditures.
- A $1,000 cost-of-living adjustment salary increase per employee in the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years, which means lower paid employees will get a higher percentage of the increase. The cost of the increase is $781,222 per year. The percent increase per employee ranges from .71 percent up to 4.55 percent for lower paid employees.
- Capital outlays of $938,569. That includes $45,000 for public relations software, $365,000 for sheriff’s department vehicle replacement, $400,000 for EMS vehicle replacement, $65,000 for mosquito control vehicle replacement, $22,000 for rubble transfer vehicle replacement, $8,000 for a turf maintenance mower, and $34,069 for washers and dryers for the jail.
- $25,000 for legal fees to a lobbyist.
- Expenditure reductions of $536,519. This includes $302,658 from existing line items, $118,831 from a decrease in retirement rate, $61,525 in fuel, $27,289 from fleet maintenance overhead, and $10,309 from travel budgets.
- An increase of $232,604 in the water fund. There will be a 2 percent increase in rates for 2016, as suggested by a rate study that prompted the commissioners to adopt a new water rate structure in the current budget year.
- Dare’s budget includes $20,310,742 in local current expenses for the county Board of Education. It also includes a local capital outlay of $250,000 and deferred maintenance of $500,000 for schools.
The proposed budget for the Board of Education could present an issue down the road.
Before the budget was presented at the May 18 meeting, during public comment, Board of Education chairman Ben Sproul told the commissioners that the proposed budget was $514,626 short of what the BOE has proposed. That difference is the cost of a second phase of a state-mandated salary increase for early career teachers.
In a joint meeting of the commissioners and the education board members in March both groups embraced a new funding formula for the schools that had been hammered out in meetings that began last fall.
The Board of Education’s proposed 2016 budget follows that new funding formula. However, the county budget does not.
Outten noted at the May 18 meeting that the commissioners had not formally adopted the new formula and that the second-phase of the state salary increase for early career teachers had not been approved yet by the General Assembly and was, therefore, not in the county’s proposed budget. The salary increase proposal is in the Governor’s and the House of Representatives’ budgets.
One of the Commissioners’ budget initiatives for 2016 is to create a new special revenue fund that would provide the local match for state and federal funds for inlet maintenance.
The proposed 2016 budget includes $3 million for the fund. Outten said that $1.25 million of that will come from anticipated surplus from the current budget year, $1 million will be transferred from the beach nourishment fund, and $750,000 will come from the anticipated sale of the old EMS helicopter.
Click here to see the PowerPoint of the county’s 2016 proposed budget.
And click here to see the entire Dare County budget for fiscal year 2016.
USE OF OCCUPANCY TAXES
The local funding for inlet maintenance is tied to legislation that is now pending in the General Assembly.
The Commissioners have once rejected proposed legislation that would have obtained the county’s share of the funding from occupancy taxes and instead asked the legislature to approve a 1/4-cent sales tax increase without a referendum.
The House quickly passed legislation to increase the sales tax, but the bill appears dead in the Senate.
Instead, Sen. Bill Cook, who represents Dare County, has once again added language in Senate Bill 160 that would establish a shallow-draft inlet fund to allow the Dare Commissioners to use occupancy tax money for the local share.
This time the language specifically states that the money would come from the occupancy taxes collected for beach nourishment. Currently, 2 percent of the 6 percent county occupancy tax is earmarked for beach nourishment.
The section reads:
“Sec. 3.3. Waterway Maintenance. – Notwithstanding any provision restricting the use of taxes authorized in this act, the county may use up to three million dollars ($3,000,000) of the net proceeds of the taxes authorized by Sections 3.1 and 3.2 of this act per fiscal year for maintenance of waterways in the county. This section is repealed for fiscal years beginning on or after July 1, 2021.”
Item 11 on the agenda for Monday, June 1, is a discussion of SB 160 and, presumably, a decision by the board whether or not to take any action on it.
BOARD APPOINTMENTS
At each meeting, the Commissioners deal with appointments to various county advisory boards and committees. As terms expire, members either ask for or decline reappointment.
Usually, these appointments are pretty routine with commissioners mostly agreeing to reappoint members who want to continue serving or accepting the recommendation of the committee when a members wants to retire from the board.
Occasionally, an appointment comes up when board members whose terms are expiring want to continue but others have applied for positions on those boards.
Anyone can apply for appointment to one of the many county boards and committees. More information is available on the advisory panels and application process on the county website, www.darenc.com. Scroll down to advisory boards and committees on the left hand side of the page.
At Monday’s meeting, the board will deal with appointments to a dozen of these boards.
One is the Rodanthe-Waves-Salvo Community Center Board. Two members’ terms are expiring — Susan Gray and J.W. Kierzkowski. Both have asked to be reappointed. No one else has applied for membership on that board, so it’s likely that the board will reappoint the two members.
Another is the Hatteras Community Center Board, which is also known as the Hatteras Tax District Board. Its members, also called trustees, make decisions on how to spend the funds collected by the village’s special taxing district, currently 8.21 cents on each $100 of property valuation.
Three trustees have expiring terms — Ernie Foster, Ricki Shepherd, and Geraldine Farrow. All have asked to be reappointed.
However, two members of the community have applied to be appointed to that board.
The two are George Banks, who is a salesman, and Dennis Robinson, marketing manager for Midgett Realty. The commissioners will decide whether to reappoint all three or replace one or more of them with the new applicants.
The Hatteras Community Center Board was in the news last year as its members considered whether to buy an oceanfront parcel of land in the village that had been offered to it.
The offer from the Hatteras Island Ocean Center engendered a good deal of discussion — and opposition — at community meetings about whether or not to commit the village tax district to the asking price of $1.2 million. Eventually, the board voted 3-2 not to make an offer on the property.
Both Banks and Robinson applied for membership last November when the tax board was contemplating buying the land.
Another board that has been in the news lately is the Dare County Oregon Inlet and Waterways Commission, and appointments to that board are also on Monday’s agenda.
Four members have terms expiring — Fletcher Willey, Arvin Midgett, David May, and Jed Dixon. All four would like to be reappointed.
Three people have applied for membership on the commission. They are Holly White of Kill Devil Hills, a fisheries biologist with N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries; Stan Clough of Kill Devil Hills, who is self-employed in building, construction, and development, and Charles F. Earley Jr. of Manteo, a critical care paramedic who is employed by Dare County.
NOT ON THE AGENDA
At the May 4 meeting, board chairman Bob Woodard appointed an ad hoc committee of three commissioners to make recommendations about merging two county advisory panels on inlets and waterways.
Commissioners Warren Judge, Allen Burrus, and Beverly Boswell as chairperson were given 30 days to explore whether to combine the Oregon Inlet Task Force and the Oregon Inlet and Waterways Commission and, if so, how the merger should be accomplished.
Earlier this year, it was apparently decided by some — it’s still not clear who — involved in the two panels that the work was overlapping and communication had become a problem. Therefore, it seemed like a good idea at the time to merge the two groups.
In April, the Waterways Commission members voted to recommend to the county commissioners that their panel be disbanded and its work be absorbed into the Task Force.
This decision didn’t sit well on Hatteras Island, where the county’s second inlet is located, especially when the Task Force members made it clear they weren’t interested in solving the problem of shoaling in Hatteras Inlet.
The ad hoc committee had a public meeting in mid-May that was described by one person who attended as “the most combative public meeting” he had even participated in.
The next week each of the panels met.
The Task Force made it clear — again — that they wanted to focus on Oregon Inlet and only Oregon Inlet.
The Waterways Commission voted not to disband after all.
At one point, Boswell said that she planned a second meeting of the ad hoc committee. However, this week she said she has not yet scheduled another meeting.
“I have forwarded the wishes of both boards to our chairman,” she said in an e-mail. “I was waiting to see if it was necessary to have another meeting.”
The discussion of combining the two advisory panels is not on the agenda for Monday, but look for it to come up — perhaps in commissioners’ business at the meeting’s end.
Even if both groups continue down their separate paths, Hatteras islanders have some questions they want answered about such things as representation on the Waterways Commission and funding sources for dredging Hatteras Inlet.
