All posts in category Budget

Are we really #allinthistogether?

The Chapel Hill town manager presented a very tight budget for the coming fiscal year. As part of covering core services in a time of noticeably lower revenue, he delays for 6 months the 65-cent-per-hour pay raise for the town’s lowest-paid workers that the town committed to in being certified a Living Wage employer. But […]

Kneecapping our best intentions

Chapel Hill residents take housing affordability seriously. Are we on Town Council poised to undermine progress we’ve made? The budget we passed last week included a property tax increase that would fund the $10 million bond voters approved last year to be spent on increasing the supply of affordable housing. Some years back, council approved […]

Wealth gap

I say this every year at budget time. Call it my annual screed: A flat percentage salary increase across the whole pay scale widens the wealth gap. The rich get richer, and the poor end up with comparatively less buying power. This year, the town’s 3% across-the-board pay raise will put an extra $900 (before […]

The cost of appearances

There we go again. Dipping into our savings to pay for nonessentials. Living beyond our means. Our new town manager presented his recommended budget, a 3.7% increase over what we spent the prior year, which would require only a 1.6-cent property tax increase (per every $100 of property valuation). The hiring process for our town […]

Cost of combating climate change

Town Council gets it: Climate change is real. At our April 17 meeting, we reviewed a draft action plan for reducing our carbon footprint. The plan called for requiring solar panels on 80% of the rooftop area on all development proposals that needed a rezoning to proceed. State law prohibits municipalities from requiring new construction […]

Generous to a fault

Someone needs to cut up Town Council’s credit card. In recent weeks, our new town manager has been educating council on various aspects of the budget. In our work sessions, he has set the expectation that we will need to authorize a tax increase to cover the cost of all the things we want to […]

Operating at a loss

The old joke goes that a naïve business owner admitted he lost money on each product sale, but said, “I make up for it in volume.” Chapel Hill town staff are familiar with that business model, and after the Town Council retreat this past weekend, we are, too. We learned that for the past couple […]

How Generous Can We Afford to Be?

Richard Jenrette snagged his dream job right out of college — sportswriter for the N&O. A few years into it, though, he looked around and noticed that newspaper people didn’t make much money. He enrolled in Harvard Business School to learn a more lucrative trade. Jenrette, the “J” in the enormously successful brokerage firm DLJ […]

DOLRT bills: woulda, coulda, shoulda

Think of the transformative impact $14.5 million could have had on Orange County if we had spent it on extending bus lines so the modestly paid could commute to work and fewer people would have to rely on cars. Instead, Orange County commissioners gambled it away on studies, design and engineering for a light rail […]

Honor Council

Not long ago, a few members of Duke University’s Honor Council spoke with students at McDougle Middle School about the roles of morals and ethics in making good decisions. Honor Council members set up a scenario for the moral dilemma all of us have faced more than once in our lives — You see someone […]