In his first Wake Forest budget, Town Manager is proposing to keep the property tax rate at the current 52 cents per $100 value with 41 cents to be used for general government operation and 11 cents for the Wake Forest Fire Department.
As Commissioner Brian Pate said after Padgett’s presentation, this will be a tax decrease for a lot of folks.
The reason? Wake County has just revalued all county property which resulted in the town’s tax base increasing from $4.51 million to $4.623 million though some of that increase was from growth. Padgett found that the tax rate to provide funds equivalent to those in the 2015-2016 fiscal year adjusted for growth – the revenue neutral rate – is 53.1 cents. He chose to go with the current rate of 52 cents instead even though it means $400,000 less in the town budget.
Padgett’s budget also includes $7,500 for the Wake Forest Boys & Girls Club; $11,240 for the Fourth of July Committee to cover the cost of security and the hours spent by the Wake Forest Police Department; $4,000 for Resources for Seniors for staffing and programs at the Northern Wake Senior Center; $4,000 for the Wake Forest College Birthplace which owns and operates the Wake Forest Historical Museum; and $12,500 for the Wake Forest Area Chamber of Commerce, the fee for the town’s community investor level of membership. The town last year moved economic development activities from the chamber into the town’s administrative structure and hired its first economic developer, Jason Cannon.
The budget also increases the mayor’s salary from $8,445 to $10,000 and the salary for commissioners from $6,190 to $8,000. Padgett’s budget message said those amounts are “more in line with other communities in the county such as Apex.”
The public hearing about this proposed budget will be held Tuesday, May 17, at 7 p.m. during the town board’s regular business meeting in the second-floor meeting room at town hall. The town board’s work session on the budget will be held Tuesday, May 31, at 5:30 p.m. in the ground-floor meeting room in town hall. Both are open to the public.
“I’m very pleased you have been able to come up with a budget with no tax increase,” Mayor Vivian Jones said. “Getting 16 new employees is a monumental task” and added, “I know you need more.”
One of the new employee titles is assistant town manager, though Padgett said Wednesday during the media briefing about the budget that he was going to wait and see how it goes before filling the position. That might be easier because another new position is an executive assistant for both him and Town Clerk Deeda Harris to assist with paperwork and routine tasks.
The Wake Forest Police Department is getting the biggest bump in personnel with nine new positions: four police officers, one sergeant for the traffic unit, and two communications supervisors, all of them slated to begin work at the beginning of 2017. The department currently has 84 authorized positions; in 2017 that will jump to 91. There is a recommendation in the budget to establish a traffic unit that would free up the large patrol division, allowing it to respond to the increasing amount of service calls. Fifteen replacement police cars are included in the separate Capital Improvements Plan along with a new street sweeper, a garbage truck and vehicles for the people in the new positions. The town purchases its vehicles through the state contract, but that will probably not be possible for the street sweeper.
The total operating cost for next year for public safety, which includes the police department and the contract with the Wake Forest Fire Department, is $15,150,620. The fire department’s contract at 11 cents of the tax levy should yield just under $5 million. A cost-sharing study about fire services in Wake County is complete, and Padgett’s message said he hopes to see the county commissioners approve it before July 1 when the new budget year begins. “Under the new formula, the [Wake Forest] fire service should see an increase in county funding,” which has been unreliable at times and often has not met the cost of protecting the out-of-town Wakette fire district which includes many large subdivisions.
One big item looming over the budgets for the next few years is the need to expand the Operations Center, which is now on Friendship Chapel Road and has outgrown the buildings. Padgett said Wednesday that the problem is on the town board’s agenda for May when it will be asked to approve a feasibility study: should the center remain where it is with additional land and construction or purchase an adequate site somewhere else and rebuild.
In summary, the town’s general fund will receive an estimated $23,641,085 from property taxes and have a total from all revenues of $40,724,500. The budget for Wake Forest Power, which is operated as a business, will include $20,947,935. That may change if/when the town receives the results of an electric rate study, which is due sometime this spring. It is anticipated the recommended rates from the study may be lower than the present ones because the town has been able to shed such a large part of its electric department indebtedness through a sale of its shares in power plants to Duke Progress Energy.
(There will be more articles about the budget in later Gazette issues as information becomes available and there is time to study the large document. A copy is available at town hall for residents to study.)
