Of all the things local government does, passing a budget each year is one of the most complex and bureaucratic. In Raleigh, city staff and elected officials spend months maneuvering through a series of requests, drafts, work sessions, and hearings to arrive at a 400-page document laden with an alphabet soup of acronyms.
The process may be somewhat inscrutable to a layperson, but it’s consequential. The city funds transit, parks, public safety, social programs, water and solid waste services, and quite a bit more, and all those spending choices impact residents’ property taxes and quality of life.
Right now, Raleigh’s city manager Marchell Adams-David and her staff are putting together a budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. Meanwhile, the mayor and city council are meeting periodically for budget work sessions to get updates and provide feedback on a few topics of special public interest (like separation allowance for firefighters). Residents will get to share their thoughts about the budget at a public hearing in June, and the council must adopt a budget by the end of that month.
With budget season well under way, the INDY asked Raleigh mayor Janet Cowell to distill her top priorities for the next city budget. A veteran of the city council and a former state treasurer, Cowell is fluent in the language of municipal finance. Here’s what she told us to expect from the next budget and how it will affect residents.
There won’t be a significant property tax increase this year
“We know that people have had a lot of tax increases in past years at rates that are not sustainable,” Cowell says. “And we also know the election turned on cost of living to some extent and so are very cognizant that we do not want to dramatically increase the budget.”
The city budget for the current fiscal year is $1.4 billion, a 12 percent increase over the previous fiscal year. Homeowners paid higher property taxes this year compared to last year, too, following county property revaluations—a consistent trend over the past few years.
Cowell says this year, residents might see a slight increase consistent with inflation, but nothing dramatic.
“I just don’t think there’s an appetite, on the council’s part or the citizens’ part, for the kinds of tax increases you’ve seen,” she says.
Don’t expect many new programs, either
Cowell says that in the current inflationary period, costs have gone up steeply across the board. In order for the city to keep tax rates relatively stable, it needs to implement some “belt-tightening” measures and eliminate some vacant positions.
“It’s just stunning how much everything has gone up,” she says. “Part of that is real estate values have gone up so much in Wake County that your acquisition cost of any piece of land is astronomically more expensive. But then you look at materials, labor, everything, and that is making it really challenging to undertake big new projects.”
With that in mind, “I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of big, new anything,” Cowell says. “It’s going to be completing existing projects, continuing existing services.”
For the budget to reflect the city’s current priorities without increasing substantially, the mayor says she wants to shift some existing staff onto new projects. She intends to create a specialized team that focuses on tax credit projects for affordable housing, and another dedicated to green infrastructure.
Cowell’s primary focus is paying city workers competitively
One area the city will be investing more resources is staff salaries. Raleigh hired a consulting firm to conduct a compensation study, and the consultants found that city workers are underpaid compared to the market average. The pay disparity leads to vacancies, problems with retention, and gaps in services.
Paying city staff competitively “may not be sexy for folks who reside in the city,” Cowell allows, but “I think they do want to know that these vacancies get filled.”
“What that study found was that our employees are [paid] 14 percent below market. And Raleigh is an attractive place to be, so we’ve been able to hire and retain, but that’s still not sustainable,” Cowell says.
The mayor wants to see pay raises across the board for city workers. She’s emphasized in the past the importance of paying police and firefighters competitively, and she told the INDY she’s also paying special attention to departments like code enforcement and permitting.
Those workers “have a direct impact on our ability to get housing on the ground and deliver projects,” Cowell says. “I definitely want to … shore up those salaries.”
Trump’s tariffs likely won’t impact this budget
Cowell expects the full force of the tariffs to hit in the next budget cycle, not this one.
For the time being, the city is focused on “defending the money that we’re getting from the feds,” Cowell says. Most of the federal funding Raleigh receives right now is for rail projects and Bus Rapid Transit.
Does Raleigh need all this bureaucracy?
Cowell has been reading Abundance by journalists Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, and it’s got her thinking about how to pare back Raleigh’s morass of rules and regulations.
The book posits that in order to escape the current era of polarization and government mistrust, Democrats in power need to eschew cumbersome regulations and take on ambitious public projects.
“I’m trying to think through, are there bite-sized pieces … at the city [level] where you could try to start extracting yourself from this thicket of bureaucracy,” Cowell says.
There are areas of the city’s work where a slower, more cumbersome process is inevitable, she says, especially when the state or federal government is involved. But on the local scale, she’s looking for areas where Raleigh can “keep it simpler and make more headway.”
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Chloe Courtney Bohl is a corps member for Report for America. Reach her at chloe@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.