My Top Priorities for Chapel Hill's $50 Million Bond
A window into my first major budgetary negotiation session.
Last night the Chapel Hill Town Council held a work session to discuss our next bond. We have about $50 million in debt capacity, more than $160 million in potential projects, all of which add value to the Town. Difficult choices lie ahead, and I want to show you how I’m weighing them.
The first question is whether to hold the bond referendum* in 2024 or 2025.
The case for a 2025 bond is that we can think longer and gather more information about projects. But I don’t currently believe that that will benefit us. We have articulated our values. We have received information from town staff about these projects. It’s very easy to mistake a longer deliberation for a better outcome, but this calls for open debate about impact and urgency followed by decisive action.
This is the package that currently seems to me to be the best deal:
Town Facilities ($19m)
Fire Station 4 $10m
Fire Station 3 $5m
Parking Deck $2m
Police Office Upfit $2m
Connectivity ($12.5m)
Fordham Sidepath $2m
ADA Transition Plan $2m
Bolin Creek Greenway $2m
Raleigh Rd. Sidepath $4m
Bolinwood Bridge $2.5m
Affordable Housing ($18.5m)
Legion Road Affordable Housing (160 units) $6m
Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Project (60-100 units) $4m
Public Housing Neighborhood Redevelopment (50 units) $2m
LIHTC Project (60 units) $2.5m
Craig Gomains Redevelopment (100 units) $4m
Connectivity. Our need for sidewalks, protected bike lanes, greenways, and other reductions in car dependency is urgent. It shapes our building, our city planning, our traffic, our emissions, our health, and our lifestyle – all while adding outdoor amenities that benefit every citizen in town. Building connectivity will change our city planning – especially our ability to consolidate parking and free up land for better uses, like pocket parks, commercial hubs, or housing projects – and it is the only tool we have to tackle traffic around Chapel Hill. Our greenways are also an investment in linear parks, so they are truly the closest we get to a silver bullet in town spending.
Housing. In the 2012 strategic plan and again in the recent Complete Community plan, we identified improving workforce housing as a top-tier need. Affordable housing helps the most vulnerable in our community and it helps people who work in our town but will never earn enough to live in it. Providing low-income housing helps us to fill lower-paying jobs, is more fair to the people working them, circulates more money into the local economy, and increases access to our incredible school system for lower and middle class families at a time when enrollments are shrinking in our public school systems in this county and when education is under attack statewide in North Carolina.
Facilities. Our firefighters and EMS technicians have waited a long time for facility upgrades that will address their living quarters, their equipment, their plumbing, even cracks in the walls. Our police staff are moving out of a dilapidated, moldy, unsafe building and into a multi-year leasing space that requires upgrades to be usable. These are cases where the Town simply has to invest to do right by our employees and to maintain functionality.
The Town has spent several million dollars recently on Parks and Recreation through ARPA and the penny for parks dedication in our yearly budget. Our greenways are open spaces - park amenities that also function as connectivity - and so they really satisfy this category as well. But I also think that we should review options in our five year budget plan for investing beyond the “penny for parks” allocation in our budget so that we can continue to catch up on facilities and maintenance in those areas.
That’s where I sit now. My colleagues will doubtless have different lists, and I am committed to being open to new information from them, from our staff, and from you. That’s what the job demands!
I hope it’s helpful and interesting to have some insight into how I’m thinking about these issues in my first budget cycle.
*One thing that’s important to know is that we hold bond referenda because we get the best interest rate through a referendum. There are other ways for the town to issue debt, but the interest is typically higher (about 1% higher). Over a 20 year period, paying an extra 1% interest on $50,000,000 in debt is multi-million-dollar difference in spending – which means we do fewer projects if voters don’t approve the referendum.