It’s that time of year again.

It’s budget crunch time and on Thursday, May 15, Guilford County Manager Mike Halford will drop the big bomb that, each year, blows the budget discussion wide open.

Halford, as manager, has a whole lot of important duties related to his job; however, putting together and presenting the manager’s proposed budget, as he’ll do on Thursday night, is the most important thing he does each year.

Though the county commissioners will have the final say on the 2025-2026 fiscal budget that determines how the county spends its money in the following 12 months, in reality, about 95 percent, or even more, of the budget usually stays the same as the manager suggests.

In recent years, Halford has been bringing larger and larger budgets to the board and, after a huge windfall of new taxpayer money that the county saw following the 2022 revaluation of all the property in Guilford County, Halford, with the backing of the Democratic-led board of commissioners, began spending that “extra” 90-million plus every year from that reval.

 Tax rates haven’t gone up but tax bills sure have.

When the Republican-led board saw county property values increase in the revaluation in the revaluation before the 2022 reval, that board reduced the tax rate to make it “revenue neutral” – that is, property tax bills stayed the same on average despite the increase in property values.

The good news is that the new budget will not include a tax rate increase.

Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston has asked Halford for a budget that does not include a tax rate increase and that is what Halford will present to the board this week.

 The commissioners are essentially using this coming fiscal year, 2025-2026,  to bridge the gap to the 2026-2027 budget.

 That’s because, on Jan. 1, 2026, all property in the county will be assigned new values from the latest revaluation currently being conducted, and that means that, if the commissioners don’t adjust the tax rate downward – as they did not do after the last reval –  then county residents will see even larger tax bills despite the tax rate remaining the same.

The commissioners always have some changes to the manager’s proposed budget.

For one thing, they invariably add money for their own “pet projects.” Each year, they give away taxpayer money to a long and somewhat random group of community non-profits such as a YMCA favored by a commissioner, a community group with ties to a board member, or a high school athletic fund at the chairman’s alma mater. Some of the non-profit groups added on to the funding list in the final days before a budget is adopted have literally never even been heard of by most of the nine commissioners.

As the Rhino Times noted last year at budget time, former Guilford County Commissioner Paul Gibson told the Rhino Times a long time ago that it was astonishing to him that this category of money going to non-profits makes up perhaps 2 percent of the county’s budget each year – however, the commissioners spend a great deal of their time arguing about those non-profits.

The other big item that always gets a lot of discussion among the board is how much the county should give Guilford County Schools.

It’s not known how much money Halford will suggest allocating to the county’s school system, but the Guilford County Board of Education has requested $44 million more than the schools got from the county last year – and that’s not going to happen.

No matter what Halford recommends for school funding in the new budget, which will go into effect on July 1, 2025, it’s almost a certainty that the commissioners will change the amount the schools get before the board adopts the new budget.

If the county manager plays the miserly bad cop and recommends very little new money for the school system, the commissioners can raise that amount and look like they’re being kind to the schools – even though the money they add in will be nowhere near the astronomical amount in additional money the school system is requesting.

Currently, roughly 43 percent of Guilford County’s budget already goes toward funding education operations and paying off debt from school bonds, and that percentage could go up in Halford’s coming recommended budget since the county now has to worry about paying back growing debt payments on the $2 billion school bond debt obligations in an era of higher interest rates than the county anticipated.

The Guilford County Commissioners also sometimes add positions in the final budget that the manager didn’t include in his budget recommendation. Many county department heads ask the manager for added positions each year, and, when he or she says no, the directors sometimes go over the manager’s head and plead with the commissioners – who often do grant the new positions.

In recent years, the Board of Commissioners has only found money for all their spending by taking money from the county’s savings account. Doing that so consistently makes some staff in the Budget Department – and state finance oversight officials as well – uneasy because it is a fundamental rule of good governance that you “should not use one-time funds for recurring costs” (such as using savings account money to pay salaries for new positions).

In early June, the board will hold a public hearing on the manager’s suggested budget and the commissioners will get input from area residents.

This year the board has also held town halls to hear what their constituents want to see in the coming budget.

In mid-June, the Board of Commissioners, which has the ultimate say of what does and does not get included in the county budget, will make its decisions as to how your money should be spent in the 12 months from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026.

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