This week in local government

This was budget week. The fiscal year ends on 30 June, and in seven days Chatham County, Orange County, Wake Forest, Knightdale, Fuquay-Varina and Pittsboro's ABC board all adopted the ordinances they will spend next year under. Wake County's commissioners set the school and Wake Tech bond referenda moving toward the November ballot.

Only one of those budgets was contested, and it was contested hard. Orange County's commissioners had a motion in front of them to send the budget back to the county manager for another 0.47 cents in cuts. It failed on a 3-3 tie. The commissioner who moved it laid out why: debt service could take 17 to 18 percent of the general fund between 2030 and 2036, and the county's rate is well above Alamance at 49.4 cents, Wake at 51.7 and Durham at 55.4. The resolution of intent the board had adopted on 4 June set the rate at 68.05 cents per $100, reaching 82.84 for Chapel Hill residents once the 14.79-cent school district tax is added. Those against said the manager had already cut close to the bone against an unprecedented $21 million gap, and that reopening it at that stage meant finding the money with no public visibility. The budget then passed 5-1 and the ten-year capital plan 5-1, the same commissioner opposed to both, warning of the beginning of a long line of tax increases. Commissioner Jamezetta Bedford was absent. She died five days later.

Holly Springs held a public hearing on a data center moratorium on the 16th, the ordinance it adopted that month and was still studying under in September. Its neighbors were doing the same thing within days of each other, and a resident at Orange County's meeting thanked that board for its own moratorium and asked it to hold out for industry that does not use water at the rate of a city.

Public comment was unusually busy and unusually local. Fourteen people spoke at Fuquay-Varina, eight of them about parking on the streets of one subdivision — seven asking for a restriction wider than the one staff had drawn. The board took three motions to settle where the line fell. Four others spoke against a town park the board had already funded and would pick a builder for three weeks later. At Orange County, four of seven speakers came about the same vacant lot in the county's western corner, rented out for events advertised as agritourism that draw thousands of people down a road barely wide enough for two cars, and asked for a mass gathering ordinance with permits and enforcement behind it.

Chapel Hill's council spent the 17th on housing and rights: development contracts and ground leases for the Homestead Gardens affordable development with Community Home Trust and Habitat for Humanity, and an amendment to the town's nondiscrimination ordinance. Garner returned to a quasi-judicial hearing it had continued from 2 June, on a special use permit for 300 apartments and nine retail buildings on 42.82 acres off US 70 East, this time to approve or deny it. Knightdale adopted its budget and took a hearing on an annexation agreement with Raleigh -- two towns fixing between them where each may grow. Wake Forest adopted its budget and two ordinances regulating electric bikes and scooters, with impoundment authority and civil penalties, a week before Cary's council agreed to try education first on the same problem.

Apex commissioned a study of moving CSX rail switching out of downtown, which is a decision about what that downtown is for twenty years from now. Pittsboro's downtown design committee recommended three facade grants and the purchase of two sculptures its parent board bought six days later. Three Cary boards cancelled and Pittsboro's planning board published an agenda to say it had.

31 boards met across 14 governments, with 624 agenda items on file.

Written when 26 of this week's meetings had posted an agenda; 34 have now. The counts below are current.