I’m a Rowan County resident, not a journalist, not a politician. I’m just somebody who started digging into the Salisbury city budget because I kept hearing about a tax increase and I wanted to understand it. What I found made me want to write this.
The proposed budget is $131 million. It includes a 1.9-cent property tax increase and a 4-percent water rate hike. City Manager Jim Greene says it “emphasizes our commitment to financial stewardship.” I’d really like to believe that. But when I started reading the actual line items, I started having a hard time seeing where the stewardship part comes in.
Let me just walk through some of what I found.
The budget includes $130,000 for a website and branding study. At a May 26 work session, a council member said it was “a lot of money, honestly, to look into branding” and asked “is it that bad?” The city manager’s answer was that it’s “a Council priority.” That’s not really an answer to whether we need it. that’s just explaining how it got there. Those are two different things.
There’s $215,000 budgeted for a COOP consultant. That’s a Continuity of Operations Plan. FEMA provides a template for that. Free. I don’t know what the extra $215,000 is buying that a federal template wouldn’t.
The budget also has $156,567 for something called the Fusus crime camera platform. I looked around and found that Savannah pays $150,000 for it and Columbia, Missouri, pays around $105,000. I can’t tell from the budget what modules Salisbury is getting or whether anyone went through a competitive bidding process. That information just isn’t there.
And then there’s $373,338 listed under something called Community Effort Partners. No list of recipients. No criteria for how groups qualify. No metrics for what the city is trying to accomplish with that money. Just the number.
The one that really got me was the $2.1 million fueling site. Fleet fuel cards cost about $50,000 a year. I’m not saying the fueling site is definitely the wrong call. maybe there’s a good reason for it. but the budget doesn’t make that case. It just spends the money.
So when you add up what looks questionable and I tried to be conservative. you’re somewhere between $3.8 and $5.5 million in spending that raises legitimate questions. You can look at the budget yourself on the city’s website and see these numbers.
Here’s what makes all of this harder to swallow. The city’s fund balance. meaning reserves. sits $17.4 million above its own policy threshold. The tax increase is projected to generate $893,000. That means the reserves already cover the stated need roughly 19 times over. So the question isn’t whether the money is there. It is. The question is why they’re asking taxpayers to pay more when that’s the situation.
And I haven’t even gotten to the public safety part yet, because that one bothers me the most.
Salisbury has 22 unfilled police positions. The Crime Abatement Team was disbanded. The traffic division was eliminated. Officers logged 11,500 overtime hours trying to cover the gaps. At the June 2 budget hearing, a local business owner testified that they were experiencing “a somewhat drastic increase of crime” connected to “the growing homeless population” and that “there simply were not enough patrol officers to respond.” People are paying attention. People are worried.
I’m not saying the city doesn’t care. But a budget is where you show your priorities with actual dollars, not words.
Other cities have done things differently. Stafford, Texas, eliminated its property tax back in 1995 and ran that way for 30 years. They faced some pressure to revisit it in 2024 but did not reinstate it. I’m not saying Salisbury should do exactly that. Every city is different, but the point is that different approaches are possible when there’s political will.
What I’d like to see and what I think a lot of residents would get behind is a formal citizen budget review process. Not a rubber stamp. An actual process where regular people can ask these questions before the vote, not after.
The vote is June 16. Seven people are going to decide how to spend $131 million. I think the rest of the public deserves a seat at that table.
Open the process. Let everyone in.
Stephen Arthur lives in Rowan County.
