In Chapel Hill, A Council Divided

At the end of a three-hour budget work session on June 4, Chapel Hill Town Council members looked just about ready to throw in the towel.

Adam Searing and Karen Stegman were slumped in their chairs. Camille Berry snapped at mayor Jess Anderson for seemingly interrupting another council member’s speaking time. And Melissa McCullough, suffering from a poorly timed bout of laryngitis, could only painfully whisper (“Is the microphone on? Do you want to write it down and someone else will read it?” others asked her).

Finally, in the culmination of a months-long process, a slim majority gave the informal go-ahead on a $164 million budget funded by another tax increase for the town, the fifth hike in as many years.

Voting yes: Berry, McCullough, Paris Miller-Foushee, Theo Nollert, and Elizabeth Sharp. Voting no: Anderson, Searing, Stegman and Amy Ryan.

The split, and the exasperation around the process, was the result of a pressure cooker of a year with a brutal county-wide tax revaluation, a federal firing clusterfuck, a just-completed search for a new town manager, and a looming November municipal election that will see the mayor and half the council up for reelection.

“We are catching up on long deferred costs, many of which have caught up with us because we adopted revenue neutral rates in the last decade,” Nollert said at a May meeting. “That was a mistake. We shouldn’t have done it, but we did, and we have to deal with the consequences now.”

Anderson, one of the four members who opposed the budget, said that the tax rate was too high.

“I’m deeply concerned that we are putting an extra burden on our residents at a time of uncertainty,” she said at a June 18 meeting to formally adopt the budget, noting the federal cuts that have hit this part of North Carolina particularly hard. “We are in for a few more bumpy years, at least, and we can’t make up for all the cuts that we’re experiencing by raising property taxes on people.”

A Triangle mayor voting against her council’s budget is uncommon, but not unheard of. Over in Durham, former mayor Elaine O’Neal voting against the 2023 budget was not the most dramatic occurrence on that dysfunctional council.

The economic problems that burdened this year’s council are not going anywhere, so opinions over the tax rate may serve as a dividing line for incumbents and challengers alike in this fall’s municipal election.

Anderson has already announced her reelection bid, and her only declared opponent is Chris Suttle, a pirate portrayer and cannabis lobbyist who decided to run for mayor after being hit by a town bus. Without a challenger from within the town’s political establishment, Anderson is unlikely to have a difficult campaign.

Four council seats are up for election. Two are wide open, as Searing and Stegman announced this month that they’re not running. Miller-Foushee is defending her seat, and Berry has not announced a decision and did not respond to a request for comment from INDY (during a recent council meeting she noted that she has been behind on responding to budget-related emails).

Planning commission member Wes McMahon and consultant Erik Valera (who fell just about 550 votes short of winning a seat in 2023) have declared their candidacies, and one or two other names have been buzzing across lips for months (the filing period runs from July 7-18).

Part of Anderson’s budget nay vote can be chalked up to a difference in approach between her and interim town manager Mary Jane Nirdlinger.

“Knowing that we were getting a new manager in, I was kind of hoping we could wait on a big tax increase to see the new energy and new ideas and the vast, vast experience that our new manager [Ted Voorhees] has,” Anderson tells INDY after the vote, referring to Nirdlinger’s just-hired successor. “I did have some hope that we could let him take a crack at leadership and bring in a new perspective.”

The budget is based on many estimates because the town doesn’t know exactly how much money it will raise from revenue streams like sales tax. Anderson clarified that she supported the staff pay increase, but thought that the town could have started with a lower property tax rate based on rosier revenue predictions, and then raised taxes later if those didn’t materialize.

Nirdlinger, a former deputy manager (and avid writer), has been in the interim role since Chris Blue retired early this year. At the time of his departure, municipal microblog Triangle Blog Blog noted that “Staff only learned of his departure shortly before the public announcement. It raises our spidey senses!”

While the council and mayor ultimately vote on the budget, the manager wields some quiet power during the process. Council members are not usually finance experts, so the town staff presents suggestions and recommendations for the council to consider.

Early on in this year’s budget process, council member Sharp asked Nirdlinger to bring a more detailed explanation of the budget levers that the council could play with, especially if they were to consider a cutback in services in order to keep taxes lower.

“I would very much like to have those trade-offs explicitly detailed for us,” Sharp said at the May 7 meeting. “I very much want us to know specifically what that means, and that we not just understand that as a vague concept of trade-offs.”

To keep the tax rate low, some council members considered a smaller staff pay increase and cuts to the $36 million transit fund, which helps power the fare-free socialist bus system that the town shares with its conjoined sibling Carrboro and UNC Chapel Hill. Both items ultimately received full funding.

The town budget process has a steep learning curve, and the current council is stocked with relative newcomers. While Anderson was the endorsed heir to former mayor Pam Hemminger, who ruled for eight years, they certainly have different mayoral styles. North Carolina mayoralties are meant to be part-time jobs, but Hemminger was known for a hands-on full-time approach. She also had more of a business background, while Anderson is literally a policy professor at UNC Chapel Hill.

A manager rarely pontificates like the electeds, but their deep involvement in the budget makes them almost like a tenth person on the dais through the process. Five members eventually agreed on Nirdlinger’s recommended tax rate, but in closed sessions through the spring the council was also weighing options for her replacement.

The path from deputy manager to interim manager to full-time manager is well-trodden. Durham’s current city and county managers were both deputies who graduated from interim to fulltime. The just-announced Chapel-Hill Carrboro schools superintendent was also an elevated deputy.

It’s not clear if Nirdlinger even wanted the full-time role because the hiring process is one of the few official actions that the council can carry out behind closed doors. At the council’s June 25 meeting, Nirdlinger gave a brief and slight smile as town hall applauded her for her service and welcomed her full-time successor, Voorhees.

Voorhees is perhaps more prepared for some council herding and wrangling thanks to his experience in Wilmington, Fayetteville, Orange County, V.A., and even Durham (author’s note: in 2008, the INDY criticized Voorhees for his response to a drought, but we are willing to give him another shot given that 17 years have passed).

“I pledge to you that I will do my best to serve with empathy and to practice deep listening during my first several months here,” Voorhees told the council once he was announced. 

“Have a great vacation.”

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the council has raised taxes the past three years.

Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected]. 

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