Proposed Chapel Hill Town budget

This was presented last night at the Town Council meeting.

On 12 May, I sent an e-mail to the Town Manager with these two questions:

"First, you include a slide in your presentation that compares tax rates in Chapel Hill with others in NC. It appears to me that you have picked other places that have both county and town or city taxes, and I can understand on one level why you may have done that. But I think that is unfair and at least incomplete. For purposes of allowing all of us to see tax comparisons, I believe you should include bars for tax rates in ALL counties adjoining Orange. In the end, for us taxpayers, the total rate we pay is what really matters financially, and it allows us to make the necessary comparisons and analyses of taxes paid/value received. When you have added those bars to your chart, I would appreciate your e-mailing a copy to me.

Second, we live in Southern Village and so the Southern Community Park is of special interest. I would like to know the fully allocated projected cost of operating the park for your budget year. And I would also like to know how the success or failure of the park is being measured. I walk through the park regularly and find that the number of people using the facilities there to be pitifully small, with the sole exception of the play area for children, followed by the picnic area and shelter (which I would estimate occupy about less than 1% of the park’s land), and occasional intense use of the playing fields on less than one day/week by unidentified (to the public) teams."