Roanoke Rapids City Council today voted to go with a 4-cent tax increase for the upcoming fiscal year.
The action came following a budget work session in which City Manager Kelly Traynham said she had made additional cuts to bring the proposed financial plan down to $20,254,342. Until this morning’s work session, a $21,113,732 operating budget had been on the table.
This most likely means the city will have to take less than $800,000 from the undesignated fund balance to reach the $20,254,342 operating budget for the 2026-27 fiscal year, Traynham said. A $1,601,054 infusion from the fund balance had originally been proposed.
Councilman Warren Keith Bell made the motion to go with the 4-cent tax increase and Sandra Bryant cast the second. The proposal was unanimously approved. If the budget is approved, the tax rate will go from 64.1 cents per $100 of assessed value to 68.1 cents.
Traynham said whittling the original projection down was a matter of reducing some of the city’s personnel expenses while still leaving room for a 3 percent cost-of-living adjustment for employees. “Then our police department pay ranges were adjusted to be more competitive with the market.”
There will be no jobs lost or services cut, she said. There are already 16 positions that have been unfunded over the last 10 years. If the budget is approved there will three additional positions frozen for the upcoming fiscal, bringing the total to 19. “We’ve been freezing positions at every opportunity — not because we need them frozen, but because we’ve been trying to stay sustainable.”
Asked how tough this budget process has been, the city manager said, “If you look at it from a purely mathematical standpoint, sitting behind and looking at spreadsheets, the math doesn’t lie. There’s certain things we have to pay. We have to budget for obligations that we are committed to. The budget does not have anything flexible in there.”
Looking at what the budget proposal means to the community and addressing the needs that have been expressed, Traynham said, “This budget does not meet that. It's discouraging. For me, I could make two choices. I could either give up or I can say challenge accepted and try to get this right and try to lead us into a sustainable future. We don’t know what other factors we’re going to be up against year to year most of the time.”
She said, however, “We are a public service agency and we rely on human beings to provide a service.”
Parks and Recreation Director Kelly Daughtry spoke during the work session about the implications the proposed budget has on her department. “If my budget’s cut any more then I will have to close a facility. I don’t have any other options. I took the past 10 years of funding from what I’ve received from city funds and with inflation that should have gone up 2.6 percent each year. It has gone down about 20 percent overall. Being here 10 years ago and being here now, with inflation it’s like a 41 percent decrease for us.”
Daughtry said she didn’t “really have a whole lot to offer because my only offerings would be to close a facility which you would still have to maintain and not have the service for the citizens. We’re going to do the best we can with this budget.”
What has helped the department is donations, she told the council, “None of this includes any of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that I have requested for the deferred maintenance we have had over the past 10 years. A lot of it is generated from fundraising from local businesses. Our local businesses have been very generous and we are most grateful. When you see signs on our facilities please recognize them for that.”
A recent example is work on a new concession stand deck at Doyle Field that in the next month or so will make it ADA compliant. “That was spearheaded by different organizations that use Doyle Field. The city’s contribution is going to total about $500 and we’re going to get a brand new deck. There’s no way we could do nearly the things that we do without our community.”
