There was a buoyancy in the room on Monday night as Durham city council members filed into their seats at the dais.
City staff members shook hands and congratulated one another. More than half of the community members in attendance—a team of baseball and softball Little League champions, folks from the refugee community, and a young boy bringing awareness to cleft and craniofacial differences—looked on with excitement; they were being honored during ceremonial agenda items.
“I’m really excited about tonight,” said Mayor Leonardo Williams. “The room looks really different than last year.”
After only one public speaker who gave their comments virtually and brief comments from each council member, the city council passed its 2024-25 fiscal year budget by unanimous vote in under two hours.
This year’s total budget is $668 million, up 9.5 percent from the previous year.
Highlights from the budget include:
- Higher wages for public employees to meet market rates.
- Fare-free buses for GoDurham routes.
- $1 million for the city’s Guaranteed Income program.
- Funding for an Office of Survivor Care.
To cover funding for employee wages and a host of public initiatives, the city increased its property tax rate to 59.62 cents per $100 of property value, up from 55.77 cents last year.
City Manager Wanda Page and her staff received praise from city council members for doing the heavy lifting of creating a budget that accommodates as many of the council’s priorities as possible.
“I don’t think this budget reflects the budget that any individual up here would have created,” councilor Nate Baker said, “but I do think that it does a phenomenal job of taking a lot of complicated views up here and creating one single document that reflects the values of all of us.”
Passing the budget without much fanfare stands in stark contrast to last year’s vote, when dozens of city workers and community members showed up to protest what some residents considered a lack of sufficient funding for public employee salaries.
The turbulent meeting ended in a 4-3 split vote. Employees in solid waste and public safety received raises this year, and council member DeDreana Freeman made a point of mentioning former mayor Elaine O’Neal and former council member Monique Holsey-Hyman—who, in addition to Freeman, comprised the three dissenting votes during last year’s budget discussion—for their contributions to the pay increase secured for employees this budget cycle.
“I want to call into the room former mayor O’Neal and former council member Hyman and the work that we set into motion last year to do and just appreciate that we’re here now and actually doing the heavy lift of paying those workers that we value,” Freeman said.
While most of the council members’ comments were congratulatory, some drew attention to the resignation of former planning commissioner Anthony Sease, who recently resigned from the commission in protest of the way in which some Durham city council members have, in his words, “dismissed, at times ignored” and “even denigrated” the work and expertise of the planning commission.
Mayor pro tem Mark-Anthony Middleton also expressed frustration over Durham’s continued public safety challenges. His comments stemmed from the news that a 3-year-old child was shot in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting at a Walgreens in Durham last week. Middleton said that other city improvements carry less meaning if the city can’t ensure its citizens’ safety.
“We do a lot of things as a council,” Middleton said. “But there’s no higher or more sacred responsibility of a government than to keep our residents, our citizens, our neighbors safe and alive. Parks, schools, free buses, everything else doesn’t matter if there’s no heartbeat to populate those places.”
The city council is on summer break until August 5.
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