Orange County NC Website
APPROVED 6/712005 <br />MINUTES <br />ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS <br />1NORK SESSION <br />APRIL 20, 2005 <br />7:30 p.m. <br />The Orange County Board of Commissioners met for a Work Session on Wednesday, April 20, <br />2005 at 7:30 p.m. at the Government Services Center in Hillsborough, North Carolina. <br />COUNTY COMMISSIONERS PRESENT: Chair Moses Carey, and Commissioners <br />Valerie P. Foushee, Alice M. Gordon, Stephen Halkiotis, and Barry Jacobs <br />COUNTY COMMISSIONERS ABSENT: <br />COUNTY ATTORNEYS PRESENT: Geoffrey Gledhill and S. Sean Borhanian <br />COUNTY STAFF PRESENT: County Manager John M. Link, Jr., Assistant County <br />Managers Rod Visser and Gwen Harvey and Deputy Clerk to the Board David Hunt (All other <br />staff members will be identified appropriately below) <br />NOTE: ALL DOCUMENTS REFERRED TO IN THESE MINUTES ARE IN THE PERMANENT <br />AGENDA FILE IN THE CLERK'S OFFICE. <br />Chair Carey identified various handouts. <br />1. BudaetlCapital Fundina Issues <br />a. 60-40 Capital Funding Options <br />Budget Director Donna Dean handed out printed packages. She made reference to the <br />"Summary of School and County Capital Funding Options." She said that this is the same <br />information that was given last week, with the addition of options 5A, 5B, and 5C. This <br />addresses the request by Commissioner Jacobs to have one half of Cedar Ridge debt to <br />Orange County Schools and one half on the County's side. <br />Rod Visser gave same mare historical background. He said that in the summer of 1996, <br />when County staff was developing estimates of 10-year capital revenue and how the County <br />might address a way to pay for anticipated needed debt service, which ultimately became the <br />1997 bond referendum, staff developed a number of options that were first presented in August <br />1996. The Schoal boards, in addition to the County Commissioners, reviewed those numbers <br />and raised some concerns about what the new 10-year revenue numbers would produce for the <br />two school systems compared to what they would have received under the old system done in <br />1995. And you may or may not recall that part of the 1997 bond referendum, what the <br />Commissioners decided to da was to earmark that the first $40 million of the bands that the <br />voters approved in 1997 would be paid through sales tax revenue. The balance of the debt <br />service would come from an earmarking of 3.1 cents on the tax rate. When the school boards <br />reviewed the first sets of options, they raised concerns that they would, over a 10-year period, <br />ostensibly be getting a lot less in terms of pay-as-you-go money than they would have gotten <br />under the old CIP system. So, the County Commissioners asked the staff to generate some <br />other options, and that is where the now infamous option 5B came from, which involved OCS <br />suggesting that they pay for half of the funding that would be required for Cedar Ridge High <br />School and CHCCS, which were at the time paying their portion of McDaugle School debt out of <br />